8 ms·

10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows, updated but never replaced. Either this is a free update that just increases the number (stupid move but not

10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows, updated but never replaced. Either this is a free update that just increases the number (stupid move but not catastrophic) or Microsoft will lose an enormous amount of trust.

eyelidlessness 5y ago
It’s entirely possible it’ll be a new public version name without an internal major version bump (IIRC Vista did this? I can’t remember which one)
- noisem4ker 5y ago
  Windows 7 shared Vista's internal version number: 6.1. Not really surprising, since its quick release was little more than an attempt at cleaning up Vista's bad reputation. In other times, it could have been released as a service pack.
  - garethrowlands 5y ago
    It's true that Windows 7's changes were mostly internal. But it's not true that they were minor changes from Vista. Vista had serious technical problems with memory consumption, which Windows 7 addressed. It also had perceived-but-not-real problems due to superfetch and PCs being sold with too little memory or too weak graphics - changing the name may have helped with that. But the technical changes were real. Windows 7 rearchitected GDI - offloading it to the GPU (AKA WDDM 1.1 / DXGI) - so that using it didn't cause the bits of each window to be retained in system memory. So Windows 7 can open as many Notepad windows full screen as you like, whereas Vista with DWM enabled cannot. And Windows 7 rearchitected how services load. Vista had introduced lots of features, implemented as services, but it loaded them all on startup and kept them in memory. Windows 7 introduced a mechanism to load them when the features were actually used, saving memory and startup time. And then there's the list of visible features, which, as you can see, is pretty large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7
    - ToFab123 5y ago
      To a large extend Vista and Windows 7 was the same OS. Windows 7 just had a lot of performance improvement but all the major technical redesigns and improvements came with Vista. I was happy to have a powerful PC that was more than capable of running Vista so I never saw any of the issues that people complain about with Vista. When Windows 7 came out it was just like Vista had a service pack applied. Windows 7 was not a major step away from Vista. This new Windows 11 I suspect is the same. Just an incremental update from Windows 10 with some added Marketing play in form of a new version number.
  - nemetroid 5y ago
    It shared the major version number (like 2000 and XP did). Vista was 6.0.
cable2600 5y ago
All the people who worked on Windows 10 are no longer with Microsoft so the promise of Windows 10 being the last Windows is over. I would have thought they'd have 10.1 like Apple does. Windows 10 was like MacOSX for Microsoft.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- pjmlp 5y ago
  Unfortunely Win32 did not went like Carbon, because the WinRT/UAP/UWP execution was a mess, and it still remains to be seen if Project Reunion will rescue any of that or just die in a couple of years, given the amount of WinUI issues and lack of roadmap for .NET Native, HoloLens and XBox. So better reboot Windows 11 as Windows 7 vNext, while pretending 8 - 10 never happened.
  - ripley12 5y ago
    .NET Native is effectively dead (critical fixes only) and the .NET team is focusing on NativeAOT instead. They’ve done a very poor job of communicating it but that’s what I’ve gathered from various MS employees.
    - pjmlp 5y ago
      Yep, I am aware of the form factors design document. It is just pity that Microsoft has decided to take the usual approach on sensitive subjects, usually when certain technologies are heavily pushed and then abandoned (XNA, Silverlight, Bizztalk,...) they just stop talking about it, but never make any big annoucement that they are leaving it behind.
tasogare 5y ago
Did anyone really thought it was the "last" version of Windows? It was pretty obvious that Microsoft would reconsider that choice 5 years later or so. And since Mac OS recently bumped to 11, Windows has to do it too, to keep up with the number, much like Firefox adopted Chrome's numbering.
aliswe 5y ago
i seriously thought xp was going to be the last?
DoctorOW 5y ago
> 10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows Honestly, I wish this was the move. I regularly fantasize about how much better Windows would be if it were XP with 20 years of bug fixes, driver updates, and little else. If it had focused on the support subscription model the incentive would be to churn out updates regularly to keep people paying for them. Windows truly would be the most stable OS instead of the cluttered mess it is now.
- noisem4ker 5y ago
  Vista introduced pretty big innovations at its core. Windows 8 did too, with its tickless kernel, for example. Windows 10 also brought an abundant dose of "little else" improvements. Everything wrong with Windows has to do with the GUI and the userland API, the most visible parts. What we want is a Windows 10 kernel coupled to an older, more useable and sane user interface.
  - mobilio 5y ago
    XP GUI with Win10 kernel will be great!
    - anakaine 5y ago
      Have you used XP recently? Its aged terribly!
      - hulitu 5y ago
        No, it is not. It looks and behaves far better than the mess that is windows 10. And from a user perspective, the level of improved security that windows 10 presents it's tiny compared to the features.
        salamandersauce 5y ago
        How so? I thought the default XP theme looked dated in 2005. Search is a complete joke in XP. Win 10 search is maybe a bit worse than 7 but light years better than XP. No hardware accelerated UI, no Window snapping, no support for 64 bit apps, more than 4GB RAM, taskbar quickly gets filled because of no app grouping, no windows peek. No hiDPI support. Only thing XP does better is no pop up ads telling me to use Edge. Everything else is worse.
pjmlp 5y ago
It was also going to be the version where everyone migrates their crusty apps into modern UWP APIs. Microsoft also discovered the Android update pain by tying OS APIs updates to specific OS versions. Common users and IT departments don't update the OS like browsers, even when that is a couple of mouse clicks away. Plans never go 100% as we think they would.
- noisem4ker 5y ago
  >Plans never go 100% as we think they would. Let's start by not making hazardous plans for the sake of marketing, which is notoriously harmful in its short-sightedness. What was the technical point behind the announcement of an eternal major version number? Clearly none, since upgrades to the underlying system are still happening, whether they are called Windows 11, Windows 10 "This-years-flavor Update", Windows 10 "2105" or "21H1" or whatever subversion name they come up with (with total inconsistency even here, in typical Microsoft fashion).
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    By having Windows 11 Microsoft can have a clear cut with UWP, have Project Reunion bring in the features that should have been done on top of COM and .NET for Windows 8, and try to forget WinRT ever happened. With Windows 10 linage that kind of breaking change can't be done in a clean way.
    - noisem4ker 5y ago
      I see. I find this to be a developer-focused view, though. Would users notice and care about any of those technologies? It's users, after all, that product names are targetet at, more than developers. And since Windows is known for its backwards compatibility, it's not like we're really talking about a breaking change, or is it?
      - hulitu 5y ago
        Yes. Windows 10 version numbering is a mess. What features are in 1908 version, or in 21H04 ? It is more or less the old Service pack system with a more obscure naming. And if there is a windows version which deserves to die, this is Windows 10. Is ugly, unusable, unconfigurable (white background with white icon text, fonts too small or too large, etc ), slow and insecure by default.
paqehene 5y ago
Yes, Windows 10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows according to Microsoft, when former senior technical evangelist at Microsoft, Jerry Nixen, stated in 2015 that, "Right now we're releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we're all still working on Windows 10."
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
>...Microsoft will lose an enormous amount of trust. The Patch Tuesday fiascos have already done that.
bitwize 5y ago
Then Apple released macOS 11. Version number parity with your competitor is surprisingly important. Word for Windows jumped from version 2 to version 6 to be better positioned against WordPerfect 5.x.
ostenning 5y ago
They lost an enormous amount of trust when they released Windows 10 full of tracking features. From a privacy standpoint W10 is a nightmare. Good riddance.
- vb6sp6 5y ago
  Windows 11, or whatever the new name is, will have the same tracking and possibly more.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
solarkraft 5y ago
> or Microsoft will lose an enormous amount of trust What trust do they currently have? Seriously, nobody cares about things like this. Way bigger things have been walked back on.

