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> One big caveat to Polaris will be that it is unable to run Win32 programs natively. However, reports indicate that Microsoft will be bringing the Centennial Win32 app to Polaris employing virtualization.

So.. no gamers, powerusers, or most corporate deployments. Got it. Can't wait for them to kill this off in 2-5 years.

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Yep, as a gamer there is no chance I would willingly upgrade to this. I like being able to run 20 year old games natively if I feel like it. (e.g. Diablo 1, released in 1996, can still run without virtualization on Windows 10. Sometimes.)

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.

> I like being able to run 20 year old games natively if I feel like it. (e.g. Diablo 1, released in 1996, can still run without virtualization on Windows 10. Sometimes.)

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.

Can you explain what you understand will be going wrong when you imply that games needing virtualization will somehow "go nowhere"? Is there something about OS-managed virtualization (rather than application-managed virtualization) that you know that the rest of us don't? Why would a virtualized API even be noticable for modern games, which offload almost all the work to the GPU already anyway?

Only technical people have a clue what virtualization even means. Generally speaking, gamers haven't even heard of the word. Thus whatever virtualization soulution is used must be pretty much automatic. However if Windows already automatically handles this, then why mention that there's no Win32 support? Either people can keep launching their games on Steam or they can't. If they can't, then this new Windows won't win any fans among gamers. Even if there's automatic virtualization in place, as soon as you're losing fps, gamers won't be happy.

Security. I believe Centennial apps don't have the ability to actually modify the system - they just think they can via the container interface.

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).

Yeah, that sounds like it might preclude any modding (as is the case with current UWP games) which will be a hard pass from me and many other PC gamers (I don't even mod much, usually just fan patches).

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.

@jakebasile clearly a legitimate problem to be solved. The Xbox reference is merely to show that virtualized solutions can be very high performance. I've never had my Xbox drop frames or anything that would indicate it's not running with the full power of the machine.

Seamless virtualization is done on xbone, which is an Intel AMD64 chip emulating a PPC to play 360 games

Many games are still CPU bound. May applications are still CPU bound. Notice all the threads lately about how applications have so much more latency now than 20-30 years ago? Virtualization does have impact, and games still max out the hardware available to them.

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.

> if it's not a first-party Microsoft title, chances are it's Win32.

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

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

64-bit games still use the win32 api.

It's a bit confusing that win32 is 64-bit savvy since, at least, its DEC Alpha release.

Easy, Age of Empires remaster is UWP only, others owned by Microsoft Game Studios will certainly follow.

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

Hmmm. The only way I could get behind this is if there is a remaster of Close Combat 2: A Bridge Too Far. I think Slytherine owns the franchise now, but it was definitely a Microsoft game at the beginning.

It's funny how for many people who make this argument, they'll happily drop $500 for a top of the line gfx card to keep up with gaming, but <$200 for VMWare Workstation is somehow too much money to keep up "being able to play everything older than a few years" on the PC.

(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.

Yes, but would VMWare Workstation run under Windows 10 Polaris?

In a virtualization container perhaps?

The article mentions remote virtualisation, run your win32 apps in Azure I would guess.

Once it's out? Pretty sure VMWare's entire business is about making sure their products work on "current operating systems"? Why would you think that VMWare won't update in lock-step?

In this case gaming could be a lot better if they spawned a minimal VM for just the game and hibernated the rest of the OS.

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.

It's basically how the Xbox One already works.

WDDM is doing the same each application gets its own virtual memory address space.

> if they spawned a minimal VM for just the game

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...

>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.

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

Too bad they wont sell it.

I can’t imagine that running games which are very old would be much more painful in a virtualized environment given the computational requirements are minimal compared to today’s modern applications.

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.

> you wouldn’t need to patch it up to the latest version, just run the image with the latest code

.. 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.

But a move like in TFA wouldn't be just old games. It would be literally every game I own except Forza Horizon 3 and Gears of War 4 (the only UWP games I own). New games still max out hardware - that's what I buy the hardware for.

