The Microsoft Build 2017 Recap: What To Expect When You’re Expecting Windows
by Brett Howse on May 19, 2017 8:00 AM ESTWindows Subsystem for Linux
Microsoft bringing Linux into the Windows platform was one of the most surprising announcements at Build last year, and as we discussed in the Creators Update, they’ve continued to improve their Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with quite a few new features coming earlier this year. Considering Build is a developer conference, and the Linux capabilities are being added to address their needs, it shouldn’t be a huge surprise that more features are coming, but the announcements were surprising nonetheless.
With the shipping version of Windows, enabling the Linux subsystem does require enabling a developer mode, and then install Linux. With the Creators Update, Microsoft bumped the version of Linux from Ubuntu 14.04 to Ubuntu 16.04, and to do the update the recommended method was to remove WSL and reinstall. Microsoft is now going to move this process into the Windows Store, which should make it much easier to deal with. Even though developers could likely be considered capable of handling the install, it never hurts to make things easier and more reliable.
Second, Microsoft is also adding several other flavors of Linux as options. Microsoft is working with both SUSE and Fedora to enable multiple Linux distributions to be run simultaneously.
In addition, they are going to add support for USB device communications, so you can talk to things like Raspberry Pi, USB drive mounting, network share mounting, and more. For a company that used to be at war with Linux, it’s kind of amazing how much effort they are putting in now to make Linux a great experience on Windows.
OneDrive Files on Demand
One of the biggest downgrades of Windows 10 compared to Windows 8.1 was the loss of OneDrive placeholders, which would allow you to see every file stored in OneDrive whether or not it was downloaded or not. The initial implementation wasn’t perfect, and apps would sometimes struggle trying to open files that had not yet been downloaded, but overall it was a very useful method to access OneDrive without having to sync every file. Considering OneDrive can easily and inexpensively be upgraded to offer 1 TB of cloud storage, asking people to sync everything when many computers, especially with solid state storage, come with well under 500 GB of local storage.
Microsoft had already announced that placeholders would be coming back at the Ignite conference, but at Build we got an official announcement and name of the feature – OneDrive Files On-Demand.
With the new version of this, the performance issues and application compatibility will hopefully all be solved, and better yet, the feature is going to be available not just for personal OneDrive, but also for OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online team sites as well.
There are other fixes coming as well. If a file is synced from a SharePoint Online team site, and the file is being collaborated on by multiple users, the system won’t automatically sync every single change that happens, unless of course you are opening the file. This should save a lot of unnecessary bandwidth.
With the new icons, it will hopefully be more obvious if a file is available offline, which was one of the issues cited by Microsoft when not bringing the original placeholders forward to Windows 10, and you can set any file to always be downloaded by just right clicking it and choosing Always keep on this device.
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nathanddrews - Friday, May 19, 2017 - link
"Creators Update actually shipped the first steps towards a high color aware OS, although it is limited to certain hardware configurations at the moment. That shouldn’t be a huge issue though, since there aren’t a lot of HDR monitors on the market yet."Monitor manufacturers have really, really dropped the ball. Most new 4K TVs come with 10-bit 4:4:4 4K HDR support or at least 10-14-bit 4:2:0 HDR support. DisplayPort 1.3/1.44 has been a total failure compared to HDMI 2.0 and HDMI 2.1 is going to leapfrog DP once again with features and product support.