eyelidlessness 5y ago

It’s entirely possible it’ll be a new public version name without an internal major version bump (IIRC Vista did this? I can’t remember which one)

noisem4ker 5y ago
Windows 7 shared Vista's internal version number: 6.1. Not really surprising, since its quick release was little more than an attempt at cleaning up Vista's bad reputation. In other times, it could have been released as a service pack.
- garethrowlands 5y ago
  It's true that Windows 7's changes were mostly internal. But it's not true that they were minor changes from Vista. Vista had serious technical problems with memory consumption, which Windows 7 addressed. It also had perceived-but-not-real problems due to superfetch and PCs being sold with too little memory or too weak graphics - changing the name may have helped with that. But the technical changes were real. Windows 7 rearchitected GDI - offloading it to the GPU (AKA WDDM 1.1 / DXGI) - so that using it didn't cause the bits of each window to be retained in system memory. So Windows 7 can open as many Notepad windows full screen as you like, whereas Vista with DWM enabled cannot. And Windows 7 rearchitected how services load. Vista had introduced lots of features, implemented as services, but it loaded them all on startup and kept them in memory. Windows 7 introduced a mechanism to load them when the features were actually used, saving memory and startup time. And then there's the list of visible features, which, as you can see, is pretty large: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7
  - ToFab123 5y ago
    To a large extend Vista and Windows 7 was the same OS. Windows 7 just had a lot of performance improvement but all the major technical redesigns and improvements came with Vista. I was happy to have a powerful PC that was more than capable of running Vista so I never saw any of the issues that people complain about with Vista. When Windows 7 came out it was just like Vista had a service pack applied. Windows 7 was not a major step away from Vista. This new Windows 11 I suspect is the same. Just an incremental update from Windows 10 with some added Marketing play in form of a new version number.
- nemetroid 5y ago
  It shared the major version number (like 2000 and XP did). Vista was 6.0.

cable2600 5y ago

All the people who worked on Windows 10 are no longer with Microsoft so the promise of Windows 10 being the last Windows is over. I would have thought they'd have 10.1 like Apple does. Windows 10 was like MacOSX for Microsoft.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
pjmlp 5y ago
Unfortunely Win32 did not went like Carbon, because the WinRT/UAP/UWP execution was a mess, and it still remains to be seen if Project Reunion will rescue any of that or just die in a couple of years, given the amount of WinUI issues and lack of roadmap for .NET Native, HoloLens and XBox. So better reboot Windows 11 as Windows 7 vNext, while pretending 8 - 10 never happened.
- ripley12 5y ago
  .NET Native is effectively dead (critical fixes only) and the .NET team is focusing on NativeAOT instead. They’ve done a very poor job of communicating it but that’s what I’ve gathered from various MS employees.
  - pjmlp 5y ago
    Yep, I am aware of the form factors design document. It is just pity that Microsoft has decided to take the usual approach on sensitive subjects, usually when certain technologies are heavily pushed and then abandoned (XNA, Silverlight, Bizztalk,...) they just stop talking about it, but never make any big annoucement that they are leaving it behind.

