So the Windows 11 Developer Preview has been released by Microsoft. So now we can finally
get a real look into Windows 11. And you might think, "Oh, we already saw it from that leaked
build, right?" But not really. According to Microsoft, that was some early weird build.
So it was basically running off Windows 10, but basically just had the visual elements of
Windows 11. But now with this build, we can get an official actual look at the real Windows 11.
So even if you did see that video I made about the previous leaked build, there is still quite
a bit different in this new official version. And this time, I actually installed it on a couple
of my secondary machines, not just in a virtual machine. So I'm going to show you inside all the
differences. If you want to skip right into where I show you the dev preview, obviously I'm going
to put all those links in the description, but I do have a couple of important points and updates
that you might want to hear about first. Another thing I want to point out is having to do
with the big controversy about the different CPU requirements and the TPM requirements for Windows
11. That's still in effect, I believe, for the main release, but for the dev preview at least,
Microsoft has eased the restrictions and said that the TPM and CPU generation requirements
have been lifted just for the developer preview. So if you do have a computer that previously said,
"Oh, you can't run Windows 11," you can at least join the developer insider channel
and install it for now at least. Now, I would definitely not recommend installing this
on your main computer at all. There are some stability issues, and we'll talk about that later,
but if you have any secondary computers that you don't use for anything mission critical,
just for casual stuff, and you want to try out Windows 11, I would actually encourage it,
especially if you have an older computer because Microsoft specifically said they're
going to be opening up the CPU requirements for the developer preview to kind of test out
and see how Windows 11 performs on older CPUs. So if you have a really old CPU and you're willing
to try the developer preview, the more people that do that and show Microsoft that "Yeah. It
can indeed run on these older computers," the more likely those older CPUs will be supported
in the final release. Now, to join the insider program to get the Windows 11 dev preview, first,
you have to go to the Windows Insider Program and sign up for that if you haven't already.
So you go to insider.windows.com, and then you sign in with a Microsoft account there,
and it's going to have you agree to some things and register with it. And then after you do that,
you go into the Windows Settings and then Update & Security and then Windows Insider Program. Here,
it's going to warn you that you don't have the requirements for Windows 11, but that shouldn't
stop you. It does say there may be some issues and bugs, but it shouldn't stop you from doing it.
So then you hit "Get started", and it's going to ask you to add a Microsoft account.
I do want to point out that if you have a local account for your computer, it's fine. It's not
going to make you link a Microsoft account to your login. It's just linking the Microsoft account to
the Windows Insider thing. So once you log in with that, it'll ask you which channel you want to do,
and you have to do the Dev Channel right now for Windows 11. It's then going to ask you to agree to
a bunch of stuff, and then do a restart. Now the Windows Insider Program should look pretty similar
to this. Then you just have to make sure you've installed all the current updates for Windows 10.
And once that's all done, it should start allowing you to download the Windows 11 thing automatically
through the Windows Update. But again, do not do this on your main computer. The Dev Channel always
has the least stable builds, and I did notice a few bugs and glitches. For example, Windows
Explore in Windows 11 would crash occasionally. Nothing computer-breaking or crashing the whole
computer, but it would probably be really annoying, especially if you're doing a lot
of important stuff. It would not be reliable, definitely not recommended, but if you're on
a secondary computer where you're just kind of trying it out, it might not be a big deal. And
I believe you can roll it back somehow, but still you don't want to have to deal with it. Anyway,
now that you do know how to get it yourself if you want, let's go take a look inside Windows 11
and I'll talk about the most notable stuff I found. So on the surface, most of the visual
stuff does look really similar to that leaked build, but once we start digging into it,
there is a lot pretty different. For example, when you go into the widgets panel, now you can add
more widgets than what it was before. Before, I think it was just weather and the news.
Now you can add stuff like sports, e-sports, traffic, to-do, a stocks watch list.
