> There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.)

Azure cloud instances are also an option.

> but I'm not sure if there's remaining appetite for Windows target-specific development

I think that there is. If there isn't, Windows has bigger problems...

I couldn’t find ARM with windows, can you help?

Additionally they don’t have a system like Rosetta 2 to help with translation, a LOT of windows apps are x32/64 based, and there has to be an incentive for devs to make the switch, Apple faced this issue when moving from PPC, they used I believe Carbon to help, and over time took carbon off and forced devs to update to apples current architecture at the time.

Electron unfortunately does seem like the potential way forward for apps, not just because of Windows and their handling of ARM, but it’s also potentially cheaper to develop against as its multi platform, 1Password is a prime example of this, and outside of the hardcore audience like us, they won’t notice the increased resource use of electron.

Microsoft has proven however electron can be good, see Visual Studio Code, plus with the advent of chrome os gaining traction, it’s likely we may head into a web first world, outside a niche subset of users.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/arm/arm64ec

Why make the devs switch? It would be much more in the spirit of Microsoft (opposed to the common spirit of Apple and GNU/Linux) to encourage to develop parallelly for ARM, too.

The switch from 16 to 32 bit Windows was "support running 16 bit applications still for a long time". Similarly for 32 to 64 bit Windows (32 bit applications are still perfectly supported). This is in contrast to how how it is typically done on GNU/Linux (distributions typically make it hard to support 32 and 64 bit at the same time) or what Apple typically does (only support the old architecture only for a short time and nudge developers heavily to do the switch).

They do. I'm not sure it covers x86-64 yet, but it does x86.

4 GB of RAM and eMMC would never be comfortable for Windows development. I have a very small laptop like that and I'd never think of using it to do .NET development on it. OTOH, for Python-backed web apps and API-based services, it's quite sufficient.

But then they made a big mistake: putting Windows Home on it instead of Pro... so that it didn't have RDP...

What about Surface Pro X? Not desktop enough?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/surface/surface-pro-arm-ap...

Anyone who is still interested can buy one on eBay straight from Microsoft's eBay Outlet (which surprisingly exists):

https://www.ebay.com/itm/255784903190

You seem to be talking without regard to the actual facts. Plenty of programming languages offer first class Windows support, including:

Go, Rust, Zig, D, Nim, Python, PHP, Ruby, and others.

I mean.....video games are still huge?

Feel free to ask questions!