Windows 11 Insider Preview Build
blogs.windows.com
blogs.windows.com
I find that the HN community has many unique and charming aspects to it compared to other communities on the internet.
Windows 7 was my turning point, moving away from dual boot, something I have been doing since installing Slackware 2.0 on that 1995's summer.
I can't wait for Ableton to (eventually) get their thumbs out of their asses and make Ableton work on Linux so I can dump Windows fully.
Written from my Linux X1 Carbon which also somehow magically works on my patio, don't ask me how.
It's a huge step up from Cygwin, too, since it's a proper Linux instead of just POSIX compatibility.
If you want a fun rabbit hole, look into how the WSL2 and 1 interact with Windows. WSL1 was a whole new shell around the NT Kernel. WSL2 is more of a VM, but using the Plan 9 (yes, that plan 9) filesystem implementation to talk with Windows.
Have seen that a few times from different people.
Not saying that it didn't, either. Just that it might not be a widespread issue
It fixes the forced reboots? Or are these a thing of the past?
I don't like Windows 11. WSL2 is just about an acceptable Linux, but I don't like how there's no memory ballooning. I had to disable all the sleeping network access mechanisms to make it not run out of battery when suspended. Windows 11 is ugly and unpleasant to use in large part because of the proliferation of different UI themes over the years, which they can't easily remove due to how third party software plugs into things - multiple control panels, multiple Explorer menus, etc.
As soon as there is a solid Linux implementation (ideally Debian-flavoured) with competent power management I will switch. That may be a long while off though.
I'm running it on the latest zenbook S14, on the ultra 7. Great battery life, and no problems entering/exiting sleep mode.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/1fq908x/fedora_41_be...
After using Macs M1 and M2 I can't see how people can buy these laptops. This is massively worse experience.
Using a 2021 MBP M1 Pro MBP instead of the $3000 turd my outfit said I needed to use. It’s faster and doesn’t fuck up.
I completely forgot about that PC laptops massively lose performance when on battery as well. Now she is always plugged in, which sort of defeats the purpose of having mobile device.
When going to uni she has to get a place with the outlet to plug it in.
Never had that problem with Mac (I can get it fully charged to work, do the whole day without plugging it in. I don't have a charger in my bag...).
Unfortunately some software she has to use only works on Windows and doesn't work well in VM (I tried on my Mac to see if it was viable, unfortunately not).
I'm reminded of how much people hated it when it came out. Post Vista it was widely liked. A lot of people are also nostalgic of 7 now. I wonder if we'll have a batch of people nostalgic for 10 or 11 in a decade in the same vein. I doubt it, but who knows. The old rule was "every other release is loved/hated", which held until at least 10 (8 was hated, 10 was somewhat accepted). I also remember that 10 was supposed to be "the last version of Windows".
I have a desktop that still runs all tripe-A games and is my main development machine running win10 that MS says is a boat anchor come the fall; this will be my last windows machine.
Microsoft has been pretty good to me as a developer (despite some of the technologies intentionally designed to do nothing but distract and consume attention) but the consumer side is a pathological shit-show and appears to really hate people (or at least love money more). MS looks a lot like the White House these days.
For those in the know, that was great. Windows XP + classic theme + drivers (even if you had to find the W2k drivers) was incredibly stable and performant.
But it took a few years for games to catch up and get the updates, and so for the "tech oriented" crowd (which were often gamers), it took a bit to catch on.
But its longevity is a tribute to how "good it was" and how hard it was to improve from it. Vista introduced more stability at the expense of requiring new drivers, so they re-released Vista a few years later as 7 (there's really no major differences between Vista and 7 except a few years of upgrades to drivers and hardware).
The five years between XP and Vista certainly didn't help matters, either. If you wait that long, you better be willing to support it for decades. Windows XP's last update was 18 years after it was shipped.
I'm not gonna gainsay anyone who says it was good, I'm sure they have lots of legitimate fond memories of Space Cadet Pinball, Half-Life 2, etc. But the Windows XP era was the first one where "what's happening with Windows" just passed me by. I was through with Microsoft's shenanigans starting around then.
That all went away as SSDs came on the market, but it was a noticeable "downgrade" from teh snappy.
The Ghost of Bushes Past continue to haunt us, I suppose.
