What’s new in Windows 10 Build 2004

Improved Linux, Sandbox, and Cortana features dominate Build 2004's changelist.

Read the whole story

 

[uopx]

First of all, I really like The New Microsoft(tm). First item on the new Windows build is better Linux support? amen.

Second, WSL (I've only used v1) really simplifies cross-platform development flows. Windows is still the king of office work, like it or not, and being able to develop and test locally and offline quickly, and then transfer changes with a simple git pull to the corporate compute farm is very neat.

Thank you Microsoft for putting your users ahead of "maximizing shareholder value." Seems to be working pretty well for everyone.

 

[Arganoid]

2004 dropped Cortana reminders and to-do lists without any warning. Previously set a reminder for something important? It's gone! I used to set reminders for things like cancelling website subscriptions, so I was lucky that I realised in time and this change didn't cost me money. Eventually I found that I could access my reminders by downloading the Microsoft To Do app on Android. Most people who used the feature will never discover this as Windows doesn't tell them.

 

[sir_trackmenot]

All of this works, but it's incredibly messy. It should be much easier to get a WSL2 installation going—ideally, in a single step, whether command-line or graphical. And if there must be multiple steps, they should at least be within the same interface, and all steps referenced cleanly in order in a single set of docs.

As someone who uses WSL, Windows, and standalone-Linux as part of my job, this sentence tickles me as particularly funny. At what point has any power-user feature meant primarily for programmers ever existed in a single step in CLI or graphical on any operating system?

Not saying it shouldn't exist, it'd definitely be great, but as a programmer myself anytime anything is built for programmers, usability is like the last thing programmers think of.

I'm not a programmer and I use WSL. There are PLENTY of good reasons to use it that don't involve writing code.

I use it for development, but it's also great for remote sysadmin, what with being proper Linux and having a proper ssh client in it.

I also prefer zsh to anything else, and having a full, workable zsh which has access to /mnt/c is incredibly helpful.

 

[Deleted member 14629]

2004 dropped Cortana reminders and to-do lists without any warning. Previously set a reminder for something important? It's gone! I used to set reminders for things like cancelling website subscriptions, so I was lucky that I realised in time and this change didn't cost me money. Eventually I found that I could access my reminders by downloading the Microsoft To Do app on Android. Most people who used the feature will never discover this as Windows doesn't tell them.

Microsoft has been explicitly telling people this was going to happen, including in the Cortana app for months now. Hell, it even directed me to download To-Do.

 

[Arganoid]

Microsoft has been explicitly telling people this was going to happen, including in the Cortana app for months now. Hell, it even directed me to download To-Do.

The Cortana app in Windows 10? I never received any indication that a change was coming.

 

[Deleted member 14629]

Microsoft has been explicitly telling people this was going to happen, including in the Cortana app for months now. Hell, it even directed me to download To-Do.

The Cortana app in Windows 10? I never received any indication that a change was coming.

I'd screenshot it for you, but I already did the sync, so now if I open it on a pre-2004 build of Windows, it just says "Synced to Tasks".

 

[evelo]

we're running Windows 10 Build 2004 in a virtual machine under Ubuntu, so our C: drive shows up as "Red Hat VirtIO SCSI Disk Device"

ε-(´・｀) ﾌ

WSL for WSL

 

[Uxorious]

Microsoft says it noticed how commonly people were turning its Search Indexer service off, so the company

failed again to pay the developer(s) who created Everything search all the $$$ they spent on the salaries of the Windows Search and Cortana teams for the last 20+ years to integrate and deploy a tool that will actually find sh!t on a windows computer, any day, any time, by size, with words inside a file (takes slightly longer than the 0.01 seconds of a normal Everything search), you name it.

 

[Arganoid]

I'd screenshot it for you, but I already did the sync, so now if I open it on a pre-2004 build of Windows, it just says "Synced to Tasks".

If I go to Cortana on my laptop, which has not yet updated to 2004, and click through to reminders, there is a brief pop-up saying "Your tasks are synced across Microsoft apps". There is also a thing saying "Synced with" and then two small icons, one for Outlook (which I don't have) and one showing a checkmark. This presumably represents the Microsoft To Do app, although the icon shown is different to the actual icon. There is no indication as to what the icon represents – e.g. mousing over clicking have no effect. There is no message saying that reminders are going to be removed from Cortana.

