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原始链接: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40417828

Microsoft .NET（特别是 ASP.NET）的发展多年来经历了各种版本和品牌重塑。从 ASP.NET MVC 5 到 ASP.NET Core，存在名称冲突的情况，导致潜在的混淆。虽然由于稳定性目前还不是一个重大问题，但早期的迭代给开发人员试图确定使用哪种技术堆栈带来了挑战。其他技术生态系统通常有更清晰的命名方案。微软在“Windows App”等产品中延续了不一致的命名方式，与各种版本的 Windows Messenger、Internet Explorer 和 Exchange 等复杂产品相比，它的简单性引起了笑声。此外，与 ChatGPT 或 Claude 等竞争对手相比，微软的聊天机器人助手 Copilot 因其功能有限、处理时间慢和结果质量较低而受到批评。微软的命名实践和机器人助手仍然是科技爱好者讨论和争论的话题。

It made sense when I named GitHub Copilot, since that product was a passive addition to your regular workflow.

The name was sticky enough that they've run with it, misunderstanding or ignoring that fundamental metaphor.

See the hellish naming and branding they've done with the .NET ecosystem... It is so convoluted, even people actively developing on their stacks would have and issue figuring out if they are downloading the right stuff.

Microsoft appearingly random naming conventions make me want to actively avoid using their products because I know the web searches will be heavily polluted.

I thought big companies like this would have some sort of internal committee that decides if a new products branding makes it easier for customers to understand what the product is and where it fits in their offerings.

Having had to come up with a name for a corporate product and deal with things like trademarking, I can understand why they seem to repurpose names frequently. It is enormously time consuming to generate, vet, and apply for a trademark. There are so many other products and names and trademarks out there that it’s no wonder drug companies end up with unpronounceable gibberish for new product names.

Yep, I have to do it occasionally.

The same with Visual Studio. It is referred to by a year, eg Visual Studio 2019, but then you need to look in the make files for the actual version number of the project, and then look on Wikipedia for a table matching versions to years.

Wikipedia at least has decent docs on versions.

It was very confusing, and for a while there every team inside Microsoft started adding .NET to their name for some internal visibility points regardless of any connection with the common language runtime.

That's how you ended up with names like Windows .NET Server 2003.

You see, this is where it gets confusing. ASP refers to a specific technology, active server pages, but it's also the overarching term used for anything to do with dotnet and the web. So you get this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/tutorials/choo... - you can have an entirely frontend SPA, in at least two ways, and still be called "ASP.NET"

I have an application which only serves over GRPC. It has to pull in "Asp.Net" nuget packages, because that's the branding under which the Kestrel HTTP2 server lives.

Yes, it's still called "ASP.NET Core", even though ".NET Core" was renamed ".NET" from version 5 -- not to be confused with ".NET Framework 5", which was renamed ".NET Core 1.0" before launch.

Don't forget ".NET Standard" that could be used from both .NET Core and .NET Framework, until version 2.1.

.NET is kind of like JVM but also usually includes an SDK, a build system and a package manager (NuGet), when people use the term.

It is then targeted by various languages: C#, F#, VB.NET and smaller projects - anything that emits "canonical" .NET assemblies (that use IL) works.

ASP.NET Core is a web framework for .NET, it's distributed with SDK so "comes out of box".

EF Core is an ORM framework, it does not come out of box and can be added as nuget packages (the dependency itself and then specific DB driver).

Kind of?

All these, effectively, plug into ASP.NET Core, on top of WebApplicationBuilder and WebApplication. They are then, usually, hosted with Kestrel (web server) and operate with the same set of abstractions. Razor Pages and Blazor are distinct names and I have never seen anyone confuse them with the ASP.NET Core itself.

I mean you literally work on Dotnet, don't you? That's probably why you don't have issues with the naming. I agree that it's currently fine now that it stabilized on the core naming scheme, but I don't see how it was very confusing when there's stuff like ASP.NET Core on framework, and ASP.NET Core on Dotnet core... that's just confusing, especially since other ecosystems don't usually have such a weird naming scheme.

It’s only problem in the eyes of HN because it is low-effort complaint from people who never used .NET and simply repeat what they read elsewhere. It’s just a popular thing to do, to make negative comments like this.

Otherwise, this problem is completely made up in terms of anything that happened in last there-four years.

And no, I don’t work on .NET save for a few simple contributions.

So the asp.net thing I highlighted isn't true? I'm sure the issue isn't that bad, but it sure is weird to claim that the naming wasn't horrible. Like, surely you could agree that the naming was much worse than it should've been?

It seems they identify so closely with dotnet that any perceived criticism is taken as a personal slight. It's the only thing that explains such a rabid response to a reasonable observation.

I don't identify with something that is just a tool (although one of the best ones). What does piss me off however is when people perpetuate false facts, straight up lie about arbitrary matters, are incapable of changing their mind when facts change and when disagreed with, resort to personal attacks.

This can be seen through other issues in the industry but is particularly felt in bad teams - social cohesion resides on a set of commonly agreed upon beliefs within a group and the worse the team is the more such beliefs are at odds with reality, and all I've been seeing in the past year is HN slipping more and more into this when it comes to programming.

Which languages do you program in? (asp.net core name is fine, because - who cares? it's not like js does any better, it's something you don't think about twice and is irrelevant to the experience)

Well no said that it was a huge deal. The point was that msft is horrible at naming things. Do you have any example of something like this happening in any other ecosystem?

"

In summary:

ASP.NET MVC 5: ASP.NET MVC 5 was a short-lived successor to ASP.NET MVC 4. It was released alongside ASP.NET Web API 2 in 2014. It actually ran on top of ASP.NET 4 (i.e. .NET 4.x version of System.Web.dll). Note that the entire

ASP.NET MVC library is now obsolete.

ASP.NET 5 was EOL'd and rebranded as ASP.NET Core and it includes the functionality of "ASP.NET MVC 5" built-in.

ASP.NET Core 1 and ASP.NET Core 2 can run on either .NET Core (cross-platform) or .NET Framework (Windows) because it targets .NET Standard.

