What’s New in Windows 10’s 21H2 Update, Coming Winter 2021 - How-To Geek

This article is up-to-date with the latest changes as of Windows 10 Insider build 21313, which was released on February 12, 2020.

RELATED: What's New in Windows 10's 21H1 Update, Coming Spring 2021.

Windows 10’s Settings app now lets you configure DNS servers—and DoH settings.

To find DNS (and DNS over HTTPS) settings, head to either Settings > Network & Internet > Status (for wired Ethernet connections) or Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi (for wireless connections.) Click “Properties,” scroll down, and click “Edit” under DNS Settings.

Beyond an updated design that matches Windows 10’s modern “Fluent Design” style, you’ll find a variety of new features including an emoji search box.

Microsoft has now added Disk Management options to Windows 10’s Settings app.

Rather than opening the classic Disk Management utility, you can now head to Settings > System > Storage > Manage Disks and Volumes?

Head to Settings > System > Storage > Manage Storage Spaces to find these options.

There are some big improvements for developers who run Linux software on Windows 10 with the Windows Subsystem for Linux.

WSL now supports both NVIDIA CUDA (for NVIDIA hardware) and DirectML (for AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA GPUs.) Professionals with workflows involving Linux software that offloads computation to the system’s GPU can now run that Linux software on a Windows 10 PC.

You can run wsl.exe --install to enable the Windows Subsystem for Linux with a single command—no manually enabling operating system components first.

You can also use wsl.exe --update to update the Linux kernel to the latest version, wsl.exe --update --status to view your current Linux kernel version and when it was last updated, and wsl.exe --update --rollback to roll back to an older version of the Linux kernel.

RELATED: How to Install and Use the Linux Bash Shell on Windows 10.

RELATED: Windows 10's File Explorer Is Getting Linux Files (and Tux).

If you have Dark Mode enabled for Windows, you’ll see your search results in dark mode.

The Windows Search interface probably should have gotten a dark theme years ago, but better late than never.

You can also turn off search history by heading to Settings > Search > Permissions and toggling “Search history on this device” to  “Off.”.

To access these settings, head to Settings > System > Display > Graphics Settings or Settings > Gaming > Graphics Settings.

For example, a standard 64-bit process on the 64-bit version of Windows 10 will display “x64”.

This would likely be particularly useful on Windows 10 on ARM, as it would show you which applications are native to ARM and which are running through the emulation layer.

Currently, the ARM version of Windows 10 can only emulate 32-bit x86 software.

Windows 10 now has a new “post-update experience” that will pop up and tell you about some of the biggest new features and changes in these big every-six-months Windows 10 updates

If you have “Set time zone automatically” enabled under Date & Time Settings in windows, Windows will now send you a notification when it automatically changes your device’s time zone

It brings over 200 new emoji to Windows 10, adds gender-neutral emoji as an option, and standardizes some of Windows 10’s emoji to match other platforms

As always, Windows 10 updates contain a larger number of smaller changes, bug fixes, and various improvements

It’s good to see that significant changes to Windows, like system-wide DNS over HTTPS, are getting an extended testing period before they’re rolled out to all Windows 10 users