 

[Matthew J.]

I do love Sandbox, but my biggest annoyance is that enabling it breaks VirtualBox. Does it still do that in Win 2004? If not, maybe I'll give it a go again after I upgrade.

Does it break WSL2?

 

[rismoney]

Actual advice:

Microsoft should ditch it's current Windows Update approach and the entire SxS methodology. Those directories are a mess ripe for exploitation and NOONE knows what is really in them or how they are being used.

They should instead use an active-passive root partition scheme to allow updating the entire OS as a single unit, instead of package by package. In this way the updates are quick, reliable and able to be easily rolled back. It is silly to distribute individual patches that require an install versus a binary partition drop. Then you know all the OS's are the same in the field.

This is how Chromebooks does it, and provide a high level of consistency across systems.

This requires a rethink of how the C: drive is layed out. True separation between UserData, Config, Libraries and OS files.

Also the registry is due for a revamp, or rather a deprecation. If you turn on sysmon, and see how inefficient your system is in making calls, you would question how there are even cpu cycles left for actual OS use.

I am hoping someone in Microsoft can start to address the real issues in the underlying OS, instead of slapping GUI after GUI on it, when XP was still their best UX.

 

[Emon]

First of all, I really like The New Microsoft(tm). First item on the new Windows build is better Linux support? amen.

Second, WSL (I've only used v1) really simplifies cross-platform development flows. Windows is still the king of office work, like it or not, and being able to develop and test locally and offline quickly, and then transfer changes with a simple git pull to the corporate compute farm is very neat.

Thank you Microsoft for putting your users ahead of "maximizing shareholder value." Seems to be working pretty well for everyone.

I don't think it's a them putting users in front of profits so much as realizing and embracing a strategy that leverages user and developer satisfaction to drive more revenue.

Microsoft's embrace of open source has created a HUGE amount of trust. Azure runs all things Linux these days, and Microsoft provides cross platform Azure tools, making it a serious competitor to AWS instead of being "AWS for Windows" like it was a decade ago. It's brought a flood of new customers.

VS Code is cross platform and has worked it's way towards becoming one of the best general purpose IDEs. It feels like what Eclipse should be if Eclipse's plugin ecosyst didn't suck and it didn't take so long to open that you get up to go make coffee.

It's really done a lot for the company's reputation amongst developers and technically minded people. As soon as Ballmer left, the flood gates opened. Suddenly all the people within Microsoft that actually care about open source were able to push to open up more and more stuff to the community.

It turns out having someone who understands software is a really good choice to run a software company. Who knew!?

 

[Pikolo]

All the improvements made due to trends Microsoft recognized through telemetry are really cool. Unlike Google's ad tracking and Apple's copy/extinguish motivation, I feel helped instead of harmed.

I don't. After MS noticed people were turning off web searches in cortana in the first versions of Win10, they removed a checkbox and only left a registry key to control that.

 

[kznf]

Do not forget set of new bugs

Storage Spaces eating people's (supposedly resilient redundantly stored) data is not what anyone would call a minor issue either.

Not sure why you're getting down-voted - my parity protected drive was borked - no idea from Microsoft whether or how many of 10 years of family photos I'll be able to retrieve. The hedge-language on the MS page acknowledging the issue doesn't fill me with confidence that MS is taking it seriously at all. "some" people's storage "might" encounter errors?! How about "all users of parity storage will experience data-loss with our latest release?" Because I haven't heard of any users of parity configuration of Storage Spaces surviving this bug. (given people generally don't report non-issues - but I've seen a lot of - "wait, let me check ... oh shit" type of posts.

 

[kznf]

I updated to 2004 in release preview stage. Didn't realize that parity storage spaces was broken. A couple weeks later I went to open some files on my parity storage space and they were corrupt. File had same size, same attributes, but data inside was messed up. My onedrive existed on this drive but luckily the corruption didn't sync back. Also, the newly corrupt version of the files didn't get backed up via file history.


