The shiproom schedule is intended for manufacturers, making sure they roll out their driver updates at the correct time. As spotted by WindowsLatest, that calendar has a feature update marked for May 26 – 28, the end of this month. This sandwiches it between the weekend and a national holiday. It’s far from a hard-set release date, given that it’s purely there to prevent manufacturers from releasing at the wrong time. Microsoft could have several possible release windows in mind, for example, or find a last-minute that needs squashing. Still, Microsoft’s 1903 feature update was marked on the schedule and did release on time. This would also confirm the rumors heard by ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley, whose sources say to expect a May 28 release. In all, the update will be shipping a little later than expected, given previous bugs and, according to Foley, a nasty zero-day exploit. On top of all this is the global pandemic, which is sure to be impacting productivity as all of Microsoft’s engineers move to remote working. This update will also be known as Windows 10 2004, which has caused some head-shaking within the enthusiast community. Typically, updates in the first half of the year adopt the ’03’ nomenclature, as with 1903. It says this is to “avoid confusion” with Windows Server 2003, but the different naming schemes will also complicate matters. When it comes to features, the Windows 10 May 2020 update should give bandwidth limitation tools for Windows Update, a faster Windows Search, the decoupling of Cortana from the Start Menu, and GPU temperature and disk type in the Task Manager. For developers, there will be the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, a significant expansion of Linux use on Windows that includes a real kernel. You can read our full roundup here.
