I'm not entirely up to speed on the situation of UEFI secure boot for ARM; didn't Microsoft mandate that it can't be disabled for such devices to boot Windows? Is that the case here?
These are categorized as experimental devices and Windows 10 is free to use on those devices for development and testing.
The UEFI secure boot requirements only apply if you want to distribute a commercial product and want to slap a "Designed for Windows 10" sticker on it - or negotiate a special distribution license with Microsoft (i.e. do not expect Windows 10 to be "free" if you want to use it in a commercially distributes product).
Has anyone taken a close look at what's actually running? I suppose it could be a version of the Windows Kernel since they have it running on ARM for Phone and RT but I frankly wouldn't be all that surprised if they were running Linux with .NET Core on top.
I've loaded up Windows 10 IoT for RPI 2 previously. It is a Windows kernel, but otherwise massively cut down. It limits the system to a single running "foreground" application at a time, plus some system services.
If you wished to dedicate the device to a single purpose, it's fine, but don't expect a robust shell environment like you would see on a bare bones linux box. It certainly won't support a user using it as a desktop environment. Think of it more as embedded Windows offering, great for being a single app server, robotics platform or kiosk.
Which just makes me wonder what the point of it is. I guess if you really love Windows and want to build an embedded system this would be the way to go. I'm betting that most people that build embedded systems are not Windows developers and I'm not sure that this IoT offering changes anything.
I'm starting to wonder the same thing. I've been looking for a project to try it out on but every time I think I find one, I realize that it's something I can't do with Windows 10 IoT because it lacks a key feature (e.g. printing) and the time it would save on other aspects would be wasted trying to work around it's inadequacies in other respects.
"Windows 10 IoT Core is a version of Windows 10 that is optimized for smaller devices with or without a display, and that runs on the Raspberry Pi 2 and 3, Arrow DragonBoard 410c & MinnowBoard MAX. Windows 10 IoT Core utilizes the rich, extensible Universal Windows Platform (UWP) API for building great solutions."
