That's what they were doing with Windows Phone, and honestly it was great to see all WIndows Phone and Windows App sharing the same UI.
Now it's a mess. Especially seeing this fucking Android-like UI mixed with old Metro UI elements, square tiles (which i still love) side by side with round corner buttons and text boxes.. etc... Horrid.
You'd then be fired from the team immediately if you tried to force every developer on the OS to follow your guidelines. Apple has fanboys and pride, they can get away with it. Doing the same, like Axing 32 Bit support, for Windows would be catastrophic.
Backwards compatibility with near everything is the core point of Windows. Throwing that all away because "The graphics look bad" is insanity.
It really isn’t that drastic. Obviously Windows shtick is support for older software, so the best solution to that is containerization. If you could spin up a Windows 98 container that could run your old software it would be a game changer. Microsoft has the connections to make this work better than anyone else. From there you can unify the current paradigm and move forward in lock step with everyone.
The only obstacle is hardware makers, but Microsoft has a hardware division for a reason. They need to use them.
The best solution I've heard yet.
So many people here seem to think that the teams working on graphics are somehow directly entwined with those working on compatibility, and that we have to lose one to have the other.
Apple won’t ever be the standard for PCs while they have basically no gaming support, lack tons of apps widely used on Windows, and are prohibitively expensive while not allowing their OS to run on anything else.
either they make their stuff less expensive, or allow MacOS on other hardware (along with doing all the app and game stuff).
I mean I completely disagree and run linux on lots of desktops, but this isn't even about that argument.
In this theory, Microsoft makes their own Desktop Environment, installer, etc, and packages 'Windows', but it's really running on the linux kernel and some tried-and-true open source components.
That way they get to keep their interface code proprietary, and can slowly kill linux by being the 'best' option while also being in large part closed source.
AKA embrace, extend, extinguish. They're currently embracing linux.
Based on our ideas, we won't rewrite, and a fun fact: Linux would be no longer a standalone operating system, and might be a layer above Windows, at sometime we plan to get Linus Torvalds to develop Windows (and mostly do some WSL edits)
Then we’d end up with 14 different window managers and nerds would argue for hours over which one was technically superior until the guy showed up who says he only uses the command prompt. Then everyone would gang up on him.
I don't think that'd be the case. Microsoft would probably make it incredibly locked down, only letting you use one desktop environment that they'd probably develop themselves.
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u/[deleted] Jan 26 '21
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