There are 3 new versions of Windows 10 on the horizon…
Furthest out, mentioned mainly because you’ll be hearing more about it, is Windows 10X. Microsoft lost in the cell phone market to Google’s Android & Apple, and faces competition today from Chromebooks running the Android-like Chrome OS. Windows 10X is their answer to Chromebooks. From a user standpoint it will be like Android & Chrome by not requiring the more involved update process that’s a pain in Windows 10, but it will run all the Windows apps you use now. It will also be smaller & lighter than regular Windows 10, stripping out much of the legacy code found in the current version, some of which dates to Windows 95. But, one reason Windows 10 is so big, maybe bloated, is that it has lots of backward compatibility built in – Windows 10X will be like Android & Chrome, customized to the hardware you buy with 10X already installed. And unless you buy a device with Windows 10X installed, you won’t be able to get your hands on a copy.
Soonest, in the next month or so, is Windows 10 19H2, or 1909, or the November 2019 Update. Whichever name you use, it’s going to be delivered as a cumulative update, same as every 2nd Tuesday of the month, so you may not really notice. Microsoft has been developing and testing the capability to deliver new features, but not enable them or turn them on until sometime later. You may not see a new feature for months after it’s installed, as Microsoft slowly rolls out activation, monitoring the results to minimize the incompatibilities that have plagued the last couple few version updates. And it’s likely possible you could see Microsoft turning new features off on hardware that proves incompatible once an update is installed, assuming that if you can turn a feature on, you can also turn it off. Part, if not most of the reason for the smaller fall update is Microsoft focusing most of their energy on the spring 2020 update, but home & biz users like the idea so much that it might become the new normal, with a big update in the spring, and a smaller one in the fall.
Microsoft does not by any means see all their customers as being equal. Huge corporations are the most favored – you & I the least. The spring 2020 Windows 10 update has a new core that will be used in Windows Server, including in or with Microsoft’s cloud, which is super, Super important to them. All the resources and testing that would have gone into a fall update in the past have been spent on this version, with the 2019 fall update seeming almost like an afterthought. We’ll see more new features and design changes than usual, partly because the fall 2019 update has so few, but we might also see more compatibility problems because of those changes to the code at the core of Windows 10.
In the For-What-It’s-Worth category, I skipped about a month’s worth of weekly updates to a Windows 10 Pro 64-bit VM enrolled in the Insider’s Fast Ring. The 1st version update after that pause barely ran, with all sorts of display problems, with the Settings windows messed up, particularly for updates, with the Task Bar being completely transparent and so on. Installing the new version the week after that was a little bit better, and the 3rd update build after I resumed weekly updating started out pretty bad, but eventually worked out most of its problems on its own, and now it’s behaving normally. That sort of thing bothers me, perhaps because of unpleasant memories from the win98 era – too often the only way to fix something was to keep at it, keep trying, and maybe eventually something would click internally with Windows, and it would work. That said, even though they’ve been working on the Spring 2020 update for many months now, there are still plenty more to go – hopefully everything will be working well by then.