Microsoft's Plan To Split OS From Shell Takes Shape (zdnet.com) 128
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The latest Windows preview from the 20H1 branch, build 18917, has some hidden components that signal a future where the Windows Shell UI parts, such as Action Center, will be separate from the rest of Windows and can be updated with shell packages. A developer who uses the Twitter handle Albacore gave a breakdown of a new component in Build 18917 called 'Shell Update Agent,' which he notes is "capable of obtaining and updating the shell on demand."
That capability may mean nothing to most Windows 10 users. However, for Windows watchers it could be an interesting development of Microsoft's unannounced plans for Windows Core OS, in which Windows is modularized and calls on a range of shells that target different form factors, from HoloLens to Surface and dual-screen devices like the recently revealed Centaurus laptop, whose shell is called Santorini. Albacore goes on to explain that the Shell Update Agent references 'Package Family Names,' which suggests that the "shell will indeed be a separate, packaged component." Those shell packages can be acquired from both external and internal sources, which could mean shell components like the Start Menu, Action Center and Taskbar could be selectively built, based on these acquired packages. Finally, one more shell-related change noted relates to a new method for syncing settings. "The new one should support syncing more advanced and previously 'legacy' options such as File Explorer configuration," Albacore notes.
That capability may mean nothing to most Windows 10 users. However, for Windows watchers it could be an interesting development of Microsoft's unannounced plans for Windows Core OS, in which Windows is modularized and calls on a range of shells that target different form factors, from HoloLens to Surface and dual-screen devices like the recently revealed Centaurus laptop, whose shell is called Santorini. Albacore goes on to explain that the Shell Update Agent references 'Package Family Names,' which suggests that the "shell will indeed be a separate, packaged component." Those shell packages can be acquired from both external and internal sources, which could mean shell components like the Start Menu, Action Center and Taskbar could be selectively built, based on these acquired packages. Finally, one more shell-related change noted relates to a new method for syncing settings. "The new one should support syncing more advanced and previously 'legacy' options such as File Explorer configuration," Albacore notes.
Re:Linux! (Score:5, Funny)
Learn how the pros do this.
Linux is going to pay.
Microsoft is going to get patents on this whole "replaceable shell" thing, and Linux has been infringing on these patents for decades. Linux is going to be facing massive liability for this theft of Microsoft's IP.
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Prior art? Aren't patents a first to file thing now?
First-to-file did not narrow novelty. (Score:2)
There are two cases in patent law when the Patent Office must determine who was first. The more common case is that of a patent vs. things published before the patent application, which is called novelty [wikipedia.org]. The other is between patent applications that are pending at the same time, which is called interference [wikipedia.org]. The American Invents Act changed interference to favor the first to file, but at the same time, it expanded the forms of prior art that can disprove novelty.
Intellectual Property is Theft (Score:1)
Intellectual Property wasn't even a term when I was young. We had copyrights, patents, trademarks, and trade secrets. In a sane legal system, software can not be patented. Unfortunately, money buys power in the U.S. (including the Supreme Court) and companies can own colors, numbers, and rounded corners.
The bottom line is that when companies patent "sudo" or "one click to purchase", they are stealing from the commons. Thanks to U.S. laws and treaties, prior art doesn't prevent patents in a first-to-file
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Thanks to U.S. laws and treaties, prior art doesn't prevent patents in a first-to-file system.
Citation needed that first-to-file precludes rejection of a patent application on grounds of lack of novelty.
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Learn how the pros do this.
Actually, ain't that what Microsoft has been doing of late? Adding bash, for instance? Except that they've been copying just the shell parts, by the look of it: one can't yet replace the Windows UI w/, say, KDE or other DEs
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Except that they've been copying just the shell parts, by the look of it: one can't yet replace the Windows UI w/, say, KDE or other DEs
You used to be able to replace part of the UI. Litestep was one that I used, and probably one of the most common shells, but there were others.
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Yeah, I was going to say "Windows becomes modular?", so it's now where Unix was 45 years ago...
Windows shell on Linux OS (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft has been doing two things:
Making Linux and their stuff work well together.
Separating the shell users are accustomed to from their kernel/OS.
Those are the steps required to make Windows 14 look like Windows, while using a Linux kernel and system services.
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and you will end up with some freakshow linux user version in similar vain to android.
android is a linux kernel, with all the good userland stuff thrown out, if MS makes windows run on a linux kernel, it will be the same. being; windows will still suck, but now runs on linux.
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What good userland stuff? You mean GNU?
I use Alpine Linux specifically because it doesn't contain any of that GNU crap.
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talking about modularity of the whole OS and a decent package manager to go with it, among other things.
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M$ should have done this years ago.
Pull an Apple and run Windows shell over Xenix or like they may be doing a Linux as they kind of have a distro in Azure Sphere.
Re:Windows shell on Linux OS (Score:5, Insightful)
More likely it's as TFA says, because they want to have another go at mobile devices.