I think Gnome 3 is the most successful, because their utilities and first party apps have the right kind of compromise while not trying to enforce their view on other software workflow. iPad OS would have been great too, if they went for a free floating windows management and some widget redesign instead of the awkward stage manager.
XP also had the benefit of riding Moore's law for so long that the "high hardware requirements" became lower than the cheapest hardware you could buy halfway through its useful lifetime, which helps with its perception.
That rule can always be gamed too, heh. I felt it went 8 bad, 8.1 good, 10 bad. Then 11 broke the pattern.
With KDE you can simply align it with your own opinions.
Funnily enough, I see the same thing playing out with computers, operating systems, the internet, and video games. People identify the peak as some time when they were younger and it was all new and exciting. Everything was downhill since then.
Talk to younger people and they’ll already tell you that Windows 10 was actually the GOAT and they won’t comprehend any fascination with Windows XP. That was the junky old OS they had to deal with on old computers once.
People hated Vista, and loved 7. Yet 7 was really just vista with a bit of polish. What changed is when 7 came out the average computer capabilities had gone up significantly.
People hated 8, but loved 10. The only real difference between the two is MS dropping the weird tablet mode that nobody wanted/asked for.
People currently hate 11, I suspect 12 will be loved mostly because MS will back off a bit on some of the new innovative UI changes and advertising everywhere.
Microsoft shoved glass panels, widgets and such down the user's throat in Vista. It was a new look and they wanted to make you realise it. Without spinning a fresh 7 machine now, I'm certain it was very toned down.
But, I could be very wrong about this :D Last time I used Windows was XP (I mean, granted last week) because nostalgia is a real thing :D
Edit: I can't reply (not sure why, thread too deep?) but @cogman10, you're right! My memory is bad :(
I think they were roughly the same
Vista: https://img.sysnettechsolutions.com/What-is-Windows-Vista-Ne...
Windows 7: https://blog.thinprint.com/uploads/tp/sites/6/2019/08/319410...
Your memories are not serving you well. Windows 7 was very glass and very aero when it was first released.
You can disable the transparency and fake glossiness, but then it's just a pale blue glossy glass colour instead of transparent.
1) Install any Windows version from the past decade in any machine
2) Go to 'performance' and remove all visuals
3) download and install ClassicShell to have a decent Start button
4) download and use (most are portable) any Privacy settings tool
5) find, download and install WindowsFirewallControl v4.9.x.x and use it on MediumFiltering with "Display Notifications" (you get the 'ZoneAlarm experience')
6) Uninstall all the crapware and disable many services (I use SysInternals Autoruns64)(Winternals for the older ones)
7) Happy Days!!Windows is only free if you don't value your time, huh?
If Fedora setup puts food on your table, go for it!! I 'bet' on Microsoft for my career and it has taken me around the world multiple times, so yeah :)
Tbh I don't change machines 'that' often. My laptop is from 2015. My desktop is 3? 4? years old, and I won't be changing either in the next 5-6 years, they do 'ok' for home use.
But every now and then (couple of years) I do buy some second-hand cheap Surface, or HP Elite, or similar Win tablets, I set them up, and keep them on the side (OS, and Firefox only) just in case someone will need an urgent laptop, or I travel somewhere and I want a 'burner' machine with zero data/sw in it.
Please listen to yourself. It's just a style, they didn't kill your dog. The UI was fine, beautiful even, especially coming from Lego XP — which if you think about it was really tacky, literally an RGB palette.
Personally I think 98, 2000, XP, 7, and to a lesser 10, were all stellar releases from Microsoft. None of those would be the GOAT, but the closest in my mind was 7, which dropped when I was doing tech journalism and I had the time and space to poke at it in an extended fashion
Nope. They were raised.
Vista's minimum requirements were [1]
A modern processor (at least 800MHz)
512 MB of system RAM memory
A graphics processor that is DirectX 9 capable
a 1 GHz or faster processor
1 GB (32-bit OS) or 2 GB (64-bit OS) of RAM,
16 GB (32-bit) or 20 GB (64-bit) available disk space
a DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver.
[2] https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/window...
Plus Vista's UAC was far too intrusive.