ASP.NET Core 3 now only runs on .NET Core 3.0.

ASP.NET Core 4 does not exist and never has.

ASP.NET Core 5 exists (as of August 2020) however its official name seems to be "ASP.NET Core for .NET 5" and it only runs on .NET 5."

https://stackoverflow.com/a/51391202

Again, not a big deal in retrospect now that it has stabilized. But it was a huge deal. Because you couldn't easily figure out if you needed to use Asp.net MVC, or if that version is now deprecated, and if the core you're using means dotnetcore or aspnet core on framework... again, it's the type of stuff that matters when it happens and leaves a mark afterwards.

Whereas I do use dotnet daily, have done so for years, and I like the C# language and a lot of the ecosystem, certainly over Java .. and I still hate the naming scheme. I know the difference between all the confusingly named things, it's just that Microsoft branding insists on flattening them all together.

The internal codenames were better. If I say "Roslyn" it's a lot clearer what I'm referring to.

Do you expect anything else from the company that introduced "Plays For Sure" branding over a wide ecosystem, only to kill the ENTIRE thing (not just the branding) less than 5 years later? (as in, all purchased content became unplayable)

Still one of the funniest pieces of corporate stupudity ever.

And not just because they killed it. Even when they introduced it, the "plays for sure" brand meant music that couldn't be played on the ipod or most mobile phones. That it quickly came to mean music that couldn't be played anywhere was just the icing on the cake.

Windows Surface Copilot for Workgroups 360.Net

It's kind of like those cryptographic keys they use a dictionary for: a nonsense noun phrase representing a number. Perhaps they're just encoding a SKU?

dotnet for me is the most obvious example of how terrible they are at branding. First there was .NET framework which was windows only (note I'm ignoring Xamarian because it was originally not owned by MS).

Then they decided to do a reboot with cross platform support and named that Dotnet Core. This was honestly fine. But then we reach late in the 3.x timeframe and they declare for real and for true that Framework is a dead end, and Dotnet Core will be the one true Dotnet moving forward. And to indicate this, the next version will remove Core from the name, skip 4 because it would be too confusing with Framework, and just call it Dotnet 5.

I wish they'd stuck with the Core name, if no other reason so if they decide in another 15 years to do a major rebuild again they can just come up with another new descriptor the way Core described the transition away from Framework and towards real cross platform support from MS itself.

> Their "copilot" brand is so weird and... muddled.

Microsoft can't brand anything cleanly and unambiguously.

"MSN Messenger" / "Windows Messenger" / "Windows Live Messenger" / "Microsoft Lync"

"Internet Explorer" / "Windows Explorer" / "MSN Explorer"

Windows 95 email client "Exchange" / email server platform "Exchange"

"Outlook" / "Outlook Web Access" / "Outlook Web App" / "Outlook.com" / "new Outlook for Windows"

"Microsoft Teams" / "New Microsoft Teams"

"Office Communicator" / "Microsoft Lync" / "Skype for Business" / "Skype" / "Skype for Business Online" / "Skype for Business for Microsoft 365"

The most guffaw-inducing branding, to me, was the recently-announced remote desktop client called "Windows App". That's going to be an easy one for users to search for.

(For guffaw-inducing I suppose there's also the Windows 98-era "Critical Update Notification Tool"[0])

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Update#Critical_Update...

(Edit: Yikes. I didn't even consider .NET. Windows.NET server. .NET Framework. ASP.NET. .NET Core. Ugh...)

More editing because I can't stop myself:

"Great Plains" / "Navision" / "Solomon" / "Axapta" / "Dynamics AX" / "Dynamics GP" / "Dynamics SL" / "Dynamics NAV" / "Dynamics 365" / "Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations" / "Dynamics 365 Business Central"

More editing because I was egged-on... >smile<

"Windows Defender" / "Microsoft Defender" / "Windows Defender Antivirus" / "Windows Firewall" / "Windows Defender Firewall" / "Microsoft AntiSpyware" / "Microsoft Security Essentials" / "System Center Endpoint Protection"

Oh, ugh... then there's the whole "Microsoft Proxy" / "Forefront" / "Federated Identity Manager" nightmare.

Then there's "System Management Server" / "System Center" and that whole train of products.

Edit: Forgot SharePoint

"Microsoft FrontPage" / "Site Server" / "Site Server Commerce Edition" / "Office Server" / "SharePoint Portal Server" / "Windows SharePoint Services" / "Microsoft Office SharePoint Server" / "SharePoint Foundation" / "SharePoint Server" / "SharePoint Standard" / "SharePoint Enterprise" / "SharePoint Online" / "SharePoint Designer"

To add to this, I have always found the Xbox naming conventions to be confusing, personally. "Xbox One" is the third one, not the original "Xbox" and the two newest models are named almost identically; "Xbox Series X" vs "Xbox Series S".

To make it even more confusing, the Xbox One had the mid-generation updates called Xbox One S (slimmer, a few additional features) and the Xbox One X (more powerful.)

So from oldest to newest it's

- Xbox

- Xbox 360

- Xbox One

  - Xbox One S  

  - Xbox One X

- Xbox Series X and Series S (released simultaneously: S is smaller, X is more powerful)

So for a period of time in stores you might see a One S, a One X, a Series S, and a Series X. If you aren't a gamer, it's a complete mystery which is the newest and most powerful. I'm sure some kids got the wrong console for Christmas, as the One X was at times more expensive than a Series S, despite being an older console that would later not support many games that the Series S supports. This would be even more likely to happen if the Series X was out of stock (so the most expensive Xbox console at the store might be a discontinued model that won't support all the new games.)

In contrast, it's pretty obvious that a PlayStation 5 is going to be better than a PlayStation 4. Yes, a quick search will show which is the newest and most powerful Xbox, but if people have to do research to find out which is your best console and they don't have to do that for your competitor, then you have a confusing naming scheme.

