So this is not the post I planned to write today. I had a half-finished draft about switching my RSS reader again (I know, I know) and then last night a friend on Discord sent me a Baidu forum link and I lost two hours of sleep instead.
Somebody leaked a full build of the next version of Windows. Not screenshots, not a rumor. An actual ISO, floating around Chinese forums since sometime Tuesday, build number 21996, and by Wednesday it had made its way to WinFuture and then everywhere else. Microsoft has an event scheduled for June 24th, complete with one of those overproduced teaser videos (sunrise, a faint outline of the logo, a choir humming). Whatever they were planning to unveil that day, it's already sitting on a torrent site a full week early. Someone's job is having a very bad week.
I am not proud of how fast I had it running in a VM.
What it actually looks like
The big one, the thing every screenshot leads with: the Start menu is centered now, sitting in the middle of the taskbar next to a row of centered icons, instead of jammed in the bottom left corner where it's lived since 1995. It looks a little like someone took the Windows taskbar and ran it through a macOS filter. You can drag it back to the left in settings, which I did within about four minutes, because thirty years of muscle memory does not care how modern something looks.
Everything has rounded corners now. Every window, every menu, every dialog box. It's a small thing but it changes the whole personality of the OS. It feels softer, less like a spreadsheet and more like a phone. The Settings app has been redone again (this happens every couple of years and I've stopped expecting it to stick) and there's a new default sound scheme that's genuinely pleasant, a little chime instead of the harsh startup blast I've had muted since 2015.
There's also a Teams chat icon welded onto the taskbar that I could not fully get rid of without editing the registry, which is exactly the kind of thing that makes me sigh out loud at my desk. I don't use Teams. I don't want a permanent icon for it. Nobody asked for this and yet here we are, right-click, "hide," and it comes back after the next explorer.exe restart.
Running it
I put it in VirtualBox on the old Dell tower rather than my main machine, because installing a leaked pre-release build on your daily driver is how you end up reinstalling everything the night before a deadline. Guest Additions didn't cooperate at first, some driver signature mismatch that took three reboots and a registry tweak I found in, of all places, a Reddit comment from nine hours earlier, but once it settled in, it's stable. Not fast, VMs never are, but stable enough to click around for an hour without a crash.
Is it a good redesign? Mostly, yeah. The rounded corners and the new icon set (flatter, more colorful, a genuine improvement over the mismatched icon styles Windows has accumulated since Windows 7) make the whole thing feel coherent in a way Windows hasn't in a long time. But I'll say the thing nobody in the leak threads wants to hear: centering the Start button by default is going to annoy an enormous number of people the first week, and Microsoft knows it, and they're shipping it anyway because it tests well in a demo. It always does. Everything tests well in a demo. It's the six months after launch where you find out if people actually adjust or just quietly move the button back.
Whatever this thing gets called officially — and given it's build 21996 instead of the 21xxx numbers we'd expect for an incremental Windows 10 update, I'd bet real money it's not going to be called "Windows 10" anything — Microsoft is going to have to stand on a stage in eight days and pretend the entire internet hasn't already picked it apart. I almost feel bad for whoever's running that keynote rehearsal this week. Almost.
I'm leaving the VM running for now. I want to see how many more registry tweaks it takes before I can make it look exactly like my normal desktop, purely out of spite.