Windows 11 is failed Windows 10X

I’ve been thinking a lot about what windows 11 is, and I really think it was windows 10X in which all the really exciting features like sand boxing of programs torn out of it, and they just release what they had. For security windows 10X was only going to run on new hardware, while 11 can run on some computers up to 3 years old. Windows 11 clearly has 10X’s UI changes. I guess this is better than Longhorn’s failure and Vista. But it seems to me really sad. Microsoft couldn’t pull off windows 10X, so instead put out Windows 11 – which does look a little different and will be a little safer. But isn’t the Future OS that could have been.

Conversation 11 comments

  • dmitryko

    13 July, 2021 - 10:49 am

    <p>Why do you think ‘sandboxing’ is exciting? I don’t want to answer a dozen UAC prompts just to run my regular applications, and I don’t want them to run at half speed because of the additional OS overhead – not to mention the touch-driven UI. </p><p><br></p><p>If I really wanted this, I’d just use a tablet – I briefly had Windows 7 and Android 4.x tablets, and just stopped short of getting an iPad.</p>

    • sheafferlb

      13 July, 2021 - 11:07 am

      <p>Sandboxing is exciting from a security standpoint, for sure. It would also allow of lot of modernization that Microsoft can’t do right now because of Win32 compatibility. </p>

      • dmitryko

        13 July, 2021 - 12:22 pm

        <p>I really don’t understand why you’d need ‘sandboxing’ on top of existing user-space isolation and object security. If Microsoft cannot eliminate stupid coding errors that lead to backdoors in their OS kernel, they should improve programming and code analysis tools, or switch to a new inherently safe programming language, not translate existing machine-code applications into a software-interpreted virtual machine as in Java. I don’t want to sacrifice half of the processing power to ‘sandbox’ a perfectly legitimate app, i<span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">t’s not really my problem as an end user.</span></p><p><br></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">As for ‘modernization’, I’m fine with Win32 applications as they are, thank you. I’m yet to see a full-blown productivity UWP ‘app’ that can do something on the scale of Adobe Creative Suite or Microsoft Office; they don’t exist, because .NET/WinForms and Win32 developers still don’t care about the UWP framework which has never become feature complete and still relies on Win32 components like User32/Kernel32 to function.</span></p><p><br></p><p><span style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">If Microsoft wants to experiment with another WinRT/S Mode/10X successor that only supports ‘modern’ apps, rename it to ‘Window 1/X/1X’ whatever, so ‘old’ people would just stick with regular Windows to have their work done.</span></p>

        • wright_is

          Premium Member
          14 July, 2021 - 4:29 am

          <p>You can’t have one without the other. </p><p><br></p><p>You need to sandbox the old code, so it can’t do any damage and you can sandbox the legacy APIs, while you are at it, packing them up with legacy applications.</p><p><br></p><p>Sandboxing is one of several security techniques, including using more modern languages that preclude some of the classic errors that creep into code. </p><p><br></p><p>And there is so much legacy software, you can’t just re-write the old APIs in new code, that would take a decade or two to complete and some of the original documentation is already lost – SMB "just works", but the code is complex and the documentation lost / incomplete, so some things are unkowns and regularly throw up gotchas. The newer versions of SMB are documented, but don’t include backward compatibility, so the older versions have to be there as well. Sandboxing <em>that</em> is a damned good thing.</p>

    • wright_is

      Premium Member
      14 July, 2021 - 4:23 am

      <p>Chrome sandboxes tabs, how often do you have to deal with UAC prompts in Chrome?</p><p><br></p><p>Sandboxing puts the applications in a secure environment, where they can’t damage the rest of the system. It is good security practice and it would be great if Windows implemented it properly.</p>

      • dmitryko

        14 July, 2021 - 9:27 am

        <p>Chrome/Edge ‘sandboxing’ is simply spawning a separate process for each active tab with additional threads for HTML renderer, JavaScript/WebAssembly interpreter/JIT, built-in antimalware engine etc. </p><p><br></p><p>So it’s using standard process isolation and object (file) security, which is already available for all Win32 or UWP applications.</p><p><br></p><p>W</p>

  • waethorn

    13 July, 2021 - 11:10 am

    <p>Microsoft just can’t do sandboxing because they let developers have too much access to low-level components of Windows. This is apparent with the amount of problems relating to stability and malware on the platform.</p><p><br></p><p>Linux does sandboxing right, aside from competing file format standards – so much so that the componentization of Linux is in use, by Microsoft, in WSL. Win32 doesn’t afford that level of flexibility though. Microsoft would call that "a hard engineering problem".</p>

    • wright_is

      Premium Member
      14 July, 2021 - 4:35 am

      <p>They need to sandbox Win32 and all legacy apps and move forward with a new API and deprecate Win32 over time, making the sandboxed Win32 environment more and more isolated from the rest of the system over time, forcing developers and users to move forwards.</p><p><br></p><p>This would be a carrot and stick approach to moving forward, as opposed the big stick approach of Apple or the mouldy carrot approach of Microsoft in the past (hey, look, a new API, it is modern and slick and it doesn’t do half the things you need it to do, but we’ll try and get it up to feature parity at some point, assuming we don’t lose interest).</p><p><br></p><p>I’ve been saying that Microsoft need to do this for the better part of a decade now, but they still haven’t listend.</p>

  • lvthunder

    Premium Member
    13 July, 2021 - 4:00 pm

    <p>Why don’t you wait before Windows 11 is finished before you call it a failure? Not all the features are even in there yet.</p>

    • dmitryko

      13 July, 2021 - 5:29 pm

      <p>I believe build 22000 is an RTM build, it’s too late for significant changes. </p>

    • hrlngrv

      Premium Member
      13 July, 2021 - 9:51 pm

      <p>MSFT has stated its intent that Windows 11 will be available preinstalled on new PC during the 2021 holiday season.</p><p><br></p><p>How much time do you believe MSFT has between now and Christmas Eve to add new features to Windows 11? Then once added, make sure they’re adequately tested?</p><p><br></p><p>One would be unwise to expect substantial changes in Windows 11 before 22H2.</p>

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