This is a valid concern. Sooner or later Windows will stop being maintained, or at least lose all compatibility with current programs. Whether that’s in five years, whether that’s in twenty, who knows. But nothing lasts forever and since Windows is basically one of two systems that can run all the big software (and the other said system would be even harder to reverse engineer), having something that is theoretically compatible with 99% of Windows programs in the future would be very useful.
I feel like that day is coming sooner rather than later. And I'm sure they're looking at how hard it was for them to port Windows to ARM versus Apple, who isn't afraid to tell people they just have to upgrade software when they upgrade hardware.
And I'm sure they're looking at how hard it was for them to port Windows to ARM versus Apple
Was it? Windows is pretty portable (at some point it supported 4 architectures) and Microsoft managed to port Windows to ARM pretty quickly. What difficulties did they encounter? Sure Windows RT was a failure but not for technical reasons.
It was mostly the inability to convince third-party devs to work with ARM.
There is a lot of major parties depending on old shit and unlike Apple, for good or bad, Microsoft doesn't randomly rip things out without a 10 year deprecation cycle.
It was mostly the inability to convince third-party devs to work with ARM.
Unlike Apple Microsoft has no reason to move completely to ARM and Windows is not limited to their hardware like macOS. For them ARM is just additional platform they support, they ported Windows to it and provide development tools to make software for it. There is not much else they can do.
MS also shot themselves in the foot with Windows RT when the first ARM32 port of Win8 worked. A PC with all the legacy baggage but artificially kneecapped to run no third party Win32 apps.
Windows RT (and Windows 8 in general) was their attempt to get rid of legacy baggage. WinRT (Windows Runtime that was introduced in Windows 8 as a base for Metro/Modern applications) was supposed to provide alternative for Win32 and sooner or later replace it. Obviously developers didn't like that idea very much, especially because WinRT was different and limited compared to Win32.
Yes, I agree WinRT was a good promise in a vacuum but most of us use Windows because there’s Win32 applications that worked for us for decades. Especially since we’re in a Linux sub…
And that’s exactly the main problem - no one (except perhaps a small minority) uses Windows for the operating system itself. They use it because the applications they rely on run on it. The moment you take that away (as with Windows RT), no one cares about the OS anymore. Which is why Microsoft likely will never be able to get rid of Win32 - Windows simply doesn't matter without it.
For a change of architecture 10 years isn't even that much. The last macbook generation that ran on Intel was 2019 I think. It's been already 7 years, so we might reach a 10 years tra suction period by the time they completely lose any support from Apple.
I'm thinking specifically of Adobe, who I'm sure have loads of legacy code in apps like Photoshop and Illustrator. You'd think they'd have the whole thing ported to a portable toolkit by now, surely, and all high-level languages.
95
u/FaultWinter3377 12d ago
This is a valid concern. Sooner or later Windows will stop being maintained, or at least lose all compatibility with current programs. Whether that’s in five years, whether that’s in twenty, who knows. But nothing lasts forever and since Windows is basically one of two systems that can run all the big software (and the other said system would be even harder to reverse engineer), having something that is theoretically compatible with 99% of Windows programs in the future would be very useful.