The Hot Take: We'll have to see if this take off.... With ARM just entering the market with nvidia we'll have to see if it gains traction.
VMware has quietly debuted a technology preview of its flagship ESX hypervisor that is capable of running on Arm processors and servers. The virtualization giant teased its new tech in a Xeet which piqued our interest and led to the discovery of this document [PDF] on the public internet that explains the hypervisor supports guests running RHEL, Ubuntu, and SUSE, on servers from HPE and Gigabyte powered by Ampere processors, or Supermicroâs ARS-221GL model with an Nvidia Grace processor. The document offers slightly contradictory advice to the effect that âArm host clusters must be managed by a separate, standalone vCenter running on x86. We do not recommend managing x86 installations and Arm installations from the same vCenter.â The tech preview appears to be a very basic affair, as it lacks support for vSAN hyperconverged storage, NSX virtual networking, and plenty of other features VMware offers in its x86 hypervisor and Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite. VMware has also made it possible to access Arm guests from its desktop hypervisors. As disclosed last week in release notes for new versions of the Workstation and Fusion products that add âthe ability to connect to remote ARM-based ESXi, allowing users to manage VMs on remote ARM servers directly from VMware Workstation or Fusion on any supported platform.â Virtzilla is therefore making good on its promise to bring its hypervisor and VCF to the Arm architecture. The Broadcom business unit is porting its products because it thinks customers will increasingly turn to Arm servers on the network edge, perhaps for AI workloads. VMware is also aware that Arm processors can be more energy-efficient than x86 CPUs, and must also know that its hyperscale partners AWS, Microsoft, and Google aggressively promote their home-brew Arm processors as delivering superior performance-per-watt. In its announcement of its new desktop hypervisors, VMware offers another reason: âAs development environments diversify, cross-architecture connectivity is essential.â VMware hasnât offered a timeline to get ESX on Arm ready for a full release, but the company has previously told us itâs in no rush because customers are currently Arm-curious rather than in a rush to shift workloads onto the architecture. While VMware explores a new architecture, its rivals continue to prepare products they hope will prize away some users who feel Broadcomâs licensing regime isnât to their liking. Platform9 last week debuted âPlatform9 OSâ, a cut of Linux that encapsulates its Private Cloud Director in an appliance-like format so that users donât need Linux administration skills to adopt its stack. Platform9 is going after VMwareâs top 10,000 customers with a promise it wonât try to lock them in with licensing or restrictive hardware compatibility lists. Australian outfit Netframe takes a similar approach with its wares and has chosen to walk down a well-worn path by creating a free version of its eponymous product that allows users to run up to three hosts. The company thinks that offering will attract home lab operators and small shops who will be sufficiently impressed by the product to upgrade and sign up for support. ÂŽ
The Hot Take: Been saying it for years, Microsoft is pulling Linux into windows on bite at a time. This probably I would assume only accelerates.
Microsoft is turning Azure Linux into a general-purpose, Fedora-based cloud distribution available to all Azure customers, while also productizing Flatcar as Azure Container Linux for immutable container hosts. "When Microsoft joined the Linux Foundation, there was this big conspiracy theory that somehow the Linux Foundation was undermining open source in partnership with Microsoft, and now you announce that you're shipping a Linux distribution," Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's CEO, said in response to Microsoft's surprise announcement. "That's amazing." ZDNet reports: Until now, [Lachlan Everson, Microsoft's Principal Program Manager on Azure's open-source team] noted, "we had Azure Linux only available to third-party customers through AKS specifically, and that was Azure Linux 3.0." Going forward, this will be ACL. Everson emphasized that Azure Linux 4.0 is the culmination of years of internal usage and the evolution of the earlier Mariner distribution. "So we've been running Azure Linux for many years internally, and we got through to 3.0, and we only allowed it on as a container host on AKS. What we've done is make it a general-purpose, so this is all the learnings that we've had in the heritage of Mariner."
Under the hood, Azure Linux 4.0 is based on Fedora Linux and is delivered as an open distribution on GitHub. This code is available now. Yes, Red Hat knows that Microsoft has done this. Everson continued, "So, we made a decision to use Fedora as an upstream, so it's using RPMs in the Fedora ecosystem. Microsoft curates the packages and the supply chain to fit Azure's cloud platform." Microsoft also created "it to be purpose-built for Azure, which integrates vertically into all of our infrastructure to give you the best Azure Linux experience on Azure." While Azure Linux will ship as a VM image, Microsoft is already preparing a developer-friendly path onto Windows desktops: "And as of today, we have it as a VM image for your VM host on Azure. We're going to announce WSL images as well."
