Schrödinger’s OS
Microsoft emitted a fresh build of Windows 11 last night and piled on the woe for customers hoping that virtual machines might be their way out of the hardware compatibility hole. Despite Microsoft’s efforts to distract users by showing off its updates to the Photos app (now rolling out to users in the Windows Insider Dev Channel), the alarming warning that „this build includes a change that aligns the enforcement of the Windows 11 system requirements on Virtual Machines (VMs) to be the same as it is for physical PCs“ was the main news for many testers. Microsoft’s own minimum hardware requirements document (at the time of writing) says [PDF]: „Windows 11 does not apply the hardware-compliance check for virtualized instances either during setup or upgrade.“ It added, „if the virtualized environment is provisioned such that it does not meet the minimum requirements, this will have an impact to aspects of the user experience when running the OS in the virtualized environment.
