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Windows 8 Desktop 'Just Another App'?
CWmike writes "Steven Sinofsky, president of Microsoft's Windows and Windows Live division, said this week that Windows 8 will let users treat the traditional desktop as 'just another app' that loads only on command. When it unveiled Windows 8's UI in June, Microsoft said it would feature a 'touch-first' interface to compete in the fast-growing tablet market. Underneath that, however, would be a traditional Windows-style desktop. 'Having both of [the] user interfaces [work] together harmoniously is an important part of Windows 8,' Sinofsky said in a blog post on Wednesday. The Metro-style UI — the one inspired by Windows Phone 7's tile-based design — will be the first to show up when a user boots a device. At that point, users reach a crossroads. 'If you want to stay permanently immersed in that Metro world, you will never see the desktop — we won't even load it (literally the code will not be loaded) unless you explicitly choose to go there,' Sinofsky said. 'If you don't want to do ... 'PC' things, then you don't have to and you're not paying for them in memory, battery life or hardware requirements.' If using a conventional PC with keyboard and mouse, Windows 8 users will run an 'app' to load the desktop, he said. 'Essentially, you can think of the Windows desktop as just another app.'"
...even Microsoft starts to understand that modularity is the way to go while designing complex systems. Moving various operating system components to the user space is just a logical conclusion of the research done during the last four decades.
MS has understood that longer than you think; in fact, Windows is rather better in that regard than Linux is. Vista in particular was a big turning point with the introduction of the usermode driver framework (UMDF), which put a lot drivers in userspace. (I'm not sure of the details, e.g. whether the UMDF is the only option if you're writing such a driver.) Heck, the first version of NT back in 1990-whatever even put the graphics driver in usermode: if your graphics driver crashed, the system would just restart it. (Graphics drivers were moved into the kernel for performance reasons and remain there now.)
As for explorer, I don't think it's ever run in kernel mode. It's always been "just another app" from the system's perspective. You can even replace explorer with another desktop environment if you'd like; I remember running Litestep back in Windows 98.
What this article is about is the user's perspective. The standard desktop is no longer going to be the first thing you see when you turn on or log onto your computer, and you'll have to explicitly start it.
(And their new "tile" thing will continue to run in userspace.)