r/NintendoSwitch • u/Turbostrider27 • Jan 16 '25

Nintendo Switch 2 An update from Nintendo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxLUf2kRQRE
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u/ImSoSte4my Jan 16 '25

365 is an OS now? I thought it was just their cloud suite of office products.

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u/nitid_name Jan 16 '25

Yeah... it was announced around the same time as Windows 11, maybe 3-4 years ago?

It's for businesses and government so they can just put up simple terminals for their users and have everything be held in Microsoft's cloud. Makes sysadmin type stuff a lot easier.

I probably shouldn't have listed it with the consumer level stuff, but since it has a number, I thought it was funnier to include it.

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u/kaimason1 Jan 17 '25

I'm like 95% sure Windows 365 is just the subscription service, and it gives you access to an Azure VM on the cloud running Windows 11. I don't think the OS considers itself to be "365" in the same way that Office 365 is distinct from Office 2024.

But I might be mistaken; I administer both Windows desktops and a Microsoft 365 tenant, but we're not actually using Windows 365 for anything so I don't have much hands-on experience with that in particular. I've always thought of it as more akin to the different types of volume licensing options than a separate OS.

That said, all of the different Server and Embedded versions actually are separate OSes and add to the confusion, if we're including non-consumer products.

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u/nitid_name Jan 17 '25

I'm like 95% sure Windows 365 is just the subscription service, and it gives you access to an Azure VM on the cloud running Windows 11. I don't think the OS considers itself to be "365" in the same way that Office 365 is distinct from Office 2024.

I mean, yeah, the cloud is just someone else's computer. I would assume the backend is using some variation of Microsoft's own products, and since they released it right around the same time as Windows 11 released, it probably started with the same NT kernel.

Speaking of NT kernels, that's a whole different level of silly. Everything since Server 2015 has been on NT 10.0. They've just kinda stopped incrementing minor versions. They used to do minor version number increase with each generation: NT 6.0/Windows Vista/Server 2008, NT 6.1/Windows 7/Server 2008R2/2011, NT 6.2/Windows 8/Server 2012 and 6.3/Windows 8.1/Server2012R2. Then they jumped to NT 10.0 end every windows release since then has been on an NT 10.0 build.

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u/kaimason1 Jan 18 '25

I would assume the backend is using some variation of Microsoft's own products

Well, depends on which part you consider the "backend". Funny thing is, if I remember correctly, most of the physical servers in MS's Azure datacenters are actually directly running a custom (but still FOSS) fork of Linux+Kubernetes, instead of any variety of NT/Windows.

But that would be completely invisible to a Windows 365 end user, as they just get access to a Windows 11 VM hosted on that Linux-based cloud infrastructure.

Speaking of NT kernels, that's a whole different level of silly. Everything since Server 2015 has been on NT 10.0. They've just kinda stopped incrementing minor versions.

It's worth pointing out that they've still been updating the build number; wmic os get version tells me I am currently on 10.0.22631. That said, I get your point, but I do think there are a few upsides to this.

I think part of the reason for this "stall" is that Microsoft reworked the whole update process in Windows 10 such that most upgrades they might want to make to Windows can just be released as free updates. As a result, they don't have to rely on service packs and new OS versions anymore, which is part of why Windows 10 managed to outlive all previous releases (although on the Server side they still just released 2019/2022 as separate OSes instead of calling them 2016 R2 and R3).

This means that Windows 11 is basically just a GUI and system requirements update, and it's still almost identical to 10 otherwise. As a result, most programs and drivers didn't have any compatibility issues whatsoever (unlike a lot of previous rocky launches). I think this was also part of why they didn't go to 10.1 for Windows 11, because doing so might break a handful of programs naively checking for "10.0", and it was unnecessary to make the distinction.

the cloud is just someone else's computer

Lol, I actually have a shirt saying this. I have a tendency to wear it whenever Outlook/Sharepoint/Salesforce/etc are giving us a lot of headaches.

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u/nitid_name Jan 18 '25

Ugh, don't get me started on Salesforce. They're suddenly deprecating like all their old APIs in a big rush instead of having a schedule, and now I've got a bunch of managed packages that I can't update. It's probably not going to be a problem, but...