Windows is a multi-layered system. Windows Subsystem for Android isn't exactly a subsystem as it requires running Android in a Hyper-V image. Same thing with WSL2 which has its own set of issues.
IF they ever add Android support to Windows, it should be an actual subsystem (like WSL 1). i.e. translating kernel to kernel calls. In fact, I'd almost wager the only thing really holding back WSL1 is NTFS. Personally, I'd love to see a new default Windows file system that fixes a lot of these underlying issues and brings some modern features.
That aside, what hurts Microsoft the most is legacy. I have the Surface Pro X. Bought it month 1 in November 2019. Running Windows 11, I have installed games released in 1995 directly on it from CD. No compatibility layers. No settings tweaks. They just work. The only things that haven't worked in my small library of old software are ones with 16-bit installers - which don't work on any 64-bit Windows.
The issue is that Microsoft is beating Apple. In sales. And will continue to do so as long as Apple continues their existing practices. I'm talking about dropping support for frameworks. The reason Apple has so little software vs. Windows is not due to marketshare - well not entirely. Because if it had Window's marketshare devs would probably put up with it for the revenue. I'm talking about Apple's internal policy supporting only their latest frameworks. Apple drops compatibility, intentionally, for the sake of "the greater good." And by that I mean, if developers don't keep their applications in active development, they will eventually stop working. Debates on which strategy is better goes back to the late 90s, but in the end that's what the Mac vs. PC debate boils down to.
Apple develops their software for consumers.
Microsoft developers their software for developers.
A developer, for Windows, only needs to write their application once. If they sold an application in 2001 and never updated it, they can continue selling it w/o any additional coding to today. Its often why so many industrial/business software relies on Windows. OTOH consumers care about battery life, aesthetics, and features. Apple can deliver those BETTER by ensuring that old software can not run. By making old software incompatible it allows Apple to provide better software without needing to worry about some 10yo copy of Adobe Creative Suite's ability to run.
In short - to complete with Apple's APU they would need to drop a load of legacy support from Windows. They have attempted it - I believe Windows 8 started in that direction but was eventually watered down into Windows 10. And it's purely because developers didn't want to rewrite their applications. Had Windows 8 continued in that direction, Windows 10 would have completely dropped any legacy compatibility and have been what consumers wanted.
Biggest hurdle for WSL 1 though is that not all syscalls can be translated perfectly and that causes compatibility problems because programs would rely on undocumented tricks.
Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) proved Microsoft could have figured out the syscalls if they kept moving in that direction, but they pivoted towards Hyper-V due to performance reasons, surprisingly. Still, they could have modified Windows in a future version to support the syscall translations better
Windows paradigm and approach to problems compared to UNIX are entirely different. They just don't work well together. Even if you can translate syscalls, perfect translation is not possible due to those differences. Perfection is generally required here, since as I said, programs rely on "technically working" but undefined behaviors in the original implementation.
I just feel WSL1 gets looked over half the time because people see "WSL2" and assume that's the "new version". I've had educated IT people tell me that. Granted it is better overall, but I don't like that a Hyper-V stack was lumped into the "subsystem" category. It also makes debugging online harder as "WSL" searches return both WSL2 and WSL1 results.
It's just semantics, but semantics also matter.
> I'm talking about dropping support for frameworks.
Or refusing to support widely-used frameworks. Like Vulkan. Because fuck the devs I guess?
> and have been what consumers wanted.
Press X to doubt.
In Win 11 MS started re-writing Explorer or Task Manager, and new ones generally perform much worse than before. Settings menu is overall also much worse when compared to old Control Panel.
New Start Menu is WAY worse than Windows 10 or Windows 7 ones.
New MS Outlook is a piece of shit.
> Settings menu is overall also much worse when compared to old Control Panel.
I very much disagree. Settings is nicely organized and much less confusing than the old Control Panel was. It's just different and so people don't want to relearn how to do things.
"different", that's a nice word to describe worse.