While developers will be able to run Azure Linux locally through WSL, Microsoft is not positioning it as a traditional desktop Linux. Asked whether he could run it on his laptop, Everson said: "I will be able to run it on my laptop, or what have you. Yes, on Windows 11." However, when pressed about a desktop experience, Everson was clear that there are "no plans" for a graphical environment. "It's optimized for server-side in the cloud," he said, adding that even on a developer machine, users should expect a lean environment. "Minimal packages, yeah. The idea is that we offer you a consistent experience to do your development on your machine, and that you can take your workloads as you develop them on your machine and run them with VS Code. You can run your applications on that, and know that the platform is the same that you're running on the cloud, so that you have that kind of consistency between environments."
Flatcar itself remains the upstream project, but Microsoft is packaging it for Azure customers. Everson described Flatcar as "purpose-built, immutable, secure by default, production-ready operating system, and Azure Container Linux is the productization of that, but we're still investing in the upstream Flatcar ecosystem and pulling that downstream into a productized exterior experience just for container workloads, so it's a container hosting in AKS." To underscore the immutable model, he added that "Everything's baked in, so there is no package manager. We bake the bits into the immutable, and they're in the immutable version. So Azure Container Linux is the immutable version. So you shouldn't be changing any system packages or any application packages. Anything that you need to change is customer workloads run in containers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
The Hot Take: SMS/TXT is going to cause some pain for sure.
For years, typing in a six-digit code sent to your phone has been the universal standard for verifying your identity online. But that era is officially coming to an end in the Windows ecosystem.
In a statement to Windows Latest, Microsoft independently confirmed that itâll stop sending SMS codes for personal accounts.
Now, first spotted by Windows Latest, Microsoft has officially announced that it is pulling the plug on SMS codes for personal accounts. According to a support document quietly published earlier this year, the company is actively phasing out text messages as a method for both two-factor authentication and account recovery.
While the tech giant subtly hinted at this shift in a previous security advisory earlier this year, stating it was âcommitted to advancing security standards,â the newly released documentation explicitly confirms the end of SMS verification.
Moving forward, Microsoft is forcing a transition to passwordless alternatives, mandating the use of passkeys, authenticator apps, and verified secondary email addresses.
Why Microsoft is abandoning SMS authentication
Redmondâs decision to kill off SMS verification comes down to the undeniable fact that text messages are no longer a secure way to protect your digital identity.
In their official advisory, Microsoft states that âSMS-based authentication is now a leading source of fraud.â
âMicrosoft is committed to advancing security standards, and as such, we will start phasing out SMS as a method of authentication and account recovery for personal Microsoft accounts,â Microsoft noted in an advisory spotted by Windows Latest. âMicrosoft believes that the future of authentication is passwordless, secure, and user-friendly.â
Text messages were never designed with modern cybersecurity in mind. They are transmitted in plain text across vulnerable cellular networks, making them highly susceptible to interception.
Furthermore, hackers frequently use SIM-swap attacks, a tactic where a malicious actor tricks your mobile carrier into transferring your phone number to a device they control. Once the transfer is complete, the hacker instantly receives all of your SMS two-factor authentication codes, allowing them to easily hijack your accounts.
To combat this, Microsoft believes the future of account security is entirely passwordless. The company is replacing SMS with passkeys, which are a modern, phishing-resistant security standard.
Unlike traditional passwords or text codes that can be intercepted, passkeys use your deviceâs built-in biometric hardware.
When you sign in using a passkey, you authenticate your identity using Windows Hello facial recognition, a fingerprint scanner, or a localized device PIN. This creates a cryptographic key pair where the private key never leaves your physical hardware, rendering remote phishing attacks virtually impossible.
Depending on your setup, passkeys can be device-bound, meaning the private key never leaves the physical hardware (like your laptopâs TPM chip), or they can be synced across your devices via services like Apple iCloud Keychain or Google Password Manager. This cross-device compatibility ensures that if you lose your phone, your verified email and synced passkeys will still allow you to recover your account safely.
The problem of a forced passwordless transition
On paper, eliminating vulnerable SMS codes in favor of biometric passkeys is an objective win for global cybersecurity. In my daily workflow, the passwordless ecosystem is genuinely fantastic. I use Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Password Manager, and the Microsoft Authenticator app across all my devices. Thanks to the IR camera on my Lenovo laptop, Windows Hello face recognition makes logging into my personal Microsoft account a breeze.
However, Microsoftâs forced transition may cause significant headaches for power users.
As a Windows Insider, I constantly spin up, configure, and manage new virtual machines (VMs) to test software builds.
