Ask Paul: May 15 ⭐️

Happy Friday! We’re flying back to the United States as I write this, so let’s get this weekend started early. I don’t know about you, but I have days of sleep to catch up on.

🧑‍💻 Going native

madthinus asks:

With Microsoft “all in” again on native apps, is this work simply to enable modern API’s for the Windows Interface / Build in apps that does not rely on bloated HTML5 frameworks or JavaScript engines? I can see this benefitting Windows and Xbox interfaces. I can also see that reliability of the Start menu going up.

I assume it’s obvious I obsess over this topic.

This is a difficult one for me. I’ve been “researching” (what we call “reading” and “watching YouTube videos” now) related topics all year and tied to all kinds of things: A coming nostalgia focus month and the next programming project most obviously, but also whether something cross-platform makes sense. I looked at Flutter again recently and then Kotlin/Jetpack Compose this past week anticipating future Android laptops. And, while this will irk those who dislike web technologies, React Native.

First, two points to the “native app” thing that I didn’t raise Native Apps? It’s a Trap! ⭐️: This is not official policy for Windows 11 per se, though obviously the “pain points” changes and subsequent communications did indicate that some of the performance work will include removing things like the web-based code used for Recommendations and probably elsewhere in Start. And this isn’t even official policy for Microsoft broadly; Rudy Huyn, who I do not trust, tweeted this foolishly, in my opinion, to energize the fanboys. He came up in the world as a Windows Phone developer–Microsoft used to pay him to copy apps from other mobile platforms–and this is his mindset. He’s not a web guy.

But there’s more.

Office adopted web technologies broadly for good reasons, and while I know everyone hates the new Outlook, to me this is more about an extensibility model that works across platforms because they have apps on Windows, Mac, the web, Android, and iPhone/iPad. So the “all native apps” thing must appear cute to the Office folks. That ship sailed. But there’s also Copilot, which is a cross-company effort, and that has the same needs/concerns.

This past week, we started hearing about the work Microsoft is doing to speed up launch experiences across apps and system components in Windows 11 by implementing a low-latency profile. That will likely help with the launch performance of many of the web apps in Windows, none of which I think to start slowly, or whatever other web-based experiences there are in there too.

This is classic Microsoft communication. As a company, Microsoft does not have a new app development framework and my guess is it never will. Having used the Windows App SDK/WinUI 3.0, I can speak to how horrible it is, and how difficult it is to move existing codebases forward. So this one guy tweets about all native apps, and God help anyone who looks into what that might mean for them. It’s such a non-starter. Or a slow starter, maybe. Who makes native apps for a single platform other than Apple developers?

I’m not sure if I’d call HTML and JavaScript bloated per se, but I certainly have my issues with both. Regardless, web apps have their place, just as there are places where they do not make any sense. For Windows, web app technology is probably the most common (I hesitate to write “best”) way to bring an existing/new app to Windows and all other platforms. At this point, that’s all Microsoft has any right to expect. Other than system utilities, web browsers, and legacy apps (Office, Photoshop, etc.) it’s difficult to make a case for a new native Windows app.

Anyway, whatever work Microsoft is doing now, whether it’s speeding up interfaces in Windows 11 or creating new native apps that may or may not be bundled with Windows later, will likely be scenario dependent when it comes to the technologies used. For literal apps, it will most likely be Windows App SDK/WinUI 3.0. Rather than obsess over what they’re using, I’m just happy about any performance boosts (and, related to that, resource usage reductions, though I wonder if both are simultaneously possible). It’s an interesting year for Windows and it’s exciting that anyone is paying attention. I never saw this coming.

For Xbox, the need for highly performant and resource friendly code is even more important given that device’s focus. My opinions on this are a bit out of date, though I will play around (ahem) with my Xbox Series S when I get back, but as impressive as the Hyper-V-based Xbox platform is on many levels, it’s fair to say that Dashboard (UI) performance has always been problematic. I’m not sure how much, if any, of that is the fault of web tech, but this does feel like a platform that needs nothing but native code to me. And not just for the games. As with Windows, this is an interesting year for Xbox, and while I feel like the current console generation would have been benefitted more from a hardware refresh, anything they can do on the code side is quite welcome.

📦 Preppers are made, not born

ken_loewen asks:

After the electrical trials you experienced recently, how are you setting the CDMX place up to be away for a while? Do you unplug appliances when you’re away?

