Submitted by As you all know, Windows 8 will be the first release of Windows NT which supports the ARM architecture. Microsoft hasn’t been particularly forthcoming about this new Windows variant, but that’s changing today. The company has posted a long and in-depth blog post about Windows 8 on ARM.
It was never clear whether Microsoft was going to include the classic desktop with the ARM release of Windows 8. They’ve cleared that up now: yes, the classic desktop will be part of Windows 8 on ARM, including most of the default applications and utilities people come to expect from Windows (although a few will be missing, Microsoft has not stated which). On top of that, Windows on ARM will also ship with desktop versions of Office 15 (the next version of Office).
What the desktop will not support is current Windows applications. Microsoft already confirmed there won’t be any emulation of x86 applications, but now the company has also ruled out any options for recompiling or whatever. “WOA does not support running, emulating, or porting existing x86/64 desktop apps,” Microsoft writes. The single and sole method of getting applications on WOA is through the Windows Store, and only Metro applications are supported.
For the rest, Windows on ARM has all the WinRT capabilities present in Windows x86, including the same set of programming languages supported by WinRT. The Windows Store is smart enough to offer the right version to users, so that won’t be a problem for users.
Moving on, the most interesting part of the blog post is the account of the porting endeavour – getting Windows NT to run on ARM in the first place. After getting an actual tool chain going for building Windows for ARM, the porting process could begin. Significant parts of Windows 8 were already architected to be platform-independent, and even the Windows NT kernel had significant parts that were easily portable due to NT’s history of platform-independence.
Microsoft really got into the nitty-gritty here, even going so far as developing the actual firmware for the ARM devices Windows 8 is going to support, including ACPI and UEFI. NT’s HAL had to be altered as well, adding the “ability for each of the core system resources to be plugged in via an extension to the HAL, kind of like a driver for the interrupt controller”. Furthermore, several ARM-specific drivers had to be written, and several regular Windows drivers had to be adapted for ARM.
Once Microsoft was ready to start the graphical environment, it was time to make sure the graphics chips in the supported ARM SoCs supported DirectX. The ARM device makers had to write DirectX-compatible drivers, which took a long time. In the meantime, Microsoft created a soft GPU driver working directly against the hardware framebuffer – this work benefited x86 Windows as well, as it gave Microsoft the opportunity to make changes to how Windows works and looks when no supported graphics driver has been found (so, prettier and more capable blue screens and Windows setup experiences).
More higher-level stuff followed, such as device support. The most interesting tidbit here? “For Windows 8, we rearchitected the print infrastructure to add class driver support,” the post explains, “The majority of printers selling today are supported using the class driver, which means you’ll be able to ‘plug and print’ on WOA without additional drivers. While the new architecture was needed for many reasons, we had printing from WOA PCs in mind from the beginning.”
Also fun: the first ARM devices running Windows NT. Fancy specialised hardware? Hand-crafted tablets? No – Windows Mobile devices. Seriously. I’m not kidding. They ran Windows NT on Windows Mobile smartphones (so not Windows Phone 7). Awesome photos included.
In any case, it’s a very interesting post, and surely a recommended read – even if you don’t use or like Windows.
Ok, so you can’t port existing x86 desktop applications to ARM …
And the only way to get applications on WOA is through the app store, and the app store only supports Metro apps. So not only can you not port existing x86 apps, but you can’t install any new ones?
Does that mean the only desktop applications you can run are the ones it came with? That being the case, why the hell did they even bother?
Same reason Apple bothered with iOS and various other providers bother with Android. They want a share of the tablet market
No, I meant why did they bother porting the DESKTOP over, if you can’t run any apps on it. Why not just do metro and be done with it?
Edited 2012-02-10 01:17 UTC
Because Office 15 isn’t written for Metro and needs the legacy desktop to run.
http://www.winsupersite.com/article/windows8/screenshots-windows-8-…
Edited 2012-02-10 01:32 UTC
Oh good lord, so it’s just to run Office? Why not port Office to Metro, instead of porting desktop Windows AND Office to ARM? Or if nothing else, don’t they have a web version of Office available?
They also wanted users to be able to use Windows Explorer and other utilities. And the desktop version of IE10 (which supports plugins like Flash; the Metro version of IE10 supports no plugins, relying purely on HTML5 for fancy stuff).
I look at it like this: They want Metro users to be able to drop down to a lower level where Windows Exploerer and whatnot can be run, just like today WIndows users can drop down to the command line to run certain utilities.
