Windows 11 Pro and Windows 11 Home will each receive major feature updates just once per year, rather than twice. (Windows 11 Home in S Mode will also be available, though we haven’t tested it.) It appears that Windows 11 Pro will leave the functional differences between Windows 10 Home and Pro intact, offering features like BitLocker encryption, Hyper-V virtualization, Remote Desktop Connection, and Windows Sandbox.
Though we didn’t try out Windows 11’s Remote Desktop Connection, we confirmed that the Hyper-V virtualization capabilities worked, generally. Windows 11 was unable to find an Ubuntu ISO that Hyper-V downloaded, but it opened and installed a saved Windows 10 build just fine. Windows 11 also opens a copy of Windows 11 (rather than Windows 10) with Windows Sandbox, a nifty-though we suspect little-used-virtualized OS that you can use to surf the gray areas of the Web. In all, the reasons to upgrade (or not) to Windows 10 Pro seem to carry over into Windows 11 Pro.
There’s a significant new reason to consider Windows 11 Pro now, however. The Windows 11 Pro edition will be the only edition to allow local accounts, which Microsoft now calls “offline” accounts. Windows 11 Home requires you to initially sign in with a Microsoft account. Continue reading “Windows 11 will ship in two different editions for home use”