This short blog post describes my first impressions of Windows 21390.1 available to Windows Insiders as of June 2021.
The upgrade took an hour or more, possibly because I walked away and did not respond immediately when it powered down while rebooting or when it needed a password.
I notice that Windows has again reset my mouse pointer speed preference and that Meet Now is in the notification area despite my previous stated preferences. I do not yet know what else Windows may have forgotten or otherwise changed, but I had better check personalization preferences and browser privacy configuration.
This may have been true in previous versions of Windows, but I notice in the new version of Windows 10 21390.1 that when Windows Terminal is fullscreen, if I access a different Windows application, the Windows taskbar appears, and if I close that application, the taskbar disappears, reverting to Windows Terminal fullscreen. The taskbar also appears and disappears appropriately when I press the Windows key twice while in Windows Terminal fullscreen. Little things like this make it easier for me, who prefers Windows Terminal with Windows Subsystem for Linux to the Windows UI.
I cannot be sure, but Windows may feel a bit snappier, work better with dark color schemes, and be mildly visually more appealing.
There seem to be minor visual changes such as to the icons on the start menu and in file explorer, but I have not noticed anything significant.
I notice the weather to the left of the tray, which you can turn off by right-clicking and selecting News and Interests. Generally, my reaction to any new Windows feature is to disable it.
Updates: When the relevant keyboard shortcut failed, I found PureText missing from my tray. I can see it in the screen shot above, so I may have exited it inadvertently or it could have crashed. I restarted it, which may affect whether it would have come back after a reboot. I will reboot now, see if it comes back, and use sysinternals autoruns (wink autoruns in my WSL shell) to see if it comes back.
Also, just because I do not remember this does not mean that it was not there before.
Another update: PureText was there after a reboot, so I am not sure if that was ever gone. Other than two semi-suspicious but also semi-expected things for edge (“performance”), which might have even been there before, I do not see any startup changes. I will leave the two edge things in place for now.
Also, notepad.exe works now; it had not after a recent sublime text editor update that had broken a previous override of notepad.exe that triggers sublime instead of the default editor.
I do not a Linux node in Windows Explorer, but again, I might not have noticed it in a previous version of Windows.
I believe that the update may also have changed my screen saver?
wslguy.net 