As for porting Office to Metro, the problem there is that WinRT only supports a subset of Win32. So a Metro version of Office would require a significant rewrite, that would take too long for the next release. Office 16 will probably be purely Metro, but there’s not enough time to do it for Office 15.
All well and good, but since Flash is not a metro app, and only metro apps are allowed, will it be available? Would Adobe be allowed to do this if they wanted to?
No, because they already stated that IE10 won’t support plugins.
They want a unified codebase and brand marque instead of having to maintain separate product development lines on each.
Simple this is just another case of MSFT aping Apple and getting it all wrong and will be such a failwhale it will make MSFT Bob and WinME jokes a thing of the past, heck it’ll make Vista look like Win95.
the way to know a thing is to truly understand it, so lets look at Windows and WinMO shall we? Why do people buy Windows? 1.-To run Windows programs and 2.-Its cheap, in fact as far as the consumer is concerned its free as part of the cost of the desktop/laptop.
Now lets look at WinMo, what is it? Its a failed attempt to stick the WinDesktop on phones, in fact most even had a start button and an XP/Vista look even though that didn’t work with a cell phone controls schema.
So what is Win 8? its MSFT’s answer to iOS only instead of actually learning from Apple and having a separate OS (OSX) for the desktop and an OS (iOS) designed for the ground up for the mobile devices they are run on MSFT in their infinite stupidity think that developers are retarded and that they can get them to write apps for WinPhone by saying “You can write apps for one and have BOTH desktop and mobile!” which of course is a lie as Metro “apps” will be about as deep as iOS fart apps while traditional desktop apps will be rich and have access to all the things that Win 8 ARM won’t have like the well known APIs, full DirectX, better storage, etc.
So in the end you have a touchscreen UI (Win 8) that is gonna be shoved into an area where it simply doesn’t belong because desktops/laptops/netbooks are NOT touch enabled and considering that a 17 inch touchscreen is $300+ and a 25 inch widescreen monitor is $140 isn’t about to change between here and Oct, and the developers will simply stick with Android and iOS. Also without the Windows X86 lock in frankly win 8 ARM simply has no chance, it costs more than Android while not having the buzz and polish of iOS and worst of all the average consumer doesn’t know ARM from a washing machine and will see these WinTabs and think “Hey my stuff will run on it!” and when they find out it don’t will return them en masse.
As someone I was talking with described it the other day “Windows on ARM: The performance of ARM combined with the polish of first generation Microsoft products and the software support of NetBSD.”
This is the golden opportunity Linux has been waiting for, I really hope the community is up to the challenge.
What opportunity is Linux supposed to take advantage of? Linux won’t even be able to run on these ARM-based devices, or at least without jailbreaking. They’ve got that secure boot thing on there.
Edited 2012-02-10 02:05 UTC
I don’t really know much about this secure boot sh*te, but it’ll probs be cracked in a few days anyway… Or does that render the hardware unusable because of it requiring keys?
I’d love it if it was cracked and other OS’s could be installed
Edited 2012-02-10 11:22 UTC
So much for Ed Bott’s “For one thing, there^aEURTMs no such thing as a ‘Windows 8 ARM PC.'” (*) That didn’t take long.
Thanks for nothing, Microsoft (and commentators like Ed Bott)!
* http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/linux-wont-be-locked-out-of-windows-…
Oh my, it’s 2001 again.
This is the golden opportunity Linux has been waiting for [snip]
I’d like to know as well what the opportunity is supposed to be here? Windows 8 Tablets are off limits to anyone but MS, thanks to the custom written MS UEFI with secure boot only. WOA is firmware, incredibly powerful firmware with Office 15 integrated, but firmware nonetheless. So no real chance of getting anything Linux related on there.
Or are we talking about the attempt of KDE to bring their Plasma Active to market on a rebranded, Chinese tablet? Regardless of the quality of the software, a tablet with an 1 GHz yesteryear ARM SoC is no match for the coming dual and quad core ARM WOA systems. No matter how insanely optimised Plasma Active might be, single core SoC’s won’t be running circles around the newer crop of ARM chips. I do applaud the KDE project for having the wits to see that just making a DE platform isn’t enough.
I’m a very happy Linux user, but since I’ve shed my rose colored FOSS, Kumbaya glasses, I’ve started to see clearly that opportunities are there for Linux to make a splash, but all these opportunities are NOT predicated on perceived failures of Microsoft.
How many times haven’t we heard “Microsoft stumbled, this is a golden opportunity for Linux!” After which the Linux luminaries just sat on their butts, assuming that “not being worse than MS” is enough to take over. We have a few Linux based OEM’s, like System76 and ZaReason, but lets be realistic here. Buying at these shops is just robbing yourself monetarilly for the pleasure of having a FOSSically correct machine. A very small selection of expensive machines too.
