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.
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.
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.
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.
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?