When I attempt to log into my Microsoft account within these isolated, nested environments, the passkey experience falls apart. Biometric hardware wonât be available on a VM, for obvious reasons, and I do not have access to security keys either. When trying to log in with passkeys via PIN, Iâm always shown an error.
In these highly technical, edge-case scenarios, requesting an SMS code was the ultimate, foolproof fallback. It just worked.
Passwords and SMS codes are ubiquitous. Typing in a six-digit text code is an instinctive, habitual behavior for billions of people. To successfully change a deeply ingrained habit, the replacement technology must be utterly flawless across every conceivable scenario.
Microsoft could drop the forced Microsoft account sign-in during Windows 11 setup; now thatâs one less place where youâll need to sign in!.
Either way, Microsoft will soon begin prompting all personal account holders with a âSign in faster with your face, fingerprint, or PINâ screen, urging them to set up a passkey and verify a backup email address. While losing the convenience of SMS codes may be a bitter pill to swallow for some, it is a necessary step to secure Windows 11 against modern threats.
The post Microsoft is killing SMS codes for Microsoft account sign-in, aggressively pushes passkeys on Windows 11 appeared first on Windows Latest
The Hot Take: Well now, that definitely sucks it was doing that. No wonder people are moving to Linux!
Microsoft is reportedly preparing significant changes to how Windows 11 manages graphics driver installations through Windows Update. The update is intended to address a long-standing issue where the operating system could overwrite newer manually installed GPU drivers with older OEM-certified releases.
The Hot Take: Trying to get those linux converts back?
Microsoft is reportedly developing a new Windows 11 performance optimization feature internally known as Low Latency Profile. The technology is said to be part of the companyâs broader Windows K2 initiative, which focuses on improving responsiveness throughout the operating system.
The Hot Take: So legacy is always a ball and chain keeping you from moving forward faster. We'll see how they drop some of the legacy architecture to modernize the OS.
When you right-click a file in Windows 11 or launch a traditional desktop application, you are interacting with code that predates the commercial internet. The Win32 API, introduced all the way back in the Windows 95 era, is still a significant part of the worldâs most popular desktop operating system. But according to Microsoftâs own leadership, this was never the plan.
First spotted by Windows Latest, in a recent video posted by the official Microsoft Dev Docs account on X, Mark Russinovich, Microsoftâs Chief Technology Officer of Azure and the legendary creator of Sysinternals, admitted that the survival of Win32 is one of the biggest surprises in the companyâs history.
https://www.windowslatest.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Microsoft-statement-on-Win32.mp4
âDid anyone in the 90s expect Win32 to be a first-class API surface in the year 2026? And I think I can safely answer, no,â Russinovich explained. âNobody, I think, would have expected that because we were thinking flying cars and, you know, moon stations by the year 2026, not Win32 that was designed back in Windows 95 days.â
Even as everything in the world has changed, it baffles me that computer code, as old as me, is still relevant when nothing around me feels the same as it did just 10 years ago.
Disk Management Tool is a Win32 application still relevant in Windows 11
So how did a 30-year-old API outlive decades of internal attempts to replace it? According to Russinovich, it all comes down to the massive ecosystem built on top of it. âI think that one of the reasons itâs got the staying power is itâs just a fundamental layer inside of Windows that so many apps have built on⌠itâs kind of bedrock,â he said.
Russinovich pointed to his own Sysinternals tools as proof. Founded in 1996, he noted that he would have âbet a million dollarsâ that his earliest tools wouldnât be relevant in 2026. Instead, they are more relevant than ever. Sysmon, which became an inbuilt feature with the March 2026 update, is actively being integrated directly into Windows, and Zoomit, developed in the early 2000s, remains an incredibly popular utility inside PowerToys today.
Microsoft has a graveyard of Win32 replacements
Several years ago, when I came to know about Win32, the first thing I was told was how robust it was. So, if Win32 is such a capable bedrock, why has Microsoft spent the last twenty years trying to kill it?
Like many of you, I have more Win32 apps on my PC than web apps or apps built in a modern framework. Yes, they are incredibly fast and deeply integrated into the OS hardware, but the fact is, they are notoriously difficult to modernize visually. To keep up with modern user interface expectations, Microsoft desperately needed a new framework.
What followed was a decades-long graveyard of abandoned app frameworks. Microsoft tried MFC (a C++ wrapper), followed by WinForms for .NET developers. While these arenât really Win32 replacements, they were abstractions on top of Win32.
Then came Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), which was when the actual effort for replacement started and it introduced XAML and hardware-accelerated rendering.