Where is the new business that makes laptops, desktops, tablets and works with upstream to ensure smooth software upgrades? The shop that sells Linux machines at comparable market prices? The shop that isn’t afraid to do some marketing. Isn’t afraid of pushing ODF and ODF office applications as first class components, based on a recognized ISO document standard.
Oh well. Business as usual I guess.
These ARM devices aren’t the only ARM tablets out there. Another analogy, I don’t know a single person using WP7.
Well, who cares, just don’t buy locked tablets running MS jailed system. While Spark isn’t the best hardware around, there were reasons why that model was chosen, and those reasons outweigh need for higher end specs now. The project needs to start with something practical, rather than wait forever for ideal situation.
Edited 2012-02-10 18:10 UTC
Yup, it looks like Win8 might very well be the next Vista when it comes to weakening the Windows grip on the market, propping up Linux market share. Or like it happened due long dying of win9x, and all its flaws.
And this time, the awesome UIs of Gnome 3 or Unity will assure even better success for desktop Linux than on previous occasions.
If so then a lot of people are going to be happy about this move.
Still, MS could have delay Office 15 to put out fully native Metro apps.
“(..)As you all know, Windows 8 will be the first release of Windows NT which supports the ARM architecture.(..)”
I though windows nt 4 was able to run on ARM (at least up to 4th SP)
NT 4 had support for those architectures
No ARM there.
All that counts is that Solitaire works.
Herpa derp! I’mma port my company’s OS and modify it so customers can use it on their tablets, and at the same time remove the entire point of running Windows! Yeah! Best. Plan. Evar.
I’m fully aware x86 apps won’t run on an ARM processor, but really, restricting Windows to just the app store is possibly the stupidest thing they could have done, in terms of marketing the device to the end users. The only reason to want Windows on a tablet, over Android or iOS, is for the familiar desktop, and the flexibility of installing whatever you damn well please.
I have a feeling because Microsoft is very business oriented that businesses can also setup their own appstore or somehing else along those lines.
I believe that is correct. I don’t have a link to anything at the moment but ISTR that allowing companies to have a private, internal app store is part of their plan.
At least for now. (-;)
It wasn’t so long ago that legacy apps weren’t coming to WOA either …
Limiting users to only installing from the Windows app store is the only way they can keep stupid users from buying an ARM version of Windows then complaining that their 1998 version of program “X” wont install.
If they understand that you can’t watch a foreign movie without subtitles, unless you know the language, I’m sure they can grasp that the CPU is different. The way I explain to my customers the reason MS Office won’t run on the Android tablets we sell is very much the idiot’s interpretation of a CPU. I tell them it’s basically like an abacus, but with more than one bar for the beads to zip along. A different kind of CPU may have a different number of bars in a different arrangement, and instructions for one will make no sense at all to another. They seem to get that. Strangely, it’s not my least knowlegable customers who have a problem with it. They accept what they don’t understand, and all I need to say is “it’s a different type of CPU, and one can’t run things written for another”. It’s the people who know just about as much, but have gleaned a few buzzwords that are the problem, because they clearly know everything there is to know.
Dynamic recompilation might help (though not with games installing kernel drivers).
Thing is, Microsoft was there with NT/Alpha and FX!32 – rather mixed reception. Alpha was very powerful compared to the x86 of its time – ARM is not.
We had such Windows tablets for quite some time. They… didn’t really took of.
And nearby you write…
Yeah, and making out of that difference the main issue, main cause of avoidance; they can just not buy it – there were (too many) examples of people avoiding even AMD due to “different CPU”…
(really, even “obvious” OS differences were often enough to return unwanted in the end purchases; MS maintaining the same trademark for this product, Windows, will quite possibly prove unfortunate)
The article states that GPU/decoding drivers will be supplied by vendors to WOA.
So this is risky for WOA (if open specs were released Ms would be in a better situation) and second this is anti-competitive.
The article mentions nothing new provided with respect to other OSes that already have. It also displays the benefits of open hardware specifications (I2C HId devices) but simultaneously it fuels vendor lock-in by saying vendors would create media off-loader drivers and GFX drivers.
In my view win-8 brings nothing new to the table but continues the anti-competitive behavior/tradition of MS supported by marionette governments not applying the law and skillfully smashing competition.
ReactOS is a better target for developers even on ARM.
Can I have some of what you are smoking … it must be damn good.
