What the Heck is Windows 10X? (Premium)

During the confusing series of leaks leading up to today’s Microsoft event, we came to understand, and then question, and then truly understand what exactly Windows 10X is. It’s what we used to call Windows Lite or Lite OS. Meaning that Microsoft isn’t making a direct Chromebook competitor but is instead moving forward with a system that, temporarily at least, is aimed only at dual- and folding-screen PCs. (That will change over time.)

But I wanted to leave this article, which I wrote days ago, intact, to demonstrate how things came together in the days leading up to the launch. A historical record, of sorts.

—

What is Windows 10x? Is it Windows Core OS? Or is it Windows Lite/Lite OS? Or is it some successor to S mode? And what does it say about the future of Windows 10?

I think it says something very simple: That Microsoft’s ongoing efforts to modularize Windows 10 have reached an important milestone: It has now modularized the OS such that some big portion of the Win32 API—what most people think of as the underpinning for desktop applications—and the shell/user experience can now be separated from the system itself. And that Windows 10X is the first Windows 10 “personality,” for lack of a better term, that will run on top of this new architecture.

On that note, I don’t think it’s Windows Core OS. Nor do I believe we’re ever going to see a Windows version called Windows Core OS. Instead, I think that that thing is literally what its name implies, the core part of the Windows 10 OS, the thing that must sit underneath all actual Windows 10 product editions and versions.

On top of that, we’re going to see different personalities, which are combinations of shell/UX and capabilities.

Windows Lite/Lite OS is probably the thinnest/lightest of these personalities, at least as far as systems that real consumers/users will interact with. I still believe this thing targets Chromebook-like systems and is mostly web-based. But perhaps Windows 10X is Windows Lite/Lite OS and all the previous supposition was simply wrong.

Windows 10X is, I think, the next layer up. It doesn’t load most of Win32 until/unless the user runs a desktop application. And when that happens, the application runs in a container, ensuring a level of safety/security that is impossible today in mainstream Windows 10 versions. This happens at the expense of performance, of course. But it will also enable thinner/lighter devices.

But Windows 10X also explicitly targets a coming generation of dual-screen and folding screen-based PCs. That’s … weird. Why would it be limited to just those form factors?

I don’t know. But other personalities can and will sit on top of this too. Whatever the HoloLens OS is. Whatever the Surface Hub 2X OS is; remember, Microsoft said it was looking into seeing whether it could run Windows desktop applications on that system, and that this new modularity could enable that. Xbox One, maybe, though I believe its Hyper-V-based architecture is unique.

Windows 10 Home, Pro, and Enterprise? Of course. In fact, I believe that Windows 10X and the more general modularity efforts are the real reason that Windows 10 version 20H1 will have been tested for a full year before its release. Not because Windows 10X will ship with version 20H1—it will actually arrive with 20H2—but because the underlying work had to happen there first. You start with the plumbing (20H1) and then implement it in the next version (20H2). They’ve done this before, for example with delta updates in Windows Update.

But here’s the most important bit. Regardless of what it literally is, thematically, of course, Windows 10X is nothing less than Windows 10 S/S mode done right. (And no it doesn’t matter that Microsoft will continue offering Windows 10 Home, Pro, and Enterprise in S mode too.)

Remember what I’ve always said about S mode: The problem is that it’s too strict. Users sometimes need to load a printer driver or that one crucial desktop application, but the system won’t allow it. Over time, Microsoft has restricted the S mode limitations somewhat, most dramatically in Windows 10 version 1909, where administrators can allow certain desktop applications on top of S mode in Intune-managed environments only. But Windows 10X is what customers really want.

That is, you can run real desktop applications in Windows 10X. But they will be prevented from harming the system, thanks to their container-based architecture. Problem solved.

There’s one more aspect to Windows 10X that I think is important, and it’s tied to Microsoft’s semi-secret revelation at Build that UWP is “dead” and that the Microsoft Store will no longer be required for application distribution. Microsoft has likewise stated that Windows 10X users will not need to use the Store to find apps. So what does that mean?

Simple: It means what they said at Build.

Which is this: UWP is no longer Microsoft’s app strategy. Instead, the firm is allowing developers to use Windows 10 features that were previously restricted to UWP with other developer frameworks, including WinForms and WPF. These frameworks are all first-class citizens now. But UWP continues, because of course it does: For some of these Windows 10-based platforms, notably HoloLens, it’s currently the only way you can even write applications. It’s just not the way forward anymore, the only way. The future is heterogeneous and far more universal, ahem, than UWP ever was.

Likewise, the Microsoft Store is no longer a requirement for these apps, no matter which framework developers use. They can distribute them from the web, just like real desktop applications now.

That is what Microsoft said at Build. And yet I’ve been raked over the coals by some who have a hard time understanding that the strategy has changed. Microsoft is finally doing what most developers want. And Windows 10X, like other Windows 10 variants, will benefit from this change. So will its users.

There are still tons of questions, of course. And Microsoft could be a lot clearer about what Windows 10X means, both to the future of the platform in general and to how this impacts Windows 10 on PCs going forward. But that’s today’s Microsoft for you: They are not effective communicators. So I and others will keep digging. And will try to figure out what’s really happening as quickly as possible.

But that’s where I’m at right now, in the fog of war.