Windows Weekly 929: The Blue Screen of Soup

Leo, Richard, and Paul discuss Week D, Ubuntu 25.04 and WOA, AI, Big Tech and antitrust, Xbox and gaming, and much more.

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Windows

It’s Week D, do you know where your preview update is? 23H2 is out – 24H2, not so much

• No surprises in the new features list

More new features on the way?

• New text actions in Click to Do – Practice in Reading Coach and Read with Immersive Reader – in Dev and Beta (24H2)
• Find cloud-based (OneDrive-based) photos using Semantic search – Comes to EEA, Snapdragon X only for now, Dev and Beta
• Voice access improvements – add words to custom dictionary – Dev and Beta
• Updated green screen UI – latest Canary build, from today
• Minor update to the Beta/23H2 channel, no new features

Ubuntu 25.04 is out and there’s a native Arm64 ISO (!) and BitLocker support

• Hands-on with WSL (which is stuck at 24.xx) and in Hyper-V on a Copilot+ PC
• Is dual-boot even possible on Arm? (Yet)

Friday night update to identity caused accounts to be marked as leaked for 50,000 partner accounts

AI

We’re in a new wave: Microsoft 365 Copilot updated, new Agent Store and more on the way

Copilot Vision is now free for everyone in Microsoft Edge

Google is giving Gemini Advanced/Google One AI Premium away for free to US college students

• FYI: Court data: Google estimates its Gemini AI chatbot had 35M DAUs and 350M MAUs worldwide as of last month while ChatGPT had 160M DAUs and 600M MAUs (Erin Woo/The Information)

Perplexity is coming to Samsung and Motorola phones – and Microsoft is apparently coming to Motorola too

Antitrust

It’s getting real – 20 years after US v. Microsoft, Big Tech is finally getting a reckoning

• Google has now lost two major US antitrust cases in less than a year
  • US v. Google (search): DOJ wants Judge to break up Google
  • US v. Google (ads): Google found to have another illegal monopoly
• What’s the “right” outcome for Chrome and Google’s ad businesses?
  • OpenAI says it would be happy to buy Chrome from Google– hilarious
• Google just killed Privacy Sandbox, cites regulatory climate

Apple, Meta fined by EU for not conforming to the DMA

Apple Intelligence is no longer “available now” (Siri: Is it raining?)

Xbox/gaming

Elder Scrolls IV Remastered lands on Xbox, PC, PS5 and Game Pass

Xbox app arrives on LG smart TVs

It’s (back) on: Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders rescheduled to April 24 with no price change

• And the demand is higher than expected, Nintendo says

Tips and picks

Tip of the week: It’s time to look at Google Fi again

Google Fi turns 10 this week and the service just got interesting again

App HARDWARE pick of the week: Microsoft keyboards and mice are back, baby

Incase finally has a (nearly) full slate of Microsoft-designed keyboards, mice, and desktop sets!

RunAs Radio this week: Agentic AI for IT Pros with Tim Warner

https://runasradio.com/Shows/Show/981

Brown liquor pick of the week: Dark Harmony No. 3 Black IPA Cask

https://hellyersroaddistillery.com.au/products/dark-harmony-no-3-black-ipa-cask