Windows 10 May 2019 Update Feature Focus: Light Themes And Sandboxes
by Brett Howse on May 24, 2019 8:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Operating Systems
- Software
- Windows
- Microsoft
- Windows 10
Wrapping Up
When Windows 10 first launched, the subsequent updates were pretty substantial in terms of new features, since the operating system was new and need a lot of polish, but over the last year or so, the amount of substance in each update has been much more manageable. That continues with the May 2019 Update. There’s some great new features, and some polish, but overall, it’s a minor step, as it should be at this point in the lifecycle of Windows 10.
Arguably the biggest feature that most people will see is the new Light Theme. Theming is something that is personal, so either you’ll like it or you won’t, but I think it looks clean and refreshing. I especially like the new default wallpaper, which takes the original Windows 10 wallpaper and gives it a new lease on life. The small changes to iconography help as well, and the Fluent Design continues to permeate through Windows 10, adding subtle touches here and there, such as the log-in screen.
Windows Sandbox is also a great addition to Windows 10, although it does require at least Windows 10 Pro to get this option. Having a lightweight containerized version of Windows for testing and development will be very useful for a wide range of industries, and if you are looking ahead, you could easily see Windows Sandbox becoming a way to keep legacy access for certain programs. The small 100 MB footprint on the system makes it no burden at all, even if it is rarely used, unlike if you have a 100 GB VHD file sitting on your drive.
Windows 10 continues adding new features for developers, and 1903 is no exception. There are even more updates to the console, and even Notepad got an update to accommodate Linux file support. There is clear buy-in by the Windows developers to leverage Linux tools where appropriate, and their work has paid dividends for developers who use Windows. The upcoming Windows Subsystem for Linux v2 will offer even more compatibility and performance, and Windows Terminal looks amazing.
If you’d like a full change-log of everything that’s in 1903, Microsoft keeps a running total on docs.microsoft.com
What will be the most key though is Microsoft having a smooth rollout of this version of Windows. The last couple of updates haven’t gone so well, so they need to get a win here. Time will tell, but the 1903 update went very quickly for me on several machines so far, but obviously my sample size is insignificant compared to the number of machines running Windows 10, which is now over 800 million computers. It feels like Microsoft is going to be very measured with the rollout this time, which should help them catch any major bugs before they impact a large number of people.
It’s also good to see Microsoft giving some control back to users on how updates get pushed out. Windows 10 Home now supports up to seven days of delay for an update. It would be nice to see this bumped up to perhaps a month, but something is better than the nothing that was offered before.
Windows 10 May 2019 Update offers a refreshed look, some nice new features, and less of the bloat of some previous updates. Assuming the rollout goes smoothly, it feels like a nice update to Windows 10.
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abufrejoval - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
Perhaps it is because I was already an adult when the Personal Computer launched in 1981 and a programmer, who’d been using Fortran and Cobol before and trying to find out what BASIC on a PC could do for me.PCs were very expensive tools, about the same price as a brand-new premium car: I got myself lots of bleeding edge PCs over the decades, because they were the base of my career. Never bought a new car in my life.
My PCs were and are my shop, my studio, my office. I depend on them, so I keep them in the best possible state: The notion that somebody else might be managing parts of that space, other than by a very conscious act of delegation, is anywhere from unacceptable to abhorrent.
So imagine my horror, when I saw Candy Crush tiles flipping on the screen after upgrading a Windows 7 system: This is blasphemy, rape, war, ad-extortion!
Classic Shell came to the rescue and eventually I learned how to tame even Windows 10 to the point where it wouldn’t phone home on every click or tock. Unfortunately, the wonderful, wonderful person who developed and maintained it for years, eventually changed priorities, but so far, it just continues to work as it should, giving a Windows 7 like experience to whatever Microsoft wrongly believed they could do better afterwards.
I read reports lately, that you could actually hijack tiles on the start menu, because of a combination of an “Internet first” design and gross negligence by Microsoft…. Why does that not surprise me?
Designing an “operating system” as a theme park is an Apple invention, and I only wish Steve Jobs were still alive to enforce nobody duplicating that nonsense on Personal Computers.