If it doesn’t serve your purposes there are other FOSS OSes. In my posting I meant driver and kernel developers.
But msvc only software could be ported to mingw and easily to ReactOS.
I dunno if you are trolling or stupid.
Never attribute to malice what can be attributed to stupidity.
I have high hopes for ReactOS, but this statement is completely false at this point.
First, although a lot of work was done at one point, ReactOS does not even support ARM.
Second, although there have been some exciting developments lately, like USB and wireless networking, ReactOS does not even work on most hardware yet.
Third, let’s just skip the other “completeness” arguments and skip to the fact that ReactOS has about 0% market-share.
The last point should probably be first. If there is nobody to buy your software, it makes a poor target for your development efforts.
Thankfully, targeting ReactOS and targeting XP, Vista, and 2003 are all basically the same thing.
Well, to be honest, I don’t really think this would help to gain popularity of Windows 8 as a whole.
It has very unfamiliar, awkward, counter-intuitive, Fisher-Price-like UI which makes it unusable.
Thus, no matter what HW platform it will run on – that’s just not gonna work for most of users.
Of course Microsoft will try to force it down the users throats [it’s hard to buy hardware without Windos these days], but I don’t think it’s gonna work this time.
I mean, this is a HUGE change, not just a small one. They expect people to go from regular desktop to some new, untested environment, and recently we got an info of limiting “classic” interface of Windows 8 by removing START button.
Sure, other operating systems do some major changes as well, but it’s never THAT radical [at least they try to retain USABILITY].
Don’t know about others, but I’m sure I won’t use Windows 8 on any of machines I have unless they treat me seriously, as a grown-up man and provide me with some environment to WORK, not to play games for children.
Fortunately I am not even limited to their products and I’m on a stable “other OS” ground for many years now.
Two things:
(1) New interfaces haven’t scared people as much as you’d like to think. People used traditional cell phones for years and then the iPhone comes along and for the most part, people did just fine with it. They’ve done just fine with the changes in the Windows UI over the years. Yes, there have been complaints here and there, but everyone grumbled and moved forward and now it’s ancient history.
(2) ARM-based tablets aren’t meant to be the same as powerful general purpose computers. If you want to be doing serious software development or number-crunching or game playing, you aren’t going to buy an ARM-based tablet; you’ll buy a regular computer. MS doesn’t need to provide a full-featured traditional desktop on a tablet. It’s really unnecessary. If you don’t personally want it, then just consider yourself not the target market. I don’t care for iPads, but they are selling like hotcakes, so I must just not be the target market.
First of all, let me clarify we’re talking about twoj things here, as you’ve mentioned yourself:
1) productivity machines – desktops/workstations, portable desktops
2) entertainment machines – portable gadgets like tablets, some dumbed-down netbooks
Now, we used to WORK on the first [productivity machines] on a NORMAL operating systems, usually dekstop operating system with regular windows, workspaces and means that enhance our productivity.
For some time we play on the gadgets like iPad [or TABLETS for that matter], sometimes we read books on such devices, usually for entertainment too.
We are not doing any serious work on the entertainment machines.
Now, the problem is that Microsoft is making its next GENERAL PURPOSE operating system available for both productivity and entertainment machines available with THE SAM, ENTERTAINMENT-MACHINE-LIKE UI.
This is not normal and it is certainly not good for people who use their computers mainly for work purposes.
I understand Microsoft would like to have a single software platform to rule them all, but they just don’t seem to care about myriads of people who just want to make the work done on time on a normal interface.
They don’t have time, money to train their staffs [jobs] this new UI, rewriting productivity software just to make it work on METRO, which is very limited by now.
Forcing this will make huge amount of irritation among MS customers/corporates. And that’s the problem.
Just give people a valuable/productive/functioning alernative to Metro UI, that’s all.
Otherwise it would be selling sport cars to everyone, regardless their real needs [trucks, vans, etc].
I would agree with you except that on productivity machines, there will be the classic interface for productivity apps. My guess is that in the office, you’ll hardly ever see Metro going because everything they use will need the classic workspace.
Well, we may *expect* this to happen [expect that corps will get classic UI with Windows 8] but the problem is that they probobly won’t.
Classic app compatibility is quite misearble at this point, and MS is taking away some of the most classic features like START button.
I’d rather say corps will stay on Windows XP/7, which is far more reasonable for them.
Companies usually don’t upgrade immediately anyway. It’s a bad idea. You have to test and make sure your existing software and hardware works with the new OS. If there are bugs, those have to be fixed before the upgrade and retraining.
