Is it possible to switch from Canary to Stable?

26H2 is strongly believed to be 26300. Which means 28020 users will have to wait until post-26H2 (27?) for unification where the production channel will jump high enough to migrate (> 28000).

Regardless of whether you keep extending the Canary's expiration date, you're stuck on a different track for at least a year.

Slavic said:

It is not as obvious as you said. Let's imagine that we have a Canary build 28020. We can expect that soon or later the release build number will become more than current Canary (say, 28200), which would allow to update it normally. Unfortunately, the Canary builds are time-limited, they cannot outlive the normal progression of release builds. Sure, it will be possible to set the clock in Canary back, but then Windows Update may refuse to work at all, it requires that PC clock is set more or less correctly (I saw this several times).

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The criteria to leave an Insider version is not just that the release version build number exceeds the Insider version.

The Insider and Release versions have to be identical.

I think it like a train line with major stops and minor stops. A fast train (Release version) only stops major stops. An Insider version slow train stops at all stops. It is only when an Insider train stops at a major stop, a person can hop off and join the Release Train.

If the Insider train goes even one minor stop past a major stop, the Insider cannot hop off until the next major stop is reached.

So, it is never going to happen for Canary to match release version unless MS deliberately chose to do that and I cannot see why they would ever do that anyway.

cereberus said:

The criteria to leave an Insider version is not just that the release version build number exceeds the Insider version.

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We cannot know the criteria for sure, I doubt that MS will disclose it. From my point, there may be two different approaches for in-place upgrade: interval of the builds and hardcoded list. The first means that any build within a specified interval (from minimal supported up to current release) should be upgradeable. The second means the limited list of allowed builds, any other build including all intermediate is not supported (e.g. because they may have some test features which were excluded later). I think that first approach is more probable, because it worked with previous Windows versions. But may be not now.

It is very simple, from:

What else is there to understand?

• To get off the Canary Channel, a clean install of Windows 11 will be required. As a reminder – Insiders can’t switch to a channel that is receiving builds with lower build numbers without doing a clean installation of Windows 11 due to technical setup requirements.

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Marcus Vinicus said:

It is very simple, from:

Announcing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 28020.1611 (Canary Channel)

Hello Windows Insiders, today we are releasing Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 28020.1611 to the Canary Channel (the desktop watermark is showi

blogs.windows.com

What else is there to understand?

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And yet, somehow Microsoft did that to me and I somehow got dropped from the Insider program back to the retail distribution.

Slavic said:

We cannot know the criteria for sure, I doubt that MS will disclose it. From my point, there may be two different approaches for in-place upgrade: interval of the builds and hardcoded list. The first means that any build within a specified interval (from minimal supported up to current release) should be upgradeable. The second means the limited list of allowed builds, any other build including all intermediate is not supported (e.g. because they may have some test features which were excluded later). I think that first approach is more probable, because it worked with previous Windows versions. But may be not now.

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We DO know the criterion. It has been like this since W10 was released 10 years ago. You can only leave the Insider version WHEN release and Insider builds are IDENTICAL and if not, selecting to leave waits until the criterion is met.

cereberus said:

We DO know the criterion. It has been like this since W10 was released 10 years ago. You can only leave the Insider version WHEN release and Insider builds are IDENTICAL and if not, selecting to leave waits until the criterion is met.

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This may never happen if the insider builds use different numeration. For example, as discussed above, insider is 28020 and release will be 28200.