 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. 98SE, 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 on 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 sponsoring today's video. Zoho Projects is a project management tool that has everything you need for your business and integrates with your favorite apps. Get a 30-day trial of their Enterprise Edition by using the link in the video description. ["Skyrim 2.0 Remake"] 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. And 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 gonna be removing folders entirely from the Start menu for the final release. The taskbar itself, yes, it's centered. However, you can change that by right-clicking on it and clicking on Taskbar 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 change the position that's located on screen either. Sorry, no more vertical taskbar for you, A-Prime. 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 to 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 or interests is to go to MSN. Blah. Kshhhhhh. Rehh. 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 recently 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 Wi-Fi and Bluetooth toggles, now live in the same area as the network and audio icons in the system tray, which is now called taskbar 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. Oop, there it is. Unlike Windows 10, right-clicking on most objects in the OS, the desktop included. Now it brings up a new glassy context menu with bigger, more spaced out items with this show more options button here, 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, seven 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 in 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 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, context-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's 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 new 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 folder's tab. Sure, it looks neater and is more realistic, I guess, but it's tougher to make out of the 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 submenus 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, 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 and file type individually, which... 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 suggesting all of these settings every time I switch to using a new app. Can you imagine what the new set as default browser prompts are gonna look like? 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 designed 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 and cow emoji here, though while categorized, these aren't searchable like emoji are. Man, these classic ASCII emoticons bring back memories. Oh, whoa, what's this? Ahem, holy balls. This video's 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 minimized in maximized wholesale. You can kick this whole process off by either dragging a window to the side of the screen as usual, or by hovering over a Windows 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 alt dragging 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 UI apps. 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 requirement 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 because 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 all will 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 games support it, 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 series, and as the name suggests, this requires an HDR monitor and can automatically generate HDR metadata for SDR games running DirectX 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 blow 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 on 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 going to 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 sponsoring this video. You can get the best prices and selection on anything tech at any one of Micro Center's 25 locations across the United States. If you use Micro Center's custom PC builder, you can spec up the best PC at any price point. And once you're done in the PC builder, just add your computer and set up to the Micro Center custom build 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.