All the 25 years of code is still in Windows 11 they just hide it with a lick of paint. If you want to play old games Microsoft is still your best bet.
There are a lot of baffling decisions by Microsoft’s Windows division, but their extreme dedication towards backward compatibility is nothing short of Herculean.
Sometimes I wish they’d split up Windows in an ultra-slow ‘Enterprise’ ring and a move-fast (think about the speed of macOS changes) ‘consumer’ ring, where they could drop much of the legacy cruft in trade for speedy/forced improvements. Think macOS going fully 64 bit, making the system image immutable, etc.
Hell, imagine if they’d allowed the Xbox One, X and S to run Windows 11 in S mode. Instant cheap performant computer for the layperson! And with it running S mode, they’d make their money through the Microsoft Store.
They do: Long-term Servicing Channel releases: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...
This just tells me Windows is on a level with Linux + Wine, with the compatibility mode.
> All the 25 years of code is still in Windows 11 they just hide it with a lick of paint.
That's not true. Windows had a big, discontinuous shift when they abandoned the DOS-centric Windows codebase in the move to XP.
Initially happy as the install and intro ran fine, but pressing enter to skip the video exits the game immediately.
Maybe that's further than you would expect, wine / proton is incredibly good nowadays, but still your point stands.
You mean the move to the NT platform, which made the consumer windows desktop OS finally stable.
Compatibility features, while not perfect, were implemented to help try and get Win9x and DOS workloads to function normally. Some DOS apps ran fine on XP in compatibility mode, although I couldn't say what %.
Windows 11 is the latest member of the Windows NT family, which originates from Windows NT 3.1 which coincides with Windows 3.1.
Windows NT 4.0, which coincides with Windows 95, is where things start to look more familiar to us today.
Windows 2000 followed to coincide with Windows 98 and ME and is where the NT family really got consumer-aimed software working right with the integration of DirectX all the way up to DirectX 9.
Windows XP which followed 2000 is really just 2000 with some more cleanup and QoL improvements. All the foundations were laid by the time of Windows 2000.
So yes, "all the 25 years of code" are definitely still in Windows 11 under a lick of paint.