Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

blogs.windows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

471–480 of 567 posts

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#471

Post by kitsunesoba »

kcb wrote: post #460
kotaKat wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I'm sitting here shocked at everyone's hate. I took a major leap and bought a Thinkpad X13s, with the same 8cx Gen 3 CPU this thing has. I am beyond impressed at it. Windows 11 on it - while, yes, it's Windows 11 with its own concerns and issues - runs flawlessly. I've been able to run my traditional x86 and x64 workloads - even things like arm64 Tailscale without issues, and I get amazing battery life. I am 10…

There's a lot of the "it has less geekbenches than the M1 so it must be a total piece of crap" going on. I have a far less performant 8cx Gen 1 laptop with similar experience to you. It's no workstation but general usage and browsing work as well as you'd expect a modern laptop. With great battery life and total silence. This thing is basically the most performant ARM soc on the market with a lot of memory, fast stor…

> There's a lot of the "it has less geekbenches than the M1 so it must be a total piece of crap" going on.

It's not that it benches worse than an M1, but rather that it doesn't do well against comparable x86 laptops. The whole reason M-series sells as well as it does is because people don't feel like they're giving up generations of power increases by buying them.

Low power ARM laptops have been a thing for a long time in the form of Chromebooks, and adding Windows to the equation alone isn't enough to get most people to take notice. For Windows on ARM to work, the hardware it's running on has to be at least as powerful as mainstream x86 laptops.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#472

Post by svnpenn »

withinrafael wrote: post #420

This is Microsoft's second go at a developer-focused ARM kit. You may recall the first was called the Snapdragon Developer Kit [1] and was a miserable machine. It appears Microsoft has already pulled it from the Microsoft Store [2]. There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.) Seems like a…

> I fear web (electron, etc.) has become good enough for Windows users.

You seem to be talking without regard to the actual facts. Plenty of programming languages offer first class Windows support, including:

Go, Rust, Zig, D, Nim, Python, PHP, Ruby, and others.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#473

Post by lmm »

tomcam wrote: post #251

Haven’t bought a Windows machine in a few years. It seems like this would likely be useful as a general purpose development machine because there is probably no crapware installed. Do you think this is a plausible argument to buy one or are they now all infested no matter what?

Buying from Microsoft themselves, or Signature Edition systems, is certainly a less bad option than typical windows manufacturers. You still get Candy Crush preinstalled though.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#474

Post by jhickok »

wyldfire wrote: post #422
MBCook wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m out of the Windows ecosystem, except one machine at work. I’d love Windows on ARM to work. I love my M1 and would like something comparable. But Apple had the M1 and the ARM PCs seem to be based on iPhone 7 level chips (perceptually). “You can have Intel or ARM. No one buys ARM so there is little software. Windows was ruined on ARM for a long time. Your ARM laptop will be way slower, but it will be cheap because…

> Your ARM laptop will be way slower, but it will be cheap because the only ones you can buy are ultra-low spec with terrible components like eMMC storage. It's not clear what you're quoting from. But it's out of date, now. The last generation (or two?) of windows ARM laptops certainly have NVMe storage. And they're not generally cheap (in cost nor components). > MS can’t fix it (without their own chip) and Qualcomm…

MS has been credibly rumored to be designing their own ARM processors for both Azure and the Surface lineup: https://www.theverge.com/2020/12/18/22189450/microsoft-arm-p...

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#475

Post by [deleted] »

Joe_Boogz wrote: post #197

It appears the consensus is HN is hesitant about the Windows on ARM push. I really want this to succeed. If this gains traction then we should start seeing support for windows laptops on ARM. As a dev who prefers windows but has a m1 MacBook b/c of the battery life I really hope this works out.

[deleted]

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#476

Post by josephg »

MBCook wrote: post #465
hallway_monitor wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not upset but resigned I guess. Making do for now - typing this on my Macbook but my main desktop is Windows as is my work Laptop. Could Windows have better battery life? Probably only by dropping backward compatibility and moving to a Linux kernel or something radical.

