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Jim salter
Microsoft made the first versions of Windows 11 available through its Windows Insider program the week after its first major announcement, and we spent quite a few hours crushing the tires. When Windows 11 is released publicly, it will likely be a good operating system, but for now, it’s a raw and unfinished mess.
Of course, that’s no surprise: Windows 11 is still only available in the Dev channel of the Insider program. The three Insider channels are Release Preview, Beta, and Dev; Dev is roughly alpha software, and Microsoft itself describes it as “the latest code”, with “rough edges and some jitter”.
Windows 11 is upgraded only (for now)
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Unfortunately, you cannot yet perform a clean, clean installation of Windows 11, instead you will need to use Windows Update to modify an existing installation of Windows 10.
Jim salter
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There is something ominously appropriate about your first glance at Windows 11 being the “working on updates” screen.
Jim salter
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We have a lock screen! A very macOS lock screen, between the desert wallpaper and the choice of an extra-rounded sans serif font.
Jim salter
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Most of Windows 11’s built-in themes and wallpapers are as attractive as you want them to be. We don’t know what happened with this “Captured Motion” theme, however …
Jim salter
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Jaggies? JAGIES. No, this is not an artifact of a bad graphics driver or something like that: copy the actual file from the Windows 11 VM and to the host and then open it in Shotwell does looks no different.
Jim salter
The first disappointment we encountered with Windows 11 is confusing: it cannot (yet) be properly installed as a new operating system. To install Windows 11 Build 22000.51, you need to start with a fully patched and up-to-date Windows 10 installation, then point it to the development channel, then improve to Windows 11 via Windows Update. (If you’re not already on Windows 10 20H2 or newer, you’ll need to perform this upgrade first.)
We had no real issues updating a well-used or brand-new Windows 10 VM, but we strongly recommend that you do not upgrade to Windows 11 on a machine or VM you are interested in, unless you don’t have a guaranteed recovery method for both of you. trust and are ready to use. Although one of our test VMs is a “daily driver” that we rely on, it relies on a ZFS dataset and we took a manual snapshot before upgrading, for easy recovery.
Ironically, the first look everyone is getting at Windows 11 itself right now is the dreaded BSOU (Blue Screen Of Updates) – after we uploaded our Windows 10 VM to the Dev channel and a really fast download it got restarted. During the restart we get the usual “do not turn off your computer” message, but it is in a new font and maybe on a slightly different shade of blue.
While the initial download to Windows Update completes fairly quickly, the “working on updates” phase is not. This phase took about an hour on each of the Windows 10 VMs we upgraded, one reasonably well used, and a brand new one.
Alpha means alpha
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It didn’t take long to find our first Windows 11 bug: The DNS resolver stack was weirdly broken. Nslookup works, but not ping!
Jim salter
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The second bug didn’t take much longer – we couldn’t get the “IP Settings” dialog box to accept valid configuration information.
Jim salter
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With the settings broken, the next question was whether the Control Panel – theoretically deprecated years ago by the settings – is still available. Fortunately, it’s still there and its adapter configuration dialog still works fine!
Jim salter
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Although Control Panel worked, changing my IP configuration did not resolve the DNS issue. Oddly, changing the network “card” – from VirtIO to Intel e1000 – solved the problem.
Jim salter
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In the weird world, you can troubleshoot DNS resolver issues by using a DNS resolver on the other side of a WireGuard tunnel. Amusing!
Jim salter
It took almost no time to find our first and second nasty Windows 11 bugs – the DNS resolver was weirdly and inconsistent, and the network configuration dialog under Settings was also broken.
You can see the DNS resolution issues in the first screenshot above. We can ping 8.8.8.8– Google’s anycast DNS provider – no problem so we know general connectivity is good both inside and outside the local network. But the attempts to ping google.com fail! The confusion only gets worse when we use nslookup to directly query our DNS server, it responds perfectly to our requests. Nevertheless, attempting to ping the same hostname fails directly, like most attempts to browse with Edge or Chrome.
The second bug arose while trying to troubleshoot the first – attempting to configure the IP address directly using the Windows 11 Settings dialog box 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 just broken. Next question: Is the Control Panel still there?
Thankfully, Control Panel hasn’t been removed in Windows 11 yet, and its proven network card setup dialog works as expected. Unfortunately, this did not fix the original DNS issue, which turns out to be a conflict between Windows 11 and the VirtIO network driver we are using.
Changing the VM’s network adapter to emulated Intel e1000 fixed the DNS issue, just like, hilariously, leaving the network adapter as VirtIO and just using a DNS server on the other side of a WireGuard tunnel. (WireGuard has its own virtual network card, so we are technically not using our “real” network card to access the DNS server on the other side of the tunnel.)
In the week or so we have been playing with Windows 11, we have also frozen the entire VM, and need a hard reset several times. Did we mention that this is still alpha software and that no one should be running something they are interested in yet?
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