And while none of these are actually interesting or exciting to me, so I'm probably
not going to use this. Hopefully, they will add more with some actual utility,
maybe stuff like maybe monitoring the current CPU usage and hardware usage or network activity,
stuff like that, or maybe allow custom widgets to be added from third parties. That'd be awesome.
Next a really noticeable difference is having to do with the right click context menu. You'll
notice now it's way more simplified with increased spacing. And then there is a "Show more options"
button that brings back the menu that you're probably most used to. I don't know if that
showed more options, is going to stay like that or what, but that is how it is now. A big change here
is now the options to cut, copy, paste, rename, and delete are now little icons that appear
next to the cursor after you right click. And whether this line of icons appears on the top
or bottom is going to depend on where that menu pops up. So if you click on something near the
bottom of the screen, the start menu is going to go upwards, so then those icons are going
to appear at the bottom so that you don't have to move your cursor as far to do those. And depending
on how this new context menu gets developed and changed, I'm actually kind of optimistic.
If they add some customization features, it'd be pretty awesome. For example, right now, I mean,
any program can throw itself into the context menu. You've probably seen myself included or
other people where they right click and a whole bunch of crap comes up in the start menu. 99%
of the stuff I do not use, and some of them you can't remove in the Windows Settings. For example,
Adobe Acrobat adds these options to convert stuff. I'd never use it, but you can't remove it.
So if Microsoft were to add customizability to the context menu where you can move stuff you don't
really use into the more options menu, that would be pretty awesome. That's not a feature right now,
but I'm just kind of being hopeful because really most of the time you are using the context menu,
it is for those basic operations. So I think it kind of makes sense to have a very simplified
context menu, and then if you want to do more that's less common, you have that more options
menu. As for the taskbar, you still really can't customize it at all, besides just moving stuff to
the left or center, which I do not like. I, for example, like having a bit of a bigger taskbar.
You can't even change that. There is a setting in the registry you can use, but then it makes the
icons blurry and stuff. It's not a real scaling. You can't even unlock the taskbar, drag it up,
any of that stuff. Really wish they would add a little bit more customization
at least to what we have now in Windows 10. Now, as for the Start menu, it pretty much looks
exactly like we saw from the leaked build where you have some icons for programs at the top
where you can choose which you want to pin and which you don't. And then at the bottom, there
is recommended apps. However, the customization is still not there, which I really don't like.
With the Windows 10 Start menu, you can customize a lot. You can put icons wherever you want, but
here they auto-arrange themselves. You can change the order in which they appear, but you can't
just drag them anywhere onto the start menu and kind of group them together and stuff like that,
which I really do not like. Also right now, you can't remove that recommended section, which
takes up half of the Start menu, and I hate it. I do not use it. I basically disabled everything
for that, and yet it still persists right there. You can't get it to go away.
Hopefully, they'll remove that because I would much rather have the ability to pin a lot more
programs to the Start menu than have half of it taken up by random crap that it thinks I'm going
to use. I don't see the point of that. Another big feature we saw in the leaked build that Microsoft
has been touting is the task view or basically virtual desktops feature where you can now
rename them and actually customize the wallpaper of individual virtual desktops. And this allows
you to basically have different running programs in different versions of these desktops. However,
again, the customizability, I think, is the real weakness to this feature because yes,
you're going to have different features running in these different virtual desktops,
but you cannot customize it, for example, to add different icons for each desktop. They
all are going to have the same set of icons. You add one to one desktop, it's going to appear in
all of them, which I think honestly defeats the entire purpose of having virtual desktops.
If I want a desktop for work, one for gaming, one for just leisurely stuff, I want to be able
to have only the work, leisurely, or gaming icons on each desktop. I don't want all the crap to be
on there. It seems really pointless. I'm not going to use it unless they add that feature. Hopefully,
they do. All right, moving on to Windows Explorer. This is going to look a lot different than what
you're used to in Windows 10. Notably, the ribbon thing at the top is gone, way more simplified. I
actually think this makes way more sense and looks a lot better. 99% of the crap in the ribbon bar,
I never even looked at or used. So it makes kind of sense to just have the basic stuff up
there that you are going to use most common. You can click "New" and then "New folder", or then
go to new stuff, although I usually just use the right click menu anyway. At the top, we now do see
the little icons we saw for cut, copy, paste, and all that that we saw from the context menu.
