I was startled recently when I wanted to use Quick Assist to provide support for a user over a remote connection. Quick Assist is a feature of Windows 10 that lets a person share their device with someone else and view their display and/or take over control of their machine. I’ve used it many times in the past to resolve support problems, but when I pressed Ctrl + Winkey + Q this time to launch the Quick Assist program, I was greeted by the following message:
What’s this? The Microsoft Store?! Yech!!
A little googling showed that I wasn’t the only admin who was frustrated about Microsoft ending support for the native version of Quick Assist in Windows 10 and forcing users to use the Store to install the new version (Günter Born). Bad move, Microsoft, stop trying to push the Store by removing built-in functionality from Windows.
And in other news Canonical has now made preview builds of Ubuntu available on the Microsoft Store (Ubuntu Blog). This means that if you use Windows Subsystem for Linux you are no longer limited to running Long Term Supported (LTS) releases of Ubuntu on Windows 10 and Windows 11 (BetaNews).
***HOT TIP*** We thought we’d stick this into the news section even though it’s not strictly news about Windows. If you’re tired of being forced to create a Microsoft Account when you’re setting up a new installation of Windows 11, you’ll want to read this article on Neowin that explains step-by-step how you can bypass the Microsoft Account requirement when setting up Windows 11 with an Internet connection. The downside of course is that when Windows 12 arrives Microsoft will probably make it even more difficult to set up a new Windows installation without having or creating a Microsoft Account.