NO! UWP is NOT The Way Forward.
The current Preview edition of Minecraft Education, suggests that the codebase is transitioning from a win32 codebase to a UWP one using Project Centennial.
While UWP may modernize some internal elements of Minecraft Education (eg: Login process, Cloud uploads and etc...), It completely botches support for platforms such as GNU/Linux and Legacy platforms such as Windows 10/8.1 and Windows 7. For now, since the login process is dependent on Windows Runtime (WinRT), Minecraft Education Preview can only be accessed on Windows 10/11 devices.
For the longest time, Minecraft Education was the only true win32 fork of Minecraft, Bedrock edition aside from the Chinese build of Minecraft.
My suggestion, is to either continue maintaining a win32 build of Minecraft Education (if Minecraft Education transitions to a UWP codebase) or cancel the transition to UWP.
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Hey there!
Thanks for sharing your concerns.
We are not only developing .appx from here on out. At this time we have plans for .exe to be coming with no ETA, however we do not have it for Preview currently.
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Hi. Thanks for your reply.
I wanted to specifically mention that .appx packages can include win32 programs, just like the Microsoft Store distribution of Minecraft Education.
The problem here, is that by transitioning to UWP/WinRT (Not necessarily in the .appx package), the game is basically killing off unofficial support for older and alternative platforms as mentioned before. As it stands, Minecraft Education Preview uses newly introduced WinRT Components (Cloud world saves, Login prompt, etc...) that are already incompatible with said platforms. Even worse, Project Centennial hints that even more components inside Minecraft Education may transition to WinRT as time goes on.
It's important to note that before Minecraft Education Preview, the game entirely relied on win32 even inside the Microsoft Store build as mentioned before, And that's what kept support for it on unofficially supported platforms.0 -
Hey John,
Just to confirm, we do intend to continue supporting Win32 for AppX builds in our full release. The EXE package will remain a Win32 app as well once released (preview builds only get AppX versions at this time). Features shown in preview are not final and will likely be reworked before release.
However, while we don't intentionally intend to cut off any unsupported setups, we can never guarantee they will continue to work with ever build. As of writing, we do not support Windows 7, 8.1, older builds of Windows 10, or Linux. See our supported systems here: System RequirementsLet us know if you have any additional questions, or concerns!
Thanks,
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Hi! Thanks for your response.
I’m glad to hear that the win32 build of Minecraft Education will continue to receive updates for the foreseeable future.
I just have one more request. Is it possible for the team to maintain and release 64-bit builds of the win32 fork of Minecraft Education alongside the 32-bit build? This would be a nice addition, especially to those with more powerful hardware, as the 64-bit build of Minecraft generally provide more performance over the 32-bit builds.0
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