I wish Microsoft was content with just keeping Windows working. I'd buy a special "we will only issue security and compatibility updates" version if I could. I hardly ever want the new features they decide to add. UWP is garbage. the Microsoft/Windows/Zune store is garbage. Cortana is garbage. The Xbox app/game bar is garbage. I don't want any of it, I want Windows to run my games and get out of my way.

edit: All that said, Edge is kind of OK.

As I pointed out below, this isn't even 20 year old games. Name a release in the last year - if it's not a first-party Microsoft title, chances are it's Win32.

You mentioned Diablo 1, well with polaris Diablo III would need virtualization.

Fortnight? PUBG? Overwatch? All are Win32 games.

Excited for monster hunter in Q3? That'll be virtualized in polaris.

This is going nowhere.

All Windows APIs relevant for game developers are available to UWP apps.

64 bit games, and even 64bit _only_ games are increasingly common.

Turns out for many modern AAA games 3GB of RAM isn't enough.

Worth noting: the Xbox One has used virtualization since day one for video games. Done right, gamers shouldn't even have to know that this is what's happening. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xbox_One_system_software#Syste...

Disclaimer: Microsoft employee, not working on Windows 10 (aka I have no idea how accurate this is).

The Xbox One has come up a couple times here, and I don't think the people bringing it up understand that the Xbox is the exact opposite of what PC gamers want their PC to be. It's closed down, controlled, and limited compared to a full PC. It may be more secure, but often the beneficiary of that security is not the user but the console manufacturer, game publishers, and game developers.

If this is 100% seamless virtualization that doesn't make anything noticeably slower, it might be acceptable for business users. I doubt it's going to have zero impact though...

I highly doubt it's going to fly for power-users and gamers.

It would solve a lot of the windows gaming bullshit like Cortana popping an alert or filesystem indexing kicking off in the middle of Battlefield 1.

I'm not sure Microsoft's patchwork of fueding PMs will actually allow for something like that to happen but I can always dream.

PS: Apple already has technology to migrate GPU frame buffers across processes so that you can render video in one sandbox and display it in another. I used to work on it. Microsoft could be doing something similar.

They don’t even need a full-blown VM, windows 10 has pico processes. That’s how windows subsystem for Linux works: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/wsl/2016/05/23/pico-process...

It's not an upgrade for existing general-purpose (or any other) editions of Win 10, it's a new OS edition available only with new hardware; it's basically a successor to Win 10 S and Win 8 RT. And, while no doubt Microsoft thinks they've made the tweaks that will make it more attractive to some market this time (from other stories, they expect it to have enterprise and education market traction, which it's at least remotely plausible that virtualization for Windows API apps would provide a good enough solution for), it may suffer the same fate.

From a technical point of view I can understand their desire to ditch Win32 all too well. And in fact I have wondered years ago why they did not use virtualization to achieve backwards compatibility by letting legacy apps run in their own special VMs with all the right drivers, libraries, etc.

However, if that does not work very reliably and seamlessly large corporate and government customers are going to skip that one.

In fact, it could even be a better experience. For example you wouldn’t need to patch it up to the latest version, just run the image with the latest code. Finished? Delete the image. No registry bloat.

So I feel you but it’s hapenning and you should probably get used to it because you’ll need the security patches unless you have an air gapped gaming machine.

.. what? You have to get this image from somewhere, and given the size of modern games that's going to be an awfully large image.

> it’s hapenning and you should probably get used to it

Words that start customer rebellions everywhere.

I own over 600 games on Steam and many others on Origin/UPlay/GOG. I would rather use an unsupported, unpatched OS to access those games than simply lose access to them because MS wants to "modernize" something that doesn't need changing.

Windows Enterprise LTSB is something like that. Without UWP/Store and security updates for 10 years.

(That might not be you, but wanting an OS from 2018 to play games from 1998 or before natively sure makes it sound like it)

I went the other way: if I want to play my old games, I fire up a fullscreened VM, because I don't care what OS I'm hiding when I'm enjoying a nice bit of classic gaming, running in what it thinks is the OS it should be running in. Whatever atrocity the next windows is going to be, as long as VM makers release an update for their software, as far as gaming goes: I have no reason to care.

I expect something similar will happen with Win32 apps in that new Windows 10.

Hence why the only way Linux (the kernel) only got successful for consumers with either a browser OS or a Java OS on top of it.

These machines have 64 bit processors, but not much ram (2 GB used to be common, 4 GB is a bit more common now). They also have tiny hard drives. It's possible to find machines sold today with just 32 GB drives. 64 GB is more common.

Very many people just need something as powerful as a phone but with a bigger screen and a physical keyboard.

Without MS providing something for this market they all move to Chromebooks and the Google suite.

MS have, for very many years, offered cut-down product or alternative product to home users. MS Works (a fucking awful product, especially the spreadsheet) or Outlook Express are some examples. If MS offer some kind of Office functionality, even if cut-down, we'll see a bunch of people using it.

The goal has appeared to be since Windows 8 to have a modular Windows where you opt-in/buy-in to legacy backwards compatible systems as needs and hardware change. Polaris isn't so much a new idea as the next in a series of codenames for efforts that have been going on for some time.

This is aimed at making the Windows Store more relevant. MS is looking to be the gatekeeper with an appstore

Hence centennial project aka desktop bridge.

Still don't see GNU/Linux systems on sale at the shopping mall.

This is even worse. So dangling old code just hanging around to make the system unstable and insecure. Yay?

ducks, runs away

In all seriousness we complain in the developer community that Internet Explorer and Edge holds back using more modern Javascript yet we make these excuses for OSes.

Almost all programs I use now have a 64-bit executable. If I am using something that needs to run legacy software then I probably don't want the latest version of something to run legacy stuff.

Also the article indicates you can still run 32-bit apps. Most older 32 bit games should run perfectly fine under virtualization. Even then it will be a few years before the majority of Steam user are even using Windows 10 as last I check over 50% were on Windows 7. So by the time gamers shift to Windows 10 i'd imagine their hardware will be more than adequate to handle virtualizing the 32-bit app, I can't imagine there will be much overhead to virtualizing 32-bit apps.

Photoshop, Visual Studio, Chrome.. you name it. Pretty much ALL executables fall into this category. Unless it's a UWP app.

Almost all modern games will fall into this category.

EDIT: To further explain, You still use Win32 for 64-bit processes. It's just a stupid name.

Converting a Win32 exe using UWP Desktop Bridge is stupid easy though. Older exe with a lot of legacy dependencies may be more difficult or lack of source code. In which case they need a virtualization to run those legacy app.

So even though all games/apps fall into this category most companies could have a UWP build ready very quickly.

It just wraps the app, but underneath still calls those same win32 APIs. If you remove the APIs, "bridged" apps won't work. Hence why TFA mentions that not all win32 API can be removed and it isn't clear which will be.

So "bridging" your win32 app will not somehow make it immune to win32 api going away.

I still encounter a fair numver of new games that are built on DX9, not even DX11.

Brb gonna go play more overwatch.