Windows 10X is now running on another device, with the recently leaked build of the lightweight OS having been shown off on a Surface Pro 7.
Well-known Microsoft leaker Zac Bowden already provided us with a video of the purportedly near-final build of Windows 10X in action, but there’s now footage of it running on the Surface Pro 7 – showing how the operating system works with a touchscreen.
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This clip was made by a developer going under the name of ‘ADeltaX’ who did the grunt work of getting the drivers to function properly with Windows 10X and enabling support for elements such as the camera.
The OS appears to run pretty slickly, albeit with a touch of lag here and there – but obviously bear in mind that this is not the final build of Windows 10X, and of course it has been unofficially crow-barred onto the Pro 7.
The video shows the main ways that the desktop will function under a touch-based control scheme, with the user able to easily pull up either the Start menu (which is now a launcher-style affair that will be very familiar to Chromebook users) or the new Action Center (which is now split into Quick Settings and Notifications panels, as we’ve seen before).
Stylus switching
At one point, the developer also uses a stylus and flicks swiftly and seamlessly between running apps. Remember that Windows 10X will only let you run full-screen apps, not windowed ones, and you’ll only be able to snap two apps side-by-side in terms of multitasking. (To begin with, only PWA and web apps will be supported, too.)
This also represents an interesting look at how Windows 10X can be run on existing devices, remembering that Microsoft only intends to make it available on new PCs as a preinstalled OS. The tricky bit, of course, is getting all the drivers to work, otherwise users will be missing important bits and pieces of functionality.
As you might have seen, we recently reported on Windows 10X running on an M1-powered (ARM) MacBook, and a Lumia smartphone no less, as well as a Surface Go. By all accounts, Microsoft’s OS ran quite nicely on the MacBook, and given all the fudging required to make these projects work, that’s promising news in terms of how 10X will function on devices it’s actually made for.
Incidentally, the model of Surface Pro 7 used here was the Core i5 with 16GB of RAM.
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