Microsoft looks ready to launch Windows 11 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft looks ready to launch Windows 11

theverge.com

10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows, updated but never replaced. Either this is a free update that just increases the number (stupid move but not catastrophic) or Microsoft will lose an enormous amount of trust.

It was also going to be the version where everyone migrates their crusty apps into modern UWP APIs.

Microsoft also discovered the Android update pain by tying OS APIs updates to specific OS versions.

Common users and IT departments don't update the OS like browsers, even when that is a couple of mouse clicks away.

Plans never go 100% as we think they would.

>Plans never go 100% as we think they would.

Let's start by not making hazardous plans for the sake of marketing, which is notoriously harmful in its short-sightedness.

What was the technical point behind the announcement of an eternal major version number? Clearly none, since upgrades to the underlying system are still happening, whether they are called Windows 11, Windows 10 "This-years-flavor Update", Windows 10 "2105" or "21H1" or whatever subversion name they come up with (with total inconsistency even here, in typical Microsoft fashion).

By having Windows 11 Microsoft can have a clear cut with UWP, have Project Reunion bring in the features that should have been done on top of COM and .NET for Windows 8, and try to forget WinRT ever happened.

With Windows 10 linage that kind of breaking change can't be done in a clean way.

I see. I find this to be a developer-focused view, though. Would users notice and care about any of those technologies? It's users, after all, that product names are targetet at, more than developers. And since Windows is known for its backwards compatibility, it's not like we're really talking about a breaking change, or is it?

Of course it also affects users, they are the target audience for the applications and need have a system that fulfills the requirements.

UWP evolution is like Android updates, APIs are tied to specific versions and backwards compatibility is a mess.

Win 8 had three programming models for tablet, phone and desktop.

Win 8.1 merged tablet and desktop and called it UAP.

Windows 10 merged all of them together than called it UWP and the whole One Core message.

Then some key C++ developers started an internal movement at WinDev against C++/CX, managed to deprecate it. But here is the thing, after 4 years it still doesn't offer anything like C++/CX tooling, forcing a Notepad like experience for IDL files. Screw paying customers.

Meanwhile .NET Native is stuck into C# 7.3 with .NET Core 3.1, with no roadmap.

WinUI 3 is only planned for desktop with no roadmap for HoloLens and XBox.

So both developers and users need to come to an agreement what their computers should be running.

For me, pressing the red button and coming into an alternative version of "Windows 8", aka Windows 11, is the only way to sort out the mess Sinosfky started.

Yes. Windows 10 version numbering is a mess. What features are in 1908 version, or in 21H04 ? It is more or less the old Service pack system with a more obscure naming. And if there is a windows version which deserves to die, this is Windows 10. Is ugly, unusable, unconfigurable (white background with white icon text, fonts too small or too large, etc ), slow and insecure by default.

I don't think it's messy. Year-Month based version scheme is most recognizable one. What's bad for Windows (or Microsoft) is that they think the version shouldn't duplicated to previous product (like Windows Embedded POSReady 2009 or Office 2010) so they changed to 20H2. Such duplication should be expected from the beginning.

> 10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows

Honestly, I wish this was the move. I regularly fantasize about how much better Windows would be if it were XP with 20 years of bug fixes, driver updates, and little else. If it had focused on the support subscription model the incentive would be to churn out updates regularly to keep people paying for them. Windows truly would be the most stable OS instead of the cluttered mess it is now.

Vista introduced pretty big innovations at its core. Windows 8 did too, with its tickless kernel, for example. Windows 10 also brought an abundant dose of "little else" improvements. Everything wrong with Windows has to do with the GUI and the userland API, the most visible parts. What we want is a Windows 10 kernel coupled to an older, more useable and sane user interface.

I honestly just want UI configurability. The start menu is so utterly useless that I wish I could disable it and replace it with something like Alfred from MacOS.

Have you seen https://cairoshell.com/ yet?

XP GUI with Win10 kernel will be great!

Have you used XP recently? Its aged terribly!

No, it is not. It looks and behaves far better than the mess that is windows 10. And from a user perspective, the level of improved security that windows 10 presents it's tiny compared to the features.

How so? I thought the default XP theme looked dated in 2005. Search is a complete joke in XP. Win 10 search is maybe a bit worse than 7 but light years better than XP. No hardware accelerated UI, no Window snapping, no support for 64 bit apps, more than 4GB RAM, taskbar quickly gets filled because of no app grouping, no windows peek. No hiDPI support. Only thing XP does better is no pop up ads telling me to use Edge. Everything else is worse.

