- 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
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the video description. (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. - Thanks Micro Center for
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Custom Builds Showcase, which is a great place
for people to gather and discuss each other's builds and get inspiration for their next PC. So don't wait, head to the link in the video description to check out Micro Center, and get a coupon code for a free pair of wireless Bluetooth headphones. - 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.
I am staying on 10 and skipping 11. It’s an old Windows tradition at this point.
Linus, what have you done to our Linux god?
I can't personally identify with all the hate towards Windows 11 because I'm not much of a software geek (though I can understand where Anthony and the commenters are going with their criticism). To me, an amateur design/UX enthusiast (I just look and enjoy, IDK how to develop and stuff lol), Windows 11, appearance-wise, is leaps-and-bounds ahead of W10. I like the frosted glass stuff, I like the redesigned icons, the generally bigger and more accessible modes of interaction with the UI (like the icons, menus, etc.), and most importantly, I like that Windows, after a long while, doesn't look like it's going through a freaking identity crisis. For the first time in a while, I see cohesion in their design language through almost every nook and cranny of the UI, and that itself is cool for me.