And the main window of the File Explorer, you'll notice that, like I mentioned before,
stuff seems more spread out, but you can go back to the compact view and make that look more like
what you're used to now. But the spread-out view might be better if you're using a touch display
or something like that. So you can do a lot of the same customizations you can in File Explorer
now. Basically, just the overall kind of aesthetic appeal of Windows is changed to look more modern
rounded, but the actual navigation features with the shortcuts on the left and then the main window
on the right, all that seems to be the same. All right, next, let's talk about the action center.
So before, there was a dedicated action center button and it would pop up notifications and the
quick action, stuff like that, but now that's been changed up. So to get to notifications,
you actually now click the clock and that'll bring up the notifications as well as the calendar.
And if you want to get to the quick actions, you now have to basically click those... I don't know
what they're called, the system icons, like the volume, network, whatever. Those will be grouped,
and you can click on those, and it'll now bring up those quick actions, such as airplane mode
or connecting to WiFi. And then of course the usual volume and brightness sliders are in here
now. Now you can add and remove buttons depending on what you want by just clicking the Add button,
so there is some customizability there. And if there are unread notifications, what will happen
is the bottom-right will have a little circle with a number in it and that's to kind of signal
you that you have unread notifications. You can click on that or the clock and it'll bring it up.
Overall, I think the design of these new menus is fine. However, it was not immediately obvious how
to get to these. I actually had to search how to bring up the actions menu to be able to find
it because I never would've thought to click on the system icons or something like that.
Now let's go into the Settings menu, which is very different from Windows 10 and very
different from that leaked build we saw. It's actually completely redesigned. I think it looks
great. So now instead of the main window coming up and having tiles, now on the left-hand side,
you have all the top level menus and you click on those. And then now on the right-hand side
will bring up the sub-menus that you can click into. And then it seems like in all the individual
sub-menus, those are also pretty redesigned. For example, in the power and battery level, there's
a cool new graph thing that shows you some details about the battery life, that sort of thing. That
being said, even though a lot of the menus are redesigned, the actual settings themselves or what
you can change and stuff do appear to be basically exactly the same as in Windows 10. So everything
that you were used to being able to change should be in there. It'll just kind of look different.
Next up. Let's talk about the Microsoft Store, which has been redesigned, and this is a major,
major thing that Microsoft is pushing in Windows 11. And that's basically that they're going to
be supporting a lot more apps in the Microsoft Store. Before, it was just Universal Windows
Platform apps, UWP, which was very limited because not a lot of people were willing to
rewrite their programs, I guess, that support it. So the Microsoft Store didn't really have
all that many programs. But now they will be supporting other apps, including Win32 apps,
which are basically normal apps that you're used to if you run an EXE file to install it,
that you downloaded from somewhere. Those can go now in the Microsoft Store. And of course,
as we saw in the presentation, Android apps will be installable. However, that is not
in this developer preview yet. That's going to be later down the line. They're going to add that.
Anyway, back to the actual redesign of the Microsoft Store we're looking at,
it is redesigned. It does look a little bit more modern, but to me, it doesn't look like it was
a completely re-imagined redesign. I kind of wish they had totally re-imagined it,
so it doesn't look super simplified and dumbed down, I guess you could say. Now that being said,
even though I'm criticizing it, I don't actually have any alternative suggestions or anything.
I'm just kind of saying that, me personally, it almost kind of looks dumbed down to me. But again,
this is still the dev preview. It's literally the earliest preview that is possibly available.
