It's been nearly a month since Microsoft officially announced Windows 11, and if you're a Windows Insider, you can test it out now. All the company has said about when it will be publicly available is that it's coming this holiday season. However, there have been various hints that Windows 11 is coming in October.

For example, there was part of the event where the time and date in Windows 11 was set to October 20, 2021, at 11:11am. There was also a message shown from Stevie Bathiche, saying "Good luck today, Panos! Excited to turn it up to 11...can't wait for October!"

As spotted by Windows Latest, Intel's latest DCH GPU driver release notes identify support for the Windows 11 October 2021 Update, or version 21H2.

Let's break this down a bit. It makes sense that Windows 11 is listed, since the driver was officially the first to support the new OS. We've also known for some time that Windows 11 is going to be version 21H2, just like this fall's version of Windows 10. However, it's unlikely to be called the October 2021 Update, because frankly, it's a new operating system. It's not an update to anything.

It's a lot more likely that Windows 10 version 21H2 is going to be called the October 2021 Update. After all, that's how Windows 10 updates are usually named, just like we saw with the Windows 10 October 2020 Update and the Windows 10 October 2018 Update (the 2019 fall update was in November; you can probably guess what it was called).

So, did Intel spill the beans that Windows 11 is coming in October? Maybe, and maybe all of the other hints are true as well. However, it seems more likely that this is just a typo. Perhaps, whoever was writing up these release notes took Windows 10 version 21H2 and Windows 11 version 21H2, and accidentally combined them into the same line. We've reached out to Intel for comment.

While we know that the first shipping version of Windows 11 will be version 21H2, we don't know about future updates. Unlike Windows 10 - which got updated twice a year, Windows 11 is getting annual updates. It makes sense that Microsoft might shed the 'H1' and 'H2' in favor of just using the two-digit year. Perhaps in 2022, instead of Windows 11 version 22H2, we'll just get Windows 11 version 22.

Time will tell on that one, and time will tell on the official date that Windows 11 launches. Honestly, when the OS was announced on June 24, Microsoft probably wasn't even ready to commit to a specific month. After all, we're now in the second half of June and some major features aren't even in testing yet. Teams integration isn't there, and even more notably, Android app support isn't there. These have to be ready for public testing, and then they have to be good enough to ship before release.

October is just two and a half months away at this point. You can expect a lot to happen in the world of Windows news between now and then.