I agree, but I think that technology journalists were too harsh on this aspect of Vista. It was Microsoft's only really serious attempt at shoring up single-user security on Windows, and I think that its poor reception contributed to Microsoft neglecting to make any improvements thereafter. xkcd.com/1200 is still embarrassing relevant over a decade later.
But in the vista days security was not yet so much on the radar for most people. In fact even for companies. I remember working for a company where all the laptops had the same local admin password which was the company name + "123". I'm not exaggerating. There was also no full disk encryption used. These were also the days most websites would use plain http.
With that in mind I just don't think the importance was clear yet to most users. They just saw the negatives, not the benefits. Post Stuxnet and Wannacry/NotPetya things are really different.
Ps: it wasn't like that for all of course. I also worked for another company in the late 90s that had all their laptops equipped with windows NT 4.0 with full disk encryption (aftermarket of course as it wasn't yet built in), managed admin account and the whole shebang.
Time has probably colored my memory some. But pound for pound 7 ran better than Vista on equivalent hardware.
[0]: https://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-8-1-service-configurations/
[1] http://www.blackviper.com/service-configurations/black-vipers-windows-10-service-configurations/
Typical nonsense people believe because it feels true.
Vista was perfectly fine. The problem was trying to run a 2006 OS on a 2001 machine during a time of both great stagnation in OEMs and great progress overall.
I used Windows Vista beta as my primary OS on my new computer that summer and that thing was amazing.
I mean, that's a significant difference. It was well justified to hate Windows 8 when they screwed up the main UI for the entire OS as badly as they did.
Oh I'm sure it will be radically different.
I expect they will rename windows to "Copilot" or Windows Copilot" just like they have done with most of their other products like Microsoft 365. I'm not even joking.
They just seem so hell-bent on destroying their existing branding, even more than they normally are. Looks like they have a huge fear of missing that AI boat and becoming irrelevant.
At the same time they are building a catalogue that's so difficult to understand because everything is called Copilot now. I've even seen their own sales people get confused about what's what.
Personally I don't care what they name their services because I've already determined I want nothing more to do with them.
The same with office, there was no point in renaming it to Copilot especially because the standard license doesn't even come with the Copilot features in office.
I think the pattern holds for Windows 7 and Vista. I don't know anyone who remembers Windows 10 fondly, and on a personal level I hated both 8 and 10.
I also don't share your optimism regarding Windows 12. You or I might consider switching to Linux, but 95% of the population has never heard of Linux and even fewer will ever install it. Then there is MacOS, which is gated behind hardware that is prohibitively expensive, as well as having a limited selection of software available; also a non-starter. Microsoft isn't going to back off of user-hostile practices unless they lose a series of anti-trust suits. They were already forced to allow users to uninstall Edge in the EU and they region-locked the functionality so that users outside of the EU were still stuck with Edge. They are in the mass surveillance game for the long haul.
If you threw enough horse power at, vista could be fast, but it would always end up using more resources than windows 7.
Personally I thought the first twenty-five years of SNL were great, and it is good recently.
This may be netlore at this point, but IIRC, a big reason why XP pushed for product keys was for cancelled experiments with subscription pricing (or at least updates for paying customers only). That plug was pulled before launch due to lack of widespread broadband infrastructure for the downloads. Continuous updates are a nightmare enabled by modern CDNs and cable.
What was wrong with Windows 7? Windows Vista was poorly designed but it wasn't intentionally user-hostile. I don't remember the bloatware and design gimmicks starting until Windows 8.
And installing the new version required 20+ 3.5 inch 'floppies'
3.1 was a white box. 95 was sky and clouds. 98 was more cloudy clouds. NT 4.0 was sky turning into space.
You can imagine my disappointment when ME and 2k were just white boxes.
Very tangential, but I had the same kind of intrigue for Maxis games where SIM was stylized as a colour and the game name with its own font.
Kick rocks, by the way.
I can think of one scenario only - You have a desktop app or drivers that you want to ensure will work in the upcoming non-beta, so getting a head start would be good I suppose.
But for anyone else, why would you test software for free from a trillion dollar company that have a bit of a track record now of hostility towards users.
This isn't a troll, I'm a Windows 11 user myself. I am genuinely at a loss.
Edit: I'm being a dumbass (on first coffee as I write this), there's plenty of reasons why people would download a beta... I was thinking from my perspective only!
