A developer in Spain has succeeded in installing Windows 10 for ARM on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. In practice however, it turns out that this combination is not suitable for daily use.

Linux

The Raspberry Pi is pre-eminently the domain of Linux. While it is true that Microsoft, with ‘Windows IoT Core’, has released a Windows system that also runs in the Raspberry Pi, it does not have a desktop and is rather more targeted towards measurement and control applications.

The Spanish developer José Manuel Nieto has developed an installer that can install a complete version of Windows 10 on the ARM processor of the RPi. This is based on the ‘Windows 10 on ARM’, that was released by Microsoft in 2018 for ARM based notebooks but which has not been very convincing.

ISO

Nieto has made an installation tool available on GitHub for the installation. Requirements are a fast SD card and a suitable ISO of Windows 10 on ARM. To download various files from the Microsoft servers, Nieto has made an online-assistant that generates a download script.

First test

During an initial test, the downloading and assembling of the ISO file took about two hours. Continuing, from this image a wim file has to be extracted that is then passed to the installation program. This program adds an EFI shell and subsequently copies both to the SD card.

EULA

The test on the Raspberry Pi 3B+ was a disillusion. Before Windows is booted, the EFI shell has to be exited and the boot order has to be adjusted. The ‘Windows-Out-Of-The-Box’ dialogue window took three quarters of an hour for configuring the peripherals and the standard question about region. The selection of the keyboard layout went wrong the first time. After an hour and a half, various ‘blue screens’ and restarts the test was abandoned. That is because at the display of the end-user license agreement (EULA) the interface definitely did ‘hang’ completely. The little input via the keyboard and mouse already made clear that the Raspberry had pretty much reached its performance limit.

OOBE

The attempt to get Windows to work on a Raspberry Pi is, and for now remains, a pure experiment in feasibility. Even if the problems with the OOBE dialogue (out-of-box experience) can be solved, it appears that productive use of Windows 10 combined with an RPi is not possible for the time being.

Source: Heise Online