- Windows has been a part of our lives for decades now.
Whether we like it or not.
Since we left humble Windows 3.1 behind,
we've been on a constant cycle of good
and bad releases of Windows.
Like check this out.
Windows 95, good.
98, bad.
98 SE, good.
ME, bad.
XP, good.
Vista, bad.
Seven, good.
Eight, bad.
10, good.
11, huh.
What will 11 be?
That's a bit of a difficult question to answer.
On one hand, it looks a lot like 10.
On the other,
there are far more changes than we originally thought.
So today I'm going to take you onto my personal tour
of the Windows 11 beta,
and show you everything I think is cool
as well as everything that's not.
But first let's take a look at this video's sponsor.
Zoho Projects.
- Thanks to Zoho for sponsoring today's video.
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that has everything you need for your business
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Get a 30-day trial of their enterprise edition
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(energetic electronic music)
- Sure, most of the changes
in Windows 11 appear superficial,
and in many ways they are.
But when there are enough superficial changes,
eventually that coalesces into something much bigger.
So let's talk UI.
Our first look at the updated fluent UI
was a very incomplete one.
And while that old leak did have the fancy new
rounded window corners, it was running in a virtual machine,
and not only was the performance bad,
the UI clearly still resembled Windows 10.
Not so much anymore.
The Start menu is significantly more polished now,
and far from laggy.
Search, which has a dedicated bar on the Start menu now,
is ridiculously quick.
So no waiting a second or two for Windows to catch up
with what you typed.
It's pretty much instantaneous.
The dedicated space for pinned
and recommended apps hasn't changed.
And now that live tiles are gone,
it should make pinning apps a lot more straightforward
than it used to be in Windows 8 and onward.
I swear, I've seen this menu layout in Linux before though.
In case you don't like it,
there are already third-party replacements popping up.
So don't worry too much about that.
Anyway, the All Apps button on the top right brings you
to an alphabetical listing of all the apps on your system.
Just like the Start menu does by default today.
Folders, at least for now,
still seem to work as they do in Windows 10.
But Microsoft says
that they're going to be removing folders entirely
from the Start menu for the final release.
The task bar itself,
yes, it's centered.
However, you can change that by right clicking on it
and clicking on Task Bar Settings.
Though you'll note that right clicking
no longer gives you any window controls,
task manager or toolbars to play with.
And you can't choose the position
that's located on-screen either.
I'm sorry, no more vertical taskbar for you, Abraham.
You can also turn on and off the dedicated search button,
which despite it being the same thing
as the Start menu search is actually kind of useful now
because it gives you recent search results
as you hover over it.
That's pretty cool.
You can also turn on and off the integrated Teams chat
and the widget panel button.
Speaking of the widgets panel.
That's a thing.
They made a big deal about it, but frankly,
I don't see it being all that useful.
By default,
you've got your weather, your money,
your sports and your news,
but I'd hazard a guess
that most people aren't using Microsoft services for those.
There doesn't seem to be a way to personalize it
outside of Microsoft services.
There's no widget store.
So basically the only way to manage your news
and interests is to go to MSN.
(he heaves a protracted sighs)
Your mileage may vary here.
Hopefully Microsoft allows third-party widgets
to exist here too.
Otherwise I see it being completely overlooked
by almost everyone.
Sort of like that news interest button
that Windows 10 reasonably got.
Notification center, meanwhile,
has been significantly updated with a very Apple-like view
of stacked cards
that includes the calendar as well as your notifications.
The controls that used to live here, like WiFi
and Bluetooth toggles, now live in the same area
as the network and audio icons in the system tray,
which is now called task bar corner, I guess.
And they similarly slide in as cards,
including controls for any media that's currently playing.
Like Windows 10,
you can choose which quick settings are visible here.
If for example, you want a keyboard layout switcher.
There it is.
Unlike Windows 10,
right clicking on most objects in the OS,
the desktop included,
now brings up a new glassy context menu
with bigger, more spaced out items.
