The Windows 11 insider build is surprisingly raw and unfinished

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Enlarge / Setting Windows 11 to one of its dark themes also darkens the background of the Settings app, but not the background of more traditional apps, such as Resource Monitor.

Jim Salter

Microsoft made the first builds of Windows 11 available through its Windows Insider Program the week after its first major announcement, and we spent a few hours kicking the tires. When Windows 11 is released publicly, it’s likely to be a good operating system, but right now it’s a crude and unfinished mess.

Of course, it’s no surprise that Windows 11 is still only available in the Insider Program’s Dev channel. The three Insider channels are Release Preview, Beta and Dev; Dev roughly corresponds to alpha software and Microsoft itself describes it as “the newest code”, with “rough edges and some instability”.

Windows 11 is upgrade only (for now)

It is not yet possible to perform a clean and clean installation of Windows 11, unfortunately you will have to use Windows Update to modify an existing Windows 10 installation.

Jim Salter

There is something grimly appropriate about your first glance at Windows 11 being the “working on updates” screen.

Jim Salter

We have the lock screen! A lockscreen very similar to macOS, between the desert background and the choice of the extra-rounded sans serif font.

Jim Salter

Most of Windows 11’s built-in themes and wallpapers are as attractive as you’d expect. We’re not sure what happened with this “Captured Motion” theme, though …

Jim Salter

Jaggies? JAGGIES. No, this isn’t an artifact of a bad graphics driver or something that copies the actual file from the Windows 11 VM and onto the host, so opening it in Shotwell looks no different.

Jim Salter

The first disappointment we encountered with Windows 11 is staggering: it can’t (yet) be properly installed as a new operating system. To install Windows 11 Build22000.51, you need to start with a fully updated and correct installation of Windows 10, then fly it into the Dev channel, then upgrade to Windows 11 via Windows Update. (If you’re not already on Windows 10 20H2 or later, you’ll need to complete the update first.)

We had no real problems updating a well-used or brand new Windows 10 virtual machine, but we strongly advise against upgrading to Windows 11 on a machine or virtual machine that interests you, unless you have a guaranteed recovery method that you both trust and are ready to use. Although one of our test VMs is a “daily driver” we rely on, it sits on top of a ZFS dataset and we took a manual snapshot before the upgrade for easy rollback.

Ironically, the first glimpse anyone gets on Windows 11 itself right now is the dreaded BSOU (Blue Screen Of Updates) after launching our Windows 10 VM in the Dev channel and a very quick download, it got restarted. During the reboot, we get the usual “don’t shut down computer” message, but it’s in a new font and possibly on a slightly different blue background tone.

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Although the initial download in Windows Update finished rather quickly, the “working on updates” phase is not. This phase took about an hour on each of the Windows 10 virtual machines we upgraded in a reasonably well-used fashion and a brand new one.

Alpha means alpha

It didn’t take long to find our first Windows 11 bug the DNS resolver stack was strangely broken. Nslookup works, but ping doesn’t!

Jim Salter

The second bug didn’t take much longer as we couldn’t get the “IP Settings” dialog to accept valid configuration information.

Jim Salter

With settings discontinued, the next question was whether the control panel, theoretically deprecated years ago by Settings, was still available. Thankfully, it’s still there and its adapter configuration dialog still works fine!

Jim Salter

Although the Control Panel worked, changing my IP configuration didn’t fix the DNS problem. Oddly, changing the NIC from VirtIO to Intel e1000 solved the problem.

Jim Salter

In the bizarre world, you can troubleshoot DNS resolution issues by using a DNS resolver on the other side of a WireGuard tunnel. Fun!

Jim Salter

It took almost no time to find our first and second nasty Windows 11 bug the DNS resolver was oddly and inconsistently broken, and the network configuration window in Settings was broken as well.

You can see DNS resolver issues in the first screen above. We can ping 8.8.8.8 from Google’s anycast DNS provider with no problem, so we know general connectivity is fine both inside and outside the LAN. But attempts to ping google.com fail! The confusion only gets worse when we use nslookup to query our DNS server directly, it answers our questions perfectly. However, trying to ping the same hostname directly fails, as do most attempts to browse with Edge or Chrome.

The second bug occurred when trying to fix the first attempt to set the IP address configuration directly using the Windows 11 Settings dialog fails miserably, with a cryptic message to “check one or more settings and try again”. There is nothing wrong with the settings, the dialog is simply broken. The next question is is the control panel still there?

Thankfully, the Control Panel has not yet been eliminated in Windows 11, and its tried and tested network adapter configuration dialog works as expected. Unfortunately, this did not fix the original DNS problem which turns out to be a conflict between Windows 11 and the VirtIO network driver we are using.

Changing the VM’s NIC to the emulated Intel e1000 fixed DNS issues as it does, hilariously, leaving the NIC as VirtIO and only using a DNS server on the opposite side of a WireGuard tunnel. (WireGuard has its own virtual NIC, so technically we are not using our “real” network card to access the DNS server on the other side of the tunnel.)

During the week or so we played with Windows 11, also locked the entire virtual machine and required a hard reset several times. Did we mention that this is still alpha software and should no one be running anything that interests them yet?

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