 Microsoft hasn't even announced Windows 11, but there's three things that tell me it's probably coming soon. Number one, they've got an event announced for June the 24th where we're gonna see what's next for Windows. Number two, they've actually posted a retirement date for Windows 10 on their official website. And number three, I'm holding it. We're gonna install Windows 11 right now. So excited to tell you about our sponsor. GlassWire, instantly see your current and past network activity with GlassWire. Detect malware and block badly behaving apps on any PC or Android device and use offer code Linus to get 25% off GlassWire at the link down below. ["Win 11"] ["Win 11"] Before we begin, I gotta admit this label was a lie. And the first thing we need to do is get the Windows 11 installer actually onto our USB drive. Now, normally you would just go on the Microsoft website and use the Windows media creation tool. But because Microsoft is not obviously intentionally distributing copies of Windows 11, we are gonna have to use a different tool called Rufus. So let's fire up good old Rufus here. And look at that. It automatically picked up our USB drive. And now, look, I'm not gonna aid in a bet, software piracy or whatever else. So I'm not gonna tell you guys where to get an ISO, but we got an ISO. There it is. Let's create a bootable Windows installer. I'm actually so excited right now. I haven't looked at any of the leaked screenshots or any of the rumors. So I just get to go into it totally fresh. Now, one of the big controversies around Windows 11 is that there isn't supposed to be a Windows 11. Microsoft said outright when they launched Windows 10 that it was going to be the last Windows you would ever need, which people interpreted to mean that they would never need to pay for another Windows license, and that they would just get free upgrades forever. Kind of like, well, nothing, nothing works like that. It was gonna be Windows as a service though. Well, it looks like that's all getting kicked in the head. I wish I could find the power button for this test bench. I'm gonna install it. I don't have a product key, obviously. Okay, well, we're going pro boys. Oh no, we're going pro for workstations, ah. No, no, it wasn't that easy. We've now tried this on three separate machines running Ryzen 3000, Intel 7000 series, and now Intel 10 series. And we can't find a single one that meets the minimum system requirements to install this version of Windows. If you were looking closely, you might have noticed that many of the leaked screenshots of Windows 11 were at oddball resolutions, like 1600 by 1200. And that's no coincidence. While that would be an extremely uncommon resolution for a desktop or a laptop monitor, it's really common in virtual machines. So that's when you have one operating system running inside another host operating system. There are a ton of reasons to test new software by installing it on a virtual machine rather than on your bare metal hardware. It can be better for security, especially if you don't trust the source of the software. It can be quicker to wipe and start over. And in the case of Windows 11, it may just flat out be the only way to do it because it appears though we can't find any confirmation of this online that Microsoft has found a way to lock down the installer so that it just won't install on their hardware. Of course, that's not gonna prevent us from just doing it this way then. I'm creating a 500 gigabyte boot drive and I'm just chucking it in my VirtualBox VMs, Windows 11.VirtualDisk blah, blah, blah thing. And then all I've got to do is change my settings so that my storage, here we go, has, there it is, Windows 11 mounted to it. Let's go ahead and fire this thing up. Start. It really is that fast, they didn't know. Pirating Windows is thirsty work. LTTstore.com. What is the perfect time to get hydrated? Right out of the gate, there's a lot of things I'm expecting to be different. There's supposed to be a whole new visual design and if the last Windows 10 update is anything to go by, there's probably gonna be a lot more shoving content and ads down my throat. See this thing they added to my task bar? Anyway, the point is it's ready. Wow, that is different. Well, you might as well know where the filthy pirate is from, Canada. Is this the right keyboard? Yeah. Secondary keyboard? No. Okay, this is basically the same thing but with a facelift so far. Apparently the on-screen keyboard allows you to like customize it and stuff now, which is less relevant for a desktop user but more relevant for a device like this one. Are they gonna make me log into a Microsoft account? Sign in with a security key? Sign in options, can I just have a local account? Offline account, look at that. No problemo. Oh, limited experience. You know what else? I'll sign in, I'll sign in. I'm gonna sign in with that account. Let's customize your experience. Oh, gaming, creativity, family. You know what? I do everything. Oh, hey, there it is. Okay. Oh my God, is this the start menu? It's like a Mac. Why did that getting started thing go away? And why is search a separate button now? The Windows button already was search. So wait, does this not have search? Hello? It does, it totally does. But there's a delay while it switches over to this search thing. Wow, that is really sluggish. Okay, part of the problem though is that we're running anything that would be GPU accelerated just in software right now. So we shouldn't judge that also, it's an early build, et cetera. Are they trying to kill right click? Look at this, Brandon. Right clicking on these ones works just fine. So that could be just early weirdness. But that slide up when you left or right click also kind of makes sense when you consider that this is supposed to be a complete rethinking of the idea of Windows. And the design is supposed to be intuitive to use with keyboard mouse, touch, stylus, or whatever the case may be. File Explorer doesn't seem to have changed too much. Hello? There it is. Looks pretty similar. These icons though are so different. Apparently the Microsoft store got a total overhaul. But I'm probably not gonna spend a ton of time on that because realistically, neither you nor I is ever gonna open it again. Oh hey, you can save 60% on PC games. Okay, there's a few more cool things that we can talk about though. Okay, check this out. Widgets are now apparently a much more central part of the experience. So boom, up comes your widgets. And we can scroll down. Can we move the whole thing around? Oh, okay, that's yes. That's the behavior I would want. Now is where we're gonna find out if we can actually just install stuff. So from Windows 7 to 8, to 8.1, to 