I restored the files but on next reboot they started corrupting again. I ran a chkdsk and it made it even worse.

Lesson is, don't update to 2004 if you use parity storage spaces. If you've already updated, roll back, or mark the space as read-only.

According to Microsoft's official response rolling-back will not resolve the problem.

 

[ChrisSD]

Tbf, installing any OS in the preview stage is very much "at your own risk".

 

[AmanoJyaku]

Not sure why you're getting down-voted

Probably because all this talk about bugs is off-topic. This is an article about features.

 

[wolfwood6]

"Once you've got your WSL2 VM up and running, it's a little exciting if you're a Linux person. For almost all intents and purposes, you've got yourself a real Linux system inside your Windows system, with fully native code including all kernel syscalls (not just some emulated APIs patched through to the Windows kernel) and all devices working."

Does this mean I can finally reach my actual GPU from linux running on windows?

 

[Dachannien]

Will Windows automatically escape the backslash characters in the shruggy kaomoji, or is this all a conspiracy to elevate u/LimbRetrieval-Bot to sentience?

 

[ArsSide]

... and a new round of bugs, from Microsoft's highly vaunted QC process.... </sarcasm>

 

[martixy]

Test driving 20H1 since this week. (Test driving because I still haven't deleted "Windows.old" and all the recovery files.)

The one feature I was most excited about was also the most inconsequential - I can finally rename my virtual desktops.
Sigh.
I paid 20 GB of my SSD space for a patch that's probably 10 lines of code written by a Microsoft engineer during a lunch break.

 

[SeanJW]

One upside of Windows 10 2004: You won't find old install CDs all over the office two decades from now.

Oh come on .. the joke would've been better with floppy disks.

Why not both? I opened one of my boxes in storage looking for something the other day, and found a bundle of Windows 98 CDs complete with the required boot floppy (seeing when 98 came out, CD boot wasn't standard) and license stickers and printed manual... I have no idea where I acquired them or why I still have them...

 

[dodexahedron]

No, the [Windows key] + [.] shortcut to bring up an emoji selection panel is news to me. I have never seen it mentioned before, and I do computing support for a living with Windows as the primary OS that I support.

It's been there for a whiiiiiile in Win10. I've relied on it for some time (usually to bring up the emdash shortcut).

Yeah it’s been there for at least 2 years at this point. Article really needs to be updated with that erratum.

 

[sir_trackmenot]

I do love Sandbox, but my biggest annoyance is that enabling it breaks VirtualBox. Does it still do that in Win 2004? If not, maybe I'll give it a go again after I upgrade.

Does it break WSL2?

Sandbox, WSL2 and HyperV are all... HyperV. They use the virtualization instructions of the CPU to work.

IIUC:

- Hyper-V correctly restores the CPU state when they leave the VT context so, in theory, it's possible to run another VM program concurrently.

- VirtualBox doesn't restore the context and expects to find it as it was left, so doesn't play nice with sharing the VT instruction.

Coincidently I believe KVM suffers the same issue with expecting the VT context as it left it.

 

[OptimusP83]

All of this works, but it's incredibly messy. It should be much easier to get a WSL2 installation going—ideally, in a single step, whether command-line or graphical. And if there must be multiple steps, they should at least be within the same interface, and all steps referenced cleanly in order in a single set of docs.

As someone who uses WSL, Windows, and standalone-Linux as part of my job, this sentence tickles me as particularly funny. At what point has any power-user feature meant primarily for programmers ever existed in a single step in CLI or graphical on any operating system?

Not saying it shouldn't exist, it'd definitely be great, but as a programmer myself anytime anything is built for programmers, usability is like the last thing programmers think of.

I'm not a programmer and I use WSL. There are PLENTY of good reasons to use it that don't involve writing code.

I use it for development, but it's also great for remote sysadmin, what with being proper Linux and having a proper ssh client in it.

I also prefer zsh to anything else, and having a full, workable zsh which has access to /mnt/c is incredibly helpful.