As for the Start menu thing, MS may change their minds, or they may have found that people don’t really use it that much. In my experience watching people at a boring old business use computers, I don’t think I can recall a time when they used the Start menu, except maybe to shut down. Usually, they click icons on the desktop — icons put there by IT, or saved there from MS Word or downloading or whatever.
Fairly similar things were said about “fisher price” XP (even it wasn’t such a radical change); they could have been easily said about win3.x or win95 (DOS all the way!), about Windows UI in general. And yet here we are…
Thing is, with how many new users the PC (mostly Windows, mostly XP) amassed over the last decade+ – for majority of them XP UI very much was “a HUGE change, not just a small one” – going from no desktop to some new, very unfamiliar (to them), awkward …counter-intuitive?
Well, the way many people seem to struggle with using PCs, maybe the UI doesn’t work very well at all.
Also (“untested”), MS does plenty of usability testing (but you’re a serious grownup man, none of that childish nonsense…)
What I found most interesting in that post, is this: “Windows 8 will run on every Windows 7 logo PC”. If true, this makes the whole discussion about firmware requirements that prevent installing a second OS a bit moot.
x86 != ARM.
They are saying that any Windows 7 pc, will run Windows 8. No ARM device is in this group.
You are right, but I wasn’t talking about WOA, but about Windows 8 (which as the article makes clear are two separate OSes, even though they share many components). I was talking about this article: http://www.osnews.com/story/25180, which states “Microsoft requires OEMs that want to be part of the logo program for Windows 8 to have secure boot enabled.” However, if any Windows 7 PC will run Windows 8, this may be a moot point.
An article which IIRC was followed on & clarified, on this very site, in the meantime…
Also, future Windows logo requirements (for Windows 8) != past Windows logo requirements (for Windows 7 – which may furthermore become fairly unavailable in retail, after the launch of its successor)
There will be a desktop, but just for Office and Explorer. Great.
You get “free” Office in exchange for the right to determine how and how long you can use the hardware. When MS stops the support for the device you will have to buy a new one.
Brave new world
Something tells me that there would be a reverse-engineering version of Microsoft Office 2003 (aka the ribbon-less version) under an open source license agreement in the near future. The 2003 interface and function are perfect enough for your average computer users.
Are you saying you missed the existence of Open Office?… O_o
PS. Plus I have doubts if “2003 interface and function are perfect enough for your average computer users” – from what I see 1) that UI doesn’t really work out too well for them (and hopefully it’s not a case of “least evil”, hopefully there will be progress) 2) something between Wordpad, Abiword, LyX and TeXmacs would probably fit much better and be more than enough function-wise (for ~”word processor” element, but it’s generally similar with others)
Edited 2012-02-10 18:00 UTC
I imagine many people could be swayed by such deal and be rather glad, Office being basically the only essential “very desktop” application they use… (as for the “typical rest”: browser, IM, music, videos, some light gaming – I don’t really see anything which doesn’t already work well on ~smartphonified UIs)
Bonus (for MS): no Open Office / Libre Office (which BTW I can see as something the EU etc. would take issue with – so maybe, down the road, this will mean forcing at least partial opening of “desktop” WOA)
They are again 2 years late and again ARM WIndows will flop (this time on tablets). It has nothing really to do with x86 Windows, Metro apps will run on both, but there will be no possibility to even _port_ existing apps easily. So the ARM version will be MS equivalent of iOS. Please, MS, don’t call that sh** Windows.
x86 tablets with keyboard “dock”, similar to Asus Transformer: well this will be interesting. Win8 multitouch support could allow very cool tablet-laptop hybrid products, which I’d buy instead of a normal laptop. At least it would run non-crippleware windows variant, and allow the HUGE world of existing Windows apps to run, not only those made for that badly gone experiment (called Metro) that they’re shoving on everyone without mercy.
So I get that the issue with the old Windows API stack is that if you allow unrestricted installation of even ARM compiled “desktop” binaries, eventually something is going to be installed that doesn’t work well with power management, runs processes in the background that don’t place nice, or runs stuff in the foreground that eats your battery alive.
WinRT is carefully crafted to make it very very hard to do any of these things. Whereas the older windows APIs allow just about anything – this is why MS had to carefully port Office to WOA, to make sure that these desktop apps behaved properly on more limited devices.
That being said, couldn’t MS provide an updated subset of the older windows APIs? This would be a cleaned up API that allows for easy porting, but forces app designers to make sure that their desktop apps are touch friendly, don’t require admin privileges to install or run, have portable installations, and play nice with power management.
WinRT is already possible to use from the desktop side, although the set of available APIs is limited.
