Polaris was a very short lived variant of Windows Core OS (which is now the foundation of Windows 10X) meant for Desktops and Laptops.
Polaris would have introduced a completely redone UI, made using the Universal Windows Platform, on top of a new core/OS base, and the shell would have been most geared towards desktop/laptop users.
Now that's the short introduction done. Now let's deep dive into what leaked.
What leaked is an ARM32 version of Polaris, Build 16299. This version of Polaris unfortunately is either crippled due to the branch it comes from, or too early to actually contain an actual shell.
What does this mean? Well in short, if you ever get this to boot (i did this for you so you do not have to), you will get thrown into a placeholder "UI" (which consists basically of a different shade Windows logo.
From there you can really only do two things:
- Press power once to shut down the device
- Wait a little while til a debug USB interface shows up on a connected computer over USB, from there you can potentially open a command prompt shell edit/view files and sideload applications.
Now, here are some actual pictures i took, of what could be taken:
The name used on the boot entry is Windows OneCore 10
ChkDsk running
The fallback UI you get thrown into, when no shell/composer is present on the device
The current version key, showing Polaris as the 'edition' name
With the release, is a readme attached if you ever feel like booting this. You will really need drivers, as despite this having no shell, it does require you to provide a valid GPU driver, and you may want USB to work for diagnostic.
I haven't figured out yet how to properly use the diagnostic interface. It is certainly a variant of TShell (which is terminal shell over telnet, like on good old Windows Phone) but unfortunately none of my older TShell tools work with this build.
If you try this on a phone, you will have to get rid of Platform Manifests (present on EFIESP\efi\microsoft\boot\platformmanifest) and be extra careful with the phone partitions, which shouldn't be altered in any way other than mainos and data and some of efiesp.
You might also be interested in some prepatched files to disable signature verification/umci: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ ... 97/out.zip
Now, why should you care?
Well PolarisOS was an extremely short lived version of Windows, might have been the most short lived one, and is as a consequence is a very rare collectible. Safe to say you may never see something from Polaris in the future, other than this.
This release may not have much in terms of UX goodies, but it's going to be well preserved for the future, and perhaps some people will find out more things about it.
As a bonus, a picture of a build of Polaris OS with an actual shell leaked along with this release:
And here is one of the wallpapers as well:
Hope you found this piece of history as interesting as I did, but in my opinion, this is a very good start to hopefully a much better year..
). For sure gus33000 will know.
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