Windows 10 is getting a fresh News app, plus Linux integration in File Explorer
Windows 10’s latest preview version has brought a major boon for Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) users, in the form of full integration for Linux files in File Explorer.
As of build 19603 (for the update due to land in the second half of 2020), File Explorer – the part of the interface with which you view folders and files on the desktop – now has a little penguin icon that allows you to directly access your Linux distros.
You can click on any distro to show you the root file system for that particular distro, which you can then explore away to your heart’s content. It’s a useful extra touch for WSL, and makes for a much more convenient way to access Linux files under Windows 10.
Cleaning house
There are a couple of other changes with this new preview build, including the introduction of clean-up recommendations under Storage Settings. This lists superfluous files which you could get rid of to free up drive space, so we’re talking about the usual suspects: temporary files, unused apps, along with other bits and pieces.
And finally, Microsoft has also implemented a News Bar, although this is currently only available to US testers (as a beta version in the Microsoft Store). This highlights breaking news continuously throughout the day, drawing from a network of over 4,500 publishers, and keeping you up-to-date with brief highlights (or you can click through to get the full story).
It’s possible to customize the appearance of the News Bar in a number of different ways, and it currently provides news as well as info on the stock market. However, in the future we’ll also get coverage of sports news and the weather.
As ever, there are a load of general fixes and tweaks, as well as known issues, which you can get up to speed with by checking out Microsoft’s full blog post on build 19603.