I guess it is a question of resources, as even for Microsoft it would be too hard to fully provide a complete Win32 replacement in Windows 8.
In the future there might be more WinRT integration in the desktop side, but this is just a guess on my side.
Microsoft is proud to announce what open source developers and other companies have done a long time ago, simply hilarious.
Open source devs and other companies have ported Windows NT to ARM, really?
(I mean, surely you don’t mean operating systems in general – since, say, MS has at least one other OS which runs on ARM for a long time)
Edited 2012-02-10 21:25 UTC
Don’t forget: around here, Microsoft only does the stupidest things and OSS is full of the bestest, most powerful and secure software ever. If you dare to question it, you must be a shill!
Microsoft does create crappy software because technical excellence is not the main issue, the real main issue is to make money. If the people keep buying, they do not give a shit about anything else.
Edited 2012-02-13 13:37 UTC
But they don’t create crappy software. A lot of their software is actually quite good, especially for the amount of things it can do, compared to the competition. People here complain about MS Office, and it does have its flaws, but it is head and shoulders above the competition. Excel, for example, has no real counterpart in the FOSS world. All the FOSS equivalents are, dare I say, crappy (how’s that for irony on your part). Eclipse is the closest equivalent to Visual Studio and it’s only good because it’s backed by IBM and the Apache Foundation and gets a ton of resources. There is no real FOSS equivalent to Access, Exchange, SharePoint or .NET. You may say these are crap, but they aren’t (they have crappy parts, for sure, but they are otherwise remarkably capable and powerful tools and platforms), and businesses use them and they really help. People don’t pay money to MS because they’re idiots, they pay money because MS software *works* and does a lot of things they *need*. Try working in the real world and maybe you’ll realize that.
About your Eclipse comment, I was going to say that MonoDevelop is getting pretty good and is very similar in spirit to Visual Studio:
http://monodevelop.com/
Then you said there was no FOSS equivalent to .NET which is absurd. First of all, there is a complete .NET clone–Mono.
http://mono-project.com/Main_Page
Second, there are many other environments which are good substitutes or “equivalents” for .NET around. Many people might consider Java as a candidate for example.
There is an army of FOSS CMS systems; they own the market. Your other selections are worthy of a bit of debate but you certainly overstate things:
http://www.open-xchange.com/en/home.html
http://www.zimbra.com/
http://www.sogo.nu/english.html
http://www.zarafa.com/content/home
http://www.horde.org/
Don’t make me laugh. I’ve used both and Visual Studio wins hands down in terms of features, performance and usability. I mean, it’s not perfect, but it’s much better than the alternatives. With ReSharper, I can’t imagine using any other tool to do .NET development.
It’s not a complete clone, it’s a half-completed, buggy clone. And more to the point: it’s a clone. It’s not something that the FOSS world came up with the provide a unified, cross-platform development system that integrates with all sorts of applications. .NET can be used to build PowerShell scriptlets, webservices, even database procedures. All using a common runtime with a common library. Where’s the equivalent in the OSS world? There isn’t. Even if Mono is a clone, it’s not used in nearly the same capacity that .NET is on Windows.
Java wasn’t developed by the OSS community. It’s been open-sourced, sort of, kind of, maybe, but it’s still primary developed by Oracle.
Own the market? Again, I have to laugh. I’m sure plenty of people use these, but Exchange owns the market with well over 60% of marketshare, with Lotus Notes in a distant second in the teens and then all the rest.
WPF and WCF are part of .NET and a pretty damn big and useful part. But you’re just proving that Linux has copycat things, just not as useful…
Man, i use Vim, LaTeX and stuff like that, i do not use any other software for writing code. Visual Studio and Eclipse are a waste of time for me. The most important thing for me is technical excellence, and not fancy and useless features.
I love Vim as much as the next guy, but I wouldn’t want to do my serious .NET work in it. If you haven’t used Visual Studio + ReSharper, you might think that you’re just missing out on a few frills. I’ll say this, though: I am much more productive with the “frills” of Visual Studio and ReSharper than I am with just a plain text editor. The latter is fine for hobby projects, or projects written in C/C++, which lack the metadata and overall structure to be parsed and used by tools like ReSharper. When it’s time to get work done, I’m going to use a powerful tool that’ll let me get it done quickly and correctly. For C#, Vim is not that tool.
Even for C/C++ Visual Studio is much more better than Vim.
The next time you think about using Haskell or OCaml, don’t forget that Microsoft is the main company sponsoring its development.
Sorry to disappoint you, i do not use stuff like that.
