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.
I was like, this has to be fake. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/09/microsoft-releases-a-new-windows-app-called-windows-app-for-running-windows-apps/
so by now even Microsoft acknowledges that it has lost the battle of making computing synonymous with Windows?
FOSS release of Windows when?
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)
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.
Unlike X11, Wayland was never intended to be network transparent. As others say, solutions like waypipe and more tradionally RDP and VNC exist.
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.
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.
How so? Is there a way for malicious code to start injecting itself into calls to 127.0.0.1?
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.
Let me guess? CLOUD VMS? "Emulation" tries the most generic app: Doesnt work. Office apps will be the only functioning apps.
To be fair MS Office fully working on Linux is about the only thing we really need to make it completely viable for businesses.
The Desktop apps will be replaced with web apps ASAP anyway. Well, I think, as soon they think they have ported enough of the features to the web version.
Are there native arm versions, or are those already webViews?
I hope its so they can finally end the legacy support for all the win98 software and end all "settings is actually a folder" non-sense.