Excuse the double post, but I just found out about the upcoming Windows 11 24H2 update and it's really interesting because they're gonna add a
lot of new features.
-More Copilot which is gay and unnecessary and you'll have to cut it out when you don't care about having ChatGPT on your desktop hogging resources. IIRC all this shit is based on Edge, so killing off Edge kills off Copilot, Widgets and so on.
-One of the many features from the "why the fuck did it took them so long" genre, they're finally adding sudo so you can elevate a single process from an unelevated command line. Great change, why the fuck did it take you so long.
-Super Resolution, AKA Microsoft's venture into adding their own DLSS/FSR/XeSS directly into Windows. If they won't make it support more 3D applications then I'd say it's pretty useless if it still requires game developers to add support for it IMO.
-Energy Saver, so Microsoft is reworking power management for both laptops and desktops. Is it ESG greenwashing, is it a genuine QoL improvement for battery life and lower energy bills, we'll see.
-The quick option flyout is scrollable instead of being limited to how many tiles you can put on it. More desktop UI/UX sensibility, that's good to see.
-Changes to the Bluetooth settings, apparently to make it easier to quickly add new devices I guess, whatever.
-Voice Clarity, so something like NVIDIA Voice where it uses AI to cut away all the mic noise that's not your voice. An actually useful AI addition which is great to see.
-Speak for me, I have no idea if this is just a more sophisticated TTS system or if this is actually meant to use your voice to create a mimic of it so you can TTS when you don't have a mic at a web meeting or whatever. Will probably see some use in home office.
-Another one of those "why the fuck it took them so long", a built-in archive creator in File Explorer, so you don't have to install 7-zip.
Total Commander is still superior btw
-Viewing and editing .png metadata, will get used by 3 people that don't use something like XnView already.
-More improvements to the new context menu and the new taskbar instead of focusing on feature parity of the new glued on elements with the old ones. Seriously Microsoft, how hard is it to get your new context menu to show legacy context menu options? Just parse non-MS context menu registry keys, it's not undoable.
-Support for WiFi7 that maybe 5 enthusiasts have the hardware on both ends to support, while most people are still using WiFi5 because even the WiFi6 adoption is going painfully slow. You can also view your WiFi password now and there's new diagnostic tools for WiFi issues.
-Firewall improvements, the type of shit that's configured by default and 99% of users don't need to know about.
-Some domain administration features that home users won't ever see, I'm sure some sysadmins will be happy with them though.
-Support for new protocols for better DNS security so that you automatically use encrypted DNS, good change if it works out of the box for all normies.
-Microsoft is attempting to remove old legacy settings and move them into the Settings app, yaaaaay, will never get accomplished anyway.
-Some new printer setting that I guess needs modern printers.
-Support for pairing hearing aids, I can see that a lot of people will be happy with it.
-You can listen to your microphone from the Settings app because mmsys.cpl is old therefore hard to use and bad.
-A "privacy feature" to notify you when software is asking for your location. In Windows.
-Microsoft porting more PowerToys features directly into Windows 11. This is why Microsoft embraced FOSS, people will do work for them for free so then they can use it in their commercial products.
-Widgets redesign, nuke Edge and never use it it's trash.
-Lock screen weather widget, so most likely an Edge based widget. Nuke Edge.
-Improvements to ReFS while MS still relies on NTFS with all it's flaws.
-Snipping Tool gets something that third party tools like ShareX had for years. Microsoft slowly catching up with the competition in their built-in tools as always.
-Copilot integrated with Notepad. I'm guessing it's just a simple text redirect function, not a full Copilot integration. So if you kill off Copilot this one Notepad feature will get broken.
-MS finally updating the Windows installer ever since it was first introduced in Vista. Adds one more click to launch the system restore function but it seems like an okay improvement for the installer.
-This here is the most Microsoft thing in the update. Hot patching. They can't do live updates like in Linux because NTFS is crap and they have been using it for over three decades now, so instead of finally making a better FS and migrating to that, they're gonna do memory patching of processes when there are security issues, but you'll still have to do full reboots to do proper updates. It's a goddamn miracle this OS hasn't completely crumbled.
-Command Prompt can auto update the PATH variable, that's neat.
-One more "why did it take you so long" feature, limiting registry searches to a subtree.
-Legacy Remote Desktop Connection improvements, I guess some will find it useful if they still use it.
-Cosmetic theme color change, meh.
-MS killing off Windows Mixed Reality and Microsoft Defender Application Guard.
So yeah, a shitton of changes. I guess they finally got over the biggest hurdles with Win11 and are ready to properly expand it, and a lot of these changes are good and make sense for once. Maybe there is hope that the Windows division will finally pull their head out of their asses.
