• Kushan@lemmy.worldEnglish
    8·
    2 months ago

    I thought this was dumb as fuck, but I think I understand what Microsoft is trying to do here.

    What might not be obvious is that this “Windows” app is for iOS, Android and Linux - yes, it’s a replacement for remote desktop but it’s specifically a remote desktop app to connect to Windows machines.

    So while I still this this rebranding is entirely unnecessary, I can see that they are trying to clearly distinguish “I’m not on windows and I need to do something on windows so I’ll use the windows app for that” .

    It also means less confusion when “remote desktop” doesn’t let you connect to your Mac or whatever.

  • Snot Flickerman@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
    7·
    2 months ago

    It’s really more like Remote Desktop+. It has some additional “features” (slight retch) on top of traditional Remote Desktop features.

    Let’s wait and see if it’s actually more secure than traditional Remote Desktop.

    (and I’d still rather use Wine)

        • d_k_bo@feddit.org
          1·
          2 months ago

          Unlike X11, Wayland was never intended to be network transparent. As others say, solutions like waypipe and more tradionally RDP and VNC exist.

          • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
            21·
            2 months ago

            Exactly. We won’t. We’ll get specialized video stream over network. I’m not happy about this regression. I understand that was a willing sacrifice to achieve better local performance, but I’m not sure it was worth it.

            • MinFapper@startrek.websiteEnglish
              2·
              2 months ago

              Their reasoning was that X11 network transparency had been broken for quite some time. If you tried running chrome, most games, or anything with modern hardware acceleration over X11 forwarding, they wouldn’t work.

              So, IMHO waypipe is actually an improvement in terms of compatibility, rather than a regression.

              • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
                2·
                2 months ago

                You always had the option to send frames over the net using VNC and such. But for many use cases, X over SSH was absolutely fantastic.

                I remember using it on a very basic DSL connection to work remotely back in 2005, and it was almost like running local. You don’t get anywhere near the same performance with VNC or RDP.

      • lurch (he/him)@sh.itjust.works
        1·
        2 months ago

        X11 can render individual windows (Xclients) through the network on another Xserver since decades. With XPRA you can even buffer them, to move them from one Xserver to another or make sure they survive network disconnect. It’s very cool, but not widely used.

      • infeeeee@lemm.ee
        0·
        2 months ago

        No, it’s just remote. Remote desktop is now also called Windows, also the operating system you are connecting to is called Windows.

        Gnome has relatively good rdp support, so with this you could use Windows (the app) on Windows (the os) to connect to you Linux machine running Gnome.

        It seems deliberately confusing naming is working as expected, Microsoft marketing team should get extra raise.

  • nifty@lemmy.world
    1·
    2 months ago

    But not all Windows apps can be run via Wine, at least some apps related to some tools I’ve had to use were not available

  • schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de
    0·
    2 months ago

    so by now even Microsoft acknowledges that it has lost the battle of making computing synonymous with Windows?

    FOSS release of Windows when?

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
      2·
      2 months ago

      FOSS release of Windows when?

      Can you imagine if that entire code got released tomorrow, without Microsoft selectively cleaning it up first?

      I remember WinXP getting decompiled a while back and people thought it was pretty wild. Can you imagine Win8+?

      Bet we’d find a few comments like #Yes it's a massive security hole but don't ask questions. LOL

      I think we’d still be shocked at how much data collection it does. And probably how “I don’t know why it works but don’t touch it.” The code is. (It was written by people, after all)

      I’ve always felt a lot of Windows’ “dependability” is really just slick presentation and the mystique of a black box that sounds solid when you knock on it.

      But what bothers me so much, as a non-career-coder and DIY-computing learner, is whenever a corporate product breaks, everything is obfuscated with nonsense that is only meant for a company engineer.

      At least good FOSS tries to tell you exactly where the issue is.

      If Windows went FOSS I bet it would get a lot of human-friendly fixes…and MS would get a lot of new scandals lol.

      • HStone32@lemmy.world
        2·
        2 months ago

        i read a blog post by a former MS employee who shed some light on the situation. apparently the windows dev team is entirely made up of junior developers. As soon as anybody gets any experience, either MS tries to promote them to management, or they leave to find a better job.

        what that means is there is nobody at MS who has deep knowledge of the Windows kernel. So instead of re-writting, re-factoring or making additions, all they know how to do is add things on top of the existing OS.

        • areyouevenreal@lemm.ee
          2·
          2 months ago

          I don’t think this is strictly true. They do tweak parts of the kernel such as the CPU scheduler to deal with new CPU designs that come out which have special scheduling requirements. That’s actually happened quite a bit recently with AMD and Intel both offering CPUs with asymmetric processors with big and little cores, different clock speeds, different cache, sometimes even different instructions on different cores. They also added ReFS not long ago, which may have required some kernel work.

          I can understand though if they have few experienced people and way more junior devs. It would probably explain a lot to be honest. A lot of Microsoft stuff is bloated and/or unreliable.