I owned an XBox One something. I believed "Series X" was short-hand for "Xbox One X", as I believed that there were maybe other kinds of "Xbox X". I even bought a game that didn't run on my console because it was for a "series" something, which was not actually what I had. "Series" is often used as an english word to identify a product line. Like "Is that the 'premium' series?"

Sometimes I joke about how confusing the xbox names are. I probably couldn't come up with a more confusing set of names if I tried.

Rumour has it (not sure if this was ever confirmed) that one of the big reasons the second Xbox was called the Xbox 360 was to avoid unfavourable number comparisons with Sony. The Xbox launched vs the PS2, which meant the "Xbox 2" would compete against the PS3. As 3 is bigger than 2, it would make the second Xbox look bad. Hence, Xbox 360. Both have a 3, no number issues. For what it's worth, Robbie Bach (former Chief Xbox Officer) is on the record as saying one of the potential names for the second Xbox was just "Xbox 3" to catch up the PS3.

While officially the meaning of the "Xbox One" name was something about it being an all-in-one entertainment system, I would put money on it being chosen as some kind of subliminal naming scheme as it sounds like "Xbox Won".

Steve Ballmer was hoping people would call it "the one". This was also around the time that SkyDrive had to be renamed to OneDrive due to trademark issues with Sky.

I always judge corporations whenever they resort to "One" as a brand because it signals a total lack of creativity and is likely the result of executives fighting each other and settling on the most mundane and inoffensive concept to represent "it does everything".

I always thought calling it Xbox One was the most bizarre choice in the history of branding and marketing. Given how common it is to retroactively refer to the first item in a series as "One" (Rambo 1, Rocky 1, Playstation 1, etc), it seems intentionally designed to cause confusion.

This is beyond being bizarre. I have never owned an Xbox, and always thought that Xbox One was a re-release of the original Xbox, similar to the Original PlayStation -> PS One. I am hearing it for the first time here that it was a third generation device.

I find that name even more baffling when the reason they apparently branded the previous one Xbox 360 was so that they wouldn't go against the PS3 with an Xbox 2. Somehow it was now fine for an Xbox One to go against a PS4.

Sure, but the problem is S and X sound very similar when spoken, causing more confusion. Try clarifying which one you are talking about in a loud room at a conference.

One team I was on had a bug where the product name was so long that it was being truncated in the about dialog. It was something like:

Microsoft Dynamics® CRM 2011 for Microsoft® Office Outlook® with Offline Access

"Active Directory" / "Active Directory Domain Service" / "Active Directory Application Mode" / "Active Directory Lightweight Directory Services" / "Azure Active Directory" / "Entra Id" / "Active Directory Federation Services" / "Active Directory Certificate Services" / "Active Directory Rights Management Services"

Ugh... and don't even get my started about the pronunciation of "Azure" (or the fact that, somehow, they took a project code-named "Red Dog" and named it after the color blue. Then there's the JEt Red and Jet Blue database engines, one of which was used by Active Directory...)

You're forgetting Azure Active Directory Domain Services, which is presumably now named Entra AD Domain Services which is different from Azure AD/Entra AD because it's a managed domain controller in Azure...

In 2013, "Team Foundation Services" was renamed to "Visual Studio Online".

In 2015, "Visual Studio Online" was renamed to "Visual Studio Team Services".

In 2018, "Visual Studio Team Services" was renamed to "Azure DevOps Services".

They're actually still separate products. They don't want to sell office 365 but it still exists.

M365 = office 365 plus windows as a service licensing. If you buy your licenses as lifetime with your laptops it is much cheaper to simply subscribe to O365. Thus Microsoft is gating more and more things behind M365 to get companies to pay for the expensive windows subscription.

It’s called “Intune” / sorry, “Microsoft Endpoint Manager” is a way better name / just kidding, it’s “Intune” again! We had you there for a second though!

Don’t forget “Windows Live Mesh/Windows Live FolderShare/Live Mesh/Windows Live Sync/Windows Live Folders/Windows Live SkyDrive/SkyDrive/OneDrive”

To be fair, they have mostly settled on OneDrive after the lawsuit that forced the name change.

You've missed Defender there

Edit: you updated defender, but you missed the depth of the rabbit hole. There's defender for office 365, there's defender for IoT, for Containers, for cloud, for cloud apps, for identity. There's one for gramma too

A Microsoft employee did once joke to me that if Microsoft had invented the holy grail it would be called the Microsoft life preserver 3.4 Pro+ or something like that

It was a joke about the nature of these names and the nature of that particular problem (and nothing about engineers, really) -- but I guess the downvoters didn't get it.

The thing about Copilot is that outside of the developer niche, nobody knows the term. The vast majority of Microsoft's customer base will recognise neither the Xbox feature nor the Github product.

In the same way, their .NET naming has never bothered anyone they actually care about selling stuff to. It's a tad annoying for developers, but nothing more than that.

I find the way they renamed their Office products every five years much more baffling. Consumers probably don't care beyond "office" but I'd expect them to protect their business clients from their ever changing names for office products at least.

Personally, I think Microsoft wastes the name "Cortana" on their mediocre Google Assistant competitor. I haven't really seen Copilot do much copiloting, it mostly seems to answer questions and follow instructions. Maybe Windows 12 will be different, but I kind of doubt it.

It’s not just negative associations. I believe GitHub had a blog post where they went into why they chose copilot.

The answer was more of subtly conveying its output needed to be checked

Copilot is also the name of a windows (and presumably xbox console) feature that allows you to combine multiple controllers and have them show up as one device.

Yes, and additionally the Copilot 360 user interface is a mess, processing time is slow, and the quality of results is poor. Using the Chat GPT or Claude interface produces much quicker/better results.

> you really can't convince me the above is the result of a coherent company-wide strategy

Well that was an ignorant thing to say given how widely famously Microsoft implemented it's stack ranking system and the toxic culture it produced (as intended). This is exactly the result of that strategy. People who thought it had gone away are mostly parroting Microsoft propaganda. I live here in town with these people. You don't get hired without having "Microsoft morals". It's all a desperate gold rush to find out who is going to get promoted.

