Windows 10 X is Microsoft’s new operating system for dual-screen devices and it’s reportedly coming to traditional laptops at some point. Windows 10 X was originally announced at Microsoft’s Surface event on October 2, and PC makers are now publicly showing off their devices running this OS.
Microsoft initially plans to ship Windows 10 X on devices like Surface Neo and Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Fold before unveiling laptops running the modular operating system.
At CES 2020, Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 Fold was spotted with a very early version of Windows 10 X and the UI is currently heavily focused on swipe gestures.
Like Windows 8, you can swipe in from the bottom-right to open the Action Center and you can swipe down to close apps. Similarly, the Start menu can be trigged with a swipe up gesture.
These gestures may seem a bit out of place on a non-touchscreen device, but Windows 10 X gestures could support trackpad and gestures on a trackpad work in a similar fashion. It is likely that Microsoft could also enable keyboard shortcuts for the gestures.
Unfortunately, Windows 10 X currently allows users to run more than one app at once in a side-by-side experience only. At this time, you cannot run multiple apps in windowed mode, but this is likely to change as there are rumours claiming that Microsoft will enable windowed mode support before shipping Windows 10 X to consumers.
The details of Microsoft’s new virtual-machine-like approach to run Win32 desktop apps in Windows 10 X are also not known.
Microsoft will be taking a new virtual-machine like approach to run desktop apps on ‘Containers’, so it’ll be easier to manage such apps on less powerful machines. With Containers, Microsoft plans to let users run Win32 apps in a virtual environment from the cloud rather than from local storage.
Windows 10 X is still very incomplete and some of the basic features are currently missing, but the operating system will be ready by this holiday season.