Yup. I use it at home to admin my FreeNAS on occasion (my usual daily driver is a MacBook though, but I use my windows box on occasion). Plus there are tons of incredibly useful utilities like fio, iperf and whatnot that is super useful and is now drop dead easy to use on windows. I know iperf has a windows CLI client, but I’m far more accustomed to Linux CLI and it’s just much easier for me to deal with.

 

[georgedarroch]

Microsoft says it noticed how commonly people were turning its Search Indexer service off, so the company

failed again to pay the developer(s) who created Everything search all the $$$ they spent on the salaries of the Windows Search and Cortana teams for the last 20+ years to integrate and deploy a tool that will actually find sh!t on a windows computer, any day, any time, by size, with words inside a file (takes slightly longer than the 0.01 seconds of a normal Everything search), you name it.

At home I use Agent Ransack. It's almost instant. At work I have no such privileges, so manually save file paths to create my own index in a OneNote folder in order that I can reliably find every file I need.

I still have no idea why native search in Win10 is so incredibly bad. If there's one thing that a desktop operating system should do, it's help you manage your files.

 

[wagner17]

All of this works, but it's incredibly messy. It should be much easier to get a WSL2 installation going—ideally, in a single step, whether command-line or graphical. And if there must be multiple steps, they should at least be within the same interface, and all steps referenced cleanly in order in a single set of docs.

As someone who uses WSL, Windows, and standalone-Linux as part of my job, this sentence tickles me as particularly funny. At what point has any power-user feature meant primarily for programmers ever existed in a single step in CLI or graphical on any operating system?

Not saying it shouldn't exist, it'd definitely be great, but as a programmer myself anytime anything is built for programmers, usability is like the last thing programmers think of.

If you don't include at least three command line steps that have to be read from a manual and can't possibly be remembered, you lose the Linux crowd anyway.

You are right they should have just used registry keys or GPOs to control the installation options. And then in the next version update, Microsoft could ignore the group policy settings and change the registry hacks to provide a more genuine Windows experience for the Linux crowd !

 

[mx-1979]

RE: Virtual Desktops, believe they have been around since the beginning of Windows 10. The history features (which I don't use personally) I think were introduced in the last couple of years.

Virtual desktop aren't Linux feature either, as article says. They existed on other *nix already before Linux.

 

[richardnpaul]

RE: Virtual Desktops, believe they have been around since the beginning of Windows 10. The history features (which I don't use personally) I think were introduced in the last couple of years.

RE: WSL Networking, the bridged connection becomes an issue if you're connecting to a corporate VPN developing, which is by and large true for a lot of people because COVID. The NAT based setup, while not perfect, avoids routing issues connecting to resources living on the corporate network like test database servers, source control servers, etc. It's a challenging problem to overcome, but I personally fell like the NAT based setup out the door was likely the best fit for the target audience, developers.

Unfortunately, the netExtender software that we use as a vpn means that the network connection to the Internet is broken which then makes WSL 2 useless for me (no SSH anymore)

 

[richardnpaul]

I believe there are real people out there that want, love, and use WSL; I don't understand why. To me it's so much easier to run native Linux and host a windows VM for use when I need it (never).

You're getting buried in downvotes, but let me I say both that I agree with you that it's easier to run Windows as a VM under Linux, AND I understand why people are excited about WSL.

There was a time when I used Windows on the desktop and Linux on the server, pretty much exclusively for both. Being able to have a real, nearly first class citizen Linux right on my laptop--leagues above and beyond Cygwin--would have been an enormous win for me then.

I think there are LOTS of people now in basically the same place I was then; WSL is starting to allow them to blur the lines in interesting ways. It's better than either Cygwin or (from the other direction) WINE, and it's on track to keep getting better.

There's likely going to come a time in the near future where Windows users can run either Windows native apps or Linux native apps just as easily on the same system, all the way down to a laptop, without needing to worry much about the difference. That's pretty awesome IMO.

Yes the future support for Linux GUI apps is what I have am really looking forward to. Windows is still a little ahead in some ways on the desktop - and by that I mean that you can have independent scaling per screen, and that scaling can be fractional scaling and you don't have issues with high refresh rate monitors - but there are things that are only available on windows where it'll be nice to be able to mix and match.