I recall it was renamed to PixelSense right when the Surface tablets arrived.

Then they named an entire input device line "Surface" as well. When you search for "surface keyboard" you will get results for desktop keyboards and type-covers for tablets.

I agree, and it's strange to see 'Copilot' everywhere. By the way, does anyone know how the development/update of GitHub Copilot is going? I tried to look for a blog from the engineering team or something similar, but I can't find anything.

I don't find it all that confusing, most of them work similarly and I don't see how you could call them different things. I just hate that their logos aren't uniform. The Windows & Bing logo is a rainbow color (looks awful), and the Edge version is blue and green (looks way better). It's not remotely comparable to their other branding flubs (Teams, .NET, etc). I wish they would have kept the Cortana and Continuum brands. Recall is basically what Continuum should have been, why not just keep the name? Co-pilot works for naming in some cases, but when you look at the GPT 4o voice demo that seems like the Microsoft white labelled version should be Cortana.

Cortana's biggest fault was mostly that it wasn't very good, and the things it was good at required the Cloud...but with the new AI chips, some of that can be offloaded and work much faster. It's like when they added Cortana to Xbox and killed the other voice commands. Then it just became a very slow process when the old on-board model was way faster. Even the voice commands became longer "Xbox on" to "Hey Cortana, turn on my Xbox" then having to wait for it to ping a server and come back to your device.

> Their "copilot" brand is so weird and... muddled.

It’s Watson.

Ha ha, only serious. You’re right. It feels like an umbrella brand they’re just tossing around, because AI — and Copilot in particular — is hot in Redmond.

I find the new Copilot key funny, because it feels like a pantomime of the Windows 95 keys[0], but with Logitech characteristics.

[*] Okay, it’s been 30 years. I haven’t used a Windows computer in almost as long, and so I ask. Do people who use Windows actually use any of those keys? It always seemed weird that you’d need the start menu at a single button press, and the right click menu at a keyboard press felt even weirder. I think I only used the Windows key as a meta under Linux, and I don’t think I ever hit the context menu key out of anything but curiosity.

I use the "Windows" key pretty extensively, including to open the start menu (and then type in a search term, i.e. a program on my computer to launch).

I also use it extensively for "Windows" (operating system) level shortcuts: Win-R to open a run dialog, Win-E to open Explorer, Win- to move/resize windows, etc.)

That being said...I use it in basically the same way on Linux, and use the Command (Apple) key on Macs for essentially the same purposes.

I don't think I've ever used the "right click menu" key for anything, though. Most modern Windows keyboards don't include it, or have it hidden behind a manufacturer-specific function key.

Huh. You’re right. Some keyboard have both windows and the menu key, and others have only one menu key. I don’t know if this means Microsoft relaxed their “Made for Windows” standards, or higher profile manufacturers don’t care.

I use it a lot. Win and start typing to launch just about any app or open any document is really handy. Win and a number key launches or switches to that app pinned at that position on the taskbar. Win+L locks the screen whenever I get up from my desk. Win+Shift+S starts the screen clipper. Win+Left/Right snaps an app from one side to the other, win+shift+left/right switches between desktops, Win+Tab lets me drag apps from one desktop to another and see what's open where if needed, Win+E opens a new explorer window, Win+. opens the emoji keyboard. Those are just the ones I use almost every day, I probably use a few others a lot as well.

The windows key is pretty handy. Lots of good shortcuts, and they add new useful ones often. I don't tend to hit it by itself much anymore, because the start menu is so terrible and inconsistent, and anyway, we only run three programs anymore.

I don't think I've used the menu key... If I want to right click, there's the mouse, or mousekeys... But maybe I just missed out on learning to use it. Mostly everything in the context menu is in other places too that you might get to with the keyboard.

> Do people who use Windows actually use any of those keys?

I only use Windows at work, and there, I use the Windows key to lock my screen on demand, and to make cropped screenshots. That's about it.

At home, I never use that key for anything.

Microsoft is a "student body left groupthink" company. We once named EVERYTHING "Active" something, then EVERYTHING ".NET" something. This is just the latest in a long line of tradition of groupthink.

Copilot is a game-changer in coding, helping developers with real-time suggestions and code snippets. However, it's controversial because it relies on large datasets scraped from public code repositories. This raises intellectual property issues and concerns about algorithmic bias, as Copilot's suggestions are influenced by that data. Despite that, it's super useful, but Microsoft needs to address the legal and ethical issues around data usage and bias to keep it on the right track.

> We set out to solve one of the most frustrating problems we encounter daily – finding something we know we have seen before on our PC. Today, we must remember what file folder it was stored in, what website it was on, or scroll through hundreds of emails trying to find it.

It is indeed frustrating that one still cannot search effectively a local device, but it doesn't need AI to solve. It needs a proper search engine, and Microsoft has resisted that, for some mysterious reason, for 30+ years.

What there are still people who don't install Voidtools' Everything on all Windows PCs and assign it a global shortcut? Since I have it I don't even bother organizing stuff

Windows Everything finds any file globally in the blink of an eye, let's you sort in real time by size/date, live-edit your query, and also perform operations on the result in the list, so much better that any find

It's really baffling, isn't it? A part of me wonders if Microsoft is simply unable to figure out how to make a good Windows search and so is looking for AI to do it for them.

But it seems like shooting a mosquito with an elephant gun.

Microsoft has tried to make a "better" search before, by redesigning the file system and the metadata that can be tied to files.

The idea was that you could search this:

> the phone numbers of all persons who live in Acapulco and each have more than 100 appearances in my photo collection and with whom I have had e-mail within last month

They had hyped this up as coming in Project Longhorn (which was eventually split into Vista and salvaged in Windows 7), but the new filesystem was eventually dropped like their other attempts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS

They should implement simple search first, so I don't need to reach grep for everything. Then they should implement pdftotext and fuzzy search. Of course everything should work instantly for small folders. That would be enough for 99% people.

