Beep boop - this is a robot. A new show has been posted to TWiT…
What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I applaud Microsoft’s efforts towards their game store, especially in contrast to the egregious way Epic is going about garnering their market share.
But has anyone used the Xbox store application on PC? It’s awful. I’d 100% take the old Microsoft Store over what they’re giving us. It’s SUPER slow, the UI elements are scattered all over the place, and imho it just doesn’t look appealing. Yet another example of Microsoft utterly unable to properly code a web app.
When you randomly scrub through the episode, think you heard
“Hitler did not have a trampoline land, to our knowledge”
but then never find it again - is that reality or just a deeply lodged national trauma?
BTW: Imagine an operating system in which you can fully configure if the date is shown next to the time on the desktop. Also because you can decide which desktop you want to use with that operating system. Paul, you’re one of us! You’re only just discovering it. It’s ok - let it happen. 
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I believe the phrase was “Hitler never had a trampoline room.” I was pushing for that as the episode title, but there was some serious contention from The Foley Identity crowd - not unreasonably, in my opinion.
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Confusingly, there are currently two versions of the Xbox app. The one that is installed with Windows 10 by default definitely is a total mess. The newer app, which is identically named Xbox, can be installed from the store and is much improved. This will result in having two Xbox apps with identical icons installed on your PC, which is really dumb, but you can uninstall the old one.
The MS Store has in generally been pretty poorly executed, though it has improved significantly in the last year or two. For the first few years of Windows 10 it was very common to have apps fail to install, often multiple times even after reboots. That has been fixed for a while now but the download speeds are still glacial compared to Steam. From MS I usually get 5-25MB/s downloads, using that entire range. Steam downloads almost always fully utilize my connection at 58MB/s. EA’s store also performs similarly to Steam from my experiences.
It seems like MS is making a renewed investment into Windows so maybe they’ll be able to refine all of this and really turn this new 12% cut into an advantage. The Windows store should make a lot of sense for a lot users, so hopefully they can deliver a product to capitalize on that potential.
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So I want to share my two cents on the premise of Windows running on the Linux kernel at some point in the future. I could see it going either way so will take that approach.
Why Windows might run on the Linux kernel one day
I’ll get right to it, security and battery life. It’s no secret at all that Windows’ superpower is that you can fire up any exe file from the last 25 years and it will probably work. There’s literally no other operating system that offers anything like this.
As all Windows enthusiasts know though, this comes with downsides. Why is Windows 10 so darn visually inconsistent? Because you have to rework a bunch of Windows 95 code to change anything major. Design progress isn’t the only issue, this web of legacy dependencies also creates a galaxy’s worth of celestial security holes. Finally performance is the last problem caused this incredible web of legacy support that is required for Windows to justify its existence. The transition to ARM is putting this challenge on clear display.
The ARM transition is where the Linux kernel comes into play. I’m by no means an expert on chip design, but my instincts tell me that Windows on ARM will not be truly viable until there is silicon as custom and advanced as Apple Silicon to power it. I think Apple has baked in hardware acceleration for their legacy needs, which is why Rosetta performance is so sensational. I think we’re 10ish years out from this on the Windows side unfortunately.
So what does the PC landscape look like in 10 years when Windows on ARM is actually ready to dominate? As Paul and Leo often point out, more and more traditional Windows apps for businesses will move into the cloud. So that leaves people who use Windows PCs for needs that don’t make sense in the cloud, like media production, gaming and a select few other uses with specialized hardware needs. There will also be the normal users who just stick with Windows because it’s what they’ve always used.
So what’s the most efficient way to serve this shrinking-but-still-lucrative market? I for sure don’t think that maintaining the entire existing Windows kernel is the answer. There’s just an awful lot of baggage there to maintain which contribute to those legacy challenges I mentioned earlier. Since getting to this point requires solving for Win32-64 hardware acceleration anyway, MS can really go any direction. This means either moving to a new in-house kernel or adopting an open-source option like Linux to build on top of.
In a future where Windows is an increasingly niche operating system, and where Microsoft will have had a long history by then with building off of Chromium and supporting Linux via Azure, I think adopting Linux will make a lot of sense.
Why it won’t happen
Moving Windows to the Linux kernel would probably result in major trickle-down quality of life upgrades for all desktop Linux distros, which could do more harm to Windows’ marketshare than all of the potential good from moving to Linux.
Anyway, sorry for the novel but briefly came up on the show and kind of seems like a premise with enough merit to justify discussion.
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A lot can’t move into the cloud, and a lot of those are legacy applications. We use a 50 tonne scale to weigh trucks on and off the site. That has custom software, which requires a local connection to the scale and the end-user software runs in Access 2007 (the company that wrote the software has gone bust and there is no alternative, apart from replacing the scale, which would costs tens of thousands of Euros). You simply can’t move that stack to the cloud or to ARM, or a Linux Kernel, for that matter.
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I think it really comes down there being a critical mass of business customers with those needs. Many of them could probably be served by a well-executed Win32-64 translation layer that is basically frozen in time. Those who can’t will warrant continued legacy support (Apple hasn’t immediately dropped support for Intel Macs, and MS has a history of selling extended support for even officially unsupported OSs), but that support will come at a cost. As the scale shifts and the cost/user goes up, it will be more and more attractive for those businesses to EoL those existing systems and upgrade. There’s a reason that assets depreciate over a period of time and not infinitely.
So it wasn’t my mind playing tricks on me! What a relief - thank you! 
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Working my way through the episode and couldn’t help but draw attention to the fact that Paul pronounces FIFA like a Bostonian referring to Michelle Pfeiffer, just moments after the crew were discussing Boston accents.
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Yep, the store app is the one I’m talking about, which is technically still a beta. The feedback section for the app is littered with unanswered complaints covering pretty much all my gripes. It’s just a terrible application. Like most web engine-powered desktop apps, it looks pretty but functions poorly. Even EA’s Origin replacement is better by a slim margin.
Also experienced those problems with the MS Store early on, but it’s definitely improved. I’ll typically see download speeds utilizing 50-75% of my connection while Steam will shoot right on up to 90-95% if I let it. Not all that surprising to me that Valve has invested a bit more in their CDN; It’s been their cash cow for ~15 years now.
Microsoft wants the Windows Store to be the “Trustworthy” place but it’s also full of Minecraft bootlegs, which is a Microsoft owned title.
Which pretty much sums up the entire problem with the Windows Store.
Same nonsense as the iOS App Store and the Google Play Store; you’d think these companies would have procedures in place by now to filter out junk apps.
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It’s more that you would think Microsoft could AT LEAST police bootlegs of their own properties.
I have seen Forza bootlegs too, though those seem to be more “Combination” bootlegs with names like “Need for Midnight Horizons Motorsport Extreme.”