With this Show more options button,
which just shows the old Windows context menu.
You can't win them all, I guess.
That's gonna be interesting for people
with, say, 7-zip in their right-click menu,
who now are going to have to make extensive use
of this Show more options button.
Have fun with that.
But hey, it's not all bad.
In folder views,
there's now an open Windows Terminal item,
a feature that I legit use in Linux all the time.
It's a nice touch.
Windows Terminal, by the way,
is a brand new app.
It's hardware accelerated,
and it can run any kind of command prompt at all
in a tabbed interface,
keeping your workspace a little bit more manageable
than it has been in the past.
Where Windows 10 only has PowerShell and command prompt,
and these are available here as well,
you can add your own.
Here we go.
We can use any command line we want.
So if I had Bash, for example, with subsystem for Linux,
that would work here too.
Oh, and like many Linux terminal emulators,
it can detect URLs and make them clickable.
This is all pretty sweet if you ask me,
and long overdue.
File explorer has been completely redesigned
with a simplified UI
that only has the most common features right there
in the top bar.
It's not a ribbon anymore.
Instead contact sensitive options like formatting
or optimizing drives and mapping network shares
live in this See More menu,
and incidentally map network drive isn't an option
in the right-click menu anymore, much to my chagrin.
There is no right-click control to customize
the top panel either.
At least not yet.
But the familiar options window is still there.
So you can tweak how everything works.
Almost all the options here are the same as in Windows 10,
but there's one standout setting,
Decrease space between items, AKA compact view.
You can also toggle this on the main bar's view menu.
And what this does is restore the old views
for lists, details and small icons.
Wait, old views?
Yep.
By default, Windows 11 adds extra spacing to these views,
including on the sidebar,
presumably to make touch inputs less frustrating.
It's an interesting approach to be sure,
but it's probably going to annoy you at first,
unlike our new water bottle lids, super slick,
and you get a 50% discount if you buy it with,
or already own an LTT water bottle at lttstore.com.
What may also annoy you are the folder icons.
Seriously,
they look like they were taken from a random Linux theme
with how mismatched the colors and iconography are.
Not only that,
but the indicator that a folder contains files
is much smaller now.
Being an itsy-bitsy sliver of white
next to the folders tab.
Sure, it looks neater and is more realistic, I guess,
but it's tougher to make out at a glance
because rather than looking for a shape,
you're now looking for contrast.
And the icons are already pretty bright.
So good luck with that.
Not only that,
but that also means you don't get any icon previews
of files in a folder as you do on Windows 10.
I can't say I'm a fan of that.
And not all apps got the same makeovers
that Explorer and the Terminal have either.
Notepad is still as basic as ever.
And if you dig around enough,
you'll find apps that date back to Windows 3.1,
complete with 16-color icons.
The old-school control panel is still hanging out here too
if you look for it.
Although unlike the phone dialer,
they did give it new icons.
To Microsoft's credit,
there's more functionality in the new Settings app
than ever before.
So chances are,
you won't need to dig through the old control panel
as often as you used to.
Crucially, toggles to enable and disable network adapters
have been added to the new
advanced network settings pane,
and you can get all the relevant status info here, too.
It still opens up the old-school Network Connections window
if you need to make any changes
to the adapters themselves though,
or do anything fancy like bridging.
There are a few other goodies in here,
like being able to restrict app access
to download folders as well as all the existing controls
for documents, pictures, et cetera.
And all of this is laid out
in a much easier to navigate selection
of sub-menus than the sometimes labyrinthine
Settings menu in Windows 10.
It's still there.
It's just a lot easier to navigate IMO.
Even the System overview
that, frankly, isn't that useful in Windows 10,
got an overhaul,
now showing you the status of Office 365,
OneDrive and Windows Update.
The Display section got a significant overhaul too.
Now multiple displays are hidden behind a menu
rather than having display arrangement panel
front and center.
Like if you have a single monitor, why do you need it?
Scale and resolution are higher up on the list
of most items.