We don’t unplug the major appliances, as two of them, the refrigerator and the washing machine, are on voltage protectors and we always figured they would handle whatever issues. Why the water heater wasn’t/isn’t on a voltage protector is unclear, especially given all the issues we’ve experienced. But it will be: As I noted in that post, we did buy two voltage protectors when we thought the original units were destroyed, and we are keeping them. The NAS is on one of them, and I would have put the other on the water heater already, but I need some kind of platform for it to keep it off the floor. So I will do that in July.

Generally speaking, we’ve not worried too much about electricity, but that just might be us letting our guard down because things worked fine for so long. Until this past month, the electricity service in Mexico has been more reliable than that in the U.S. (though we don’t suffer from the voltage fluctuations that are apparently common in Mexico). Likewise, the Internet service in Mexico has been more reliable and faster, too.

Part of this is tied to connectivity: We have a camera on the balcony specifically so we can view it remotely and now we have a NAS that syncs over the Internet with the other NAS in Pennsylvania and is used for file access and the like. When there’s an outage, which is rare, I get a notification from Eero, or even from Blink because it will tell me when the camera isn’t reachable. This is vaguely useful. We have friends in the building with keys to the apartment, so we can get help if there’s a problem.

Oddly, my only real worry before this trip was water. IKEA announced new smart home devices last November, but they’re not all available in Mexico yet, and I had hoped to at least get a water leak sensor going on this trip. I can always buy that in the U.S. and bring it there, as I think it is available there now. We need two, actually, one for PA and one for Mexico. Having those in place will be good.

How we leave the apartment depends. When we left in November, we knew that a neighbor/friend was having a lot of family visit over the Christmas/New Year holidays, so we offered him the use of our apartment, and that required us to pack stuff up (clothes, electronics) and put them in the storage unit we have on the roof. That was a bit tedious, we had to bring it all down and set it back up when we came back, but this guy has helped us a lot and it was the right thing to do.

For this trip, we’ll be back in two months, so it’s mostly left the way we use it. Our clothes are in drawers and closets, etc. I did pack away computers and electronics, but they’re in bins in closets, not upstairs, and that was more about decluttering than anything else. My wife’s desk in the home office with her screens, dock, and all that is still there as normal. This is the most “prepared” I’ve felt in a while, but that electrical thing is definitely a black cloud over my perceptions of that. Hopefully it won’t be repeated.

📺 Let’s get physical, er, virtual

NickTech asks:

Have you explored if having a hypervisor PC dedicated to virtual machines would be a benefit to your workflow? Since you take a lot of screenshots for articles and reinstall Windows often for testing, does using test systems over VMs for that make it easier for your writing purposes?

I’ve used virtual machines extensively over the years, from the Connectix Virtual PC (later Microsoft) stuff from the late 1990s to VMWare Workstation and Fusion Pro, Microsoft Virtual Server, Hyper-V Server and client, VirtualBox, and others. Virtual machines are most ideal because of the checkpointing capabilities that let you roll back the virtualized system to a previous time. And in the early days, they were especially useful (to me) for the reason you mention, screenshots.

The downside, even early on, is that I also want to experience the thing I’m writing about. But as Windows progressed technically, virtual machines became less ideal for showing off new graphical effects like Aero Glass at the time. I’m sure that was fixed eventually, but these days I have a lot of (too many) physical machines I can use for this. Or, I can sign in on a single PC with two accounts, mine and one I use for books that’s not customized.

The one area I do use virtual machines regularly these days is for capturing screenshots for Windows Setup. This isn’t ideal, as Hyper-V, in this case, renders the Out of Box Experience (OOBE) in a low-resolution/low-color and square aspect ratio display. I need to look at VirtualBox and whatever else to see whether they are better at this. (I still know a guy who works on Hyper-V at Microsoft and he told me years ago that the limitations in this system, including the lack of basic sound drivers, are tied to its most common use cases, which are more about remote access to server/cloud systems and not what I’m doing. I guess I get that, but it’s weird to me how long it’s been like this.)

Anyway, yes, virtual machines definitely have their place for my needs. But nothing beats a physical PC install.