WPF was supposed to be the definitive future of Windows apps, until Silverlight briefly took the spotlight as a cross-platform bet, only to be eventually killed off by the rise of HTML5.
The most aggressive push to replace Win32 came with Windows 8 and the introduction of WinRT. Microsoft wanted developers to build secure, touch-friendly, full-screen apps.
When the Windows 8 UI failed, they redirected to the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) in Windows 10.
Back in my Windows 10 Mobile days, the one thing I used to tell everyone about the app situation in Microsoftâs mobile OS was that UWP would enable a powerful unified platform for apps that work across phones, Xbox, and PCs. Well, that didnât age well.
Also, UWP was too restrictive, heavily sandboxed, and completely alienated traditional desktop developers who needed deep OS access.
As Russinovich noted in his video: âThereâs been various times in Microsoftâs history where we thought weâd reboot the Windows API surface like WinRT that actually didnât play out the way that a lot of people expected it to, given thereâs still the separation between thick client and Win32 and the browser, which is HTML and JavaScript.â
Developers still prefer WebView2 for Windows amid the RAM crisis
I asked multiple developers why they continue making RAM-hungry web apps for Windows. That, too, was Microsoftâs fault.
Because Microsoft kept introducing and subsequently abandoning native frameworks, developers simply lost trust in the Windows platform. I explained this in detail in a Windows Latest report, where a developer told me why Windows 11 keeps getting web apps instead of native apps.
WhatsApp web app stuck in the loading screen
I was told that building a native Windows app started to feel like a massive liability. And they canât be blamed. Why invest years into a framework that Microsoft might deprecate tomorrow?
Funnily enough, it was Microsoft that pivoted to the web. Microsoft introduced WebView2, a developer control that essentially embeds the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge engine directly inside desktop applications. Suddenly, the entire OS was flooded with web apps, including Microsoft Teams, Clipchamp, the new Outlook, OneDrive, the Windows 11 Widgets board, and even the latest version of Copilot is a web app.
Copilot in Task Manager
While web apps are cheaper to build and much easier to maintain across multiple platforms, they are fundamentally flawed for desktop computing. Embedding a full browser engine into every individual application is a recipe for disaster when it comes to system resources.
This love for WebView2 and Electron is the reason Windows 11 has become such a memory hog. I use the WhatsApp desktop app every single day, and it is an absolute disaster. In my testing, WhatsApp consumes an absurd amount of RAM when doing absolutely nothing, entirely because it uses heavy web wrappers instead of the lightweight native code it used to use in the UWP era.
Microsoftâs Clipchamp is another web app that I had to use for basic video edits, but I later left it because Microsoftâs built-in video editor now needs OneDrive sync to work!
My frustration is compounded when I compare Windows to macOS. While Apple users enjoy highly optimized, native applications like iMovie or the dedicated Pages suite for free, loyal Windows users like me have no choice but to rely on web-based alternatives like Clipchamp that need a constant internet connection, lack deep OS integration, and eat through system memory.
Microsoft Clipchamp is a WebView2 powered video editor
Fortunately, Appleâs success with a sub $600 budget laptop forced the Redmond giant to rethink their app development priorities.
Microsoft is pivoting back to native apps with WinUI 3
Thankfully, the tide is finally turning. Microsoft has realized that making Windows into a glorified Chrome OS is alienating power users and actively destroying system performance.
A few months ago, Rudy Huyn, a Partner Architect at Microsoft, confirmed he was hiring a team dedicated specifically to building â100% nativeâ apps for Windows 11. The focus has aggressively shifted toward WinUI 3, the latest native UI framework built under the Windows App SDK umbrella.
WinUI 3 is exactly what Microsoft needs to win back developers. It allows them to build gorgeous, modern, Fluent-designed applications that still have full, unrestricted access to the underlying Win32 âbedrock.â Just recently, Microsoft released a massive Windows App SDK 2.0 update, equipping developers with semantic versioning, a refactored Windows ML stack, and much-needed drag-and-drop support for bridging WebView2 content seamlessly into native WinUI 3 shells.
Microsoft is retiring legacy Win32 the right way
Microsoft is finally eating its own dog food and cleaning up Windows 11.
Rather than forcing a hard reboot as they did with WinRT, Microsoft is carefully etching out the oldest, ugliest (some might disagree) Win32 UI elements in Windows 11 and replacing them with highly optimized WinUI 3 native code. We recently discovered that the Windows 95-era File Explorer Properties dialog box is finally getting replaced with a modern WinUI 3 version, complete with full dark mode support.
