Microsoft has been working for years to come up with a version of Windows that doesn’t depend on parts of the programming code used in earlier versions of Windows. As each new version was developed some of the old code was reused – why reinvent the wheel – but after so many years this also causes problems. The people who best understood how some old code worked move on; stuff was designed years ago when today’s threats were never imagined, so we now find they’re insecure; new code runs into unexpected compatibility problems with the old code; Windows itself becomes huge and bloated etc. For a while Microsoft hoped the solution would be its Windows store and the UWP apps it hoped would be developed to fill it – if everything was UWP then lots of that old code wouldn’t be needed. But that never happened.
What Microsoft came up with after several attempts is a new version of Windows that aims to accomplish several goals, including leaving lots of that old baggage behind, Windows 10X. It will, at least initially, only come preinstalled on devices, so no worrying about driver installation or compatibility. It will be modular, so one version of Windows will work on every device form factor by changing only one or two modules. But maybe the most significant change is that most everything will run in containers, and that’s the part that will probably affect the Windows you use in the future.
Containers are like VMs [Virtual Machines] in that they’re isolated from the OS [Operating System] they run on. But VMs aren’t really that efficient, because there’s lots of overhead to emulating hardware in software, because you’re not making direct [best] use of the hardware itself, e.g. GPUs, and because it takes time to boot or start the OS in a VM. A container is like a lighter weight VM hybrid that tries to reduce or eliminate those inefficiencies. It uses hardware directly, so there’s better performance and less overhead, while it’s smaller than a similar VM, so it’s faster starting, and both faster and easier to replicate. But it also retains the isolation that makes VMs attractive.
Using containers in Windows is not new – Microsoft started down this path years ago, e.g. with Internet Explorer’s protected mode – and they’ve been slowly increasing the use of containers for better corporate security. And then there’s Win10’s Sandbox – basically Windows desktop in a container. In Windows 10X containers are part of an effort to isolate the core Windows files, not unlike an Android cell phone, both for better security and to better allow for a sort of duplicate OS, which can be updated without interfering with normal operation, then switched into active mode with a reboot.
No one knows how much of Windows 10X will become a part of the Windows we’re using now – Microsoft doesn’t know yet how well any of it will work out in real life, &/or whether the new devices using 10X will go the way of Windows Phone. But more use of containers is almost a sure bet. Their isolation means better security, fewer software compatibility issues, less chance for some app to muck up Windows basically, and all that potentially means less work for Microsoft’s developers, and that means less cost for Microsoft.