Make me laugh please . B)
Open source OSes run on many different hardware platforms, since more than 8 or 10 years. Windows just runs on 3 different platforms.If you mean Windows mobile it is a miserable try to make windows work on embedded devices, totally unacceptable for a company who hires thousands of programmers and engineers, and has bilions of dollars in the bank.
But for most computing needs outside the embedded world, all those platforms don’t matter. Windows didn’t target them because there’s no point in targeting them. Let the embedded OSes or Linux run on those, they are designed for that sort of thing. MS knows their target market and they also know where the money is and it’s not in embedded.
The only thing Microsoft knows is to make money, the rest is a disaster lol
Have you even used MS Software besides Internet Exploder and Windows 95? It sounds like you’re still stuck in some Linux zealot loop from the 90s. Your arguments are weak and completely unsubstantiated. In my case, I’ve used Linux for many years, including its development tools, as well as software like Apache and MySQL. I’ve even set up the HA stuff like Heartbeat and DRBD. I’ve also done a lot of dev recently on Microsoft. I can tell you that both platforms have their strengths and weaknesses, but MS has a lot more strengths than the zealots will give it credit for, and those strengths are real and relevant for a lot of the business world, where there’s no place for holy wars about free software licenses and Unix ueber alles.
Nice, disqualify and label me. B)
I don’t understand why you think I *wouldn’t* disqualify you after making such a blatantly stupid and unsubstantiated claim like “The only thing Microsoft knows is to make money, the rest is a disaster lol”. First of all, all companies generally try to make money and the ones that get big usually get that way because they are good at it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Secondly, Microsoft makes a lot of non-crap, and the FOSS world churns out a lot of crap too. It’s a crap world out there when it comes to software. If you can’t understand these basic realities, then I think you ought to be disqualified and labeled. Go out and learn some things and then come back with a reasonable argument.
Better stop feeding the troll.
Ahh, now that you escape into more platforms than ARM – NT is multiplatform since the beginning, over 2 decades, in fact it didn’t even start on x86 but on i860 (possibly before your particular open source darling even existed – the one seemingly most popular around, Linux, was even quite tied to x86 for some time, not expected by Linus to be as portable as, say, NT)
NT didn’t run on more than i860, MIPS, PowerPC, Alpha, Itanium, x86, x64, and now ARM because MS saw no need to do that, not because it was hard for them.
CE is not the same OS.
There’s more to the world (also of computing) than your narrow view (for example, your nearby “Sorry to disappoint you, i do not use stuff like that.” about some fine OSS projects …certainly used by many tools and efforts on which you indirectly depend on) – the company which, as you put it, “only […] knows is to make money, the rest is a disaster lol” is also an entity which, in the end, brought you this nice inexpensive PC of yours.
Edited 2012-02-18 00:19 UTC
With the power of these tablets, running a program like vmware would be feasible. This would solve the running linux, winxp, etc. issues. Then again, that would require someone to write a VM for the app store, and get it approved. My primary reason for wanting a tablet is to use inkscape, paint.net, mypaint and blender. Though these are probably going to be capacitive touch screens making decent stylus’s unuseable. I wish someone would make a tablet for engineers/artists. In my mind a tablet should be a replacement for a pad of paper. You just scrawl out ideas and draw out diagrams quick, or do sketches.
Yeap – the closest you have is the Samsung Galaxy Note but its 5″ screen mightn’t be the screen rel estate you were looking for.
That being said, their stylus/pen input is supposedly quite well developed and ideal for a small notepad type device. Might even replace my N900 for one given I have huge mits and the device mightn’t look to out of place in my hands as a phone LOL.
No it’s not. VMware isn’t an emulator, it’s a hypervisor. It doesn’t emulate a X86-system, it just gives you access to an virtual machine on a X86-system. Thats why it runs with reasonable speed. An emulator like vitualpc, bochs etc. will only run with a fifth of the host system is it is a very good one. Which brings you down maybe to the level of a slow pentium2 on a fast tablet. And it will burn a hole in your battery.
Pretty sure they had ported the NT to arm quite some time ago. Like 1998 or so. Pretty sure I saw it someplace. It wasn’t a modern ARM that we think of but a risc type of device.
All ARM equal RISC, but all RISC not equal ARM.
Looks like all cross-platform toolkits and runtimes (Qt, Gtk+, Java, Python) are going to be a no-go on WOA. Porting games is also going to be tough without OpenGL support…. For developers, especially open-source, this kinda sucks.
Edited 2012-02-11 17:34 UTC
Cross-platform toolkits always suck, because there is only so much they can offer while keeping portable.
