They're ACTUALLY Going to Fix Windows

Added: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]Microsoft is going to fix Windows for real this  time, but there's actually somewhat of a reason to believe it. You see, there was a leak recently  of an internal project or plan or whatever you want to call it called Windows K2. Now this is  not an update. This is a internal guidelines shift about Windows, like a new initiative or  philosophy type thing, basically saying that they're going to kind of revitalize how they make  Windows on a fundamental level in terms of like what their goals and priorities are. And this is  apparently different, but still related to that whole memo announcement they made maybe a month  ago or so, where they talked about focusing more on user feedback and fixing bugs and stuff.  And they had a whole "swarm", they call it, where they do like all hands on deck to fix  bugs in Windows. From what I understand, that whole thing is part of this larger goal of K2. And  basically Microsoft is telling the developers "no more crapping out features that no one's asking  for and just kind of shoving them out the door, getting them out as fast as possible without  quality checking." They're going to actually prioritize the quality of it. And supposedly  as part of this new initiative, there's three core pillars they want to focus on, which are  performance, craft, and reliability. Performance and reliability are pretty self-explanatory. Craft  is apparently having to do with the UI and just user experience in general. And they have actually  made improvements already, especially with Windows Update, one of the biggest memes people like  to make fun of Windows about. So for example, in a blog post they talked about how some of the  changes include always available options to shut down and restart without updating. So if you just  need to quickly restart the computer, you don't have to turn that into a multi-minute wait on the  update. Also extend update pauses as many times as you need. And for this, they're making it so you  can pause updates for up to 35 days in one go, but then you can also renew it and extend that  as many times as you want. So you can just delay updates indefinitely if you want, even though  of course I would never really recommend that because there are monthly security updates that  are really important. But still, if you needed to, you could. Also the ability to skip updates  immediately during the out-of-box experience.

[00:02:03]This is just if you do a fresh install on Windows,  it usually makes you wait for all the updates to install before you can even get to the desktop.  Now you don't have to do that. That's really convenient for me if I want to launch up a new  virtual machine just to test something, you have to wait for the updates. It's really annoying.  And then also they say more insights on available updates. And apparently this is going to be for  drivers and stuff like that, where the names might not be very descriptive. It'll be more obvious  what you're actually installing for an update.

[00:02:31]Another really big one that they're changing, at  least in the Windows Insider builds has to do with the so-called "controlled feature rollouts",  which is something that I hate. This is where if you install a feature update and they announce  all these new features and stuff in that update, "but actually it's only for certain people. And  we slowly roll it out randomly. We do A/B testing, so yeah, here's this really cool feature we just  announced, but you might not actually have it."

[00:02:55]However, now with the Windows Insider program,  like where you install preview updates if you want to test stuff out, for the beta channel, they're  apparently just doing away with controlled feature rollouts altogether. So just all the features  will be enabled. In the experimental channel, previously called the dev channel, they're going  to have an actual menu called Feature Flags, where not all of them will be enabled by default.  However, if you want to, you can manually enable any of the ones that they talk about. And I think  that makes sense. I could see why they would do feature rollouts for the main stable version  of Windows that every regular person installs in case there is something wrong with it and it  breaks. It kind of makes sense to be able to just not affect as many users up front. But it never  made sense to me why the Windows Insider builds, the people specifically wanting to test out the  early features and stuff, why would you limit it for that? At least for those people, let them  enable it if they want. Otherwise they're just going to use that Vive tool thing, which basically  goes behind the scenes and sort of does a hacky way to re-enable it. They're going to do that  anyway. So it's good that they're doing this.

[00:03:55]And those are just some examples. Looking at some  articles that go a little bit more in depth about what Microsoft is thinking with this K2 update.  One good article is from Windows Central and an excerpt from that one says, "One of the biggest  cultural changes internally that I've heard about is that teams are no longer striving to ship  fast." So again, focus on quality over quantity, thank God. The article also mentions,  "There's a lesser known fourth pillar too, community. The Windows K2 initiative is eager to  rebuild a community of fans and enthusiasts around Windows." And I think this is pretty interesting.  You might think it sounds silly. A community around an operating system, Windows? But you might  not have been around in like the Windows 7 days.

[00:04:36]People actually were excited about new versions of  Windows, especially when it came to the Windows 7 beta, I remember specifically. You could literally  get a Windows 7 party pack and people were excited about it. I mean, it was kind of a meme even back  then, like you didn't take it too seriously, but still people thought it was funny. If Microsoft  tried to do that these days with Windows 11, they would just get hounded and probably understandably  so. But it did really used to be different. People were excited about new features because that  didn't mean there was just some random new copilot integration. It was actually something  that people probably cared about or something that was actually good. I actually found an  old Reddit thread talking about experiences from people using the Windows 7 beta at the  time and people really did like it. They were pretty much all having good things to say about  it. I remember testing it out and it was pretty universal agreement that it was good. Whereas now  people actively resist Windows updates it seems.

[00:05:24]The article also mentions, "I'm told there's also  a concerted effort to debloat Windows 11 too, focusing on minimizing memory use at idle." And  of course, debloating is always good. Microsoft is also apparently working on remaking the Windows 11  start menu from scratch using native components, not whatever web crap they were using before,  React, I think is what it was. So basically this new start menu is going to be maybe 60% faster  and also more customizable. So that's obviously welcome. And apparently they're going to be doing  more native components in other apps in Windows.

