Why are they doing this? Windows RT laptops flopped almost a decade ago due to the lack of software, and the landscape hasn't changed all that much AFAIK.
The difference is that, relative to the days of Windows 8, they've significantly diversified the ways you can target Windows, directly and otherwise:
- IE is finally dead, and shipping a downstream Chrome build in the form of Edge gives Win10/11 not only a revamped WebView but platform-level support for PWAs (I cannot stress enough how much of an impact there is here just from how much the Web has evolved as a platform, and as a Linux user this cuts both ways tbh)
- To this same point there's also a first-party React Native build, allowing devs that are already shipping mobile apps to extend those to target desktops
- .NET has since been open-sourced, gone cross-platform, and picked up native ARM support
- Windows Subsystem for Linux, and now Windows Subsystem for Android, let you reach outside the Windows ecosystem entirely (the latter of which, interestingly, should also compound over time with the various efforts that Google is finally making again to make large form factors viable on Android)
- Project Reunion exists now, for the stated purpose of providing a common set of APIs that Windows developers can access
That last one alone, btw, makes the landscape inherently different from WinRT, which removed Win32 support entirely and only allowed you to run UWP apps.
I'm quite certain it has. I believe Windows on ARM now ships with x86 emulation, allowing it to run any program (albeit more slowly). I'm not sure about the state of WSL on ARM, but Linux on ARM in general is a nearly indistinguishable experience from Linux on x86, with the exception of proprietary software which is for the most part relatively rare on that platform.