They've fixed nested virtualisation already so you can run docker in WSL 2 and also they have fixed nested virtualisation on AMD, which just didn't work on Hyper-V before. Both features should probably make the way into a near future release. It'd be nice if they could make bridged NAT a .wslconfig option too and then I might be all set to switch back to Windows.

 

[Crazy Diamond]

As a .net developer, I don't have a specific need for Linux, but I do run a VM with Ubuntu on it just so I can keep what meager skills I have up, and I can also make sure my .net core apps work the way they are supposed to, even if we do end up running them on Windows still.

If I know I'm just surfing the web, I find that I end up using the Linux VM for days on end. I use VirtualBox though, and maybe WSL would be a better alternative?

 

[Oatmeal stout]

At home I use Agent Ransack. It's almost instant. At work I have no such privileges, so manually save file paths to create my own index in a OneNote folder in order that I can reliably find every file I need.

I still have no idea why native search in Win10 is so incredibly bad. If there's one thing that a desktop operating system should do, it's help you manage your files.

My approach is
1) File Locator to look for stuff in a given folder. Works well enough that I don't have to RDP into file servers, but may be slow. On boxes where I'm the sole admin & user, register it as the F3 handler.

2) If the basic or regex search in file contents does not cut it, open WSL or Git Bash and grep/ripgrep whatever -- WSL is blocked by corporate policy though :/
Notepad++ Find in files works well too.

3) Everything.exe when I look for a specific item I don't remember where it's saved


To go back on topic, it's good that Docker now has published the WSL2 integration in Docker Desktop Stable 2.3.0.2. It will allow more people who don't own a Pro (Hyper-V) SKU to both access a (WSL2) Linux instance and containers, relatively easily.

It's quite bad for the competition though as it causes issues for type-2 hypervisors. VirtualBox added the HV backend in v6.0, but this is the kind of change that could affect stability and frankly I don't fancy this 'totalitarian' approach.

EDIT:
Forgot to say, WSL eliminates the need for both Cygwin and MSYS2. Big thanks to them for providing what was lacking at the time.

 

[abundance]

Beginning with Build 2004, users can give each of their Virtual Desktops a name of their choosing, whether functional or frivolous. You might name three Virtual Desktops Browsing, Company, and Design—or Elrond, Frodo, and Gandalf. Windows 10 won't judge, and neither will we.

Can you rearrange the desktops now?
Because that without this feels a bit halfway.

 

[adipose]

No, the [Windows key] + [.] shortcut to bring up an emoji selection panel is news to me. I have never seen it mentioned before, and I do computing support for a living with Windows as the primary OS that I support.

Blew my mind too. That's why I covered it more thoroughly than just "moar kaomoji."

I also didn't know the term "kaomoji" until discovering that 2004 added "more" of them. NGL, I'm a little jealous; gets old googling the shruggie and copying and pasting it!

I just upgraded my natural 4000 keyboard to its successor, and it has a dedicated emoji button! It is where the context menu button belongs! I hate it. It can be reassigned, luckily, but the context menu button itself (which is wrongly moved to the left side of the keyboard) cannot. Boooo!

 

[jmauro]

Actual advice:

Microsoft should ditch it's current Windows Update approach and the entire SxS methodology. Those directories are a mess ripe for exploitation and NOONE knows what is really in them or how they are being used.

They should instead use an active-passive root partition scheme to allow updating the entire OS as a single unit, instead of package by package. In this way the updates are quick, reliable and able to be easily rolled back. It is silly to distribute individual patches that require an install versus a binary partition drop. Then you know all the OS's are the same in the field.

This is how Chromebooks does it, and provide a high level of consistency across systems.

This requires a rethink of how the C: drive is layed out. True separation between UserData, Config, Libraries and OS files.

Also the registry is due for a revamp, or rather a deprecation. If you turn on sysmon, and see how inefficient your system is in making calls, you would question how there are even cpu cycles left for actual OS use.

I am hoping someone in Microsoft can start to address the real issues in the underlying OS, instead of slapping GUI after GUI on it, when XP was still their best UX.