Although I would prefer the refresh rate
to be adjustable here too,
rather than being hidden
under the advanced display settings.
To be fair, I guess for most people,
that really is an advanced setting.
So I guess I'll give it a pass.
HDR though,
that has its own section that comes before all the others.
No longer a little link hidden among all the other stuff.
The menu itself isn't significantly different,
but it does include the auto HDR setting,
which we'll get to later.
For now,
if we go back to the advanced display settings pane,
you'll see that Microsoft has added lines
about the HDR certification and peak brightness
of your display.
Which is such a nice quality of life thing
for troubleshooting.
It really feels like HDR is finally becoming
a first-class feature.
And it's about time.
Come on, Linux.
(claps hands)
Time to pick up the pace.
It's not to say that all the Settings app changes are good.
Changing your default browser has become
significantly more difficult now,
with the removal of common app types like web browsers,
mail readers and media players.
Instead,
now you have to change the handler
for every link type in file type individually, which
(he sighs)
Microsoft, buddy, listen.
This used to be a criticism of Linux.
Why do you want to make it a criticism of Windows?
Where the logical conclusion is that you're doing it
so that people will finally give up and use Edge?
It's all well and good that you want
to give people more granular control.
But as user-friendly as this UI is,
I don't want to spend five minutes
adjusting all of these settings
every time I switched to using a new app.
Can you imagine what the new Set as default browser prompts
are gonna look like?
(he exhales)
Speaking of imagining how things look.
While using Windows 11,
one of the things you'll notice is
that even apps that aren't designed
around Windows 11's rounded corners design,
well, they've got rounded corners.
Even things with custom skins like Steam.
This hasn't been a problem for me yet,
but I guess we'll have to see if it reacts poorly
to certain types of windows,
like skinned media players for example.
What, people still use those, right?
Windows 11 is less consistent
with other design elements though.
It's still jarring to be in dark mode
and load up a classic app,
like Notepad or Device manager,
and see that it's still using the old school Windows UI,
where even the title bar doesn't fit the new look.
At least touch users should appreciate how much easier it is
to drag stuff around thanks to the larger touch targets.
As well as the new touchscreen gestures
and better auto rotation with snap windows.
The new touch keyboard resembles most mobile keyboards
in both standard and small modes right down to the emoji
and Tenor GIF button.
Interestingly, there's also classic emotes
in camoji here.
Though, while categorized,
these aren't searchable like emoji are.
Huh, man, these classic ASCII emoticons bring back memories.
Oh, wow, what's this?
(glassy music)
(clears throat)
Holy balls.
This video has gone on for how long
and I've only talked about the new UI?
See what I mean about lots of superficial changes
coming together to make something much more substantial?
The crazy part is I'm not even done yet.
Virtual desktops got a lot of love,
and you can set them up almost
as completely different workspaces with unique wallpaper
and snap layouts.
But what are snap layouts?
These let you create window layouts,
like how you've been able to do since Windows 7,
but with far more flexibility than we've seen to date.
And thanks to the snap groups feature,
these layouts can be saved and restored
when you connect an external display, for example.
Snap groups keep these layouts in a single place
on the taskbar so it can be minimize and maximize wholesale.
You can kick this whole process off
by either dragging your window to the side of the screen
as usual, or by hovering over a window's maximize button
and selecting a layout.
You need a 1920 pixel wide display
in order to access these triple snap layouts.
But overall,
this whole feature set is a serious improvement
for not just laptop users,
but anyone whose desktop layout randomly shifts
when their monitors go to sleep.
Like mine.
My workstation's monitors do that to me all the time.
I use a program called Sizer to shuffle windows around,
but this could mean I no longer need it.
Now, all I need is AltDragging integrated into Windows.
I can dream, right?
Overall, though,
the UI feels much smoother and more responsive
than Windows 10,
and a lot of that probably boils down to faster,
smoother animations, particularly in modern UIS.
But even something as small as launching File Explorer
feels more responsive than it does on Windows 10.