The AI is the least interesting part of this announcement. Microsoft is giving ARM another try with a special branding that's supposed to guarantee some level of performance and quality. That's possibly huge news.

It's also notable that Qualcomm is officially upstreaming kernel support for the Snapdragon Elite platform that Microsoft is pushing, so those systems may actually not suck at running Linux.

Yes, and Lenovo is releasing a new Qualcomm-powered ThinkPad, which are known to be a Linux-friendly laptops.

> The ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 is, of course, business-focused. It will have the same Snapdragon chip, storage capacity, and webcam but will support up to 64GB of memory and one of three 14-inch display options: an IPS with up to 400 nits of brightness; an IPS touch display; or an OLED that covers 100 percent of the DCI-P3 color gamut, also with 400 nits of brightness.

>Lenovo expects the Yoga Slim 7x 14 Gen 9 to start at $1,199 and the ThinkPad T14s Gen 6 to start at $1,699. Both will be available in June.

Source: https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/20/24160819/lenovo-qualcomm-...

Lenovo has been selling a Qualcomm laptop, the Thinkpad x13s, for several years already with questionable at best Linux support so I wouldn't expect the new ones to be much better.

It isn't so much about the chip but that there are almost no standards for how things should work when compared to a PC. Almost every PC boots the same. Almost no ARM device boots like another.

There has only ever been 1 or 2 ARM SoCs for Windows for the last 10 years. It didn't make Linux support on them easy.

Hmm. The first thing I do when I buy any new machine is to format the hard drive so I can install my own OS on it. I don't really trust any manufacturer to get that right.

So, if it's so hard to get Linux running that you need to have it preinstalled for you, then it's not really a good Linux machine in my view.

It's not as much "How do I install Linux?" as it is "The manufacturer supports these Linux images but my hardware isn't working right with it so I can call them and they're supposed to have an answer as to making it actually work". Otherwise you're just as good to buy any random laptop and try to make sure everything is supported yourself (not a horrible option, just not the premise of these kinds of laptops).

I had decent luck with Dell (though it was an n=1 interaction so I'm not sure how it indicates overall) ~5 years back on this where there was some issue with the dual GPU nature of the 7730 where on this model you could actually completely bypass the iGPU (it wouldn't even show up as a PCIe device anymore) for the main screen but it was causing some sort of display desync after a few minutes on Linux but not Windows. Loaded up the official image, reproduced, opened a ticket, they sent a firmware patch, it worked.

That and that the manufacturer has worked to ensure that at least some version of Linux works on it well, i.e. has done the systems integration work. Otherwise it can be a death of a thousand paper cuts, where things kind of mostly work, sorta, occasionally.

I usually take it as, they installed Linux on it and support it. I will use my own install after formatting a drive (or carrying one over from the previous machine) but it’s more like a seal of approval that Linux works.

And if the company are good stewards, they will upstream any drivers/kernel modules for that hardware too.

> [Lenovo pricing]

Also available @ 75% off in 12mos on eBay because the used Lenovo market is a beautiful, beautiful thing.

I just picked up an unused T15 Gen2 11thGen 16Gb/256Gb for $390. In Warr until late 2026.

Bought a thin client today w/ similar specs for $350.

In the past a few Snapdragon 8 Gen x chip dev kits have had Linux support if I recall correctly. I'd love to have built a device out of them but they seem quite expensive unfortunately for consumers ($800-1000, often from grey market sources). It's nonetheless good to see Linux support.

Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 chip laptops are only just getting there. Last time I tried to daily it maybe 6 months ago, they didn't even have hardware rendering on the GPU, everything was rendered on the CPU. Ubuntu and Armbian have custom images for the x13s, no idea about the Volterra but it's much worse than the windows on ARM experience for that laptop and that's saying something.

I thought Microsoft requires UEFI + secure boot for Windows, and with no disabling option in the firmware setup, for Windows Arm PC? Or maybe it was "only" Microsoft Secure Boot and you can actually use a Linux distro? If this is the latter case, can you build and run the kernel you want or not?

Yeah, “ARM-based Linux laptop with 22h battery life” is much more interesting to me than “Windows 11 ARM-based AI PC”. If the TPU can eventually be utilized by open models under Linux that’s just a cherry on top.

Laptop battery life estimates outside of Apple are downright criminal. I'm still bitter over the time I bought a fully loaded Sony Vaio which had an advertised battery life of 11 hours. When in actuality, I only got less than three hours of battery life and complained, they explained to me that they meant it gets 11 hours of standby mode with the lid closed. I only made the mistake of buying a non-Apple laptop one more time with a fully loaded XPS which could barely manage 4 hours of battery life. I honestly have no idea how anyone can put up with non-Apple laptops. It's pure garbage out there.

Exactly. They're now aggressively competing with Apple with supposedly better performance and better battery life. That's huge. Apple was years ahead with the introduction of the M1 but it appears competition has finally caught up. All of this has to be proven in real life though, but so far all the newly announced ARM devices [0] look like impressive MacBook competitors on their own.

[0] So far it seems this are the devices that have been announced.

Microsoft: Surface Laptop 7, Surface Pro 11

Dell: XPS 13, Inspiron 14 and 14 Plus, Latitude 5455, Latitude 7455

HP: OmniBook X and Elitebook X

Lenovo: Yoga Slim 7 and ThinkPad 14s Gen 6.

Samsung: Galaxy Book4 Edge

Acer: Swift 14

They do some sleight of hand when doing the comparisons during the release today.

The Surface Laptop is physically a competitor to the actively cooled MacBook Pro (in fact it’s thicker).

Their performance and battery metrics are against the slimmer and passively cooled MacBook Air.

Their performance comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Elite when the M3 has throttled (their wording is sustained performance)

Their battery comparison is between the M3 and the Snapdragon X Plus.

That they interchange both freely is a strong tell that their devices don’t compete on all fronts like your comment suggests.

The only area where I think the snapdragon X will compete is price, because they’re claiming it’s $200 lower than a comparable M3 MacBook Air (but don’t disclose the exact comparison).