The 1903 update gave me a scare, because it reported that an “administrative guideline” had blocked the Classic Shell reconfiguration. Now, who but me is the administrator on my Personal Computers and I certainly didn’t block Classic Shell from taking over!
Re-ran the command in an Admin shell and that spooky message went away. But somehow I think that the 1909 release will finish off Classic Shell for once and forever… I don’t know what I’ll do, but Candy Crunch is enough of a threat to get out the big guns: Been testing Linux desktops since Linus started shaving and Proton is getting better: Yes, I do *also* game on my PCs. I even watch movies or “streams”.
It still doesn’t mean I mistake them for Disney Land or that anyone but me should be God on them.
Alexvrb - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
That's a big wall of text to just say "I'm a stodgey pre-internet drama queen". :P You know you can uninstall pretty much anything on there. What games do you play... Solitaire? You can still download the classic solitaire that released in the early days of Windows, relax. I love old hardware as much as the next aging nerd (mostly consoles to be honest) but that doesn't mean I want them to go backwards. Windows 7 now feels downright old and clunky, if I want nostalgia I'll just install ReactOS.abufrejoval - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
"drama queen", well that's a first."wall of text": I use an original IBM PS/2 keyboard from March 1990 these days, a Steinway in a world of e-pianos or less: Had to replace the AT-style keyboards I really liked best, because I needed the curly braces for C/C++ and those were hard to come by on the AT keyboard in German.
These keyboards did cost more than a good laptop these days, but they make text just roll off your fingers... Guess it shows and I sure couldn't do it with one of these newer and lesser variants or squinting and dabbling on a mobile screen.
Uninstall: Why should I have to kill rats in a brand new house? Good thing the company is paying for the MSDN because if it was my bucks for the OS, I'd truly rant.
Games: ARK Survial Evolved mostly, on a GTX 2080ti at 42" 4K screen using an 18-Core Xeon with 128GB of DDR4 ECC RAM: Really old style, I'll admit.
Also Doom and testing both with Steam/Proton on CentOS and Ubuntu, but also via KVM GPU pass-through on a Window 10 VM with the Linux host.
ReactOS is all wrong: Who would want an NT undercarriage, when Linux delivers so much more horsepower? It's the Windows applications that make Windows attractive as a platform, not the OS itself: That's a pile of crap, ever since David Cutler got sidelined.
Agent Smith - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link
There’s a huge difference between ‘posting a comment’ people will actually read and your version, ‘Post a Book’.abufrejoval - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
Started to run the update on the dozen or so Windows machines I have running, for work and for fun.A brand new Lenovo S730 i7 with 1TB of NVMe, took hours to go from 1803 to 1809, but only one hour to take the next step to 1903.
But that's were things started going down hill: Most other machines just took a lot of time, certainly hours, to run the upgrade: Mind you, nothing around here still runs the OS on spinning rust, below quad logical cores or three full Gigahertz... yet, single threaded and painfully slow it went... if in fact it did: So far two systems failed somewhere beyond the 90% mark and went "much ado about nothing" or back to 1809.
Couldn't tell you what kept them at that stage, because they really are rather similar, because I try to make that so (honestly, quite a few of them actualy started off as clones, because that works so well and so much faster these days. Turns out, that Microsoft itself has elevated cloning to the default installation method, but they like to take it s l o w l y).
Korguz - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link
" spinning rust " sorry.. but that is the dumbest term i have ever seen to refer to a mechanical hard drive..Axiomatic - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
MSDN Sub here, I've used 1903 for about a week now and I really like it. Also being a gamer I can attest that 1903 has not introduced any issues for gaming that I know of.Kougar - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
I actually wanted to update, but it looks like my desktop isn't being offered the May 2019 update yet. Wish MS would actually notify users the specific reason(s) why major version updates are being withheld as this is becoming a common trend with my rigs.TheWereCat - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
just get the ms update tool?Alexvrb - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
They've actually got a pretty good known issues page now that would give you some insight as to what major bugs they may have encountered with certain hardware/configs that could lead to a blocking bug, and the status of themhttps://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/release-i...
But with that being said what you're experiencing is more than likely just the effect of a gradual rollout, which is noted at the top of that page as well. Try again in a few days, or as TheWereCat said get the Windows 10 Update Assistant.