Windows 11 hands-on: First look at the leaked operating system
As we’ve seen, Windows 11 is Microsoft’s next operating system. It’s here, it’s real and we’re using a leaked version of it right now. Our hands-on should provide an early first look at what you can expect in the shipping version: the addition of a mammoth widgets drawer, an updated Windows 10X-like user interface, and more.
We obtained Windows Dev build 21996.1 via a leak from the web, downloaded it, and installed it on a Microsoft Surface Pro 7+. While we don’t have any performance metrics to compare performance before and after installing Windows 11, we can tell you that the experience felt decidedly snappy, though we ran into a few bugs.
Based on our experiences so far, it makes sense to think about Windows 11 as something more than Windows 10, but far less than what we’d consider a ‘true’ next-generation operating system. Microsoft didn’t rip apart Windows 10 and start over. Instead, this is an evolutionary take on Windows 10, as the term ‘Windows 11’ implies.
INSTALLATION
As you might expect, downloading
