Introducing Windows 11
Windows 11, version 24H2, also known as Windows 11 2024 Update, is now available via Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) and Windows Update for Business.
Today marks the start of 36 months of support for Enterprise and Education editions of Windows 11, version 24H2. We recommend that you start a targeted rollout to your organization now to ensure that your apps, devices, and infrastructure are working as expected with the new version. To help you plan, this article highlights some of the features and improvements that help you deliver great experiences while helping protect your company’s data, apps, and people on every device.
Windows 11, version 24H2 includes all the features and capabilities delivered as part of the continued innovation of Windows 11, now enabled by default. These include
Windows 11 Features
Windows 11 will get a completely new design. Microsoft clearly needs a good reason to go back on its past claims and abandon Windows 10 anyway by introducing a new operating system number. And a completely new design is perfect for this. The Redmond giant has long been preparing a redesign for an update under the code name Sun Valley (“Sun Valley”) – apparently, under this name was Windows 11. The Sun Valley project has been popping up on the net for a long time – Microsoft has regularly leaked details of the new interface style, industry insiders have shared previously unknown information, and designers popular in their circles have drawn realistic concepts based on all this data.
Start and system elements will float above the bottom bar. Start is the business card and face of every recent version of Windows. It is not surprising that in Windows 11 developers are transforming it again, but not so much in functional terms as in visual terms: the Start window will float above the bottom bar. We must admit that this small change makes the system much cooler. Judging by the information on the network, Microsoft will not radically change the “internals” of this menu – the innovations will only affect the design of the window itself. The control panel will also float, and its design will be exactly the same as that of “Start”. The action center will be combined with the control buttons, a similar model has long been used in some other operating systems. Almost all mentions of this new menu indicate that it will be an island: the control buttons will be placed on a separate panel, notifications will be on another, and specific elements (like a player) on yet another. Right angles will disappear, they will be replaced by fillets. In truth, industry insiders and designers disagree on this: some are sure that Microsoft will not change its traditions and will maintain right angles, while others are sure that in 2021 Microsoft will follow the fashion for fillets. The latter is more in line with the definition of “completely new Windows”: mouse-over menus are not enough to consider a new design truly new. The tweaks should affect almost everything in the system, from context menus and system panels to all application windows. True, even on this issue, designers’ opinions differ: some draw fillets in all possible interface elements, others combine them with right angles. There will be a translucent background with blur everywhere. There are disagreements on the Web about the style of displaying island windows, the design of corners, and the effect of levitating the menu, but almost everyone is unanimous about the transparency of windows. The vast majority of leaks and design renders show transparency and blur in all windows, be it at least the Start menu or Explorer. Moreover, these effects are present even in the assembly of the canceled Windows 10X operating system, which Microsoft was developing for dual-screen devices and weak gadgets in parallel with the Sun Valley project.