(Unless there's some new feature you're really looking forward to. But I'm not aware of many of them.)
I did it once, many years ago, for Windows 10 and my printer started printing out garbage in multiple pages no matter what you printed. At that time I used the printer quite frequently. I'd had no issues until then.
I remember checking to see if printer issues were a thing in that build and they weren't listed.
That was it for me.
The only compensation I ever got was from beta testing DirectX 5?, I think, and I received a MS Force Feedback Pro joystick for filing the most bugs.
At the time, XP was 6-7 years old, and the screenshots of a shiny new Windows OS made me so itchy to try it out. Vista looked magical compared to XP just before release, it was the dawn of the frutiger aero aesthetic too. Very optimistic vibes back then.
Ha, I remember dual booting Ubuntu and wrecking the bootloader, rendering my machine unbootable. Fun times, lol. Taught me a lot, though.
I know that Windows gets a hard (justified?) time for stability and whatnot these days but it's been pretty solid for me so I forget sometimes.
I remember that betas of Windows XP were amazing, mind-blowing for those who hadn't seen Windows 2000.
To be honest the multiple times a week updates requiring restart (which is the entire point) are the biggest drawback. I rarely encounter bugs in my daily work.
now what _I_ want, is to be able to resize the taskbar again.
also, I would prefer win11 didn't disable just about everything I had configured, particularly preview for file types. and - I dont know how they did it, but basic file explorer view feels much slower than win10,on the same machine. given that file explorer is basically all windows boils down to, i am not happy that they tske efforts to make it crappier. and given that win95 was able to show a file grid in 1995, I wonder how they are able to screw that up, 30 years later?
I'd settle for having the real taskbar shown in Teams screen sharing instead of having the time rolled back to the time Teams started, or something.
When I dare I dream of proper renaming experience inside of a OneDrive folder, without overriding me while typing. But that must be too much for the developers nowadays, unbearable difficulty! Me the humble servant of MS might must shut up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_11#/media/File:Windows...
Their best bet is to use the relatively reputable ExplorerPatcher. However, using ExplorerPatcher requires fiddling with your antivirus settings and weakening your PC's security, so maybe trying to live with the new normal is better?
Or being able to customize the Explorer context menu. They were on the right track by pushing the old context menu into a separate second menu. But they should allow the user to select what shows in the primary menu instead of the seemingly random stuff that shows there.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDUQrC5YxT0
FilePlot is very quick.
Ps I do absolutely hate the split of the context menu in two parts because many frequent operations have now become two clicks instead of one. Luckily it can be switched off at home but sadly not on my work laptop. I didn't imagine any power user would be happy with what change.
What does that mean - group policy has many fewer policies? Why would Microsoft do that - it is only used in organizations with IT departments, and they definitely want to automate and lock down configuration.
Thanks, but no thanks. I'm happy with my Linux desktops and Mac laptops. They're interoperable, using Macs are trouble free 99.99% of the time, and my Linux desktops just work.
Life is good, at last.
https://github.com/LeDragoX/Win-Debloat-Tools
https://github.com/Raphire/Win11Debloat
If you must, of course.
I stick to Linux.
But, we have been taking chisels & sledgehammers to shape our Windows installations to the shapes we like but Microsoft doesn't approve and try to counter since Windows 95.
I gave up the whole ecosystem. I'm fine.
(I went through OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, too, for desktop).
It's a powershell GUI over power shell scripts overseen by one talented windows engineer with contributions from hundreds.
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/winutil
https://christitus.com/windows-tool/
There are youtube videos: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisTitusTech
It's a simple way to declutter windows 10 and or 11, build custom stripped install images, install useful utilities and dev environs, etc.
For any that care to look under the hood (and there are a number) it's open and transparent and a good way to get that Windows VM image for hosted OS's, gameplay, Qubes OS, etc.
But..... the predatory nature of Windows and the half-ass revisions done to the UI elements, with decades-old applications with the legacy UI that can still be accessed directly, makes Windows a mess. To add to this, The hold that Microsoft has on Windows is so nasty that it keeps overriding settings like default browsers and applications, to favor Microsoft-built apps like Edge, along with the heavy telemetry just leads this platform to be a mess. It is not a clean system at all, and even sometimes pales in comparison to Linux Desktop, let alone OSX.