The legacy Run dialog (Win + R) has been completely rewritten into a blazing-fast WinUI 3 application. After using both versions, I can confidently say that the new Run dialog is as good, if not better, than the old Run dialog, especially considering how beautiful it looks.
Compiled with .NET AOT, the new Run dialog achieves a staggering 94ms median time-to-show, which is surprisingly faster than the old Run dialog, and it proves that modern WinUI 3 frameworks can absolutely match the raw speed and efficiency of legacy Win32 code.
As Microsoft continues to replace heavy WebView2 wrappers with native WinUI 3 components, Windows 11 will inevitably stop consuming so much unnecessary memory. We may not have flying cars or moon stations in 2026, but after decades of missteps, we might finally get a fast, native, and consistent Windows operating system that respects its own legacy.
The post Microsoft admits Windows 11 is still built on 90s-era Win32, and no one saw it coming appeared first on Windows Latest
The Hot Take: Ai usage growing pretty steady and fast it would appear.
Anthropic is partnering with SpaceX to ease capacity constraints that have stranded Claude customers, a gesture that may soothe developer discontent about service availability and cost. Ami Vora, chief product officer at Anthropic, announced the expanded rate limits during Code for Claude, a developer event livestreamed from San Francisco. "As of today, we are increasing rate limits for developers on Claude Code and the Claude Platform," said Vora. "More specifically, we are doubling Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based enterprise plans. And we're raising our API limits considerably for Claude Opus." Anthropic is also ending its peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts. The AI biz is able to do this, she explained, thanks to a partnership with SpaceX that expands available inference capacity. Anthropic has struck a deal to use "all the capacity of [SpaceXâs] Colossus 1 data center." According to SpaceX, "Colossus 1 features over 220,000 Nvidia GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators." The deal adds more than 300 megawatts of new capacity within the month and follows similar compute arrangements with Amazon and Google/Broadcom. The company's insatiable hunger for processing power may even take it into space. Anthropic says that it "expressed interest in partnering with SpaceX to develop multiple gigawatts of orbital AI compute capacity." In recent months, Anthropic has struggled to meet unexpected demand for Claude services â its models became sufficiently capable to win over skeptical developers and usage patterns shifted as a result of the popularity of OpenClaw's long-running agents. "Year over year, API volume is up nearly 17x on the cloud platform," said Vora. "And on Claude Code, the average developer is now spending 20 hours per week running Claude." Amid this growing popularity, Anthropic has also wrestled with bugs that affected model performance. During her presentation, Vora tempered expectations by noting that no new model would be announced. Instead, she presided over a review of new and recent Claude features in an effort to frame model improvements as exponential. The salient exponent here would be two â the doubling of Claude's five-hour rate limits. Model performance, as measured by benchmarks, has been incremental. Opus 4.7 is a few percentage points better than Opus 4.6 in various measurements, not twice as capable or more. That didn't stop Vora from claiming, "even though model capabilities are improving on an exponential, most organizations are still adopting AI on a linear path." Vora's use of "exponential" may be more of a thematic framing device than a literal assertion of progress, a device to draw a contrast between Claude's capabilities and a more cautious pace of corporate AI adoption. She cast the upcoming feature review as an opportunity for customers to see where Claude development is headed, "So you can plan for it and ride the exponential with us." The remainder of the presentation consisted of a summary of recent Claude feature improvements. These include: multi-agent orchestration, outcomes, and dreaming â a capability that showed up in the recent Claude Code source leak. "With Dreaming," explained Angela Jiang, head of product for the Claude platform, "Claude is actually able to self-learn. It's able to actually inspect over its previous sessions, figure out skills that it missed, lessons it should have learned, and actually apply those directly to memory on its own." Boris Cherny, head of Claude Code, took a turn on stage to remind everyone about Routines, a way to trigger and run Claude jobs locally or on cloud servers. "Routines can be run on a schedule, they can be kicked off by webhooks, or they can even be kicked off by arbitrary API calls, you can run them locally on your machine or on remote cloud compute," he said. Cherny said, "for me personally, a lot of my code nowadays is written by routines. I'm not the one doing the prompting. I'm the one creating a routine that does the prompting." Who wouldn't want to "ride the exponential" when one's company is paying the API bill? ÂŽ
The Hot Take: I'm so glad I've gotten the Lifetime pass, but as they up the price it only becomes a target to revoke in the coming future....
Plex's Remote Watch Pass is getting a 50% price hike starting June 1, 2026. Plex introduced the Remote Watch Pass in April 2025 as a cheaper alternative to the Plex Pass. Remote Watch Pass allows users to remotely stream from any Plex Media Server that a user has access to.