Slashdot Mirror
You Can Now Run Windows 10 on the Raspberry Pi 3 (tomshardware.com)
Raspberry Pi is finally ready for the full Windows 10 experience. From a report: A new installer lets you put Windows 10 on Arm, including the Pi. And it's made by the same people who got Windows 10 on Arm onto Lumia 950 and 950 XL handset. You can find the Github page here, in which developer Jose Manuel Nieto Sanchez call the tool "super easy to use" and "no-hassle." It requires a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B or B+, a microSD card (he recommends an A1 rating) and a Windows 10ARM64 image, which is linked to from the page where you get the download instructions.
Windows also runs a lot of software that is Windows/Mac only. Visual Studio, Adobe products, Autodesk products. Then there are games (and game dev toolkits). There are also numerous internal apps.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
My biggest complaint about Win10 is really how slowly it runs on fairly low end machines (which I can load Mint or ChromeOS and they run acceptably). Note that the RasPI 3 runs ChromeOS quite as well.
So you have Win10 executing on the RasPI, but does respond in anyway that is acceptable? This includes loading and executing apps.
Mimetics Inc. Twitter
Well, there you have it. That's the most insightful first comment I've seen on Slashdot in a very long time.
You're absolutely right. Outside of "legacy support" (including supporting legacy workflows and legacy users who don't want to learn a new interface), the only real reasons to run Windows are for application and data compatibility. Previously, I'd have included Active Directory as a vital Windows-only service, but Samba is capable enough now to be a viable alternative.
Application compatibility is already gone in this case: Even on Windows, you're still on ARM. You can't expect software will work cleanly.
Data compatibility is a hairier issue, but it pretty much boils down to Office documents and PDF. Other formats are either standard enough (like image formats) that third-party (and FOSS) software can work with them perfectly, or rare enough that perfection isn't a general expectation. PDF support in FOSS is getting better, to the point where it's approaching perfection, and Adobe doesn't have any reason to make the format intentionally unusable for others. Office formats, on the other hand, are full of things that don't actually conform to the published "standards", and Microsoft is quite happy to be the only player in that game.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
The biggest problem is that linux on the desktop is a dreadful experience. I run Linux/Mac/Windows on a daily basis and I am always amazed at how bad the linux experience is.