Shows how skewed the market is when you can actively fuck up your products and still stay ahead of the competition. Nobody without hundreds of billions behind them would stand a chance if they tried the same.
Take me for example. I want my OS to GTFO of my way. It's a toolbox, like the one a carpenter would carry around. I use the applications on it (the saw, hammer, nails etc.), not the OS itself (the carpenter toolbox).
In my case, the Enterprise LTO (or whatever it's called) is almost exactly what I need but the consumer variants are constantly trying to "help" me with shit I don't want.
They did this in Windows 2000. Now Microsoft and Windows are only showing what they are _not_ capable of.
Additionally I guess this weeks announcements prove the point Apple has given up to Windows and Linux mindshare, the composable desktop space.
Ended up getting back into PC games too as a side effect so that keeps me on the windows side too but if it wasn’t for Adobe and Cinema4D being windows I’d use Linux.
Crazy using both because some things on windows, file browsing, file manipulation, image thumbnails, unzipping, copying etc are all so dog slow compared to Mac yet when you run something like Octane Render you truly see what the same hardware is capable of. It’s kinda sickening.
I'd give my interest in Hell for a successor to the Axiotron ModBook, and if the Wacom Movink 13 had a screen resolution to compeat w/ the 3K OLED on my GB3, I'd give up on having a battery and have it and a Mac Mini, so that I could get back to something like to my NeXT Cube w/ Wacom ArtZ (which was paired w/ an NCR-3125 running PenPoint for portability).
So yeah, the hardware on the Windows side is better suited to some folks, and I agree that the software really, really needs work. Things I miss:
- Miller Column File Browser
- Services
- emacs shortcuts when using a keyboard
- TeXshop and other Cocoa apps
Things which annoy me on Windows
- the need to keep Settings open and toggle how the stylus behaves
- not being able to select text in most web browsers (Firefox and derivatives at least still have a working configuration for allowing this)
- the need to manage various settings to keep ads and Copilot from intruding
That said, having a Wacom One paired w/ my MacBook works pretty well, it's just not something I can use away from my desk.
All of this is made possible for me as a developer by the excellent work Microsoft has done in providing Win32 bindings for Rust. If only Apple would provide the same.
As for software, WSL2 is a step forward, but it's hard to beat a true native environment on my Mac. It's the modern version of "it just works" in the Mac vs PC debate.
The default installation is annoying, but I can go from a clean install to having the annoying widgets cleaned up in a few minutes (hint: Try right clicking on anything you don’t want to see. If that doesn’t work, Google it and you’ll find a lot of solutions)
To my surprise, I’ve found my Windows workstation to be more stable with heavy RAM use and multitasking. I basically never reboot except for updates. Meanwhile, my high spec Mac seems to bog down with a lot of multitasking over the course of a week. Reboot fixes it. I find myself wishing for the stability and consistency of the Windows machine, which is not something I ever expected.
This has been true since the NT4 days where you could make that spinning rust beg for mercy under a heavily used page file and NT would never fall over.
macOS will complain fairly quickly after it's swap space runs out. And if you read /r/macos or /r/mac, you'll see that happens with innocuous programs as well as 1st party Apple apps like Pages/Music. There's a memory leak in userland across a wide variety of apps in macOS right now.
Makes you really wonder what's going on with their QA.
You are their QA!
They got laid off in 2014. MS relies more on insiders, early update roll outs, automated testing.
I'm still on Windows 10 so can't comment on the state of 11, but I feel like I see a good number of headlines about botched updates. The recent 24h2 screwed up users that had Ubisoft software installed and caused them to pause roll out.
In October an update caused systems to get into a bluescreen loop requiring a rollback.
The fact that they're pushing people to 11 this year and stopping 10, when 11 is still having "teething" issues is not good.
it is not even nostalgia, it just worked.
If you're looking for pure productivity then Win 98 was great. XP and 7 were great too, but they had more unnecessary UI junk while becoming overly minimalistic where it matters. I strongly disagreed with removing the "Start" button and replacing it with the four squares button for example. And presumably they only did that because some UI dude thought it looked better... It's not like modern screens don't have room for the text.