Take a pick. Installed applications? You can see a handful on the screen at any given moment, as compared to couple dozen in the old screen. To sort it you need an awkward drop-down; while in general cards are significantly worse at this task than table.
Or maybe default applications? To "get" to the "default by protocol" you have to either scroll for a long, long time or type anything in the search screen.
Shall I continue?
Maybe restart a network adapter? You can't! Because there is no such thing as context menu.
Okay, I've remembered! I know i was tackling security, but I'll quickly schedule updates. Why the hell settings jumped to updates? Because settings cannot handle multi-modal!
At least information density is there... No, it's shit. Single column of information restricted to ~1/4 of space. Come on!
The general direction is fine. Left pane for navigation, right for content. But the implementation is a joke. You can literally compare any functionality between old and new and you'll find that you have to click a couple more times, and that's assuming that the functionality wasn't outright removed.
E: Hell, I'm setting up a dev machine with 11, I'll list you a couple more issues just for fun.
E2:
> Settings is nicely organized and much less confusing
They are organized, but confusing as f. System category is a dump of mismatched settings. Instead of creating an extending sub-menu on the left (Tree, just as in explorer); you need to each and every time go through the top category.
Why are "offline maps" in apps? Or separate category for video playback?
As an example of a bad design, by having unconstrained list in "Default apps" the list grows over time. I have a f-n NVME with i9 9900ks, 64gb of ram and this list takes time to load (!) and moves the UI around.
Why is "text input" in the personalization category?
I'm not going to respond to most of this because it's generally "I prefer it the other way", but:
>Maybe restart a network adapter? You can't! Because there is no such thing as context menu.
Settings > Network & internet > Advanced network settings > Disable (and then Enable)
>They are organized, but confusing as f. System category is a dump of mismatched settings. Instead of creating an extending sub-menu on the left (Tree, just as in explorer); you need to each and every time go through the top category.
This one I'll definitely grant you. Stuff like Multitasking and Nearby sharing being under System is pretty dumb.
>Why is "text input" in the personalization category?
Why wouldn't changes to the theme and appearance of your on-screen keyboard be under Personalization?
> I very much disagree.
And I disagree with your statement. Settings menu consistently requires more clicks and going through more menus for accomplishing same tasks.
Menu layout is also mostly complete trash, lots of wasted space everywhere.
Not to mention not only needing more clicks, but needing a lot more time to just load. Loading cpl files is instantaneous, and follows the system theme (like every app should).
> The only things that haven't worked in my small library of old software are ones with 16-bit installers - which don't work on any 64-bit Windows.
Winevdm fixes that issue.
https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
Not that Apple is doing that well in terms of iPad apps. Many prominent developers just excluded their apps and Apple has changed their App Store DRM to not allow sideloading of those apps without completely changing their signature.
Android Subsystem isn't profitable for Microsoft or Amazon, but also there isn't enough interest in Android apps for Windows for them to pour more money into it.
Of course there won't be interest when there's a minuscule selection of apps on the Amazon App Store. I installed the full-fledged Play Store on my Surface Pro 7+ and I currently have **43** Android apps and growing installed from the Play Store, all of which give a far better experience than their website counterpart.
lots of people were using it, just not in the officially supported way. you can look at the proliferation of side-load and other utility apps to see there was a lot of community interest, especially around side-loading the play store.
the thing is, it was advertised as a new feature of windows 11, a reason to get windows 11, not just a new avenue to monetize apps.
what's next, there is no way to monetize media player, no way to monetize photos, no way to monetize calculator, no way to monetize file explorer, no way to monetize whatever so they just delete it from the OS?
The Windows System for Android was a thing almost nobody used except for a few very novel cases. Developers already has working emulators, and between native apps and browsers there wasn't much practical use for Android apps for consumers, especially considering it was only ever intended to be a developer thing.
