It seems the Linux and Android Switch ports may eventually be getting some rather unexpected competition. Bingxing Wang, also known as imbushuo, has shown on his Twitter account some pictures of what looks like Windows 10 ARM running on his console. For those out of the loop, the full Windows 10 operating system has been officially ported to ARM some time ago initially thanks to a deal with Qualcomm and has since been able to run on a good number of ARM devices, including the popular SBC Raspberry Pi 3B/3B+. This version of Windows has been received with mixed feelings, primarily because most applications have been written to run on x86 in mind and they need an emulation layer to run on ARM, thus severely impacting pefrormance. Simply put: if you think this port will allow you to play the latest and greatest Windows games on your Switch, then that's not going to happen.
Some more work to do (primarily memory regions fix) pic.twitter.com/vkJhv4XjKw
— Ben | imbushuo (@imbushuo) March 3, 2019
Switching the focus back to our console, the port seems in very early stages. Progress is being made rather quickly, as not even a day ago all one could see is an EFI shell, however the OS is not able to reach past the initial boot process due to memory-related issues. The port runs on bare metal and uses an EDK II implementation (TianoCore) for the Tegra X1 SoC, which borrows a lot of code from a similiar project (Lumia950XLPkg, an effort to bring a full Windows 10 ARM installation for Lumia 950/950 XL phones). For the curious or more skeptical readers, the developer is already known for similiar projects, primarily dealing with Lumia phones, and has already uploaded a very early version of his work on GitHub (you can find a link in the sources below).
What do you think? Will this project go far? Will it be useful? Are you interested in running other OSes on your Switch and, if so, will you consider using it over the other ports?