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.

> Yep, as a gamer there is no chance I would willingly upgrade to this.

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.

That's how it would start. But I don't believe for a moment that MS wouldn't jump at the opportunity to pull the plug on Win32 and decades of backwards compatibility if they could do so. In this case, Enterprise customers are the thing keeping Microsoft in-line for gamers and power users since they would have no tolerance for such a move.

> virtualization for Windows API apps

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.

My 64 bit Windows can’t run 32 bit programs natively. WOW64 does quite a lot of work under the hood to make them run, it translates WinAPI, redirects file system and registry, etc. Works quite well in practice.

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

I think the point here is to break with legacy. It's expensive to keep it, error prone and it creates a lot of security issues. By shifting part of the work to software vendors, Microsoft forces the market to move on to newer APIs.

That “legacy” i.e. backward compatibility is the major reason why people buy and use Windows. While indeed expensive to develop the platform, I think breaking it will be a disaster. See what happened with windows phones and tablets.

I still think the number one reason people buy Windows is that it's what comes with their computers. I don't see that changing.

Regular users only care about what is pre-installed with their hardware.

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.

This is aimed at the netbook market.

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.

It's also related to efforts in Xbox, HoloLens, Surface Hub, IoT, and even still relevant to Windows on phone handsets despite no indication that that is currently a main goal.

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.

That doesn't make any sense though. The netbook market is drying up.

The new OS will be aimed specifically at traditional form factor devices like notebooks, desktops, and 2-in-1 computers.

This is aimed at the netbook market.

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

And that's when Windows 10 has pretty low hardware requirements as long as you use an SSD. It IS already pretty light, as modern general purpose desktops go. They must be desperate to get Windows Store going. Didn't they learn anything from Windows RT?

Yeah, it was a mistake not to package legacy apps into the store as well.

Hence centennial project aka desktop bridge.

That would be a huge chance for WINE to become the de facto platform for legacy Windows compatibility. It already does wonders: https://appdb.winehq.org/

I have been reading how it is going to do wonders for GNU/Linux since Windows XP came to be.

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

> Another caveat is that there is no way for Microsoft to remove all the Win32 components from Windows Core OS.

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

Don't worry, it will be able to run those using Wine.

ducks, runs away

Sadly, the idea of running WINE on Windows for better compatibility isn't as funny as it used to be.

So for the sake of continuing to hold back technology we are held down by enterprises and DOSGaming.

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.

You've misunderstood. Win32 isn't 32-bit architecture. Win32 is the non UWP windows API.

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.

Well, the name made fine sense when it was introduced... Maybe it serves as a good warning to not include such things as dates and hardware versions in names at all.

Opps. Yah I messed up the naming, I meant exes, but just started typing 64 vs 32 which really is only a memory thing, if you simplify it.

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.

You do not understand how said "bridge" works...

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.

Thing is, in order to make this kind of cut over, you have to offer something in the new thing that the old thing doesn't have. In order for this to happen, Polaris will probably have to be much faster or MS will have to intentionally cripple regular Windows 10, if only by not supporting it with the same updates.

Exactly this. If one hand taketh away...the other better give something equally awesome.

Brb gonna go play more overwatch.

Polaris could also introduce new APIs (DX13, HoloLens 2.0, etc.) that will only work in the UWP layer and be inaccessible from Win32.

That would kill HoloLens and DX13.

Not if Microsoft buys Valve!

The more likely scenario is that nobody will end up using those APIs, especially if there are alternatives like Vulkan that work on older Windows versions.

I remember when everyone was supposed to go GNU/Linux because DX 10 was Vista only while OpenGL was everywhere, so yeah, right.

What are the stats on even DX12 penetration?

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

"...enterprises and DOSGaming." The only two legitimate uses for computers. Only slightly kidding.

Most DOS games were broken long ago just from clock speed changes. Many of them relied on things like spin loops for timing. Any person playing DOS games now is using DOSBox.

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