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.

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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 bel...