Windows 10X is the Next NT (Premium)

For years, Microsoft has been trying, unsuccessfully, to find a way to modernize Windows and the apps that run on it. Previous attempts—like Windows RT, Windows 10 S/S Mode, and Windows 10 on ARM have failed, and for the same basic reason: Customers rejected something that looked identical to “real” Windows but couldn’t run all of the classic desktop applications that they rely on and require. And that’s where Windows 10X succeeds: It provides a more modern platform while retaining compatibility with the past.

Sound familiar? It should, because that’s exactly what Microsoft accomplished with Windows NT in the mid-1990s. It created a more modern platform that, in its case, looked and worked exactly like Windows, while also offering compatibility the apps—and drivers and peripherals—that its customers expected to use. Yes, Windows NT was a bit rough at first. But once it fully met its customers’ needs, NT became Windows, starting with Windows XP, in 2001.

Windows 10X differs from early NT versions in some key ways, of course. Most notably, it’s not a completely new platform but is instead based off the same foundation as are today’s Windows 10 versions. But thanks to some important architectural innovations that rely on ongoing modularization efforts, Windows 10X is nonetheless more modern and sophisticated. And if successful, it will absolutely replace the thing that we think of as Windows today. Just as NT did almost 20 years ago.

We’ve known for some time that Windows 10X would run legacy Win32 desktop applications in software containers, isolating them from the rest of the system (and vice versa). This technology would provide the compatibility that customers expect while allowing the base platform to be more secure, more reliable, and more power-efficient, and answer the core complaint about previous attempts at modernizing Windows.

What we didn’t know, however, was that this container technology isn’t just for Win32 apps. Instead, the entire Windows 10X OS is “containerized,” for lack of a better term. Its use of containers is systemic, and this change is a key reason that this platform is more modern than the current Windows 10 variants. It is literally the reason that I feel that Windows 10X is the next NT.

(Previously, I would have said that Windows 10X had the chance to evolve into the mainstream Windows version where traditional Windows 10 versions would move forward as workstation-class systems aimed at power users, gamers, and the like. But now I feel that 10X has the chance to simply become Windows. Like NT before it.)

Windows 10X will support three types of containers: Win32 containers, which we knew about previously, MSIX containers, and Native containers.

The Win32 container is new to 10X and is used for all types of Win32 apps, including both 32-bit and 64-bit apps. These include “pure” Win32 apps, Windows Forms apps, Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) apps, Electron apps, and so on. But there is one interesting wrinkle: There is a single Win32 container on each Windows 10X, instead of one container for each Win32 app. That’s interesting, and a bit unexpected. Until you find out what the next container type does…

MSIX containers are not new to 10X as they exist today in standard Windows 10 versions. These containers—there is one for each compatible app—are designed to run trusted Win32 applications that use Microsoft’s newest app packaging format. The wrinkle here? Each MSIX container in Windows 10X actually run inside the single Win32 container.

The Native container is for UWP mobile apps, and each gets its own container. This is the most efficient of the containers, predictably, so it offers the best performance, battery life, security, and privacy controls, and it works much the same as does Windows 10 today.

Of course, any discussion about containers needs to touch on the obvious: There is some overhead to such a system and that will impact performance, in particular when running Win32 apps. Microsoft admits that the container technology it is using is “somewhat like a virtual machine,” in that it acts as a guest OS that is running “under” the host Windows 10X OS. But this Win32 container has better integration with the host and higher performance than is possible with a VM.

The Native containers offer better performance still, of course, and provide what I’d simply called sandboxing functionality if it wasn’t for the fact that they are, in fact, more isolated than is the case today in normal Windows 10: Microsoft provides a Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) client for each container that enables interactions (like copy and paste) between the apps and the underlying platform (and each other).

Regardless, UWP apps will run in Windows 10X much as they do in Windows 10 today, and will auto-suspend and resume as before. But the move to containers means that Microsoft can finally manage even legacy Win32 apps in more sophisticated ways. All Win32 apps, including those in their own MSIX containers, will receive reduced system resources when not being used, and they will be suspended automatically when there are no open windows. This could cause some issues, but users who wish for the best Win32 performance and compatibility can optionally choose to keep the Win32 containers always-on at the expense of battery life.

Given all this, I’m still not sure why Microsoft is focusing so much on the dual-screen form factors that will be the first to use Windows 10X; this container architecture is far more profound and important. But we already know that 10X is coming to more form factors over time. And I suspect that limiting the platform to what is essentially a niche form factor will help them iron out any issues before it goes mainstream. Early users will essentially be beta testers.

But Windows 10X is absolutely going mainstream. And to ensure this happens, it will feature a new shell, where its predecessors—RT, S Mode, and W10 on ARM—did not; each simply used the same shell as did traditional Windows. This shell is simplified, while still offering many of the same experiences that users expect, like Start, windowed applications, drag-and-drop, and so on.

So what’s missing? Microsoft says that Windows 10X will do away with system tray applets and File Explorer add-ins and namespace extensions. And it will not support global hooks for windows, the mouse, or the keyboard. In a nice touch, legacy applications that try to use any of this functionality will simply fail silently: An old app will think that it added an icon to the tray, but that icon and the tray itself don’t even exist.

That change might partially explain why Microsoft is not guaranteeing 100 percent compatibility with existing applications. Instead, it says that “most existing Win32 and UWP [Universal Windows Platform] apps will work on Windows 10X.” Another issue is that 10X won’t allow applications to launch startup tasks at sign-in. And some background tasks could be automatically suspended, a problem Win32 apps don’t even consider in Windows today.

Compatibility will improve over time, Microsoft says, thanks to regular updates, which infamously will happen much more quickly—and hopefully much more reliably—than is the case with Windows 10 today.

It’s a brave new world. And one that is much more exciting than would be the case if Windows 10X was just about dual-display devices.