This project brings the Windows 10 or Windows 11 desktop operating system to your Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL.
It’s the same edition of Windows you’re used to on your traditional laptop or desktop computer, but it’s the version for ARM64 (armv8a) processors.
It can run ARM64, ARM, x86 and x64 applications (the last two via emulation) just fine.
This is such a cool project, and is making me want to buy a 950 XL on eBay.
I still look back on my Lumias and Palm Pre with tinted spectacles. So sad the market duopoly crushed them.
I still maintain the Lumia series that shipped with Windows Phone 8.1 was the pinnacle of cellphone and mobile OS design. For once, Microsoft got it just right on the interface, and Nokia’s superb styling, build quality, and aesthetics were unmatched.
Maybe it’s a good thing it died out though, purely from a privacy perspective. When it comes to being a shepherd of my data, I trust Microsoft far more than Google but far less than Apple, and I don’t actually trust any of them really. As nice as Windows Phone OS was, it required a Microsoft account to be usable with all the telemetry that entails, something most of us still bemoan Microsoft for when it comes to the desktop OS.
Morgan,
I agree, their mobile interface was very nice. But then microsoft couldn’t compete with the apple/google duopoly (nor any of the other contenders in this space either). Unfortunately the world became dependent on users being locked into either the iphone or android ecosystem and people like us are punished for trying to go outside this duopoly 🙁
Same. Lots of people complain about this. The more crap they push, the more it pushes people like me away. But microsoft are banking on the majority to ultimately give in and for these things to become the new normal. The borg’s moto would be quite fitting for microsoft – “resistance is futile”.
I am sure 90% don’t care about that. It is only nerds like us who care.
kwanbis.
I’m not sure if you are referring to the duopoly or privacy issues?
I also think there is a great deal of apathy, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that 90% don’t care about monopolization or privacy without giving them a chance to actually say what they really feel. Sometimes people substitute “market share” for satisfaction or approval, but these are not at all the same thing particularly when it comes to monopolies and duopolies that deprive people of meaningful choice.
@Morgan, Yep I have to agree 100%
I preferred the 925 hardware over the 950 of the article though, for me this was at that time things just kept getting bigger and they didn’t need the extra width of the 950. As you mentioned the hardware design and build was exceptional.
For me I thought the 8.1 tile interface was superbly useful / utilitarian / clean, not the clutter of bling filled rubbish you get on iPhones, just a handful of whatever you choose or need the most of at very easy reach.
I still have the 925 sitting here somewhere, hoping one day I’ll find a clean functional interesting 3rd party OS that can put it to use. I’ve thought about IoT and IIoT applications using it as a base, but that seems a bit derogatory.
The 925 was my personal favorite as well! Mine ended up with my mother as her second smartphone; my father had gotten her an Android phone before that but she hated it and went back to her flip phone. Not long after he passed away, the flip phone stopped being supported by her network (it was a 3G phone and the network went all in on 4G LTE) so she had no choice but to upgrade. Rather than force her to choose between Android and iPhone, I let her try out my 925 and she instantly loved it. It was somewhat familiar due to her Windows 8 laptop, and she loved that it was a very text heavy OS.
That’s one of my favorite things about it too; I love a good textual interface, especially on a smaller screen where whiz-bang graphical features are more annoying and distracting than a text based view. Maybe this comes from my years of Palm and Blackberry use (my first smartphone was a Palm Treo 650).
No, it wasn’t. The whole “content before chrome” philosophy may appeal to UI designers with its “aesthetic purity”, but it’s actually butt-ugly to look at and turns off the average person. It’s a lot like brutalism in buildings, where architects will wax lyrical about “truth to materials” and other nonsense nobody cares about, but it would be commercial suicide to use it on a high-dollar hotel or apartment block because, well, it’s butt-ugly and most people don’t want to look at it, period.
I mean, look at the Windows Phone 8.1 interface: The home screen is a bunch of squares with monochrome icons. Why would anyone buy a high-dollar phone with a UI that looks like it came from a Commodore 64? Answer: They didn’t.
