Now, Walking Cat has uncovered a change in the latest Fast Ring build that indicates a shift in the way new features are delivered to the users. Microsoft recently published a new app on the Microsoft Store called the “Windows Feature Experience Pack”. The app looks like a dummy at the moment but it does coincide with a small change made to the About section of the Settings app. The About section now shows Windows Feature Experience Pack under Windows Specifications. The version number is entirely different from the OS Build number which currently is 19536.1000.
According to Walking Cat, this indicates a shift in the way shell features are delivered to the users. It looks like Microsoft might deliver shell experiences separately in the future.
This is one of the unicorns Microsoft seems to have been chasing for a very, very lone time. The ability to more easily update core parts of the operating system without interrupting users, and outside of large operating system updates, has been improving with every single major release – from XP to today – but Microsoft is still a long way off.
In fairness to Microsoft, Apple is still tying things like Safari to operating system updates in both iOS and macOS, and Google is also slowly but surely untangling Android to bypass OEMs and carriers to deliver updates faster. This is an industry-wide trend.
Sounds like they’re taking the “desktop experience” installable role from Server 20xx and exposing the same split in the desktop OS. If so the work has already mostly been done – it’d be primarily compatibility testing etc for the same thing on W10.
Can someone explain what “Feature Experience” and “Shell Experiences” actually are? I’m not in windows world for a long time now, maybe that is the reason I do not understand this… Looking from non-win world, expressions like “Feature Experience” sound a lot like marketing BS or millennial talk, but maybe I’m wrong or too old or both…
Not sure about Feature Experience, but in Server versions, the Shell Experience comprises the desktop shell, explorer, and all the bundled GUI tools (everything from Charmap.exe and regedit32.exe to the Microsoft Management Console). Without it, you get a bare console, or possibly a cmd.exe window
Thanks! So, it is a bundle of programs comprising shell, essentially… Any idea why it is an “shell experience” and not just shell? What makes it an “experience”, so it is different from other shells that are just shells?
In the server version it also includes a whole bunch of libraries and system services that implement various bits of the user environment (there’s lots of programs that won’t run under Server Core because bits of the OS just don’t exist)
They may move that split a bit for the desktop variant for compatibility reasons (which will probably involve splitting things for both OSes under the hood and just bundling them together differently)
As for “Experience” – marketing I suppose? MS branding is often odd.
Think ever more buggy,bloated and slow extensions like those you see for Gnome 3……It’s really sad the utter horror software is becoming these days.
That covers several modern software development paradigms as well as pretty much every bureaucracy within a democracy!
What the hell does Gnome 3 have to do with this news item? Regarding your other comments, we know by now that Gnome 3 has apparently disappointed you, get over it. Or get some counseling.
The teams are separated now and this does allow the CoreOS team to work on a new features that are not dependent on the UI and features that may not be a good fit on your typical computer. This also allows the Shell team to build UIs and experiences that don’t necessarily rely on Windows as the underlying OS.
I’d actually be much more interested in it the other way around – allowing third parties to add the UI on top of the Windows Core. I doubt they would open this up, but it would be nice if they did.
Such a question, this applies only to stationary PCs or also Chromeboxes? If yes, how updates will be delivered?
Indeed, on many chromeboxes all the software is already installed. And also many functions are modified.
After all, some work on Android or Windows.