Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "TechAltar" channel.

Microsoft has tried so hard to be like Apple -- look at Windows Phone. And what is UWP, if not yet another attempt at a “closed ecosystem”? Only its abandoning the use of UWP for its Edge browser is hardly a good advertisement for that ...
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Apple Watch has been around for a few years now, it has yet to be a success.
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Except this is all now Open Source. Remember that Google forked their Blink engine from Apple’s WebKit, which was in turn forked from KDE Konqueror’s KHTML. So we are not seeing (quite) the return to IE6-style Dark Ages of the Web.
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Like Google’s adoption of Apple’s WebKit gave Apple more control and power? Oh wait, it didn’t.
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s/“Windows Phone that really work”/“Pig that can really fly”/
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@gg5115 Microsoft is currently in the same stage as Apple or Oracle: making more and more money out of fewer and fewer customers. And Google doesn’t “own the Internet”, given that, to many people, “Internet” is synonymous with “Facebook”. And yes, OpenGL is used on more devices than DirectX.
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2:15 Not as diverse as Linux. Windows NT was originally supposed to be a portable OS (running also on Alpha, PowerPC, MIPS and Itanium) but most of that had to be abandoned as just too complex and expensive to maintain. And look at their more recent laughable attempts to run on ARM devices. I hear they’re going to try yet again...
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Microsoft’s fundamental problem is that their GUI is too tightly coupled to the OS, instead of being a separate modular layer like on Linux. This is why you can get such a wide choice of GUIs on Linux, from the full power of KDE, the world’s most advanced and configurable GUI, down to more minimalistic, low-overhead options that can run smoothly on a Raspberry π, all the way to no GUI at all, just a bunch of text-only consoles. And you can get all these options on the same OS installation!
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Unfortunately it’s not really “Windows 10 on ARM”, it’s only “Windows 10 on certain Qualcomm ARM chipsets”. If you want an OS that lets you have a choice of chipsets and hardware configurations, Windows doesn’t cut it; only Linux does.
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@bri1085 Chromium is not UWP-based. So to move to it, they had to abandon UWP.
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@Jamie Sharknado UWP is not cross-platform. In order to make Edge cross-platform, Microsoft had to abandon UWP.
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@bri1085 Edge has been Windows-10-only, because UWP is Windows-10-only. So to free it from Windows 10, they have to abandon UWP.
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@bri1085 The UWP version of Edge is dead -- it is being replaced with a non-UWP version. So yes, Microsoft is abandoning UWP for just about its highest-profile UWP-using app. That’s not a good advertisement for anybody else looking to adopt UWP.
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@bri1085 They won’t be left “without a browser”, since there are still third-party options available.
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@bri1085 No, Windows 10 will not be running a UWP-based Edge browser any more. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-confirms-plans-rebuild-edge-ground-using-chromium-windows-10
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It’s 2020, Microsoft. Why are you still tying the GUI into the kernel?
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3:48 Are these “enterprise customers” the ones who made the fuss over Paint versus Paint 3D? Or was that more the “consumer” customers?
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3:39 “Twice a year” ... actually, Microsoft is struggling to maintain that timetable. Witness the “October” update, with those notorious data-corruption bugs, that still hasn’t made it into general availability yet.
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This incarnation of ARM Windows will be just as successful as every one of Microsoft’s past attempts to run Windows on non-x86 architectures. That means it will disappear without trace.
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4:22 So why should they be allowed to download a random Microsoft browser from the Internet? Do you really think Microsoft still has a reputation for software quality at this stage?
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4:25 I wonder how long this will last, though. Customers will start complaining that Windows is too much of a “moving target”, they want “stability” and “predictable releases”, yada yada yada.
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@Jose Jaena Mari Ople How would that work, exactly? Would they somehow block Google from maintaining its own source repo?
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3:32 But why do they have to inflict this backward-compatibility baggage on every Windows user? Why not offer a special support deal to these “legacy” “enterprise” customers, at some suitably high price which, deep-pocketed as they are, you know they can afford to pay. Then they could simplify the OS for everybody else, and reduce their own mainstream support costs at the same time.
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@kensmith5694 I don’t think it’s ARM, it’s a separate x86 “Quark” core. And it runs MINIX. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/11/20/intel_flags_firmware_flaws/
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3:38 The reason why Edge is so tightly coupled, not just to Windows 10, but your current version of Windows 10, is a really stupid one: it’s because it’s written as a “Universal Windows Platform” app. UWP, if you remember, was Microsoft’s latest in a long string of attempts to "modernize” its antiquated Windows APIs, from MFC, through Dotnet and Silverlight, through WinRT, through ... how many other dead and gone Microsoft technologies can you name? But if anything is proof of the uselessness of UWP, this whole Edge fiasco has to be it.
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5:06 Not a good look for UWP!
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Microsoft has not found “alternative revenue sources”. Nothing else it is doing has brought in profits anywhere near the scale of Windows and Office. In fact, a lot of it is losing money: aQuantive, Danger/Hiptop, GitHub, LinkedIn, Mojang/Minecraft, Nokia, Skype ... would you count any of that a success?
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@gg5115 The time has already come, as I pointed out in my history lesson. Yes, Open Source is different -- it has already proven itself many times as a defence against vendor lock-in. Because of that, things will never be the same again. Why do you think Microsoft, once the dominant giant of the software world, is now trying so hard to play catch-up?
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@gg5115 If you want to talk seriously about GPUs being pushed to the limit, have a look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iaY3Ffor-8c No DirectX anywhere near there. Or Microsoft Windows, for that matter. It’s Linux all the way.
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