A handful of previously unannounced Windows 11 features have shown up in leaked builds of the operating system.
A Sustainability setting could help you adjust power settings and view other information about the environmental impact of your PC. Notification priorities may be a little easier to configure. Focus Assist could be renamed Focus. You may be able to customized your computer’s desktop wallpaper with Stickers. And there could be a new “hide the taskbar when using your device as a tablet” feature.
All of these leaks come from Albacore (@thebookisclosed), who has been posting screenshots to Twitter over the past few days exploring new features and UI tweaks in an unreleased build of Windows 11.
That said, it’s unclear if or when these changes will make it to the stable branch of Windows 11. Microsoft recently announced that it’s revamping its Windows Insider Preview program a bit so that some of the features it rolls out to Dev Channel testers may just be experiments that may or may not ever actually graduate to become real features.
So it’s possible that some of the changes spotted by Albacore could fall into that experimental category.
A few more improvements coming to Windows 11 🍃
• Sustainability: better energy consumption and device recycling awareness
• Focus Assist is becoming Focus, now schedulable through Outlook & sporting more granular options
• Notification priorities no longer tucked away in UI pic.twitter.com/5V6t51rDP4— Albacore (@thebookisclosed) February 5, 2022
That said, the return of a “tablet mode” would probably be a welcome addition, even if it’s not as comprehensive as the tablet modes included in Windows 10 and Windows 8.1. Support for stickers are likely to draw eyerolls from some, but it’s nice to see an option that could let uses who want more ways to customize their desktops to do so. And the Sustainability feature could be interesting… depending on how it’s implemented.
There’s an interesting personalization feature coming to Windows 11 – Stickers for your wallpaper.
You’ll be able to configure them using a new Sticker Editor app, they’ll persist across wallpaper changes as long as you don’t use a slideshow, use Fill fit & have only 1 monitor. pic.twitter.com/KIVtVxw3BC— Albacore (@thebookisclosed) February 5, 2022
Albacore notes that the leaves near the top of the screen will be filled in with color to indicate a sort of sustainability score for your system, and users will have the option to automatically implement recommended power-saver settings with a toggle.
“Sustainability” looks like they just renamed “power and sleep settings”, but to something more guilt-trippy and giving you output in units that you can’t use for any meaningful claculation.
Seeing “learn how to recycle this device” on a new computer wouldn’t inspire much confidence either.
Besides, the want to look sustainable but don’t support fully functional “old” hardware…
I personally haven’t spent enough time playing with Windows 11, so I didn’t actually realize that it didn’t have Tablet Mode.
Hopefully they maintain keyboard navigability in Tablet mode. In Windows 10, I used tablet mode on my Home Theatre PC because it could be navigated using a keyboard (or a remote control configured to use keyboard commands).