A lot of stuff on MacOS ran faster on an M1 with Rosetta 2 than it ran on the Intel chips Apple was selling the year before. For something not highly performance sensitive like office suite or line of business stuff you’d probably be fine with a half-decent ARM chip. So much of what we do these days is a web browser (ported) or a secret web browser (Electron/etc). I work in Java, that can be ported if it’s not alread…

Yep. I'm curious if microsoft ever takes the reverse engineering work from Asahi linux and uses it to make a native Windows for Apple Silicon. Or just work with Apple like they did for Bootcamp and port the real Apple drivers to the windows driver model.

Apparently there's nothing stopping M1 macs from dual-booting other operating systems. As strange as it sounds, Apple laptops might make the best windows laptops you can buy today, so long as you don't need a powerful GPU. It would be like a reverse hackintosh.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#477

Post by jhickok »

DenisM wrote: post #456
my123 wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Snapdragon Developer Kit was built with a "cost above all" mandate, $219 target pricing but it just wasn't powerful enough. > There is no other supported desktop/CI/etc. solution for Windows on ARM. (Mac mini with Parallels/VMware is a popular unsupported alternative. It may still be your fastest.) Azure cloud instances are also an option. > but I'm not sure if there's remaining appetite for Windows target-specific d…

> Azure cloud instances are also an option. I couldn’t find ARM with windows, can you help?

It's in Public Preview, I believe. I was able to create one relatively easily. https://imgur.com/a/bHXcNTz

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#478

Post by Joe_Boogz »

ankurdhama wrote: post #466
Joe_Boogz wrote: post #197

It appears the consensus is HN is hesitant about the Windows on ARM push. I really want this to succeed. If this gains traction then we should start seeing support for windows laptops on ARM. As a dev who prefers windows but has a m1 MacBook b/c of the battery life I really hope this works out.

I have seen a lot of comments/discussions about battery life of laptops but my opinion is that laptops are really bad ergonomically for any kind of work that goes beyond few minutes. I always recommend people to attach the laptop to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse. It seems that people do use laptops for doing work on the go and that too for long hours.

I work remote, if I want to do anything computer related outside of work then it basically *has* to be on a laptop. I just can’t commit to spending more time at my desk for personal projects / etc. An efficient/fast laptop that I can use wherever (coffee shop / GFs house / Parents) is a game changer for me. Every Windows laptop I’ve owned has required to me be tethered to a wall socket after 1-2 hours of use. These MacBooks literally last an entire weekend of moderate - heavy use. It’s truly wild and is an experience that I crave for a windows laptop.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#479

Post by matheusmoreira »

no_time wrote: post #327
chocolatkey wrote: post #121

The most interesting part to me was the quote from Denuvo, presumably testing out pluton: “The Volterra devices are neat and powerful, ideal for us to test our market-leading anti-piracy and anti-cheat game security technologies. They’re also very quiet, and they just work out of the box.” – Reinhard Blaukovitsch, Managing Director of Denuvo by Irdeto

I wonder how many years until every DRM vendor can enforce pluton as a baseline. 5 more?

I just read about Pluton and honestly I'm not even shocked anymore. I'm glad I could enjoy free computing while it lasted.

Re: Available Today: Windows Dev Kit 2023 a.k.a. Project Volterra

#480

Post by zenosmosis »

fomine3 wrote: post #454
csydas wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think MS needs to push this if they want to succeed, they need to start making a consumer friendly machine that Windows runs fantastically on. For an "acceptable" laptop, the price point is already pretty close to $1000, and before I would have a tentative recommendation of MacBooks/Macbook Airs because of the learning curve of MacOS. With M1/M2 and how much better it is than anything else on the consumer mar…

> Gaming isn't even that much of an issue anymore, so for casual players it's pretty fine. I don't expect "casual" gamers setup Wine+Proton+MoltenVK. It's better to say that let's play game on PlayStation. If you mean really "casual", they play on iPhone.

Cloud gaming is an option as well.
Post reply on HN