Will windows soon work on the pi?

[CarlRJ]

Yes, there are single-board computers similar to the Pi, that run Windows.

Do you have a link to such a thing? I have never seen one.

Maybe this is a reference to the Intel NUC form factor, which is bigger than the Pi but still really small.

When I wrote that, I was thinking of the Up Board:

Up Board

UP-Board-posted.jpg (38.37 KiB) Viewed 2345 times

On first glance, you might think you're looking at a Pi - there seems little doubt they had that in mind. It's a very Pi-like (physically, anyway) SBC that has an Intel Atom instead of an ARM-based CPU, and they say it runs Windows 10 as well as running Linux. I don't know much else about it, as its killer feature is that it can run Windows, and that's kind of lost on me. It's... not cheap.

My point in the paragraph that was (partially) quoted above wasn't any sort of endorsement of this (or similar) SBC's, rather, I was simply saying that while they do exist, this place (the Raspberry Pi forums) isn't likely the optimal place to ask for recommendations for such Windows-capable SBC's. In the same manner as this is unlikely the best place to ask for recommendations for roller skates or SCUBA equipment (sure, you might happen across someone knowledgeable, but your odds would be better in a forum devoted to those things).

[Michiel O.]

Windows for me has become an odd beast as it with '10

They keep stacking bloat upon bloat upon bloat. Have you seen how many gigabytes a clean install of Windows 10 takes? And as soon as you descend a few levels into configuration screens, the makeup suddenly disappears and the pig beneath it shows its face.

[Martin Frezman]

Windows for me has become an odd beast as it with '10

They keep stacking bloat upon bloat upon bloat. Have you seen how many gigabytes a clean install of Windows 10 takes? And as soon as you descend a few levels into configuration screens, the makeup suddenly disappears and the pig beneath it shows its face.

Careful with that...

Careful what you say about that company.

P.S. I agree with the sentiment. If I were going to get an SBC to run Windows, I'd want to run an earlier (sane) version of it.

P.P.S. It is a little hard to tell from their site, but I think (and it is only a guess) that the UP Board is (going to) cost $89. Which isn't cheap in the "Raspberry Pi is cheap" sense, but is not bad in terms of its competition (which is usually in the $200-$400+ range).

[fruitoftheloom]

Windows for me has become an odd beast as it with '10

They keep stacking bloat upon bloat upon bloat. Have you seen how many gigabytes a clean install of Windows 10 takes? And as soon as you descend a few levels into configuration screens, the makeup suddenly disappears and the pig beneath it shows its face.

Careful with that...

Careful what you say about that company.

P.S. I agree with the sentiment. If I were going to get an SBC to run Windows, I'd want to run an earlier (sane) version of it.

P.P.S. It is a little hard to tell from their site, but I think (and it is only a guess) that the UP Board is (going to) cost $89. Which isn't cheap in the "Raspberry Pi is cheap" sense, but is not bad in terms of its competition (which is usually in the $200-$400+ range).

Plus the cost of a Windows License:

https://www.microsoftstore.com/store/ms ... .320418600

[Martin Frezman]

Plus the cost of a Windows License:

Quite so.

Incidentally, I was also amused by this phrase in an earlier post on this thread:

... runs Windows as well as Linux ...

Does this mean:

1) In addition to
or
2) with equal facility
or
3) with similar user experience

[Heater]

CarlRJ,

Ah, the Up Board is a Kickstarter I missed. Certainly Pi inspired. It says so in the head line on their Kickstarter page.

It does not seem so cheap. We use tiny industrial PC's in beautiful aluminium cases with all connectors, SSD, 3G, etc for about only twice that.

I wounder how they are doing.

[fruitoftheloom]

CarlRJ,

Ah, the Up Board is a Kickstarter I missed. Certainly Pi inspired. It says so in the head line on their Kickstarter page.

It does not seem so cheap. We use tiny industrial PC's in beautiful aluminium cases with all connectors, SSD, 3G, etc for about only twice that.

I wounder how they are doing.

Intel are abandoning the Atom x5-Z8350 CPU use in the UP Board

http://www.pcworld.com/article/3063508/ ... chips.html

So it may be a short lived product line:

http://up-shop.org


Heater I posted about the UP in October 2015: viewtopic.php?f=62&t=123512

[drgeoff]

A Windows GUI running on a non-x86 machine does not necessarily mean it will run the myriad of Windows applications that run on a Wintel computer.

[mahjongg]

The windows ecosystem, as people now know it, will NEVER run (in a workable fashion) on a Raspberry PI.

"Will windows soon work on the pi?" is a misleading question, much better would be "Will Windows ever run on a PI?", and my answer would be "not the windows we know, but perhaps MS will design a form of Windows for ARM processors, and people would write or re-compile software for it, and that OS might run on a PI, if MS manages to remove enough bloat from it."

[fruitoftheloom]

£55.00 Windows 8.1 Hannspree PC Stick - plugs into HDMi

http://www.ebuyer.com/698859-hannspree- ... k-snnpdi1b


http://www.pcadvisor.co.uk/review/pcs/h ... w-3597928/

[CarlRJ]

CarlRJ,

Ah, the Up Board is a Kickstarter I missed. Certainly Pi inspired. It says so in the head line on their Kickstarter page.

It does not seem so cheap. ...

Agreed, it certainly does not seem cheap - it's an SBC aimed presumably at mostly the same sort of experimenter / hobbyist market as the Pi (leaving aside the Pi's educator aspect for the moment), and it costs considerably more than the Pi, and in return for the added cost it offers... "ah, but we can run Windows!"

But, if you're doing experimenter / hobbyist / embedded / IoT type things, running Windows isn't a huge benefit. Microsoft is the only one who thinks (thought?) Windows should run absolutely everywhere. The smartphone market proved them wrong - most people's love for and/or familiarity with Windows on the desktop doesn't transfer to other scenarios the way Microsoft would like. (The OP isn't asking for Windows because it's the best solution for the stated problem, but rather because it's familiar.)

So, on one hand it's a rough approximation of a Pi that is much more expensive for little useful reason, and on the other hand, it's a tiny desktop Windows PC (it can't be mobile without at least as much baggage as the Pi), that's way smaller than necessary. Neither is a compelling use case (and you don't win awards for being mediocre at two things). But it does fill the OP's mid-thread request for an SBC device that can run Windows (in the same size range are also computers based on the "Intel Compute Stick" standard, though they aren't especially cheap either). A Roku and/or Amazon media-streaming stick is still a better answer to the need posed by the original post (cheap video streaming from the major proprietary media streaming services).