Darth Vader
From the Dark Side
Some recent posts on pfm got me thinking that I hadn't had a play with any of my Pi models recently. My last aborted project around two or so years ago was implementing Win 10 so yesterday I went for Win 11 Pro.
It works surprisingly well for this little Pi 4 with just 4GB RAM. However if anyone is thinking about this as a project beware that drivers are not available for many devices. I fell for this when I couldn't get WiFi to work (Ethernet is fine). I even used a USB WiFi dongle thats known to work with Windows, macOS and Linux but no luck. Delving into the Registry I found that Windows did find the USB nic and created an entry for it however there was no driver. Then the penny dropped. Drivers are written by the hardware manufacturers and since they work down at what I call the 'bare metal' will be written in assembler unlike the rest of Windows. To my knowledge no one has written such Windows drivers for the ARM Cortex-A72 CPU. This goes for any other utility etc. For example Mini Partition Wizard does install but won't run with a disk access error.
BTW I can get WiFi access by using an Ethernet-WiFi bridge but it sort of defeats the object and adds additional costs to what for most will be a budget system
Libre Office works fine so I guess other Win apps will too providing they don't utilise drivers that access the hardware directly.
Fun eh?
DV
It works surprisingly well for this little Pi 4 with just 4GB RAM. However if anyone is thinking about this as a project beware that drivers are not available for many devices. I fell for this when I couldn't get WiFi to work (Ethernet is fine). I even used a USB WiFi dongle thats known to work with Windows, macOS and Linux but no luck. Delving into the Registry I found that Windows did find the USB nic and created an entry for it however there was no driver. Then the penny dropped. Drivers are written by the hardware manufacturers and since they work down at what I call the 'bare metal' will be written in assembler unlike the rest of Windows. To my knowledge no one has written such Windows drivers for the ARM Cortex-A72 CPU. This goes for any other utility etc. For example Mini Partition Wizard does install but won't run with a disk access error.
BTW I can get WiFi access by using an Ethernet-WiFi bridge but it sort of defeats the object and adds additional costs to what for most will be a budget system
Libre Office works fine so I guess other Win apps will too providing they don't utilise drivers that access the hardware directly.
Fun eh?
DV