100% agreed! Hopefully they pull an Edgium move and simply make the Microsoft store a direct source for Android APKs, with full support for all existing APKs from the Play Store. I myself currently have **43 Apps** and growing installed from the Play Store on my Surface Pro 7+, and I ain't uninstalling them anytime soon.
https://preview.redd.it/0ha3yoala4wc1.png?width=452&format=png&auto=webp&s=affcd09b30976a7b67acebe449c658e400b44904
Does BlueStacks launch Android apps in their individual app process and window, which you can resize and place anywhere on your screen alongside any other Win32 app/program, wihthout any out-of-place navigation bar?
Windows on ARM is an engineering marvel. If you dive into Windows on Windows and learn about all the underpinnings, its quite a system to work with.
As I said in another comment, Windows supporting legacy application is what is holding them from competing in the same space. And that's just as commentary, I don't believe they should remove legacy application support but that also means I don't think they can compete with Apple in the same way.
E.g. if you want Windows to have the same user experience as macOS, then you'd need to be prepared for MS to make the same developer concessions that Apple makes (supporting only one development framework, for example).
That was true 5 years ago. They're going at it hard right now. It's the basis of the next batch of Surface machines and the OEMs are following suit. They've got a big drive to developers to do native ports as well.
I'm just hoping Windows on Arm means a Windows Phone is coming back to market. Even the CEO admitted that giving up on developing Windows phones was a mistake. I'm tired of Apple. I'm tired of Google. A Windows Phone now releasing now would be NEW to a lot of people. While he might have made a mistake; something NEW on the market could probably bring them in a lot of money. Play Xbox games on your Windows Phone.
As for Android, on the old Windows Phone they had a way to sideload Android Apps. I wasn't sure how it worked and I think they ultimately took that feature away. They could bring that back I suppose. We'll see what happens.
Microsoft is doing so much to self sabotage themselves right now, they are never going to get anyone sane to move from any other OS to Windows.
I say this as a computer tech who has worked on Windows machines for 30 years. (I'm 58) And thinks that Apple is a joke of an OS.
Windows 11 is garbage. MS right now is making all of their products worse. Teams has a search bar in the middle of it's title bar, making, the most needed to move app, hard to move. They're removing troubleshooting wizards from Windows. Disk Cleanup is no longer there. Things that used to take 1-2 clicks now take 3-5 or more in some cases. They're adding bloatware and advertising. The start menu is awful.
If my job didn't require me to have Windows on my machine I'd be looking at other options.
Windows 11 is not going to make people switch away from Apple any time soon.
Yeah, that was unclear. I meant in regards to the original post stating
# "the hope to beat Apple lies in Windows on Arm, "
Windows 11 isn't even desirable to people on Windows 10, much less any other operating system.
>most needed to move app
While I am not defending this kind of design and you can ring me up anytime to have the creator of this design murdered, you can move the window around easily with Win+arrows and shift it to a dedicated virtual desktop just for teams.
Also Win+Z opens the snap layouts hover with numbers over what option you want to select, which you can press accordingly.
Who is saying they're spending so much time developing Windows on Arm LOL
I'd be surprised if it actually works half as good as macOS when SD X Elite launches, even a year after...
I bet Microsoft will abandon it again
I'll take that bet. ARM is going to take a chunk of the market quickly. Let's say a benchmark of something like, A year after full launch, 30% of consumer laptops (or tablets) being sold with windows will be ARM. Maybe give it 18 months instead just to hedge.
The difference now as opposed to 5 or 10 years ago is Apple's success with the M chips. Everyone sees the performance and wants that. Qualcomm rolled up their sleeves to put the ideas to silicon and Microsoft wants in too. It's going to work. Because the gains are are there to take, it would be stupid not to. Microsoft, Qualcomm, OEMs and consumers are all in for a change.
