Paul “the man” Thurrott at Thurrott.com tried to clear up the confusion about Windows 10x by providing an architectural blueprint of the new Operating System.
He posted this diagram below.
Windows 10x Architecture
In a post on the 9th of May, 2020, Paul posits the following:
There seems to be confusion around Windows 10X so I thought I would post my own observations and a clarifying picture.
Windows 10X puts all non-UWP applications (yes, that’s pretty much all applications you know and use; Chrome, MS Office, Teams etc.) inside a virtual machine which they call a container. It has its own kernel and drivers (so you can install drivers in the virtual machine). The virtual machine will be hidden/seamless integration from a user perspective. In the picture you see Windows 10X marked as host (OS) and Win32 container marked as guest (OS).
This virtual machine may be offloaded to the cloud in the future and this year’s Build event may have more about that. It’s a radical approach; what if Apple had done something similar to macOS? Curiously, Apple seems to be fine with Chrome, MS Office and other cross-platform applications running natively on their platform. Of course with the arrival of macOS on ARM we might see something similar from Apple.
Windows 10X really is Edge OS as all your non-UWP applications run in a virtual machine.
Can it work? Yes, it can as computers get faster. Virtual machine performance is already good and can be further optimized.
So it’s a more virtual, layer based Operating System.
