A Weekend With The Windows 10 Technical Preview

So Microsoft skipped 9. We're just not getting a Windows 9, apparently, and everybody's got a theory about why (something about old software checking for "Windows 9" and matching "Windows 95/98" strings, which, sure, I'll buy that) but honestly I don't care about the number as much as I cared about getting my hands on the actual bits. The Technical Preview went up for download on the first of the month and I grabbed the ISO Friday night, way later than I should've been awake, and spent most of Saturday poking at it in a VM instead of doing literally anything else I was supposed to do that weekend.

First thing: it's ugly in the specific way all early previews are ugly. Flat gray windows, placeholder-feeling icons, a build number watermarked in the corner (9841, for the record) so you never forget you're using something unfinished. That's fine, that's what a preview is for. I'm not complaining about the paint job.

What I actually want to talk about is the Start menu, because that's the whole story here, isn't it. It's back. Not the Start menu from Windows 7 wearing a costume, it's got a column of live tiles bolted onto the right side of it, which is Microsoft's way of admitting the Windows 8 tile screen was a swing and a miss without actually saying the words "we were wrong." And I get why they did it this way instead of just reverting. But sitting there Saturday afternoon, right-clicking around, pinning things, I kept thinking about how much grief I gave Windows 8 on this blog back in 2012 when it first came out — go dig through the archives if you want, I was not gentle about it — and now three years later they're basically un-shipping the thing that made me angriest. Feels less like innovation and more like watching someone quietly return an ugly sweater.

The part that actually impressed me, and I didn't expect to say this, is the virtual desktops. Click the Task View button, get a second desktop, drag windows between them. I've been using a third-party tool called Dexpot for this exact feature for something like four years because Windows never had it built in, and now here it is, baked into the taskbar, working about as well as Dexpot ever did. I'm not mad about that, I'm just mildly annoyed I spent four years installing a workaround for a feature that apparently wasn't that hard to build.

Command Prompt got some love too: you can finally resize the window like a normal application and Ctrl+V pastes text into it, which sounds like nothing until you remember that up through Windows 8.1 you had to right-click and pick Paste from a menu like it was 1998. My brother, who does actual sysadmin work for a living unlike me typing about it in my pajamas, has been complaining about this specific thing for years. I texted him a screenshot. He did not seem as excited as I expected.

Performance-wise, running it in VirtualBox on my aging desktop (i5, 8GB of RAM, and I gave the VM 4 of those gigs and a 40GB virtual disk) it was perfectly snappy, apps opened fast, nothing crashed on me, though to be fair a preview build in a VM with basically nothing installed on it isn't exactly a stress test. I'd want to see how it handles actually being someone's daily machine with forty browser tabs and Steam running in the background before I'd trust it with anything real. Which, obviously, is not what a Technical Preview is for. You don't put your tax documents on this thing.

Also worth saying: this whole month has had a second, less fun tech story running underneath everything, which is that people are still finding and patching holes from that Bash bug from a couple weeks back. I spent part of Sunday morning making sure the couple of little Linux boxes I run for this blog and some side projects were actually patched and not just patched-looking, because apparently some of the first round of fixes for that didn't fully close the hole. Not a fun way to spend a Sunday. Different post, probably, once I've got more to say about it.

Anyway. If you've got a spare machine or don't mind running it in a VM like I did, it's worth the download just to see the Start menu you've been asking for since 2012 actually show up. I don't know if I'd want it on my main rig yet. Ask me again once it stops watermarking every window with a build number.