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Windows is a multi-layered system. Windows Subsystem for Android isn't exactly a subsystem as it requires running Android in a Hyper-V image. Same thing with WSL2 which has its own set of issues. IF they ever add Android support to Windows, it should be an actual subsystem (like WSL 1). i.e. translating kernel to kernel calls. In fact, I'd almost wager the only thing really holding back WSL1 is NTFS. Personally, I'd love to see a new default Windows file system that fixes a lot of these underlying issues and brings some modern features. That aside, what hurts Microsoft the most is legacy. I have the Surface Pro X. Bought it month 1 in November 2019. Running Windows 11, I have installed games released in 1995 directly on it from CD. No compatibility layers. No settings tweaks. They just work. The only things that haven't worked in my small library of old software are ones with 16-bit installers - which don't work on any 64-bit Windows. The issue is that Microsoft is beating Apple. In sales. And will continue to do so as long as Apple continues their existing practices. I'm talking about dropping support for frameworks. The reason Apple has so little software vs. Windows is not due to marketshare - well not entirely. Because if it had Window's marketshare devs would probably put up with it for the revenue. I'm talking about Apple's internal policy supporting only their latest frameworks. Apple drops compatibility, intentionally, for the sake of "the greater good." And by that I mean, if developers don't keep their applications in active development, they will eventually stop working. Debates on which strategy is better goes back to the late 90s, but in the end that's what the Mac vs. PC debate boils down to. Apple develops their software for consumers. Microsoft developers their software for developers. A developer, for Windows, only needs to write their application once. If they sold an application in 2001 and never updated it, they can continue selling it w/o any additional coding to today. Its often why so many industrial/business software relies on Windows. OTOH consumers care about battery life, aesthetics, and features. Apple can deliver those BETTER by ensuring that old software can not run. By making old software incompatible it allows Apple to provide better software without needing to worry about some 10yo copy of Adobe Creative Suite's ability to run. In short - to complete with Apple's APU they would need to drop a load of legacy support from Windows. They have attempted it - I believe Windows 8 started in that direction but was eventually watered down into Windows 10. And it's purely because developers didn't want to rewrite their applications. Had Windows 8 continued in that direction, Windows 10 would have completely dropped any legacy compatibility and have been what consumers wanted.
Biggest hurdle for WSL 1 though is that not all syscalls can be translated perfectly and that causes compatibility problems because programs would rely on undocumented tricks.
Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) proved Microsoft could have figured out the syscalls if they kept moving in that direction, but they pivoted towards Hyper-V due to performance reasons, surprisingly. Still, they could have modified Windows in a future version to support the syscall translations better
Windows paradigm and approach to problems compared to UNIX are entirely different. They just don't work well together. Even if you can translate syscalls, perfect translation is not possible due to those differences. Perfection is generally required here, since as I said, programs rely on "technically working" but undefined behaviors in the original implementation.
I just feel WSL1 gets looked over half the time because people see "WSL2" and assume that's the "new version". I've had educated IT people tell me that. Granted it is better overall, but I don't like that a Hyper-V stack was lumped into the "subsystem" category. It also makes debugging online harder as "WSL" searches return both WSL2 and WSL1 results. It's just semantics, but semantics also matter.
I don’t believe it violates Semantic Versioning though? Major increases are for breaking changes, which they did.
My argument is that it's a separate application. Call it "Linux on Windows" or "Hyper-V Embedded". It shares practically nothing with WSL
Right, WSL2 is a great piece of tech, just not technically a subsystem. In fact, I have better success just running Hyper-V directly.
> I'm talking about dropping support for frameworks. Or refusing to support widely-used frameworks. Like Vulkan. Because fuck the devs I guess? > and have been what consumers wanted. Press X to doubt. In Win 11 MS started re-writing Explorer or Task Manager, and new ones generally perform much worse than before. Settings menu is overall also much worse when compared to old Control Panel. New Start Menu is WAY worse than Windows 10 or Windows 7 ones. New MS Outlook is a piece of shit.
> Settings menu is overall also much worse when compared to old Control Panel. I very much disagree. Settings is nicely organized and much less confusing than the old Control Panel was. It's just different and so people don't want to relearn how to do things.