etamin - Friday, May 19, 2017 - link
so still no adobeRGB support ffsqlum - Friday, May 19, 2017 - link
I would like it to be viable to get uwp apps from other stores than the windows store. Sure a lot of programs are not suitable for uwp but if they are I would like to use them. I just don't want to deal with a single gatekeeper that can deny apps from landing in the store they don't like. Emulators are a good example of that.ahamling27 - Friday, May 19, 2017 - link
Windows App Store does need a ton of work. It's the part of Windows 10 I try to stay away from the most.dumbnub - Friday, May 19, 2017 - link
I used the Windows app store once. I logged in with my email account, that has a 100 charatcher long password (it's so long because I use lastpass, so I thought why not?). By doing so windows now demanded I enter my 100 charatcher password in at login, whereas before I didn't use a password and of course I couldn't use lastpass at the login screen on my windows machine so I had to use my phone. It sure did make me feel like an idiot but there are lots of use out there imo. So, since I like the idea of a long password, I just don't use the app store. There maybe a very simple solution, like just making a separate email for logging in or an option in windows. But I never gave one crap about the windows app store, I was just new to windows 10 and thought it would be cool to download a free car racing game. /end of boring story.ahamling27 - Friday, May 19, 2017 - link
That really sucks and it really shouldn't have to work like that. I did remove my login password and used a local account, you may look into that, as it's not tied to your MS account.Meteor2 - Saturday, May 20, 2017 - link
Yeah, when you login to the App Store you're using you're 'Microsoft account', which then becomes your Windows user account. It's vaguely useful if you have multiple machines and Office 365, but not for a lot else. It's also the same as/can be used as a hotmail account, I think.Macpoedel - Saturday, May 20, 2017 - link
There are alternatives that replace the password section once you set up your account with password, although they are less secure. In Windows 10 you can set up a pincode, an image "password" on which you have to draw a chosen pattern or you can set up a biometric verification with Windows Hello (facial recognition or fingerprint matching).To be clear, your password remains the same as before, it's just for the login procedure and for entering administrative rights that the above methods replace your password.
This has been around since Windows 8.
Ionestly, I set my desktop up to not require a password, it's not going anywhere. And I also have a Windows 10 HTPC, having to enter a password there would be incredibly annoying. But my laptop needs to be protected of course.
Kevin G - Friday, May 19, 2017 - link
What I want are Microsoft products that actually work to the point where I spend more time being productive than fighting the tools themselves. Case in point, Outlook not only crashes randomly, but I'll go into various states of uselessness. Try quick reply from the preview pane? Ha, I'll be typing but my text will not appear. Pop out the reply from the preview pane and the text I was typing magically appears! Want to view a calendar? Ha, it'll randomly display a blank white screen. Outlook will also screw up the scroll bars in calendar view so that they bars themselves will move but the actual content will not. This is even worse when view more than one calendar. It feels like I'm running head first repeatedly into a brick wall using Outlook. It is actually more productive for me to use my phone for quick emails and view calendar items than Outlook now.Excel is just slow. I swear for basic calculations an older 1 Ghz box from ~17 years ago running Office 98 felt faster than Excel does now on a modern quad core 3.0 Ghz system. Oh, and the new function Excel is introducing don't necessarily adhere conventional syntax used previously in Excel.
Word has this chronic disease that it can't handle white space in an intelligent fashion. Delete a block of text? Guess what, that block of text's formatting will live on in the white space around it make any attempt to type a new block of text in its place a formatting nightmare. There is a reason why I've adapted to doing quick typing in NotePad and then pasting it in when it comes time to formatting. Outlook to a lesser extent has this same problem. Spreading like herpes.
PowerPoint has regressed by wanting to alter my monitor arrangement every time I attempt a slide show. It says it remembers my settings so that I don't have to rearrange everything after a presentation (or before or during) but I've seen more honest used car salesmen.
Dynamics integration in Outlook is painful to use due to its backwards interface. The web version isn't any better.
Windows 10 also like to reboot at the most inopportune time for me: generally when I'm doing work. Also it likes to lie to me sometime when I would like to reboot later if I put my laptop to sleep. So if I want to delay the reboot by four hours and I put my laptop to sleep overnight for ~8 hours, it'll ask me again when I wake it up but then realize that I woke it up after the initial 4 hour mark and reboot anyway. Nothing like waking up to a reboot punching you in the face in the morning.
dumbnub - Friday, May 19, 2017 - link
I bought a second-hand Lenovo that came with windows 8 pre-installed and got the free upgrade to 10. I decided, stupidly, to roll it back to 8. While rolling back there was an error and I was left with no functioning OS. A family member of mine is an accountant who did use excel exclusively but it would randomly freeze when more than one excel tab was open. They use Zoho now and a chromebook even though Zoho, being completely online, isn't ideal due to slows downs every now and again.