Unlike its predecessor with Windows 10 technology preview I was able to get all the way through succession of preview builds to (almost) RTM build released recently:
If you had any experience with early builds and previews of Windows before Windows 10 you will agree that Microsoft doing major strides in the way they deliver updates – now it is the same seamless and easy experience with build update as one you may have seen with iOS. Prior to 10 it was wipe and load for each early build and now builds just channeled through Windows Update – that is nice and I guess hugely increases number of early adopters and tester as it keeps user side efforts to try all these early builds at minimum. You may also notice that MSFT built some peer-to-peer optimizations for update downloads so that you can pull them not only from their servers but from other PCs on your LAN and on the Internet:
Once this build installed indication that you are running technical preview is gone from your desktop and some sources claim that this build is RTM version. But as you can see in official sources “this build is one step closer to what customers will start to receive on 7/29” – so not exactly final one. Another confirmation to that is that with this build you still have an option to continue receiving Insider Builds:
Apart from missing Technical Preview banner another indication of the fact is that RTM is almost here is availability of language packs (finally!):
Russian language pack weigh about 40 megabytes and it can be downloaded and installed now:
Also you can see that Edge is here as default browser (see this “Open with Internet Explorer” option hidden in “ellipsis menu”? 🙂 ):
You can also notice that icon for Edge is slightly different:
So far I like everything MSFT does with their client OS and as a product it seems to be mature and well engineered. In my opinion they really maintain quality bar in engineering and approach to rolling out new major releases set earlier with Windows 7 and 8 and well documented in Steven Sinofsky Building Windows blog posts (that was at the time when Steven was still with MSFT). As I followed Windows 7, 8 and now following Windows 10 early releases I really find MSFT doing very good job working with users’ community and IT Pro audiences from the early stages of development cycle till the RTM and official launch of their major OSs versions. See Engineering Windows 7 blog, Building Windows 8 blog and Windows Insider Program site. Though Steven’s blog posts is something you can feel miss of, overall quality of builds and communications around those is very good. You may discard these achievements and say that there is no other way to market and sell complex software products nowadays and this is not remarkable, just normal, but saying something and bringing this to reality are very different things. For such widely adopted OS some backlash and disgruntled users are guaranteed, but I am looking forward to the RTM, anyway.