✅ It was time for a (re)boot

Bitrot asks:

I have been reading here and there about secure boot certificates expiring in June 2026. I have not looked too deeply into the matter since my laptops all show an updated configuration except for my desktop where Windows Defender tells me secure boot is on but its using an older boot trust config. Can this become a serious issue and if so is there a way to update manually or will Windows handle things automatically with updates? Thanks.

I guess I appreciate that Microsoft wants to handle this automatically via Windows Update, and we’re already seeing this happen across multiple PC models. My expectation is that I’ll see more of this myself when I get back to PA and start bringing up older PCs and getting them back up-to-date. But like you, I think, I’m curious about those PCs that just never get this update. What happens then?

Microsoft hasn’t even hinted at somehow making a secure boot certificate available as a manual download/install, and this does feel like the sort of thing that PC and motherboard makers could roll out via firmware updates. And it’s possible that you will need to update the firmware (BIOS) and/or various encryption keys tied to the PC/motherboard maker. So those could come from Windows Update, a third-party support app (HP Support Assistant, Lenovo Vantage, etc.), or manual downloads/installs. This will either be seamless or a mess.

Microsoft’s official guidance on the secure boot certificate update is that those PCs that never get it will continue to work normally “for some time,” whatever that means. Over time, this can lead to an inability to get security updates and compatibility issues with newer OSes, firmware, and hardware, Microsoft says.

Here’s my guess: Because this is uncharted territory, Microsoft wants to handle this automatically for all the obvious reasons, and it has the telemetry data it needs to see how the rollout is going. If there is a point later this year when some percentage of PCs out in the world did not get this update, then it will likely adapt its rollout strategy. (You can find its current guidance online if you enjoy gruesome details.)

Tied to this, jaybac asks:

You can lump this in with Bitrot’s question, and that is are any mechanisms in place or forthcoming to update the boot certificates for Windows 10 machines on ESU? I haven’t noticed anything other than the communication as related to Windows 11.

I hadn’t considered this, but it’s an excellent question, especially since Windows 10 could be supported for another 2+ years depending on an enterprise’s willingness to pay for that. The additional year of support that consumers get puts the EOL for that system at October 2026, which could make one instantly suspicious that Microsoft might use this secure boot certificate issue to justify forcing upgrades on users.

But if you look at the guidance noted above, it does list Windows 10 21H2, 22H2, and 1809 as getting the secure boot certificates. Windows Server 2019, 2022, and 2025 are getting the updates too. So it does appear that Windows 10 is supported here, and it should look/work as it does in Windows 11. The “phase two rollout,” which is where we get the notifications and Secure Boot status in Windows Security just rolled out to Windows 10 on May 13 via a cumulative update, it says.

🐉 How’s it going

OldITPro2000 asks:

Do you have any sales statistics on Windows x86 vs Arm? There’s more choice now for Arm devices but most of the new machines I encounter are still x86. Maybe Snapdragon X2 and/or Nvidia N1 will turn the tide.

No, there are no official or even unofficial sources for that data right now. All we got was a single post-launch estimate two years ago that’s now quite out of date. This is where familiarity at scale across the ecosystem and Intel’s PC maker payoffs really work to handicap a superior newcomer. With rare exceptions, like gaming, Snapdragon X/Arm is demonstrably better for everyone who uses PCs. And even that is changing, with X2 being a nice leap forward and Nvidia’s expected entry coming soon. But no, no numbers.

If I had a dollar for every time I backed a superior technology that either went nowhere or just disappeared, I would have many, many dollars, starting with the Amiga. But the good news here is that Windows on Arm will never disappear, like it did briefly before. Now, it’s just Windows and everything just works, and works better. We have fewer choices than on the x86 side, which sucks. But we do at least have excellent choices, and more are on the way. This isn’t a dead end.

✈️ And away we go…

Christian Gaeng says:

Save flight 🙂

Thanks! I wrote this entirely on the plane, so something is finally going right. 🙂

We had to get up at 4:30 am this morning, but our flight left on time and we will get back nice and early, around 2 pm. Which, given Newark and everything else, means we will be home by dinner time. Our son is arriving tomorrow to bring back our car and show us his new car, and one of our favorite restaurants in the area that’s been mostly closed since the pandemic is now open more than it has been in years. So we’re all going there Saturday for dinner and then again for brunch the next morning before he drives back home. I’m looking forward to being back to some degree, though we will be busy. I will certainly appreciate the quiet.