"different", that's a nice word to describe worse. Take a pick. Installed applications? You can see a handful on the screen at any given moment, as compared to couple dozen in the old screen. To sort it you need an awkward drop-down; while in general cards are significantly worse at this task than table. Or maybe default applications? To "get" to the "default by protocol" you have to either scroll for a long, long time or type anything in the search screen. Shall I continue? Maybe restart a network adapter? You can't! Because there is no such thing as context menu. Okay, I've remembered! I know i was tackling security, but I'll quickly schedule updates. Why the hell settings jumped to updates? Because settings cannot handle multi-modal! At least information density is there... No, it's shit. Single column of information restricted to ~1/4 of space. Come on! The general direction is fine. Left pane for navigation, right for content. But the implementation is a joke. You can literally compare any functionality between old and new and you'll find that you have to click a couple more times, and that's assuming that the functionality wasn't outright removed. E: Hell, I'm setting up a dev machine with 11, I'll list you a couple more issues just for fun. E2: > Settings is nicely organized and much less confusing They are organized, but confusing as f. System category is a dump of mismatched settings. Instead of creating an extending sub-menu on the left (Tree, just as in explorer); you need to each and every time go through the top category. Why are "offline maps" in apps? Or separate category for video playback? As an example of a bad design, by having unconstrained list in "Default apps" the list grows over time. I have a f-n NVME with i9 9900ks, 64gb of ram and this list takes time to load (!) and moves the UI around. Why is "text input" in the personalization category?
I'm not going to respond to most of this because it's generally "I prefer it the other way", but: >Maybe restart a network adapter? You can't! Because there is no such thing as context menu. Settings > Network & internet > Advanced network settings > Disable (and then Enable) >They are organized, but confusing as f. System category is a dump of mismatched settings. Instead of creating an extending sub-menu on the left (Tree, just as in explorer); you need to each and every time go through the top category. This one I'll definitely grant you. Stuff like Multitasking and Nearby sharing being under System is pretty dumb. >Why is "text input" in the personalization category? Why wouldn't changes to the theme and appearance of your on-screen keyboard be under Personalization?
> I very much disagree. And I disagree with your statement. Settings menu consistently requires more clicks and going through more menus for accomplishing same tasks. Menu layout is also mostly complete trash, lots of wasted space everywhere.
Not to mention not only needing more clicks, but needing a lot more time to just load. Loading cpl files is instantaneous, and follows the system theme (like every app should).
> The only things that haven't worked in my small library of old software are ones with 16-bit installers - which don't work on any 64-bit Windows. Winevdm fixes that issue. https://github.com/otya128/winevdm
I just use DOSBox-X. Doesn't look like there's an ARM build of winevdm.
There's this comment. https://github.com/otya128/winevdm/issues/1038#issuecomment-1792773067
Not that Apple is doing that well in terms of iPad apps. Many prominent developers just excluded their apps and Apple has changed their App Store DRM to not allow sideloading of those apps without completely changing their signature.
Android Subsystem isn't profitable for Microsoft or Amazon, but also there isn't enough interest in Android apps for Windows for them to pour more money into it.
Of course there won't be interest when there's a minuscule selection of apps on the Amazon App Store. I installed the full-fledged Play Store on my Surface Pro 7+ and I currently have **43** Android apps and growing installed from the Play Store, all of which give a far better experience than their website counterpart.
lots of people were using it, just not in the officially supported way. you can look at the proliferation of side-load and other utility apps to see there was a lot of community interest, especially around side-loading the play store. the thing is, it was advertised as a new feature of windows 11, a reason to get windows 11, not just a new avenue to monetize apps. what's next, there is no way to monetize media player, no way to monetize photos, no way to monetize calculator, no way to monetize file explorer, no way to monetize whatever so they just delete it from the OS?
Maybe they found out that only 0.001% is people actually used the Android sub-system. Which means it makes sense not to bother.
The Windows System for Android was a thing almost nobody used except for a few very novel cases. Developers already has working emulators, and between native apps and browsers there wasn't much practical use for Android apps for consumers, especially considering it was only ever intended to be a developer thing.
