Microsoft made early Windows 11 builds available via its Windows Insider program the week after its first major announcement, and we've spent quite a

The Windows 11 insider build is surprisingly unpolished and unfinished

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2021-07-09 15:30:07

Microsoft made early Windows 11 builds available via its Windows Insider program the week after its first major announcement, and we've spent quite a few hours kicking the tires. When Windows 11 publicly releases, it's likely to be a fine operating system—but right now, it's an unpolished, unfinished mess.

Of course, this isn't a surprise—Windows 11 is still only available in the Dev channel of the Insider program. The three Insider channels are Release Preview, Beta, and Dev; Dev roughly corresponds to a software alpha, and Microsoft itself describes it as "the newest code," with "rough edges and some instability."

The first disappointment we encountered with Windows 11 is a puzzling one—it can't (yet) be cleanly installed as a new operating system. To install Windows 11 Build 22000.51, you must begin with a fully patched and up-to-date Windows 10 installation, then flight it into the Dev channel, then upgrade it to Windows 11 via Windows Update. (If you're not already on Windows 10 20H2 or newer, you'll need to get through that upgrade first.)

We had no real problems updating either a well-used Windows 10 VM or a brand-new one—but we strongly advise against upgrading to Windows 11 on a machine or VM that matters to you, unless you have a guaranteed method of recovery you both trust and are prepared to use. Although one of our test VMs is a "daily driver" we rely on, it's sitting on top of a ZFS dataset—and we took a manual snapshot prior to the upgrade, for easy rollback.