So Microsoft skipped a number. There's no Windows 9. They went straight from 8.1 to 10, and depending who you ask that's either a clever reset after the Windows 8 mess or just marketing trying to put distance between itself and Metro-tile purgatory. Either way, the Technical Preview build (9841, if you're keeping score) went up for download on October 1st, and I've had it sitting in a VirtualBox VM since Tuesday night instead of doing anything productive with my evening.
I did not, and would not, put this on my actual laptop. Early builds of an OS on your daily driver is how you end up reinstalling everything at 1am on a work night, and I've done that particular dance before with an Ubuntu beta a few years back. Never again. VirtualBox, a fresh virtual disk, 2GB of RAM handed over, and a snapshot taken before I touched anything, just in case build 9841 decided to eat itself.
Getting it running
The ISO is a beefy download, somewhere north of 3.5GB, so start that before you make dinner. Setup itself is basically identical to installing 8.1, nothing scary, just pick your language and let it churn for a while inside the VM. The first boot is where it actually gets interesting, because the Start button is back. Not the Start screen pretending to be a button, an actual Start menu, with your pinned tiles living in a little box on the right side of it and a normal list of apps on the left. It's such a small thing and yet I found myself genuinely relieved to see it, which says something uncomfortable about how much Windows 8 wore me down over the past couple years.
The other feature I kept going back to is the new Task View button in the taskbar, which gives you multiple virtual desktops. Click it and you get a grid of running windows plus a "new desktop" option along the bottom. I've had this on Linux for over a decade through workspaces, and on a Mac with Spaces, so Windows finally getting it isn't exactly groundbreaking, but it's still nice to have without installing a third party workspace switcher.
Command Prompt got some actual love too, of all things. You can now resize the window and it doesn't chop your text off, and there's a setting to let it use standard Windows keyboard shortcuts like Ctrl+V for paste. If you've ever tried to paste a long path into cmd.exe by right-clicking and selecting "Paste" from a tiny context menu, you'll understand why this is a bigger deal than it sounds.
Snapping windows also got smarter. Drag a window to a corner instead of just an edge and it snaps into a quarter of the screen, and Windows shows you thumbnails of your other open windows to fill the remaining space. Little stuff, but it's the kind of little stuff that adds up over a normal workday.
Is any of this stable enough to actually use? No, not really, don't put your real files anywhere near it yet. I had one crash where the whole VM just froze and I had to force-quit it from the VirtualBox side, and the taskbar clock was stuck showing the wrong time zone the entire time no matter what I changed in settings. It's a preview. It's supposed to be a little broken.
Unrelated, but stuck in my head this week: the Nobel Prize in Physics went to three researchers, Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura, for inventing the blue LED back in the 90s, which is apparently the missing piece that made white LED lighting possible at all. I read that over coffee and immediately looked over at the LED desk lamp I bought off Amazon for about twelve bucks last year, the one I use every single night, and felt a weird little jolt of appreciation for it. Funny how something that mundane traces back to a research breakthrough nobody outside a lab really thought about at the time.
Anyway. If you've got a spare 20GB of disk space and some patience for the occasional freeze, grabbing the Windows 10 preview and poking around in a VM is a decent way to kill an evening. Just don't expect your daily workflow to survive it yet.