[spijdar]

People who think Apple is killing MacOS generally do because they think Apple is sacrificing the utility of the desktop in favor of sharing code/UI with their mobile platforms.

I don't think these people will be fond of the sweeping changes made in Win11's UI that are dedicated to touch interfaces/tablets, and to the big new feature of running Android apps "natively" on Windows, along with an Android app store.

The ability to run Linux software is also mostly irrelevant, as MacOS/Darwin has largely been able to run those same programs natively since the beginning. It's never needed a POSIX compatibility layer -- it was built to support that functionality from day 1. e.g. Apple didn't need to build a compatibility shim to tunnel Wayland/X11 applications because Quartz was designed from the start to support that use case.

[GekkePrutser]

The changes in Windows 11 are much more mellow than those in Windows 8, which were ridiculously geared towards tablets and totally ignored the existence of desktops, which happened to be 99% of the Windows userbase :/

Windows 11 is a much better compromise of usability on both, and I like the idea of panes, it is sorta kinda heading towards a tiling window system which really appeals to me.

And the android thing and Amazon's involvement. Yeah a lot written about this and I don't agree with it either. But you don't have to use it.

[pjmlp]

Actually the changes on Windows 11 are quite deep, even if they appear mellow to those not following Windows dev scene.

Basically Windows 11 presents the opportunity to unify all the kernel and related OS infrastructure to pretend the road started with Windows 8 never happened.

The COM improvements done in WinRT, are ported into Win32 land, .NET Native goes away replaced by .NET 6 AOT, app sandoxing gets replaced by MSIX sandoxing, .....

Thus pretending that all those improvements happened as if Windows 11 suceeded Windows 7, and a couple of years from now, the UWP branch will be dropped from Windows SCM.

[GekkePrutser]

Ok I do indeed not follow this too intensely. Windows for me privately is only relevant to my game box. And while I manage endpoints at work, the windows side is a different team :) I'm just waiting for Windows 11 to hit MSDN so I can try it out. I don't really want to do the whole insider thing. I was indeed referring to what I've seen in the videos.

But this sounds like a good thing to me overall. I was never a fan of UWP as most of the apps were too tablet focused. The same issue I have with Mac Catalyst apps. Too dumbed down and basic. I know it's not technically necessary to do so, but these unified platforms seem to stimulate that kind of app. I was also very happy to see that live tiles are going away (It always takes some time for me to rid the start menu of them).

If Microsoft would adopt a more privacy friendly stance e.g. no telemetry or MS accounts required at all, I'd actually consider using it again for more purposes privately.

[pjmlp]

You can see the signs of this happening live,

UWP dropped from WinUI roadmap and desktop focus,

https://github.com/microsoft/microsoft-ui-xaml/blob/main/doc...

While Project Reunion gets renamed into Windows App SDK

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/24/what-w...

C++/WinRT also does COM anyway,

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/uwp/cpp-and-winrt-a...

All Language/WinRT SDKs become /windows,

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/05/06/announ...

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/01/21/making...

Microsoft Game Development Kit makes it clear that for AAA titles, the Win32 + GDK model is the future, while WinRT APIs are being deprecated, and only community support is planned for UWP, not from Microft XBox teams.

https://github.com/microsoft/GDK

So one just needs to read between the lines, combine it with years of experience with previous technology reboots from Microsoft, and it is relatively clear where they are heading with Windows 11.

Naturaly when playing futurology games there is always a possibility of being wrong.

[GekkePrutser]

Thanks for the summary. I think all these are pretty good changes actually. I was never a fan of UWP at all. Not because of the tech per se, but because it tended to lead to crappy tablet/mobile-style apps that didn't suit the desktop. Same as with macOS Catalyst. I really don't want my desktop being a big iPad. At least Microsoft gets this now, but Apple still doesn't.