Still, a very strong showing from Qualcomm/Nuvia. However the sleight of hand leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

I am excited on having an ARM on a PC with Linux support but I never see Windows as an OS optimized for batteries beyond if they use ARM or x86. The Apple advantage continues to be a complete control of the device from hardware to the operating system, while the bloatware of Microsoft Windows makes an arbitrary use of resources.

This is not to say that Microsoft Windows is not an advanced OS, the problem is that it is not laser focus optimized.

I guess that's true but you can't make a leap like Apple did with their transition to ARM every few years. So it's good to see the competition catch up. And I'm perfectly happy with Windows laptops trailing Apple by a close margin instead of a 4 year gap.

I still won't believe it until reviewers get hands on. In October 2022 I wanted an efficient laptop for web development but didn't want to grab a mac, so I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad X13s with the Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which Qualcomm made similar promises about and it lived up to exactly 0% of them. The main draw, the battery life was worse than my old Blade 14 that ran Fedora, windows on ARM and their current emulation continues to suck, every so often core services would just not work. The Linux support is only just barely getting there, Ubuntu and Armbian have custom images, where a lot of stuff still doesn't work. The camera will never work because of proprietary blobs and the battery life is way worse than windows, no suspend, audio barely works, etc. And those aren't just problems of Lenovo or that thinkpad it stems from the platform. I ended up buying a macbook a few weeks ago and it was 2 years late, should have got it in the first place.

> Microsoft is giving ARM another try with a special branding that's supposed to guarantee some level of performance and quality.

I hope so. I've been a happy Windows for Arm user (via Parallels on Apple Silicon) for a year+ and it's been good. Based on that, I think drivers are going to be the biggest PITA for ARM-based PC users for the first couple years — for example, Google Drive doesn't work for that reason.

> I think drivers are going to be the biggest PITA for ARM-based PC users for the first couple years — for example, Google Drive doesn't work for that reason.

Google Drive does ship with Arm64 drivers, and patching the platform check out of the installer gets them installed just fine (40 84 f6 74 08 -> 40 84 f6 90 90).

No idea why they're blocking the install.

Yep. Both Parallels and VMware have good graphics acceleration, but Parallels is better. I too have been running a Windows ARM VM for work for a year or so.

Unfortunately, even though I wish I could get an M4 (or equivalent) ARM SoC in a PC, it is very unlikely that these chips are going to live up to the hype. Qualcomm has a bad track record of overstating and cherry-picking benchmarks.

All of their claims so far have been both impressive, and very squishy. Microsoft's own messaging around performance and battery life for their Surface devices was also unusually squishy. And I am a huge Surface Pro fan that would love nothing more than a fanless AND fast ARM Surface Pro.

I live in San Diego, and know countless Qualcomm employees, none of them give a shit about anything other than modems really. The rest of the SoC is just something to push 5G. They care as much about CPUs/SoCs as Intel did about 5G modems.

Think it’s worth mentioning that their Qualcomm exclusive windows laptop deal ends soon and this should allow AMD and NVIDIA to ramp up (arm) windows laptop cpus soon within the next few years.

An interview with Satya and the WSJ indicates it is actively cooled. Joanna asks him whether you’ll be able to hear the fans and he says they’re quiet versus missing.

The first iteration of Windows ARM didn't have any x86 emulation layer, so that one was doomed from the start. The second iteration did, but it initially couldn't run 64bit apps and the performance was poor. They do have 64bit support now and it sounds like the emulation performance has come a long way.

Here is my question though, comparing how this works on Mac.

Will Windows have the opposite? ARM running on x86?

I continue to wonder how Microsoft expects to work long term. Are they expecting that every developer is just going to keep x86 and ARM based app perpetually or users be stuck always using that emulation layer if they are running ARM?

Microsoft won't be able to 100% transition to ARM like Mac did. At some point all Intel Mac's will be old enough to no longer get the latest version of Mac and for developers to stop targeting and they drop Intel support.

I just don't see many developers bothering with an ARM native Windows version when doing so means they have to support both or risk annoying customers later.

I think the official line from Microsoft would be that most software should be using .NET anyway, and in that case the same binary should Just Work on either architecture. In reality there is still a lot of native software though, so who knows how that will play out. Games in particular will always be native.

You have to understand that Windows comes from a separate division than .NET and they have no overlap. Microsoft isn't a cohesive company. .NET comes from the developer division (DevDiv) and UWP comes from the Windows division (now Server & Cloud). The Windows folks always hated .NET and the developer division has been lukewarm about UWP.

The Microsoft panel of this comic sums it up nicely: https://bonkersworld.net/organizational-charts

Not really, plenty of Windows workloads are still about C++, in-proc COM and user space drivers, do require C++.

Not that WinUI really matters after all the mess WinRT/UWP went through, but it is basically C++ COM/WinRT with .NET bindings.

It's actually kinda annoying once I started paying attention, as many software vendors just detect "Windows" and give you a x86/x64 installer, even when the company offers a ARM64 build that would presumably be faster or be more energy efficient. I installed a bunch of stuff that were Intel binaries without even knowing that I wasn't running native. But I haven't noticed any performance issues, and yeah everything just works.

In 2018 that lockdown situation morphed into "S Mode" which you can turn off in the control panel. The only trick is that you can't turn it back on. It's just that the ecosystem isn't there, both in terms of developers and performant devices.

Hopefully today's announcement is a turning point for that but atm windows on ARM is about on the same tier as a pre-carplay infotainment system.

I think the idea is to all apps and developers gradually transition and develop with ARM support - after all even the mobile devices will be running on ARM sooner or later so future apps, games will be developed with ARM in mind anyway. x86 apps will be supported - with some paid support for example.

But it all depends on the market share of ARM at one point. But you can run DOS apps still so with emulation layer - and the increasing performance of ARM - one way or another old apps will be able to run on ARM. For those who will need to those.

Unlike Mac, Microsoft just can't drop past generations and call it a day.

> But it all depends on the market share of ARM at one point.