10, part of the idea behind them has been that while compatibility definitely does need to be worked on by the developer, theoretically, you can just install anything that's compatible with one of them on the others. So we're gonna find out if developers need to explicitly create Windows 11 versions of their applications, real quick styles here. You having fun yet? It's new Windows. You're gonna be using it, whether you like it or not. Unless you're ready to go Linux, because you don't need Creative Cloud. Oh, I guess there's always Mac OS. Okay, same kind of sign-in paradigm. Here's a couple other cool things. Apparently there's a better voice typing experience, so that we don't have a microphone plugged into it right now. They've got better camera management experience, but we don't have a camera plugged into it right now. And this is really cool. On a per display basis, you can have multiple virtual desktops that you can switch between. I don't know how to do that just yet. Oh, here we go. We can create a new desktop. Boom. So they've just got the task view down here, right on the start menu. I don't, your task bar, I guess. Can I still call it a task bar? It's like, I guess, yeah, it's still a task bar. Another cool thing is, apparently when you unplug and replug monitors, it's supposed to be way smarter about putting all the same stuff back where it was supposed to be. Okay, and then, boom, we can go to, there we go. So we've got desktop one, which we can preview. That's pretty nice. Desktop two, I forget the shortcut for this. What is it? Yeah, Windows tab. And you just use your, wait, why does middle click not open a new instance of an application anymore? Ooh, that's gonna bother me. So what if I have multiple instances of something open? Then what happens? So I mouse over and it gives me the options. But then if I wanna open another one, do I really have to right click and open it again? Okay. Yep, that looks like a mobile app, all right. So that's cool. Oh, right, we never talked about the keyboard. Okay. This is horrible. It regularly misses the first couple keystrokes that I put in. Board is all it got out of keyboard. It's just too slow to switch from start menu to the dedicated search thing. Shoot, I found it. It's a personalization setting, whether to show the touch keyboard button. So I don't see an obvious way to bring it up. And anyway, that's fine because our top priority is figuring out if we can game on it. Now, obviously, if we're on a device that has trouble rendering a window being dragged around, we're gonna have a pretty bad time. But that's okay because we've got some other ideas. It takes a truly magnificent test bench to make the one we were running before look like a toy. But this is it, ladies and gentlemen. So we've got a copy of Unraid running on this USB drive over here. We're gonna pass through our keyboard and mouse to our virtual machine. Massive shout out, by the way, to Nvidia's 20 series for having a built-in USB port. So we've got our Steam drive plugged directly into our GPU that we're gonna pass through to our Windows 11 VM and hopefully run games at near native speed. Oh! And guys, the craziest part of this is this is just the bog standardist OS installation process on Unraid. If you can install Windows 10 on Unraid, you can install Windows 11 on Unraid. And I am, wait, how do I even access device manager? Okay, I gotta go over here, device manager. My muscle memory is very strong. RTX 2080 Ti, the driver's just installed. You activated Windows? Oh wait, I wanna see the on-screen keyboard then, the other one. Touch keyboard button, here we go. Show the touch keyboard button, okay. I wanna see this thing because apparently it's been changed. So there's like emojis and GIFs powered by Tenor. Oh, that means there should be lots of Linus Tech Tips GIFs. We have a Tenor account. Oh, what the, who's this imposter Linus? What is this? This is what I think of this. A keyboard layout, small, split, default, nice. We've got a nice little split keyboard there. Okay, cool, more settings. Apparently there's like colors and stuff. Keyboard layout, okay, fine, fine, fine, enough, enough. Games, this feels pretty darn good. Did you set a higher pressure? No, I haven't, this is still 60 Hertz. But like in terms of responsiveness, it's good. So display settings, can we just, like is everything just gonna work? 120 Hertz and gorgeous, it just, it just works. Okay, so what I had wanted to know was if I am pressing Windows and then searching, yeah. It's super responsive, it switches over right away. I think that's just because we were running in VirtualBox. This is a far more raw experience. So we're running, oh, you can't right click to get to task manager anymore? Right click the Windows button. Ah, that's more work. Okay, the point is we're running 10 cores on a Ryzen 9 3900X. We've got an RTX 2080 Ti, we've got 20 gigs of RAM. This is pretty darn close to what it's supposed to feel like. Oh yeah, let's try the new, oh, interesting. That's kind of cute. Yeah, it does look nicer. That didn't look that nice, that's kind of wonko. It's not even a beta release. Yeah, I know, I know. This is not even a developer preview. This is literally a leaked build of the operating system. We should be kind to it, but instead we're going to run Red Dead Redemption 2. It's just like runs. Yeah, I was expecting there to be some kind of fighting with it, you know, to get this running, but other than that it just won't install on bare metal. It just, it goes. I mean, look at this, Red Dead Redemption 2, ladies and gentlemen. I got to catch up to Dutch here. Get my lantern here. Okay, old paint, let's go. It's crazy too that just the latest Nvidia drivers just installed and just like Vert.io and all that kind of crap just. Wow. One of the things that might tell us though, is that maybe this update under the hood is not that big. And you know, maybe Windows 11 isn't because they couldn't turn Windows 10 into this experience, but rather that it was more of a business decision. Now to be fair at the start, a lot of the things that, you know, worked on Windows 7 worked on Windows 10. Yeah, that's fair. So I don't think there's much else for us to really say about it at this point, other than very weird, but very cool. To be clear, I am not saying that you guys should install this on your own hardware, on your own network, because you don't know where this ISO came from and what's packaged into it. But I'm really glad I tried it and I hope you guys enjoyed coming along for the ride. Just like you enjoy coming along for our sponsor, Manscaped. 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We'll maybe have those linked for you.