So I'm sure they'll be adding stuff to it down the line. Now, finally,
I wanted to do what I did with the Windows 11 leaked build last week, and that is look
at the Group Policy settings to see if there's any you kind of hidden settings in there.
So what I did was export a list of all the Group Policy settings, and then compared it
to the leaked build from last week, and there are literally two changes and then a couple of
renames. So basically, some of the settings have been renamed into a Legacy Policies folder. So
they'll still be supported, but I guess they're just called Legacy now. And then the only two
new settings I saw in there was one called "Allow widgets" in the Windows Components\Widgets menu.
And then under Windows Components\Chat, there's a new option called "Configures the Chat icon on the
taskbar". Not really sure exactly how that's going to come into play, probably when Microsoft Teams
is added. But yeah, those are literally the only two that were added since the leaked build,
although there were several that were added in leaked build from Windows 10. So if you do want to
check that out, check out my leaked build video. Again, even from that though, there was nothing
really groundbreaking, but still cool to see. So as for my thoughts overall, let's talk about
what I do like and dislike. Now, I do like the overall modern look. I think it was a really cool
redesign. I think looks really nice with the glass look very modern, very nice looking, stuff like
that. So overall the redesign looks really cool. And I do also like and I'm excited about some of
the upcoming features that we haven't seen here yet, such as the auto HDR for gaming, apparently
there's going to be also other HDR options, and of course the Android apps on Windows 11. That being
said, there are a few things that I definitely do not like. I've mentioned some of them before,
but one thing I did notice is that the switching between light mode and dark mode is still
slow as heck. I mean, in Windows 10, it's like this, and you might think, "What's the big deal
with that?" Well, I think it would be really cool if there was a feature to automatically, at night,
switch from light mode to dark mode. But if it takes this long and it basically
refreshes all of Windows Explorer, glitches out all the windows, stuff like that, it looks like
crap. It's going to be annoying, and it's going to break up whatever you're doing. So I wish there
was a way for them to just literally just do maybe an iPhone does, where you press the button and
literally it just changes the way everything looks without glitching out everything. Another thing I
noticed is the Start menu search function still really sucks. I mean, you search for stuff. It
brings up crap from the web. If I'm searching my computer, I'm not searching for crap in the web.
I want to search using the browser for that stuff. So fortunately though, there is still the option
in the Group Policy editor if you're using Windows Pro, or I believe in the registry if you're not,
to disable web results in the search menu, which is at least good.
Another thing is, like I mentioned before, there seems to be a gross lack of customizability in a
lot of places. For example, the taskbar, you can't resize it and stuff. The Start menu,
yeah, you can drag stuff around and pin stuff, but you can't really customize it further than that.
They still auto-arrange. You can't get rid of that suggestions or recommendations, whatever it is, at
the bottom. Super annoying. And also the virtual desktops seem to be kind of pointless to me unless
you can really customize at least what icons show up there and maybe even what taskbar pins are
there in each desktop. And then finally, there is at least one feature that is a no brainer that I
find it unfathomable that they have not added yet, which is tabbed File Explorer windows. How is this
not a thing yet? It's the most obvious awesome feature. Instead of having a million different
windows open, you can just tab between them. Why have they not added this? I don't understand.
So yeah, hopefully at least some of these things that I don't like will be ironed out
in the next few months before it's released. Although considering my current computer,
apparently the CPU is too old, so I might not have to worry about it anyway. Anyway,
let me know what you think down in the comments. Overall, I do think it's a cool upgrade. They're
adding a lot of stuff, but there are probably a few things that I would not like as well.
Is that the same case for you guys? If you guys want to keep watching, you can check out that
leaked build video I had here and see what changes were between that and this version. There was some
stuff I touched on there in a little bit more detail. And as usual, if you guys want, be sure
to subscribe because I make a couple of new videos a week, so it should be worth it. And also be sure
to give this video a like if you did enjoy it, and thanks for watching. I'll see in the next one.