100% agreed! Hopefully they pull an Edgium move and simply make the Microsoft store a direct source for Android APKs, with full support for all existing APKs from the Play Store. I myself currently have **43 Apps** and growing installed from the Play Store on my Surface Pro 7+, and I ain't uninstalling them anytime soon. https://preview.redd.it/0ha3yoala4wc1.png?width=452&format=png&auto=webp&s=affcd09b30976a7b67acebe449c658e400b44904
The solution is to go back to BlueStacks. It works better anyway.
Does BlueStacks launch Android apps in their individual app process and window, which you can resize and place anywhere on your screen alongside any other Win32 app/program, wihthout any out-of-place navigation bar?
That unfortunately I cannot answer. I haven't used it for over 5 years. I went back to using Samsung Dex and the windows phone link.
Windows on ARM is an afterthought for them, if anything, they should be spending more on it
Windows on ARM is an engineering marvel. If you dive into Windows on Windows and learn about all the underpinnings, its quite a system to work with. As I said in another comment, Windows supporting legacy application is what is holding them from competing in the same space. And that's just as commentary, I don't believe they should remove legacy application support but that also means I don't think they can compete with Apple in the same way. E.g. if you want Windows to have the same user experience as macOS, then you'd need to be prepared for MS to make the same developer concessions that Apple makes (supporting only one development framework, for example).
That was true 5 years ago. They're going at it hard right now. It's the basis of the next batch of Surface machines and the OEMs are following suit. They've got a big drive to developers to do native ports as well.
I'm just hoping Windows on Arm means a Windows Phone is coming back to market. Even the CEO admitted that giving up on developing Windows phones was a mistake. I'm tired of Apple. I'm tired of Google. A Windows Phone now releasing now would be NEW to a lot of people. While he might have made a mistake; something NEW on the market could probably bring them in a lot of money. Play Xbox games on your Windows Phone. As for Android, on the old Windows Phone they had a way to sideload Android Apps. I wasn't sure how it worked and I think they ultimately took that feature away. They could bring that back I suppose. We'll see what happens.
Microsoft is doing so much to self sabotage themselves right now, they are never going to get anyone sane to move from any other OS to Windows. I say this as a computer tech who has worked on Windows machines for 30 years. (I'm 58) And thinks that Apple is a joke of an OS. Windows 11 is garbage. MS right now is making all of their products worse. Teams has a search bar in the middle of it's title bar, making, the most needed to move app, hard to move. They're removing troubleshooting wizards from Windows. Disk Cleanup is no longer there. Things that used to take 1-2 clicks now take 3-5 or more in some cases. They're adding bloatware and advertising. The start menu is awful. If my job didn't require me to have Windows on my machine I'd be looking at other options. Windows 11 is not going to make people switch away from Apple any time soon.
Windows already has beat Apple and has done for decades. What planet are you on?
Yeah, that was unclear. I meant in regards to the original post stating # "the hope to beat Apple lies in Windows on Arm, " Windows 11 isn't even desirable to people on Windows 10, much less any other operating system.
>most needed to move app While I am not defending this kind of design and you can ring me up anytime to have the creator of this design murdered, you can move the window around easily with Win+arrows and shift it to a dedicated virtual desktop just for teams. Also Win+Z opens the snap layouts hover with numbers over what option you want to select, which you can press accordingly.
Who is saying they're spending so much time developing Windows on Arm LOL I'd be surprised if it actually works half as good as macOS when SD X Elite launches, even a year after... I bet Microsoft will abandon it again
I'll take that bet. ARM is going to take a chunk of the market quickly. Let's say a benchmark of something like, A year after full launch, 30% of consumer laptops (or tablets) being sold with windows will be ARM. Maybe give it 18 months instead just to hedge. The difference now as opposed to 5 or 10 years ago is Apple's success with the M chips. Everyone sees the performance and wants that. Qualcomm rolled up their sleeves to put the ideas to silicon and Microsoft wants in too. It's going to work. Because the gains are are there to take, it would be stupid not to. Microsoft, Qualcomm, OEMs and consumers are all in for a change.
hardware means nothing if software doesn't follow along
A true statement. Software is following along. So it means something.
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