Right thats kinda my point, unless I have missed it I have yet to see any real talk about ARM on custom built machines and I doubt gamers are going to give that up anytime soon.

Apple was able to force the transition to happen. I highly doubt Microsoft is going to risk actually dropping x86 from Windows on any reasonable timescale and there has to be something for ARM to x86.

Unlike when Apple announced that all of Mac was transitioning, there isn't a reason for a developer to think that anytime soon they can drop x86, so why complicate what they have now by adding ARM?

> Right thats kinda my point, unless I have missed it I have yet to see any real talk about ARM on custom built machines and I doubt gamers are going to give that up anytime soon.

A lot of gaming these days is running on mobile phones and portable PCs - and now laptops - will highly likely leverage ARM sooner or later. Add to that some eGPU with Nvidia cards and you get a monster.

Intel is in a deep trouble.

>Unlike when Apple announced that all of Mac was transitioning, there isn't a reason for a developer to think that anytime soon they can drop x86, so why complicate what they have now by adding ARM?

ARM is the future as there is a desire to have long battery life and performance increase. Microsoft right now does have x86 emulation layer and app support right now is much better already than it was before (in RT era where it did not even have the emulator).

Devs are developing apps across all the devices and ARM based Mac is already requires you to develop ARM compatible apps.

>I have yet to see any real talk about ARM on custom built machines and I doubt gamers are going to give that up anytime soon.

The vast majority of gamers game on smartphones and tablets with ARM processors.

Some of the biggest gaming hits recently have also been cross-architecture and cross-platform, namely Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail. Native ARM and x86 releases, runs on Windows, Android, and iOS. There are also gaming hits like Fate/Grand Order that don't have an x86/Windows release at all due to not even considering desktops/laptops.

The future is already here.

> The vast majority of gamers game on smartphones and tablets with ARM processors.

Those are clearly not the gamers I am talking about. The gamers I am referring too are not switching to playing on mobile phones. If they are switching to handheld devices they are going with x86 devices like the Steam Deck.

There is a massive market out there of games that do not support those platforms. That are only just now scratching the surface with games like Death Stranding releasing on iPhone and Mac.

Except for Nintendo the 2 main AAA consoles are x86 based, and I have seen no rumors of that changing.

So great, there are large mobile games but lets not pretend that there is not a huge market that the future is not already here for and shows very little signs of actually changing anytime soon.

https://steamcharts.com/ that is what I am talking about. Which unless I am mistaken the only one of those in the top list that actually runs on mobile is PUBG.

> There are also gaming hits like Fate/Grand Order that don't have an x86/Windows release at all due to not even considering desktops/laptops.

That is nothing new, Pokemon GO came out in 2016. That isnt a sign that gaming is changing but that gaming is expanding to include new types of players. But the "hardcore" AAA gaming market still very much exists, and is firmly on x86 right now.

Porting a game from x86 Windows to ARM Windows may take some effort, but for most games, nowhere near as much as porting to a different operating system. There just isn’t that much assembly code or even SIMD intrinsic use in your average game. And thanks to Microsoft’s Arm64EC ABI, the conversion from x86 to ARM can be done piecemeal. If, say, the game depends on some proprietary third-party library that isn’t willing to offer an ARM version, that library can be run in emulation while the rest of the game is compiled natively for ARM.

The AAA game world is very conservative, so I can’t guarantee that PC game developers will port their codebases to ARM. It really depends on the size of the audience and how well the x86 emulator works as a substitute. Even if ARM takes over on Windows laptops, I’m not sure laptops are enough, when laptop users are already accustomed to not being able to run AAA games well.

But if the audience gets large enough, it’s hard to believe that developers won’t try recompiling. It’s just not the same level of effort as a port to Mac or Linux.

> The AAA game world is very conservative, so I can’t guarantee that PC game developers will port their codebases to ARM.

Unreal, Unity, CryEngine and Godot all support ARM, so - testing and third-party binary libraries aside - there shouldn't be any reason to not have an ARM port.

> Which unless I am mistaken the only one of those in the top list that actually runs on mobile is PUBG.

Even in that case it's "kind of but not really". PUBG Mobile is a distinct game from regular PUBG, they have similar core gameplay but they are developed independently of each other.

Good to know, thank you. I figured they went the Fortnite route and it was the same game.

But I don't play PUBG, so my main point stands. None of the top steam games support ARM.

Fortnite is the outlier there, being the exact same game across every platform. COD Mobile and Apex Mobile are/were also officially sanctioned clones of the original game, similar to PUBG Mobile.

>Those are clearly not the gamers I am talking about.

You specified gamers, you should have explicitly specified PC gamers if they are who you referred to.

Note that PC gamers are, as much as they deny it, a minority of out of all gamers as a whole. The vast majority of gamers play on mobile or consoles, and of those mobile far outnumbers consoles too.

Consoles can also switch processor architectures with the changing forces of the wind, they don't have to support backwards compatibility unlike x86 and Windows. If Windows ends up becoming more ARM dominant than x86, consoles will likely follow suit to make subsequent Windows ports (and then also mobile ports?) easier.

Going on a tangent, I find it very annoying that PC gamers despite being the minority somehow want to claim gamers aren't gamers. PC Master Race is a meme, not reality.

>Which unless I am mistaken the only one of those in the top list that actually runs on mobile is PUBG.

Stardew Valley at #10 also has mobile ports.[1][2]

>But the "hardcore" AAA gaming market still very much exists, and is firmly on x86 right now.

The games I cited are AAA games, FSVO AAA; they are developed and/or published by big, established studios and/or publishers. Frankly, I find the AAA moniker worthless these days, but I digress.

[1]: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stardew-valley/id1406710800

[2]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.chucklefis...

> I just don't see many developers bothering with an ARM native Windows version when doing so means they have to support both or risk annoying customers later.

The market dictates what developers do. If Windows on ARM is the new shiny and it hits the three key laptop parameters of no fan noise, long battery life, cool case, then people will buy it and developers will build for it.