[00:05:55]So that's called the WinUI 3 is the latest one.  It's kind of been neglected for a while from what I've heard, but maybe they'll start actually using  it. If you're not really sure what WinUI 3 is, from my understanding, one sort of analogy is if  you've ever seen an app that kind of looks like this, just this style of buttons and stuff,  this is called WinForms, and these are called native buttons or native components. They're built  into Windows, like boilerplate standard buttons you can add to an app. They're not exactly pretty,  but they used to be pretty standard. And WinUI 3 is basically like a new version of that. It's  very different from WinForms. It uses a different architecture and stuff, but it's still native,  meaning it compiles down to machine code. It's going to be a lot faster than something like  React, which it's like a big bloated framework that you have to spin up a bunch of other code.  God forbid it's the Microsoft Edge view where you have to spin up a whole browser sometimes just to  display an app. Rather it's very lean because the program is only made up of the program. What  a concept. A different article from PC World also says that apparently they're going to be  focusing more on user feedback. Also another amazing concept. Who could have possibly thought  of that? And apparently Microsoft employees are also actually responding more often on social  media and stuff, at least according to what PC World has observed. Now in terms of my thoughts,  I really am glad that they're doing this. I always will appreciate a shift to quality. I mean, back  in the day with Windows XP, even Windows 7, it's not like these Windows updates were pushed out  all this frequently. There was these things called service packs, which might only have come out like  once a year. And I guess at the time, especially in the Windows XP days, they were pretty big and  they couldn't necessarily rely on users being able to download a giant file off the internet  with dial up. So they would be distributed on disks. And if you wanted all the latest features  and stuff, you'd have to get the latest service pack disk. Now you could download it if you had  fast enough internet. And also they did distribute certain updates like security patches and stuff  that were smaller over the internet. But in any case, there was still a higher pressure to scrub  out all the bugs before you actually shipped it, because you might not have an opportunity to fix  it in a timely manner and get it to all the users.

[00:07:58]This also was the case for video games, funny  enough. I specifically remember in Halo 2 days, there was a map pack that was on a disk. And I  think they bundled it with certain other games, or you could even buy the map pack at GameStop. Or  of course, if you had internet, you could buy it, but there was a physical option to get it too.  But of course I am excited that they'll also be focusing on performance too, not just bugs. Bugs  are the obvious one, but performance is really the day to day thing that makes Windows nice to use  or annoying. These days, not even just Windows, but like every app, it seems like they add in  like a million animations and it's like, "oh, super slow, make it look nice." And it's like,  I would rather just see the menu instantly when I click it. Why do I have to see a big  thing show up and take an extra second? And that's just the intentional delays. With stuff  like File Explorer, you can click something, it takes a while to even see what you want to get  to. Apparently they're also focusing on improving File Explorer efficiency and optimization. That's  going to be good too, hopefully. Although for the past several years, I've actually been using a  replacement for File Explorer, Directory Opus, I made a video about that a while ago. But still  for 99.9% of people who use the File Explorer, it can be really annoying when it's slow,  especially the search. It's so bad. I also was kind of thinking why exactly even the reputation  of Windows is especially bad these days. It really seems like in the past two years, it's just kind  of amped up. And I think that really came down to two things. It was like the combination  of the Windows 10 end of life that forced people to upgrade to Windows 11, but also that  Windows 11 had that hardware requirement. Now, I've talked in the past about why exactly  Microsoft did that hardware requirement. It was, in my opinion, a legitimate hardware requirement.  They had their reasons. It really did have to do with security and establishing a new security  baseline. And I don't want to get into that, but trust me, it wasn't as big of a cash grab as  you might think. But then the other major reason I think really is the push for co-pilot stuff.  People are getting co-pilot shoved down their throat and really, it's not that useful. I mean  AI in general, in my opinion, LLMs and stuff can be very useful in my opinion for making tools, not  necessarily just having the AI do stuff directly.

[00:10:01]I don't really like to have it edit documents  and stuff like that. I don't even necessarily trust it for that. And I certainly don't use it  for writing. Oh my God, it's so annoying to even read stuff written by Chat GPT. It's so obvious.  So I think it's kind of like people are saying, "alright what do I really even use this for?"  And at the same time they're like, "use it, use it, use it!" And it's like, I don't want to.  What is this crap? Why is there a co-pilot button on my computer if I don't even want to use it?  And why are they adding a co-pilot feature in Notepad? I think it just kind of signals  to people that Microsoft doesn't really have its head straight in terms of priorities.  It's like they're pushing all this crap that clearly nobody cares about. How can they see  that nobody cares about this? And meanwhile, there's other stuff that does matter and it's  been like broken and slow and glitchy. It kind of makes sense why people are getting mad.  But it seems like finally that may have been turned around. And I have high hopes that they'll  actually be focusing on what people care about, which is just making sure their operating system  works and for doing the stuff they actually are doing and not building in useless stuff. I  would be curious what you guys think though, and whether you have high hopes or you think  this is just lip service, although this was kind of like an internal leak. So it's not really  something they're trying to advertise. So we can talk about that all down in the comments. If you  want to keep watching, here's my video where I did talk about that Directory Opus file explorer  replacement that I do recommend, I still use it.

[00:11:19]I'll put that link right there you can click on.  And if you want to subscribe, it should be worth it. And of course, if you enjoyed the video,  be sure to give it a thumbs up. It really helps out with the algorithm. So thanks so much for  watching and I'll see you in that next video.