Mobile is an existential threat to Microsoft. Eventually, later than some people thought but also inevitably, there won't be any real difference between mobile and desktop. Same device, same OS, same apps, just a different UI layer. Phones are already good enough to do most desktop tasks like browsing, word processing, photo editing etc.
Microsoft will never give up on it, and to be fair their Surface devices have been quite decent (as long as you ignore them being made out of glue). They will just do the usual Microsoft thing of fumbling and bumbling along, slowly polishing that turd that started with Windows 8 into something you might actually want to use.
True, and complimentary (Score:2)
That's true - no matter how many times Microsoft keeps failing on mobile, they have to keep trying.
And FOR FREE they can get the world's most successful mobile operating system, and most successful operating system period, and do whatever they want with it.
They've consistently failed to build their own mobile OS that is successful. They've tried that again and again and it hasn't worked. Knowing that essentially every successful mobile device runs *nix, mostly a Linux, and knowing that Google has *given* t
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They've consistently failed to build their own mobile OS that is successful. They've tried that again and again and it hasn't worked.
Right because you cant disrupt an established market with simply more of the same, there was nothing wrong with Windows Phone or webOS or whatever but they were late to market and didn't have any disruptive innovation.
Knowing that essentially every successful mobile device runs *nix, mostly a Linux
But not every mobile device running *nix is successful.
Put their own Windows-ish UI on top of the Linux Android underpinnings that successful mobile devices use.
That doesn't provide any value, that's the problem.
Twelve years ahead (Score:2)
> Right because you cant disrupt an established market with simply more of the same, there was nothing wrong with Windows Phone or webOS or whatever but they were late to market
The first mobile devices with Windows-* were in 1996.
The first Android phone was 2008.
Microsoft had TWELVE YEARS head start. They simply sucked, partly because of one fact about the entire Microsoft software philosophy. Microsft loves being big, feature filled software, built on several layers not of complex frameworks and librar
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there won't be any real difference between mobile and desktop. Same device, same OS, same apps, just a different UI layer. Phones are already good enough to do most desktop tasks like browsing, word processing, photo editing etc.
Web browsing and photo editing maybe. Word processing I doubt unless the user is willing to carry a Bluetooth keyboard around with them all the time.
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Those are the steps required to make Windows 14 look like Windows, while using a Linux kernel and system services.
Indeed. They are also the steps required to make Windows a modular OS that runs on multiple devices using a common underlying system without the disaster that was the Windows 8 UI rearing it's ugly head.
I wonder which is more likely: MS following the same strategy they have been for the past 3 years to expand Windows onto an ever increasing number of form factors, ... or some twisted idea that they should move the OS to Linux despite the Windows kernel itself being one of the neatest and well maintained par
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I suppose using an unified and tolerable interface did not hurt, but Windows won mostly because they caught a ride with IBM, then with everyone who copied IBM's machine. They still would have won with a more modular design.
So, basically Linux (Score:2)
There are windowing UI built to host the Linux OS, just as OS/2 and other flavors hosted GUI interfaces for the underlying operating systems.
MSFT just wants you to pay them for them monetizing what is already free and open source, in the hopes that you won't realize your $20,000 car is really a $500 car with a $2,000 chassis built around it, that you could have bought for $2500 in India (where they will sell it at that price, because it's only worth $2500).
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They can't win can they? People around here have been moaning for years "why can't Windows be more like Linux". They finally head down that path and they still get bashed. Linux had it's chance to spark "The Year of the Linux PC" many times over. Little surprise that someone comes along and takes what is good about the OS while Linux guys keep making systemd jokes.
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So Linux is becoming more like Windows (Score:2)
with Systemd, and Windows is becoming more modular like Linux used to be.
Go figure.
They are creating a window manager (Score:1)
It is probably the ultimate admission of failure: They seem to be preparing to get rid of the OS kernel and run "Windows" as a window manager on top of Linux or one of the xBSDs. Not that I mind, their broken half-assed kernel should have died decades ago.
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But then, how would it retain compatibility with preexisting Windows programs? If it doesn't, might as well jump ship.
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If they did that, Wine on Linux would also get full compatibility, and again there'd be no reason for anyone to cling to Windows.
Wine does not run device drivers (Score:2)
Wine runs applications. It does not run device drivers. Even if X11/Linux runs virtually all Windows applications, there'd still be a lot of PC chipsets and peripherals out there compatible with only Windows because the manufacturer refuses to release specs to developers of Free drivers. Compatibility with these devices could keep some users on Windows.
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Some, but I think it's nowhere near the problem it used to be. These days almost everything just works.
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Emphasis on the almost. There are still some stragglers, such as the ASUS Transformer Book T100TA [debian.org] and other Bay Trail devices. CPU power management, suspend, Bluetooth, backlight brightness control, and the camera are all broken, and networking needs proprietary firmware that's a Catch-22 to install unless you slipstream it.