Just a nitpick - There absolutely was a 64-bit version of XP, which I used at the time, supporting > 4GB of RAM and 64-bit apps, and could give multiple 32-bit apps 3GB each etc.

WinXP 64 bit version is actually WinServer 2003 64 bit...

But you can use over 4G limit on x32: http://vm1.duckdns.org/Public/Windows_XP_SP3_Remove_PAE_Limi... or other versions too: https://wj32.org/wp/

It's as true today as it was in 2001: XP looks like ass by default, it's only not an eyesore in classic mode.

Didn't everyone use classic mode? :) Windows 2000 always had a special place in my heart.

Maybe Windows is just following the footstep of macOS and Android. Even OSX doensn't last forever, macOS crank it up to the 11.

Did anyone really thought it was the "last" version of Windows? It was pretty obvious that Microsoft would reconsider that choice 5 years later or so.

And since Mac OS recently bumped to 11, Windows has to do it too, to keep up with the number, much like Firefox adopted Chrome's numbering.

They lost an enormous amount of trust when they released Windows 10 full of tracking features. From a privacy standpoint W10 is a nightmare. Good riddance.

Windows 11, or whatever the new name is, will have the same tracking and possibly more.

>...Microsoft will lose an enormous amount of trust.

The Patch Tuesday fiascos have already done that.

Yes, Windows 10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows according to Microsoft, when former senior technical evangelist at Microsoft, Jerry Nixen, stated in 2015 that, "Right now we're releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we're all still working on Windows 10."

> or Microsoft will lose an enormous amount of trust

What trust do they currently have?

Seriously, nobody cares about things like this. Way bigger things have been walked back on.

It’s entirely possible it’ll be a new public version name without an internal major version bump (IIRC Vista did this? I can’t remember which one)

Windows 7 shared Vista's internal version number: 6.1. Not really surprising, since its quick release was little more than an attempt at cleaning up Vista's bad reputation. In other times, it could have been released as a service pack.

It's true that Windows 7's changes were mostly internal. But it's not true that they were minor changes from Vista.

Vista had serious technical problems with memory consumption, which Windows 7 addressed. It also had perceived-but-not-real problems due to superfetch and PCs being sold with too little memory or too weak graphics - changing the name may have helped with that.

But the technical changes were real. Windows 7 rearchitected GDI - offloading it to the GPU (AKA WDDM 1.1 / DXGI) - so that using it didn't cause the bits of each window to be retained in system memory. So Windows 7 can open as many Notepad windows full screen as you like, whereas Vista with DWM enabled cannot.

And Windows 7 rearchitected how services load. Vista had introduced lots of features, implemented as services, but it loaded them all on startup and kept them in memory. Windows 7 introduced a mechanism to load them when the features were actually used, saving memory and startup time.

And then there's the list of visible features, which, as you can see, is pretty large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7

To a large extend Vista and Windows 7 was the same OS. Windows 7 just had a lot of performance improvement but all the major technical redesigns and improvements came with Vista. I was happy to have a powerful PC that was more than capable of running Vista so I never saw any of the issues that people complain about with Vista. When Windows 7 came out it was just like Vista had a service pack applied. Windows 7 was not a major step away from Vista. This new Windows 11 I suspect is the same. Just an incremental update from Windows 10 with some added Marketing play in form of a new version number.

It shared the major version number (like 2000 and XP did). Vista was 6.0.

Then Apple released macOS 11. Version number parity with your competitor is surprisingly important. Word for Windows jumped from version 2 to version 6 to be better positioned against WordPerfect 5.x.

All the people who worked on Windows 10 are no longer with Microsoft so the promise of Windows 10 being the last Windows is over.

I would have thought they'd have 10.1 like Apple does. Windows 10 was like MacOSX for Microsoft.

Unfortunely Win32 did not went like Carbon, because the WinRT/UAP/UWP execution was a mess, and it still remains to be seen if Project Reunion will rescue any of that or just die in a couple of years, given the amount of WinUI issues and lack of roadmap for .NET Native, HoloLens and XBox.

So better reboot Windows 11 as Windows 7 vNext, while pretending 8 - 10 never happened.

.NET Native is effectively dead (critical fixes only) and the .NET team is focusing on NativeAOT instead. They’ve done a very poor job of communicating it but that’s what I’ve gathered from various MS employees.

