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Comment by _benj | Hacker News Reader

I honestly was expecting more "innovation", more daring decisions and deep convictions that "this new way", even though it might get some backlash, will prove to improve the wellbeing of it's users, even if they don't know it yet.

I haven't seen anything like that since the days of Steven Jobs and it kind of saddens me. Have we reached a plateau in tech? Are we just up for making more of the same, just a little different, as long as we can get VC or increase the stock price? Are there no more Wright Brothers? Alex G. Bell? Elon Musk for more industries?

Sorry for the sad comment, but this release just disappointed me. Idk what I was expecting, but it wasn't just another Windows...

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I was hoping 11 would get rid of a bunch of old Windows backwards compatibility cruft. Make Windows 10 the long-run version and Windows 11 the forward looking one. Almost like what Apple did with Mac OS X.

Mac OS X has direct linage from NeXTStep that was first released in 1989 -- four years before Windows NT.

When it was originally rebranded OS X there was so much backlash from developers and Apple had to go back and spend a year creating a new API (Carbon) to mimic the one in Mac OS classic.

There is no reason to complain about "backwards compatibility cruft". An OS exists to run software and an OS that runs less software is less useful. Over time this backwards compatibility stuff is less and less significant -- you can run several copies of Windows 95 entirely in the L2 cache of a modern system.

Well did drop 32 bit and bios. So they probably dropped a huge chunk of kernel code

16bit support isn't legacy enough? No 32bit install?

Desktop OSes have been basically stagnant for almost 20 years. There's plenty of software innovation out there, but not in this space.

They tried that with Windows 8, the backslash was so enormous that I think they will be on the safe side and stick with 'familiarity' for the foreseeable future.

Win8 re-design was completely unrequested, most people hailed Win7 as the best Win UI iteration. Win 8 was a desperate, unguided attempt to make the Win UI fit on tablets, which failed, hence the full-screen "Start screen"

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