I still think that the desktops eat a huge amount of resources. Win98 ran correcly with 32mb and you had more or less the same features of nowadays desktops.
I haven't bothered with Win 95/98 emulation, since I mostly use that setup for games, and Steam already has modern-ish windows games covered.
Full featured DEs offer features far exceeding what Windows 98 had: applets, advanced window management, 24bit graphics (Windows 98 icons were mostly 8bit) + transparency, a ton of convenient APIs. Coding in pure Win32 is quite difficult.
True, but Delphi with its VCL showed it didn't have to be.
I remember a default Delphi application with 0 lines of actual code showing nothing but an empty screen compiled into something like 300KB circa 2000 all thanks to VCL while its pure C Win32 counterpart compiled into a few kilobytes.
Yeah, an average HTML page nowadays without graphics and built-in fonts is easily above 500KB considering all the embedded JS and CSS.
...And then you UPX it to shave some more bits. ;)
Today you can download the .NET runtime quickly and semi automatically, but back in the day you had to make sure the user had them, so you included them in the bundle anyways...
IceWM is far more advanced/usable than Windows 98 wrt window management (and better than modern Windows, since things like the TaskBar have regressed heavily).
http://www.linuxfocus.org/English/July1998/article52.html
Compared to windows 3.1, the default theme flew, and visually, it was way ahead of Win 98. I remember getting pseudo transparency working, but I think that was in the pentium 100Mhz days. Other than that, it checked all the other boxes on your list.
On "the same features".... no. Not even close. No Unicode, no CJK input with IBUS, no GVFS/Kio for thousands of protocols and devices (MTP), no memory protection...
It was actually the reason I started using linux, to maximise the use of the resources. On win98 that machine was pretty much single task while on linux I could use command line and tui applications to play music, work on a school document with abiword or staroffice, chat with irc/ICQ/jabber while browsing with netscape/mozilla then phoenix/firebird. On windows 98 listening to mp3 on winamp audio was quickly stuttering if I was doing other stuff at the same time.
Since then, I've never had a PC/OS combo as fast as that. Need to work on that now...
Where has all this new resource usage come from?
In middle school my family XP computer had 512MB of RAM total, and absolutely nothing has changed since then.
Why is everything so fat now?