Last Updated on October 12, 2021 by Mathew Diekhake

If you follow Windows OS news and think you may have heard of Polaris OS but can’t quite remember what it might have been about, that’s because what once was planned to become a universal base of Windows OS has since been cancelled. Thanks to site Beta Archive, though, some of its screenshots have still leaked online.

Windows Polaris has been written about since way back in 2018. News of it leaked around the same time as Windows Core OS. Windows Core OS was going to be the operating system that was universal across all mobile devices and Polaris was going to be the desktop version which would remain solely for desktops. That makes the old plans for Windows Core OS similar to Google Fuchsia and Polaris nothing but a very unique idea.

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:

Source: Beta Archive

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