And aside from potential optimizations under the hood
and what Microsoft calls a new storage stack,
my suspicion is that Windows 11 is leaning
on its heavier RAM requirements
in order to more aggressively cache recently
and frequently used programs.
I don't have any solid proof of this, however.
Now let's talk new features.
Running Android apps is the big one
many people are looking forward to,
but unfortunately I've got nothing to tell you about them
'cause they haven't been enabled in Windows 11 yet.
Not even by downloading the APK files manually.
I did try.
The Microsoft store looks pretty much
like it does in Windows 10 right now.
So presumably once that gets updated,
we'll be able to get a peek at how this will all work.
For now, we'll just have to hurry up and wait, I suppose.
The other big headliner feature is direct storage.
Although it's no longer Windows 11 exclusive.
Direct storage basically accelerates the loading
of textures and assets into your graphics card's memory
without having to bother with the CPU at all.
So the CPU is free to do its own thing.
It makes things a lot faster, or at least it should.
We just don't know yet.
What it will supposedly be in Windows 11 is faster
than it will be on Windows 10
as a result of that new storage stack.
Although again,
how this works in practice is anyone's guess
because we don't have a baseline
for how it runs on Windows 10 yet either.
Once it gets supported,
we'll be checking it out.
So make sure you get subscribed so you don't miss it.
There are some features we can test today,
and the big one is auto HDR.
This debuted on the Xbox Serieses,
and as the name suggests,
this requires an HDR monitor
and can automatically generate HDR metadata for SDR games
running Direct X 11 or 12.
It works by generating a heat map for high-intensity pixels
and translating that into extra brightness data
that can be displayed as though it were HDR.
The effect is, honestly, shockingly good.
It doesn't crush blacks or blur out whites.
And it doesn't feel like the color space is
artificially extended.
Like in some scenes,
the HDR effect doesn't look any different from SDR at all.
But in others, the difference is night and day,
and this is going to be what makes people keep HDR enabled
instead of toggling it on and off all the time.
It's not quite on the same level
of native HDR-supporting games,
but it's pretty dang impressive nonetheless.
This split-screen effect by the way,
is unique to the beta version of Windows 11,
and it's hidden behind a registry key.
Frankly, I think they should put a toggle
in the HDR settings page
so people can test their games and displays.
But what do I know?
Windows 11 is expected to launch
sometime in the holiday season.
Current rumors suggest October.
And when it does,
you've got a bit of prep work to do before you can upgrade.
We've already done a dedicated video
on how to install Windows 11,
but the short version is
that you'll need to enable your system's
trusted platform module, either physical
or built into your firmware,
and you'll need to enable Secure Boot.
Without these prerequisites,
the official installation methods won't allow you
to proceed because these features together allow
for significant security improvement.
This security,
which can be enabled in Windows 10 as well
by enabling your TPM and Secure Boot,
is also why Microsoft isn't officially supporting
Intel's Kaby Lake or AMD's Ryzen-1000 processors.
Those CPUs lack the instructions necessary
to do this security and hardware,
meaning you'll take a performance hit.
Here are the full official system requirements
in case you were curious.
We've marked everything that can be worked around
with an asterisk.
The upgrade is going to be free
for all current Windows 10 users,
just like Windows 10 was free for Windows 7 and 8 users.
But we still don't know if it'll cost anything
for new builds.
If it does,
presumably it'll be the same price as Windows 10 right now,
which is 109 for Home and 149 for Pro.
But should you upgrade?
If you've got a very recent PC
and you can't bear the thought of leaving Windows,
chances are yes.
But if not, or if you just don't want to
until the bugs are ironed out,
Windows 10 is gonna stick around until October 2025,
which should give you plenty of time to weigh your options.
And plenty of time for this segue
to our sponsor Micro Center.
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- Thanks for watching, guys.
Go check out our recent video on how to install Windows 11
for a little more on those workarounds I mentioned,
and see some of these changes for yourself.