WW 923: The Bouche is Amused - Remote Desktop outrage, GroupMe, RIP Woody - podcast episode cover

WW 923: The Bouche is Amused - Remote Desktop outrage, GroupMe, RIP Woody

Windows Weekly (Audio)
Mar 12, 2025•3 hr 36 min•Ep. 923
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Episode description

Your Patch Tuesday is showing. Paul Thurrott, Richard Campbell, and Leo Laporte go over the latest features for Windows 11 with the KB5053598 update. Also, the hosts discuss Press to Talk for Insiders, the Windows app replacing Remote Desktop, the agentic future of browsers, Copilot integration in GroupMe, Gemma 3, issues with Xbox Wireless Controller 5.23.5.0 firmware, Pocket Casts Web Player, and the "vibe coding" era. Plus, Fences 6 is now in Beta, on sale!

Woody Leonhard, RIP

  • Like Jerry Pournelle, a major influence on Paul's career and writing style
  • He had a mysterious life in latter years, not clear what happened

Windows 11

  • Windows 11 gets all the features we've discussed recently
  • Are we heading towards something bigger this year? Or just more of the same?
  • New Canary and Beta (23H2) builds
  • New Dev and Beta (24H2) builds
  • Copilot in Windows 11 is getting Press to Talk
  • Microsoft follows through on threat, kills Remote Desktop App - our latest outrage
  • Arc crashed and burned but we can still evolve web browsers
  • What about sidebar apps as a UX baby step forward?
  • Does Edge need to restart every three days now to install updates?

Microsoft 365

  • Google promotes ChromeOS/Chromebooks as the right client ... for Microsoft 365

Dev

  • Build 2025 registration is now open

AI

  • It's Microsoft's 50th anniversary, so it's going to announce AI something something
  • Paul has agreed to attend this, from Mexico
  • Also, report that Microsoft's in-house models now rival OpenAI is a hint
  • Microsoft improves Think Deeper in Copilot using OpenAI o3-mini
  • Google secretly owns 14-15 percent of Anthropic
  • WTF is going on with Big Tech and regulatory evasion?
  • On that note, CMA clears Microsoft + OpenAI specifically because of change to partnership
  • Also, Google launches Gemma 3
  • The Siripocalypse - AI is a hard computer science problem and Siri is the dumb blond in this space
  • Amazon will use AI to dub movies and TV series because obviously

Xbox

  • Rumor: Third-party portable Xbox gaming handheld this year, console resets in two years
  • You could have cobbled this together solely based on what Microsoft has said publicly
  • Xbox controller firmware, we have a problem

Tips and Picks

  • Tip of the week: Code with AI
  • App pick of the week: Fences
  • RunAs Radio this week: Strong Certificate Mapping in Active Directory with Richard Hicks
  • Brown liquor pick of the week: Ardbeg 10

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

Download or subscribe to Windows Weekly at https://twit.tv/shows/windows-weekly

Check out Paul's blog at thurrott.com

The Windows Weekly theme music is courtesy of Carl Franklin.

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Transcript

Primary Navigation Podcasts Club Blog Subscribe Sponsors More… Tech Remote Desktop App Going Away: Should Windows Users Be Concerned?

Mar 13th 2025 by Kevin King

AI-created, human-edited. 

In the latest episode of Windows Weekly, Paul Thurrott explained the recent controversy surrounding Microsoft's decision to replace the Remote Desktop app with the new Windows app, sparking a bit of outrage among some IT professionals and power users alike.

As Paul explained on the show, Microsoft announced last year that they would be replacing the Remote Desktop app with something called the "Windows app" - a name that hosts Leo Laporte and Richard Campbell agreed was hilariously ambiguous. The Windows app was first released in a stable version just before Microsoft Ignite last year.

"The Windows app is a way to access remote instances of Windows in the cloud," Paul clarified, explaining that it's designed primarily for Windows 365, Azure Virtual Desktop, and Microsoft DevOps environments where users need access to cloud-based Windows instances.

The problem? The Windows app currently lacks a critical feature that many IT professionals and power users rely on - the ability to connect to local computers on the same network!

One of the most interesting aspects of the discussion was the clarification about what's actually changing. There's considerable confusion because there are multiple "Remote Desktop" tools in the Windows ecosystem:

Remote Desktop Connection - The built-in Windows feature that's been around since at least Windows XP, sporting a Windows Vista-era UI that "inexplicably lasted forever" according to Paul. This is NOT going away.Remote Desktop app - The Microsoft Store app that was supposed to be a modern replacement for Remote Desktop Connection but never fully replaced it. This is the app being deprecated.Windows app - The new replacement that currently lacks local network connection capabilities.

"When I hear remote desktop, what I think of is that feature that's been in Windows since... NT something, probably certainly Windows XP," Paul noted, highlighting how the naming confusion is contributing to user anxiety.

Richard Campbell pointed out that while most average users don't connect to other computers on their local network, the Windows Weekly audience likely represents "a high percentage of people who do that."

Paul agreed: "The thing I'm describing, where I'm sitting like I am now on a home network, and I'm on this computer and I want to access the file share on the laptop over there... almost nobody does this. That said, the people listening or watching a show represent probably a high percentage of people who do that."

Microsoft has promised to eventually add local network connection capabilities to the Windows app. In the meantime, they recommend users rely on the built-in Remote Desktop Connection tool.

The hosts placed this controversy in the context of other Microsoft community outrages, with Paul noting, "In the list of things that Microsoft community folks could be outraged by." This joins other recent controversies like Skype changes, the new Outlook, and Windows 11's UI differences from Windows 10.

"Windows 10, which debuted with a UI that came from a phone that hasn't existed in a decade, somehow, is now nostalgic or beloved," Paul observed with some amusement.

For now, if you need to connect to computers on your local network, the advice is simple: continue using the built-in Remote Desktop Connection tool (accessible from the Start menu) until Microsoft adds this functionality to the Windows app.

Want to hear the full discussion about Remote Desktop changes and the hosts' fascinating tangent into the evolution of web browsers and attention spans? Listen to the complete episode of Windows Weekly on your favorite podcast platform. Paul, Leo, and Richard dive deeper into these topics and share their unique insights on the rapidly changing tech landscape.

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Mar 12 2025 - The Bouche is Amused
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