Yep, I am aware of the form factors design document.

It is just pity that Microsoft has decided to take the usual approach on sensitive subjects, usually when certain technologies are heavily pushed and then abandoned (XNA, Silverlight, Bizztalk,...) they just stop talking about it, but never make any big annoucement that they are leaving it behind.

i seriously thought xp was going to be the last?

Ten is unpleasant to interact with; constantly nagging you about edge or update or false security threats. Edge does nothing special, updates are arduous, false security threats don't necessarily comfort one regarding real dangerous threats.

We keep it paused (or off) in VirtualBox for one small piece of proprietary vendor software.

Really enjoying these guys: https://www.devuan.org/

Sure, Edge notifications are annoying, and it would be better if they wouldn't push Edge so hard.

Regarding the updates, I don't consider it more annoying than the macOS equivalent, and it's understandable that MS wants to push users to upgrade, to ensure they have the latest security updates.

I have not seen security threats alerts with Windows Defender enabled, and without downloading suspicious (i.e. unknown/unsigned) executables, which also seems reasonable. Actually, it's less painful to run unsigned executable on Windows, than on macOS.

> Sure, Edge notifications are annoying, and it would be better if they wouldn't push Edge so hard.

If would be better if they had a setting to turn them off. All of them. But this mess is comming from mobile where every developer thinks his program (app ) is the most important.

> Regarding the updates, I don't consider it more annoying than the macOS equivalent, and it's understandable that MS wants to push users to upgrade, to ensure they have the latest security updates.

The problem is that they do not separate features and security updates. And also they don't test them enough, and this, combined with forced updates, breaks things.

> I have not seen security threats alerts with Windows Defender enabled, and without downloading suspicious (i.e. unknown/unsigned) executables, which also seems reasonable. Actually, it's less painful to run unsigned executable on Windows, than on macOS.

Antivirus programs have long stopped being useful. And, as also google has shown, you can have signed malware executables. Also there are a lot of programs which, technically not malware, will behave like malware and defender and others do nothing about it.

Yes, they do. It's been 2 years that feature updates are optional, and you can continue to get just cumulative updates.

https://www.wintips.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/image_thu...

Windows update wouldn't be annoying if it worked in the background like on most Linux distros. Instead Microsoft just decides your computer will be unavailable for an hour or so.

It's particularly upsetting considering that much of the complexity in NT comes from having a micro kernel which is supposed to make that kind of thing easier.

> Actually, it's less painful to run unsigned executable on Windows, than on macOS.

Indeed. I just want MS to merge the control panel & $ettings in a fluent UI, for the love of god. do that and update a few UI formats away from the half-assed reimplementation of W7 & 8(which it is) and frankly Windows is in a great position at that rate.

> Perhaps the biggest lingering issue waiting to be fixed is the Windows store. Microsoft has been working on a new app store for Windows in recent months, and rumors suggest it will be a significant departure from what exists today. Nadella has promised to “unlock greater economic opportunity for developers and creators” with Windows, and the Windows store seems like the obvious way to do that.

My greatest concern is that Microsoft will attempt to lockdown their OS the same way Apple and Android have.

That would explain why they would release a new operating system when 10 was supposed to be the last.

That will be the death of windows. ChromeOS is not unpopular with users and at that point the user would have more capabilities on their computer.

Precisely. I'n quite excited to see if google will make chromeOS functional for development in the sense of a meaningful, non-scrapped together existence. Bringing real Linux programs out of beta is a start.

> My greatest concern is that Microsoft will attempt to lockdown their OS

I’m not sure that will happen, they attempt it with Windows S and it went nowhere

I can't stand the amount of empty whitespace in the Windows 10 UI. I find it so offensive.

I hope they are heading in a new aesthetic direction with Windows 11.

I hope the square corners would go away

I would prefer they remain, because at this point Windows is the only (major) OS retaining a professional look and not giving in to the toyish rounded corner appearance. (Yes, even KDE is going that way in an effort to be trendy.)

Too bad the article mentions "Rounded corners [...] are also planned."

I hope Microsoft embraces PowerShell 7 (Core) and makes it the default PowerShell version in Windows 11.

I’d love to see this too, not super confident it will happen anytime soon though. Steve Lee (PowerShell PM) has commented on this fairly recently: https://twitter.com/Steve_MSFT/status/1351535477749235719?s=...