And is there a good way to sync music from a Linux box to my roommate's iPhone SE yet? I ask because I want to switch her Windows 7 laptop to Xubuntu around April when Windows 7 support
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M$ was stagnating a relying on lock in. Trump playing dickbrain, pushed the government of China and Huawei to go all in on a new OS and that means, China declared war on M$ the day the US declared war on Huawei. So M$ is now forced to make real moves, especially after being real dickwads with Windows anal probe 10. Yeah, people are looking for a new operating system and people are getting sick of Googles mass censorship (not that it is that bad but wow are the complaints loud and spreading using Googles own
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That would be so damn funny.
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Indeed.
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Its an admission that things change.
So they used to have a monolithic shell that suited the single purtpose of their single environment (windows desktop), now they need shells for different purposes - such as surface, hololens VR, games xboxy UIs etc.
So its easy to say they should have done this years ago, but they never needed to do it years ago. they need to do it now, so they're doing it.
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Actually, there was talk about doing something like this back when XP came out -- in fact I spoke with a Microsoft engineer at a trade show who said there was work behind the scenes to make the whole thing more modular, separate the OS from the shell, etc. to make it easier to maintain. Obviously it didn't go, but the idea is not suddenly new (except maybe to the younger generation).
Personally I'd like to be able to use the Windows shell of my choice atop the modern OS -- then maybe I could give up my XP bo
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I think it's a great idea.
It's an idea that's been kicked around by the OSS crew forever, even when Balmer was in charge.
Years ago when I still subscribed to Wired Magazine there was a two-page spread that was simply a desktop of a Microsoft exec left open. On it were various emails that were from a theoretical future at the time, Linus was an employee of Microsoft and Bill Gates sent an email saying he would no longer media arguments between Torvalds and Balmer. There were items about porting the Windows
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Oh, I agree that it is an excellent idea. The *nix kernel API has stood the test of time, while the Windows kernel API is an unmaintainable mess and getting worse. A GUI was always optional for *nix and that means you can add basically whatever you want as an user-space process. X11 is just one option. The window manager for X11 is something that is not part of the system, but can be changed easily and, best of all, most applications do not care. Hence emulating a Windows GUI is not really a problem. And wi
Those who ignore history ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Those who ignore history are doomed to re-invent UNIX.
This goes entirely against the design philosophies of Microsoft for the last 25 years or so ... where everything was so embedded into the operating system that it became a colossal security hole, like IE.
Microsoft has been failing utterly in the mobile market because from the onset Microsoft just wanted x386 hardware so they didn't have to do anything. Unfortunately, in the process they've infested their desktop and server OS's with bullshit UI's suitab
UI issues (Score:3)
Their modern UI's are garbage if you're on a multi-monitor desktop machine.
I've seen a bunch of fairly alarming examples of this from someone I follow on Twitter. It seemed kind of amazing to me they were letting UI polish lapse so much, like the body panels on cars back in the day not having equal spacing...
Maybe with this new approach they will correct a lot of errors? It's interesting that Apple seems to be angling this way with Swift UI (a very flexible UI targeting a lot of platforms) but they seem t
Let's just hope (Score:3)
That this goes as well and 98, and not ME.
Basically they are just reverting to the way things were done pre NT...
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*as well as (somebody needs to fire this lazy proofreader)
Good. (Score:3)
Now they just need to submit some patches for Linux to use Windows drivers and Windows will finally have a decent kernel. ;)
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> some patches for Linux to use Windows drivers
Why would you want to make Linux unstable? :-)
Rather funny (Score:2)
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And where are they now? Oh that's right they were rubbish and it wasn't until Google abstracted all that away and provided Android that it actually became palatable.
I'm pretty sure running Android on a 233MHz single-core StrongARM with 16MB of ram would feel rubbish, because that's what the 2001 iPaq had. IMAO, it was CPU & RAM advancements that made Android possible (forget palatable).
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That the company most people consider the top technology company is just now figuring this out.
Just means that most people have no clue. As usual, MS is a few decades late to the game.
Program Manager Coming Back? (Score:2)
I wonder if this means they will bring Program Manager back the way they brought File Manager [github.com]
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That case was from 2001 and even at the time we all knew Microsoft's arguments were bogus; there were even programs at the time that allowed you to decouple IE (I think 98lite let you do this). However, it's 18 years later; even if their arguments were true, it's entirely possible that the architecture of the system would change in that span of time to make decoupling it possible and that wouldn't have invalidated their original claims (if they weren't bogus to begin with).
Can you remember when... (Score:2)
Together, apart, together, apart.
It's been thirty years of me watching as windows touts itself as separate, then integrated, then separate, then integrated.
Glad to see there's no end in sight.
Getting older means having less to worry about, as you notice that so many vectors are really just loops.
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Pounderd? Sharperd? "Hashtagg"erd?
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Octothorperd.
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That Windows died when 7 stopped being useful. Initially, when it was out, 10 looked promising, after the fiasco that was version 8, but once they decided to go the Google route and make the desktop OS a clone of the phone OS (which itself went nowhere), that was it!
Whenever Windows stops working on my Acer laptop, I plan to replace it too w/ TrueOS. If that laptop dies altogether, I might look at a second hand Mac
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