Also 98/2000 had a file search that actually worked, even if it was slow. XP added an animated dog to it.
Scrollable folder view on the left, pane of shortcuts on the right. Sure they're the panels from Windows 8 but they work really well. I can right click on most icons on the panel and either open a document or go into a specific configuration easily and directly. For example Terminal and Putty.
Great, that way we now get an animation at the top of the screen every time we start dragging a file, whether we want to “share” the file or not. Who is coming up with stuff like this and thinks it’s a good idea? Especially since you could drag objects to apps on the task bar since forever, and also the context menu is arguably a more practical way to share a file? At least integrate the drag targets into the Explorer window somehow, or hover them next to the mouse pointer (like the mini-toolbars upon selection in Word), instead of showing them maximally far away at the top of the screen. Geez.
It's sad what Windows has become.
It's sad users aren't running away.
Prior to rolling Insider Preview program builds news sites used to publish regular articles with the list. Maybe some still do but my difficulty has been sorting through the ones just rehashing each blog post vs summarizing the upcoming versions differences. What's everyone's go to place for keeping up with that kind of thing these days, if any?
Thank the Court of Justice of the European Union.
After the disaster management has made out of UWP and related developer experience, and the follow-up Project Reunion efforts, I couldn't care less.
They come when they come.
While, from my point of view, UWP is what .NET 1.0 should have been (see [0]), the way it was introduced, requiring a complete rewrite from Win32/.NET applications, with limited capabilities, already required some adoption love.
Then while trying to achieve feature parity with Win32/.NET, this was done at the expense of breaking compatibilty across WinRT generations (8 => 8.1. => 10 => WinAppSDK), and if that wasn't enough, also breaking the .NET and C++ tooling experience in the process.
I think it was a mix of issues, management naturally, lack of empathy for the Windows developer community, whatever internal KPIs they had/have to meet, and most likely also quite relevant, it appears new employees don't have much experience with Windows development or its culture, were raised in a world without Windows.
People like myself have been PC users since the early days of MS-DOS 3.3, naturally new employees now have other backgrounds.
[0] - https://arstechnica.com/features/2012/10/windows-8-and-winrt...
I find WPF incredibly unsexy; unfortunately everything they have tried afterwards is even more amateurish. As others have mentioned, they have probably doomed themselves to eternal KPI hell, so with zero management vision, zero management talent, zero management strategy and zero management commitment, they are incapable of delivering anything to rise above Q3 mediocrity (Ie, they cannot deliver on any meaningful multiyear strategy, because they all have their heads up Q4 asses). They are the Intel of UI, at this point.
Figuring out how to piece it all together was a nightmare, too with searches turning up documentation and blog posts for N similar but different C# UI frameworks, which compounded with my unfamiliarity with C# and where its stdlib ends and the UI framework begins. It’s all very confusing for someone coming from other platforms.
It was very frustrating. Even Android with its notoriously bad and idiosyncratic Android Framework was less of a hurdle to pick up and start using.
What Longhorn could have been if the .NET and Windows Development teams actually worked together and not against each other.
Instead, it is usually recommended to use AvaloniaUI or MAUI (which, as I've heard, has improved). There is a variety of SwiftUI-style declarative GUI packages and built-in APIs to absolve you from ever touching XAML if that's your preference.
The irony of all of this is that WinRT is built atop COM, which should allow it to bind with any language that supports a C-based FFI on Windows. But then they add all this XAML codegen crap that's C++ or C#-only, pulling us in too deep.
In that regard, Microsoft is hardly any different from Apple, Google, or many other vendors that aren't traditional UNIX shops.
There are the official sanctioned languages, and then third parties can do whatever they feel like.
Stay away from WinUI, even with .NET or C++, the amount of bugs, missing tooling and features isn't worth it.
If you stray off the beaten path then you are in for a lot of pain. It would be the same if you were targeting macOS from Go.
The problem isn't Windows here, the problem is the GUI story in Go.
Then (what remains of) Palm had cloned the UI of Apple Watch for their "small" phone.
It's closer to Android which has no grouping. Besides, Apple only did the library once they realized Android's approach of customizable home screens + library was superior to forcing every app to be on your home screens.
Both of which ripped off the Desktop, which goes back to what, the Xerox computing days?