That would break so many crappy business programs that it would be unworkable from Microsoft's point of view. It's been the bane of Windows since day one, they're stuck with the current systems, decades of legacy libraries, and hacks on top of all it, because they don't want to make developers and admins life more difficult and give them a reason to switch.

 

[bthylafh]

I just upgraded my natural 4000 keyboard to its successor, and it has a dedicated emoji button! It is where the context menu button belongs! I hate it. It can be reassigned, luckily, but the context menu button itself (which is wrongly moved to the left side of the keyboard) cannot. Boooo!

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/keytweak/

That might do what you want. I use it to remap right-ALT on my 101 key Model M to be the Windows key.

 

[adipose]

At home I use Agent Ransack. It's almost instant. At work I have no such privileges, so manually save file paths to create my own index in a OneNote folder in order that I can reliably find every file I need.

I still have no idea why native search in Win10 is so incredibly bad. If there's one thing that a desktop operating system should do, it's help you manage your files.

My approach is
1) File Locator to look for stuff in a given folder. Works well enough that I don't have to RDP into file servers, but may be slow. On boxes where I'm the sole admin & user, register it as the F3 handler.

2) If the basic or regex search in file contents does not cut it, open WSL or Git Bash and grep/ripgrep whatever -- WSL is blocked by corporate policy though :/
Notepad++ Find in files works well too.

3) Everything.exe when I look for a specific item I don't remember where it's saved


To go back on topic, it's good that Docker now has published the WSL2 integration in Docker Desktop Stable 2.3.0.2. It will allow more people who don't own a Pro (Hyper-V) SKU to both access a (WSL2) Linux instance and containers, relatively easily.

It's quite bad for the competition though as it causes issues for type-2 hypervisors. VirtualBox added the HV backend in v6.0, but this is the kind of change that could affect stability and frankly I don't fancy this 'totalitarian' approach.

EDIT:
Forgot to say, WSL eliminates the need for both Cygwin and MSYS2. Big thanks to them for providing what was lacking at the time.

You use WSL to build mingw libraries?

I dropped cygwin for WSL, but cygwin is better in a few ways. Launching windows applications from within cygwin is easier. They did fix WSL to launch explorer in the current folder, but it is still more annoying than the cygwin way. Still, very happy I can use apt in windows.

 

[adipose]

I just upgraded my natural 4000 keyboard to its successor, and it has a dedicated emoji button! It is where the context menu button belongs! I hate it. It can be reassigned, luckily, but the context menu button itself (which is wrongly moved to the left side of the keyboard) cannot. Boooo!

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/keytweak/

That might do what you want. I use it to remap right-ALT on my 101 key Model M to be the Windows key.

I use this on lenovo laptops that moved the printscreen key. I should try it. Certain keys are not remappable but context menu is a newer one so it probably can.

I am mostly annoyed they made the buttons smaller and crammed 2 where it was once 1. So I will probably remap it to be a second windows key, which seems idiotic...

 

[bthylafh]

I just upgraded my natural 4000 keyboard to its successor, and it has a dedicated emoji button! It is where the context menu button belongs! I hate it. It can be reassigned, luckily, but the context menu button itself (which is wrongly moved to the left side of the keyboard) cannot. Boooo!

https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/keytweak/

That might do what you want. I use it to remap right-ALT on my 101 key Model M to be the Windows key.

I use this on lenovo laptops that moved the printscreen key. I should try it. Certain keys are not remappable but context menu is a newer one so it probably can.

I am mostly annoyed they made the buttons smaller and crammed 2 where it was once 1. So I will probably remap it to be a second windows key, which seems idiotic...

Perhaps one of these would work for keys that KeyTweak can't remap:

https://alternativeto.net/software/keytweak/

 

[JOATMON!]

My device "is no ready yet" for 2004. I have no idea what the hell I'm supposed to do to make my PC ready. On the bright side; I may be avoiding boatload of troubles from the update.

Microsoft does a slow rollout. Sometimes manually checking for updates will skip you to the front of the line. Otherwise, you can manually upgrade using an ISO or the update assistant (at your own risk). Or wait for full availability.