14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has released a new Windows 10 20H1 preview build to users in the Fast ring of the Insider program, bringing a series of welcome improvements to the OS.
First and foremost, it’s the new Cortana assistant, which uses a chat-based UI to type or speak in a more natural way. This feature is only available for users in the United States, and it comes with support for the majority of Cortana capabilities in Windows 10.
However, Microsoft says it’s still working on some features, but you should already be able to try out the light and dark themes, the new speech and language models, and the refined Hey Cortana screen which the company claims is less intrusive.
File Explorer search improvements
Windows 10 build 18945 also comes with WSL tweaks, so you can now connect to WSL 2 Linux networking apps using localhost. There are also global configuration options for WSL.
“These are options that will apply to each of your WSL distros. This also allows you to specify options that relate to the WSL 2 virtual machine (VM), as all your WSL 2 distros run inside of the same VM. The most exciting option that you’ll get access to in this build is being able to specify a custom Linux kernel!” Dona Sarkar, chief of the Windows Insider program, explains.
File Explorer is also getting improve searching, a feature that was originally announced back in May.
“These improved results can be launched directly by clicking the entry in the new suggestions box, or if you want to open the file location, just right-click the entry and there’ll be an option to do so. If you need to use commands or dig deeper into non-indexed locations, you can still press enter and populate the view with the traditional search results,” Microsoft detailed at that point.
As every other build, version 18945 comes with a series of other general changes and known issues, and you can check them out in full in the box after the jump.