It’s why Apple and Google may have gone the flat design way (gotta show off those high-DPI displays with those sharp lines), but they’ve kept the UI structure largely the same, and have been gradually adding back the bling in the form of frosted glass effects and color gradients. Even pseudo-3D icons are slowly coming back. Good.
kurkosdr, like everyone else’s, this is just an opinion, only more conceited than average, because you go great lengths to present it as if it was an objective truth
@Kurkosdr You can’t possibly believe an interface littered with hundreds of miniscule App Icons that develop measles like ticks and alert symbols is somehow an improvement, users could be forgiven for thinking someone spilled and jar full of hundreds and thousands on their phone, your very own electronic chocolate freckle!
Worse still you find so many of those ticks and alerts can’t be resolved it the App, the true meaning and resolution being buried under a myriad of general settings and system schemes spread through the OS like your complimentary daily maze! Then you hopefully find a way to banish the alert without losing your own personal data!
You know, the funny thing about that is that I am about as far from a “UI designer” as one can get. I have zero talent for visual arts, my talents tend towards problem-solving/troubleshooting, circuit design, and pattern recognition. Also, you are trying to speak for the “average person” when you yourself are far from average simply by your presence on this niche website.
What I like about the WP8.1 interface is that text is a first class citizen. Live tiles showed textual information without having to open an app or trying to catch a notification before it went “poof” on the top/bottom of the screen. The native apps, and third party apps that adhered to Microsoft’s design language, were text-first with a highly legible sans-serif font on a stark black background. Images were used where needed, but they were understated and to-the-point. Everything flowed at 60Hz without stutter or slowdowns (at least on Lumias and other decent hardware; I briefly had a BLU WP8 phone that was pure garbage), the page-turn effect in nearly every screen on the device was consistent and pleasing to the eye.
I feel in an alternate universe where Microsoft and Nokia didn’t make terrible decisions with the ecosystem, there could have been three mobile OSes at the top instead of just two, and in that scenario I wouldn’t be surprised to find that Apple and Google started to borrow design ideas from Microsoft.
I would argue that the WinPhone 8 was the best phone UI to date, it was intuitive, easy to use, gave you all the relevant information you wanted right on the home screen, its just a shame they got smashed by the Android/iPhone duopoly as it was the best UI of the three IMHO by a country mile.
My Lumia ran as good the day it reached EOL as it did on launch day without a single factory reset or crash, something I can’t say for my Andriod phones. Android for me has gotten so crap I just toss the phone every year and a half as they inevitably get buggy and even factory resets only delay the crapout, don’t stop it. I’ll be tossing my octocore android phone next month as with USA phone carriers only half assing support for their phones and the constant slow downs with what few security patches you do get? Its easier just to make more E-Waste than it is to deal with it. Oh what I wouldn’t give for a 2023 Lumia with a decacore and 6Gb of RAM, I’d happily throw my CC at the screen and never go back to Android.
bassbeast,
Yeah, our household has faced a lot of the same issues. As much as it sucks, we have a near absolute duopoly and to even entertain a niche alternative you generally have to give up on mainstream support because nearly everyone support the duopoly and nothing else 🙁
Take my banking app, corporate vpn app, smart radio app, smart thermostat app, wireless multimeter app, wifi light controller app, and so on…they’re all tethered to the duopoly with zero support for anything else. This is one reason I advocate for these to be FOSS. But most of the time there’s no choice since it’s almost all proprietary.
You might benefit from getting a phone that is fully supported by LineageOS and using that OS instead of your carrier’s version of Android. My wife struggled with carrier-provided Android devices for years; she is anti-Apple to an extreme so I got her a Google Pixel 5 not long after it came out, and switched it to LineageOS. It’s going strong over two years later with zero issues or slowdowns, running the latest Lineage-supplied Android version with all security patches up to date. Her only complaint is that she has to use a USB-C dongle for her wired headphones (she is not a fan of Bluetooth earbuds).
Morgan,
Wow, we have the exact same complaint with google phones.
