The Windows 11 insider build is surprisingly unpolished and unfinished

It's strange how "dark/light mode" was such an innovative/killer feature, when the same feature was available decades ago.

The thing people miss, and that I have been unfortunately privy to, are the incredibly number of large companies that customize these older dialogs.

They add controls, remove controls, override anything and everything.

This is why something that seems simple ("scrap it and start over") does not fully solve the problem. You have thousands of customers who rely on that old dialog.

The only choice would be to run them side-by-side for a long time and warn these customers that stuff is being deprecated. If they don't move forward in a certain period of time, they can not use the newest OS.

Sorry, I completely disagree. An OS should be a dependable stable platform. The Apps are what drive productivity, and I want to keep the software that I purchased running for as long as I can. The vendors probably would love to sell you the newer version that works on OS version N+1. I don't want to keep re-buying software just because the OS vendor deprecated a library/framework. That's just my view.

I've told this story before of how we installed an XP app (i.e binary was created ~15-20 years ago) on W10 and it just worked w/o any fuss. In biotech you have a lot of very very expensive commercial software and you can't just treat the OS as the 'flavor of the month' and not care about backwards compatibility. There are many industries that are the same. We think of Autodesk as this giant company, but (correct me if I am mis-remembering) some dude analyzed their financial statements and concluded they only have like 20-30,000 paying users, but at $4,000 a pop, it adds up. If I purchased their product for $4,000 the last thing I want is some OS vendor to follow some UI fad and render my application incompatible.