So in the end you always have to write some abstractions layers yourself to compensate for the missing functionality.
Having said this, nothing forbids the said toolkits to try to provide some functionality around WinRT and with that achieve some portability.
the reassertion in the blog post that end users will be unable to upgrade or extend the desktop side of the WOA OS, only install Metro style apps and then only through the new app store ; also confirmation that the end-user will be locked in to the WOA OS as their one and only OS choice on WOA devices via the mandated UEFI restrictions ..all equal, to me.. the death of the chance ‘on the desktop’ for alternative or ‘other’ OS’s (all the linux’s, haiku’s, bsd’s and react OS’s ETC of the world)’.
Sure….there’s all the x86/64 system’s…but when so many many future tablets, low power ‘long battery life’ laptops, net tops, are going to be ARM based
…………..this could really be the beginning of the death of ‘free computing’ (speech not beer).
sorry for the caps but DOES ANYONE think microsoft could be mandated (e.g. by a careful thoughtful European court perhaps) to back track on their HUGELY exclusionist and damaging (to consumers/humanity even if being alarmist) UEFI WOA OS lock-in mandate.???
…and addition to my ‘paranoid’ train of thought…
yeah I know the ARM hardware partners for Microsoft’s forthcoming WOA hardware tablets/ low power laptop’s *COULD* build ‘near identical hardware’ without the UEFI OS lock in restrictions running a linux variant probably (but with no legal opportunity, and probably little or no technical capability either to install WOA install or alongside as part of an ARM dual-boot system)
..but I can see this ever happening in reality. Sure there will probably be a few ‘niche’/’cheap’ linux ARM based hardware products………but they probably won’t be anywhere near the mass market.. if WOA really takes off. And it might. I SO hope it doesn’t! not as currently proposed!!! .I want WOA to have it’s space to be, to thrive, but not to ‘be allowed’ basically a ‘space to monopolise’ (yeah I again know of course, their is Android and iOS etc..) but these ARE ALL closed ecosystem devices……..none let the user to ‘INSTALL WANT THEY WANT WHEN THEY WANT’. & goddamnit they should, at least some should!!! grrrrrr.
Maybe ALL the linux/other OS users will need to bandy together and try to make sure at least some/ONE of the big ARM device makers …tablets… laptops in the future.. make an OPEN version of some of the WOA devices!! Money *could* talk….
I like how the BLOG starts out:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/b8/archive/2012/02/09/building-windows-for-…
“One of the notable aspects of Microsoft Windows has been the flexibility the architecture has shown through shifts in technology and expansion of customer usage over time..”
LOL!
Yeah it has been soooooo flexible Windows has been, that is is on my PC….and that is about it.
I think Microsoft is going down the tubes personally as the cost to maintain multiple branches of Windows to compete with a open source model is going to cost gigantic piles of cash.
This could put an end to the idea of Microsoft doing the slow death by the irrelevant desktop to the quick and impending death of Windows to just game machine appliances.
Which If I had to take a long term look at things, Direct X is probably the most important product the company has ever made.
But the article is so full of it. It is like Microsoft in the old days when they were a rising star.
Now not so much.
I will never load my phone up with Windows.
No way. Neither will my customers either.
Same for tablets. Already went down that road.
Yikes!
-Hack
I’m pretty sure that the WOA desktop is just a touch friendly window manager for Metro style apps.
MS haven’t yet found a working alternative to the desktop/windowed apps way of working with office applications, so they decided to support that workflow on WOA as well. It’s just that instead of porting Win32 and the legacy desktop, with all the problems that brings, they short circuited the whole issue by reusing the Metro versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint, which already exists due to WP7, in a windowed environment. Throw in a file manager, IE and call it desktop on WOA and done.
I believe this to be the most likely scenario. It is a pragmatic approach to solving the office app workflow problem and it explains why there will be NO porting of existing desktop apps to WOA, there simply is nothing to port to.
In time, when the industry finds out whether windowed apps are necessary for office like workflows or not, I think MS will either allow 3rd party apps to run in windowed mode or deprecate their Metro desktop.
I know that it is a less interesting explanation than all the monopoly/[insert perceived wrongdoing] stuff, but it seems like the most likely reason to me.
The main reason people use Windows is its supposed backwards compatibility – knowing that your accumulated software collection will *probably* still run. People don’t use Windows because it has an awesome interface, features, or stability… quite the opposite. It’s because they feel locked in to what everyone else is using. They probably need to make the ARM version anyway, but perhaps Windows is starting to lose its former relevance.