I'm a Windows ARM user (Surface Pro X). For me the benefits (fanless, battery not running down randomly in your backpack, phone charger compatibility, integrated LTE, 16G RAM in that envelope), are worthwhile.

No one cares for power saving. Turn it into higher performance at same power usage and people will bite. Of course it has to actually be a real upgrade like the Apple Silicon chips were.

Really? The Recall feature is pretty interesting and potentially quite useful. I see their AI implementation as V 1.0 of bigger things to come.

Not quite. Hidden at the very end of Microsoft's blognouncement[1] is this tidbit (emphasis mine):

> We look forward to expanding through deep partnerships with Intel and AMD, starting with Lunar Lake and Strix. We will bring new Copilot+ PC experiences at a later date.

So it's less Microsoft pivoting to and giving ARM a try again but rather testing the waters and distributing the risks by introducing ARM into a line of laptops and tablets that will still be fundamentally x86. Arguably, the only reason ARM is first to store shelves is because Qualcomm released this generation first before Intel and AMD.

This isn't as significant as Apple throwing Intel out to pasture and converting to ARM wholesale, not yet anyway.

[1]: https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2024/05/20/introducing-copi...

apple never wanted to use intel hardware, they were forced to by motorola/IBM et al; whoever was selling them the PowerPC chips told them to pound sand because the xbox and playstation needed way more PPC chips than apple. Apple made a business decision to switch to intel, which caused a bit of a to-do in the community at the time. That apple switched off intel at their earliest possible chance - that which took time to "design" their own ARM cpu - doesn't really mean anything, in my opinion.

I wonder how many people remember all of the hardware platforms that NT 3.51 and NT 4 ran on (Sparc, etc)

Well, that's not what the story was at the time. "You don't order enough" was the reasoning.

Further, nearly contemporaneously after apple M chips debuted intel released chips with P and E cores. Furthermore, Intel made lots of chips that have TDP under 10W, even 5W - multicore, even. I still use them to run HA VMs for emergency communications internet gateways.

"power-efficient" is a weird thing to claim, anyhow. What does it mean? PPC were much faster per socket than maybe even server class chips by intel, if you wanted power efficiency you could run them slower and get whatever FLOPS/J intel could give.

I am very sure i remember Apple not having a choice.

Microsoft has no courage. They have to keep catering to every possible audience, so they’re not willing to pull the plug on x86, which means ARM will always play second fiddle.

> Microsoft has no courage

Sadly the headphone jack is definitely dead.

> They have to keep catering to every possible audience

That's not Microsoft's job at this point, they heavily invest and push the envelop where makers don't want to take the risk, but from there it's for Lenovo, Dell, HP, Asus etc. to decide what they want to market and which chip to push. The same way some of them put weight behind AMD while other went full Intel 100% of the time.

Microsoft and Windows (and by extension x86) achieved their desktop market dominance by respecting that most people want backwards compatibility.

Everything that has tried to go or is going against that tide either failed (eg: Itanium, Windows RT) or never had market share to lose in the first place (eg: MacOS, Linux in the consumer space).

Microsoft would be stupid to be "courageous" and drop backwards compatibility, that would even trump Apple's courage abandoning the headphone jack. It also makes business sense to keep your eggs in multiple baskets, assuming those baskets are each commercially viable.

> Microsoft ... to guarantee some level of performance and quality.That's possibly huge news.

Only when you lived on a remote island, with no access to news. /s

This Apple-genesis (Nuvia) and Microsoft-led (Pluton) Arm Oryon hardware provides rare boot standardization and optional upstream Linux on Arm EL2. With enterprise PC OEMs on board, there should be a healthy supply of used Arm Linux laptops in a few years. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40350408#40355554

  The system firmware will ship with 3 boot modes selectable via the setup interface:

  - Windows (this one has the Windows tcblauncher escalated to EL2 through Secure Launch)
  - Linux (this one stays at EL1)
  - Linux w/ KVM (which jumps to EL2 [at ExitBootServices] before kernel handover)

Mainline Linux support is underway via Linaro/Qualcomm and Dell supports Ubuntu Linux as a first class OS. Linux support won't be perfect in OryonV1, but if enough customers use these devices with Linux, it can only improve. Device trees are likely still needed for Linux.

  Arm SystemReady SR/ES assumes sane ACPI tables. That's something that Snapdragon X (1st-gen) very much doesn't have. The ACPI tables present there are pretty much only usable for Windows if you want full functionality.. ESXi-Arm is bootable, but a number of patches were required.

April 2024 video & slides: https://eoss24.sched.com/event/1aBEy/enabling-linux-support-...

> the upstream kernel was used during the Snapdragon X1 Elite SoC Linux bringup.. demo booting upstream kernel with a Debian/Ubuntu userspace on a Snapdragon X1 Elite QRD (Qualcomm Reference Device).. Boot to console support has already landed on kernel version v6.7 and is on track to have remaining kernel support land by the time the first commercial device with X1 Elite SoC comes out on the market.

If the following does not happen in 2 years I will eat my hat:

They will have performance problems. They will have compatibility problems. They will have poor repairability and zero repair network and support. The software will be abandoned and completely useless within 18 months. They will fail very early but just outside a standard 1 year warranty. This will be a lot of e-waste. Regulatory or national bodies will step in and force privacy regulations which make all of this unworkable.

They've been selling ARM Surface devices for a while now. Not sure why these would suddenly fall over and stop working.

Even if the AI stuff doesn't pan out that doesn't make it e-waste, that just makes it a normal PC that could do everything previous PCs could do anyway.

If in 18 months anyone feels that their ARM laptop isn't cutting it, i'll gladly pay $0.15/$1.00 for them. I know lots of people who could definitely benefit from a laptop that cannot afford them, and IME ARM runs linux just fine.

> "Easily find and remember what you have seen in your PC with Recall"

I can't even get Windows File Explorer to reliably search for a file by name. It frequently freezes or shows no results.

You're lucky to get that far. I got a tablet with 32-bit Windows 10, which doesn't get updates any more. When I tap the search box, the on-screen keyboard appears ... and then immediately closes again.

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