“It’s .NET that needs to match Windows support lifecycle that’s the limiting factor”

My understanding is that anything that needs to ship in Windows must be supported for 10 years. And if they ship PS7, now they need to support the .NET version it uses for a very long time.

This!

Also, provide easy option for OS be 100% configured using PowerShell script or give export of current settings to script.

Are we seriously believing it's going to be Windows 11 because of a blurry shadow? I saw this on Reddit, I didn't expect HN to fall for it.

Theres more evidence than that. Either way we'll find out soon enough.

It’s really to generate some excitement for OEM PC sales. 10 being the last version with Windows update is a viable way to go, but you get none of the annual “get people excited” event apple has capitalized on so well.

It would be interesting to see microsoft to create a meta operating system that would run virtualized instances of windows 10, xp etc. to run applications securely and in the way to easily backup/version. I would easily pay $200 for such an operating system with enterprise grade support. There's nothing on the market like it right now.

I hope microsoft can figure out how to successfully monetize the operating system market again. I don't like them putting all their eggs in the cloud marketplace.

Wouldn’t that necessitate them supporting every one of those OS’s, including security updates as well? Compatibility mode is one thing, but a virtualized instance would be something else entirely, I would think.

They did it in a limited fashion already. Remember the "XP Mode" addon for Windows 7?

I think if they had three compatibility VM modes: DOS/Windows 3.1 (might need a more complex DOSBox-like emulator, to solve the '64-bit OS doesn't like 16-bit stuff' problems), Win98SE, and WinXP, that would cover the vast majority of compatibility needs. Maybe there could be (downloadable from their store) more special-purpose images, for the guy who needs "WinME mode" or "Win2000 mode".

But it still feels like we're missing out on the true potential of VMs. They could be huge for privacy and security-- you run anything suspicious in a VM, and maybe only allow specifically (and user-configurable) permitted data to be persisted on disc.

I want my browser living in a seperate VM, that I can nuke from orbit in a single click. If I get drive-by downloaded, or just end up with a huge cookie file, poof, it's gone.

> you run anything suspicious in a VM

I think Windows already has some sort of feature like that, although I never really tried it (and therefore can't say how smoothly to use the implementation is) because it requires HyperV, and at least on my computer HyperV breaks hibernation.

QubeOS does what you are describing but it's obviously not as polished as a commercial product would be from microsoft. I believe chromeOS runs browser instances within their own vms and has pretty good security.

They already have personalities and ntvdm. The shell even has buttons for it (under properties for .exe files.)

My guess is this will be somehow tied in to the release of Windows for ARM64 with full x86-64 emulation.

Not that I expect to see it, but I think the opposite would also be fascinating. A natural partner for WSL2 would be Windows shipping with a full Android runtime, with support for ARM Android (rather than Android x86) apps. Hell, they could even offer the Windows Store up as a delivery mechanism for Android apps.

Having read the article, I don't understand why this would be described as a major change. It sounds like a visual refresh and some bug fixes — a nice incremental update, sure.

The suggested change to the Store's policies also sounds like a reasonable upgrade, but of the “A whole new Windows Store!” variety, rather than the “A whole new Windows!” variety.

Is there something revolutionary in there that I've missed?

Don’t think so. Personally, more than policy changes I hope to see a store that works as a package manager. Iirc something like that was in the works a year or two ago and might be ready by now

With any luck this will be what was promised with OS/2 v3.0 and microkernels. The Win 10 advancements that let us run Linux kernel and GUIs can be generalized so that Windows itself is hosted rather the the host.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27402455

That new window picture. Is it just me, or is the perspective slightly off on the building line you can see through the window?

I hope they add smooth inertial scrolling one day.

Scrolling on MacOS just feels 10x better, it’s the main thing I miss when using windows.

Windows 11 will r.i.p like windows 10x maybe.

Anything but a new theme?

All the telemetry disabling scripts will probably stop working correctly.

If only :) There will be need for total new kind/genre of that scripts ;)

Maybe also less need for traditional disk storage. Even more in the cloud ! Starting with browsers bookmarks ! /s

Oh, and mandatory login to your desktop via M$ servers backed API...

Are there even any fundamental updates that Windows11 could make? Maybe changes that reflect (and require) an SSD being used as the system drive instead of a HDD?

What about the rumour that Microsoft were going to adopt Linux for the kernel with a Windows UI on top?

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