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
What’s Still Coming
At Build this year, Microsoft announced a new version of the Windows Subsystem for Linux, which will run a true Linux kernel. This will improve performance dramatically in certain scenarios, and increase the compatibility as well. The original WSL translated Linux system calls into Windows system calls, which causes a performance hit that the new version won’t need to do, since it’ll have a Linux VM running instead. The original WSL will still be available, since there are scenarios where WSL v2 may cause interoperability issues, such as if you want to run virtualization applications like VirtualBox, because WSL v2 will be using a Hyper-V backend. But the team is working on fixes and WSL v2 should be available to test in insider preview builds starting in June. If you missed our original announcement, check it out here.
Microsoft has also been making a lot of changes to the console to improve its usability, but they are running into limits where changes may break backwards compatibility. As such, they will be launching a new Windows Terminal application which will allow you to run multiple console sessions in a tabbed interface. It looks amazing if you use a lot of command line in Windows.
Probably the most important update coming is that Microsoft is replacing their web browser experience with one based on the Chromium project. It’ll still be called Edge, but the company has clearly decided it no longer makes sense to develop their own rendering engine when developers won’t test against it, so by going the Chromium route they’ll have a much better compatibility. The web was supposed to be the new open world, but in practice it has never been that way. The dominant browser of any time period is the one that web developers target against. For years that was Internet Explorer. On mobile, it was Safari for a period as well, but now the leading browser is Google Chrome. It’s a decision that makes sense for Microsoft, even if it’s a sad day for the web to lose a major rendering engine. If you want to give it a try, you can run it side-by-side with normal Edge, or any other browser. You can download it here.
Microsoft’s Your Phone app is also getting an update soon to provide more functionality with Android devices, including screen sharing, and notification support. I’ve had mixed results with Your Phone since it debuted, with periods of time where it just would not sync with my phone no matter what I did, but recent updates have seemed to help. It’s still pretty slow and clunky, but I’m hopeful for improvements since it should be a genuinely useful app.
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bill44 - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
Been waiting since Creators Update for -well, creators update- a proper systemwide colour management that also supports wide colour gamut natively. 3D LUT support would be nice too.Never happened, never will. Lots of cosmetic and game focused updates, but nothing substantial. Like an SSD focused file system (only available in the Workstation version of Windows I think)..
Alexvrb - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
Most of their work was under the hood, yet as typical most people only see the cosmetic changes.Their work on implementing Retpoline and Fast Import was a pretty massive undertaking, read their detailed technical articles on the subject.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Windows-Ker...
The changes to how they manage updates are pretty nice too. I'm not talking about the superficial "you can delay on Home more", but rather the underlying systems were overhauled so more update work can be performed while the system is still up. They also manage Windows/App updates better, so as to not hurt performance when in use.
bill44 - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link
Thanks AlexvrbInteresting and useful. Under hood changes are nice, but it’s time to do something more substantial a user can see and use every day. It’s nearly 2020 and we still forced to use sRGB on our desktops, in a world, where we have P3, Adobe RGB, HDR etc.
We can take photos in P3, game in HDR, but no seamless way of handling this in Windows. Each app has to do it’s own thing.
A system wide Rec.2020 support is needed, that can constrain the gamut to sRGB when needed. Calibration should be done once, and all applications should/must take advantage of it.
I’m all for under the hood updates (visible or not to the user) that benefits us all, but there has to be a time for windows to catch up to the 21st century visuals.
valkyrie743 - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
was waiting for over a year for tabs in the explorer but i guess that's not happening anymore. not happyDominionSeraph - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link
Install Clover.Alien88 - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link
Damn, didn't know about Clover, installed it and it is great, thanks for the heads-up!erple2 - Friday, May 24, 2019 - link
Interesting. This puts the `docker run microsoft/windowsservercore` back into perspective. I wonder if the work they did on that directly contributed to this version.wolfesteinabhi - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link
why would they run out of numbers after 2100!!? ..they would still have 14 more years after it to get their shit together!!Brett Howse - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link
Fair point!beisat - Saturday, May 25, 2019 - link
First decent update ever for w10 I think - love the sandbox idea. Can it also be persistent? I basically want docker / containers for windows but for GUI software to isolate some installs