Another complaint is how google deliberately breaks HDMI compatibility. I don’t have the link now, but someone was able to show the exact line of source code that google commented out to disable HDMI on all new pixels 🙁 They literally paid a developer to remove it so they could upsell chromecast, which does not cover all the same use cases.
https://forum.xda-developers.com/t/enable-desktop-mode-hdmi-alt-mode-in-kernel-bootloader-or-with-custom-rom.4398501/
https://support.google.com/pixelphone/thread/165637109?hl=en
At first I felt this was annoying but not that important, however over time we’ve encountered quite a few times when these google impediments have been problematic when traveling. My dad also found that HDMI output was blocked on his android phone and he has to actually pay for extra data to stream via a chromecast and similar wifi streaming devices because on-phone data and hotspot data are billed differently.
Many have complained, but google doesn’t care. Unfortunately companies are learning that it can be easier to upsell certain addon products and services when they deprive owners of other features that could previously be taken for granted.
I still have my 640XL sitting in my drawer. Even after all these years Android doesn’t even come close to how good a mobile system that was. It was a sad day when MIcroshaft killed yet again, another great product.
Lumia? Damn phones that couldn`t share Internet via USB cable. Sad that this feature was to much for them.
I sorely miss my Windows phones. 8.1 was such a delight to use, and even the basic apps, like the phone app and message app, were just so good compared to Android or iPhone.
@Drumheller, do you think this was because it just wasn’t around long enough to be overburdened with all the crud iPhone and Android Apps typically collect? To me 8.1 was just clean and functional, that’s why it worked for me!
I know I’ll be howled down by writing this, but I think it actually benefitted from not having to many devs.
cpcf,
Haha. I agree with this.
I still remember when apple was boosting about massive app numbers as if the platform were better for it. But if we’re being honest, the vast majority of them were trash. Quantity was definitely prioritized over quality, something we’re still suffering through this day.
Moreover, I think the “there’s an app for that” mentality actually leaves the OS worse off in some cases by excluding core OS functionality. As an example, the lack of standard dialogs, file share/file management functionality has resulting in individual applications having to re-implementing the same functionality over and over again poorly and in inconsistent ways with shoddy implementations. One of the huge benefits of running windows is that so many applications reuse the same familiar UI primitives and conventions, yet mobile applications are a chaotic free-for-all. To make matters worse some of the popular file management tools needed for basic file management were spyware. I’m not against allow users to replace functionality with custom apps, but basic functionality should be built into the OS to have a more robust starting point.
I think it was because they just started with a better design – while live tiles were dumb for Windows 8/10, they made sense and were quite useful for mobile. The best apps were those that followed Microsoft’s way of doing things.
Unfortunately you started to see the quality decline in the last months of Windows Phone. Microsoft started to adjust their apps to make then more in-line with their Android equivalents, which ended up dropping the usefulness of the UI, for example, by putting common controls at the top of the app instead of the much more accessible bottom.
Google and Apple successfully convinced the public that the number of apps in the app store was the metric for success. Never mind that 80% were clones, harmful or just made sound effects.
Developers then (understandably) followed the crowd. My only personal app build was a 6 Nations rugby app for windows phone. It had about 1000 downloads and i earned £0.03 from it! Worth it 😀
Adurbe,
I feel this is representative of “the long tail”. Most businesses that have an idea for an app end up here. The best case scenario for most app developers is that they are paid per application up front and not per user over time. The competition for eyeballs in these global app stores is brutal. Especially when competing with these app-mills pumping out thousands of apps.
I think that it would be interesting if one of the open source phone UIs made a clone of the Windows Phone UI (Metro). I had a Windows Phone for a few months and it was by far the best mobile UI that I have used.
As much as I disliked Windows 8 UI on the desktop for mouse and keyboard, it was by far the best touchscreen UI.
Is there a step-by-step video that tells you how to do it on a stock Lumia 950 (XL)? I don’t want to spend time making sense of all those GitHub repos (that they link to without clearly explaining what to do with them).