tasogare 5y ago

Did anyone really thought it was the "last" version of Windows? It was pretty obvious that Microsoft would reconsider that choice 5 years later or so. And since Mac OS recently bumped to 11, Windows has to do it too, to keep up with the number, much like Firefox adopted Chrome's numbering.

aliswe 5y ago

i seriously thought xp was going to be the last?

DoctorOW 5y ago

> 10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows Honestly, I wish this was the move. I regularly fantasize about how much better Windows would be if it were XP with 20 years of bug fixes, driver updates, and little else. If it had focused on the support subscription model the incentive would be to churn out updates regularly to keep people paying for them. Windows truly would be the most stable OS instead of the cluttered mess it is now.

noisem4ker 5y ago
Vista introduced pretty big innovations at its core. Windows 8 did too, with its tickless kernel, for example. Windows 10 also brought an abundant dose of "little else" improvements. Everything wrong with Windows has to do with the GUI and the userland API, the most visible parts. What we want is a Windows 10 kernel coupled to an older, more useable and sane user interface.
- mobilio 5y ago
  XP GUI with Win10 kernel will be great!
  - anakaine 5y ago
    Have you used XP recently? Its aged terribly!
    - hulitu 5y ago
      No, it is not. It looks and behaves far better than the mess that is windows 10. And from a user perspective, the level of improved security that windows 10 presents it's tiny compared to the features.
      - salamandersauce 5y ago
        How so? I thought the default XP theme looked dated in 2005. Search is a complete joke in XP. Win 10 search is maybe a bit worse than 7 but light years better than XP. No hardware accelerated UI, no Window snapping, no support for 64 bit apps, more than 4GB RAM, taskbar quickly gets filled because of no app grouping, no windows peek. No hiDPI support. Only thing XP does better is no pop up ads telling me to use Edge. Everything else is worse.

pjmlp 5y ago

It was also going to be the version where everyone migrates their crusty apps into modern UWP APIs. Microsoft also discovered the Android update pain by tying OS APIs updates to specific OS versions. Common users and IT departments don't update the OS like browsers, even when that is a couple of mouse clicks away. Plans never go 100% as we think they would.

noisem4ker 5y ago
>Plans never go 100% as we think they would. Let's start by not making hazardous plans for the sake of marketing, which is notoriously harmful in its short-sightedness. What was the technical point behind the announcement of an eternal major version number? Clearly none, since upgrades to the underlying system are still happening, whether they are called Windows 11, Windows 10 "This-years-flavor Update", Windows 10 "2105" or "21H1" or whatever subversion name they come up with (with total inconsistency even here, in typical Microsoft fashion).
- pjmlp 5y ago
  By having Windows 11 Microsoft can have a clear cut with UWP, have Project Reunion bring in the features that should have been done on top of COM and .NET for Windows 8, and try to forget WinRT ever happened. With Windows 10 linage that kind of breaking change can't be done in a clean way.
  - noisem4ker 5y ago
    I see. I find this to be a developer-focused view, though. Would users notice and care about any of those technologies? It's users, after all, that product names are targetet at, more than developers. And since Windows is known for its backwards compatibility, it's not like we're really talking about a breaking change, or is it?
    - hulitu 5y ago
      Yes. Windows 10 version numbering is a mess. What features are in 1908 version, or in 21H04 ? It is more or less the old Service pack system with a more obscure naming. And if there is a windows version which deserves to die, this is Windows 10. Is ugly, unusable, unconfigurable (white background with white icon text, fonts too small or too large, etc ), slow and insecure by default.

paqehene 5y ago

Yes, Windows 10 was supposed to be the last version of Windows according to Microsoft, when former senior technical evangelist at Microsoft, Jerry Nixen, stated in 2015 that, "Right now we're releasing Windows 10, and because Windows 10 is the last version of Windows, we're all still working on Windows 10."

x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago

>...Microsoft will lose an enormous amount of trust. The Patch Tuesday fiascos have already done that.

bitwize 5y ago

Then Apple released macOS 11. Version number parity with your competitor is surprisingly important. Word for Windows jumped from version 2 to version 6 to be better positioned against WordPerfect 5.x.

ostenning 5y ago

They lost an enormous amount of trust when they released Windows 10 full of tracking features. From a privacy standpoint W10 is a nightmare. Good riddance.

vb6sp6 5y ago
Windows 11, or whatever the new name is, will have the same tracking and possibly more.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

solarkraft 5y ago

> or Microsoft will lose an enormous amount of trust What trust do they currently have? Seriously, nobody cares about things like this. Way bigger things have been walked back on.