Compromises were made, because of the hardware limitations of the time. A "Windows 2095", rebuilt for modern processors and security practices while maintaining the essential aesthetic of the original, would be blazing fast.
Haiku feels like it is getting very close. I have been meaning to give it a serious shot.
ReactOS feels like it is never going to get there. It is a real shame.
Honestly, what I want is Serenity Linux. The Linux kernel and drivers are already fine. If it booted into the SerenityOS WindowServer ( and maybe ran Podman ), it would be perfect!
And the result is indeed pretty blazing fast. I tend to run pretty close to this now; my world is basically a tiling WM, some shells, and a browser.
The biggest compromise overall is that browser. They just keep getting bigger and bigger, and I need it to work. Props to the people writing them who are doing an amazing job making them faster, but, well, as the saying goes "if the hardware doubles its speed, software will become three times slower" must now apply even harder to the browser, which just keeps becoming a more and more amazingly performant platform for serving pages with tens of megabytes of JS and dozens of layered video ads playing.
I wonder what a 2090s release of Windows would look like, if Windows (or humanity) is still around by then. I’m pretty sure I won’t be.
Maybe: Windows 2095 has a chat window which connects to an AI at Microsoft HQ. That AI has full access to the Windows source code. If there is something about Windows you don’t like, complain to the AI and it will modify the Windows source code to create a patched version fixing the thing that annoys you. The binary patch will be downloaded and hot-applied without reboot.
Oh, and it will break a few other things so you have to ask it again. Right after it posts to your social media some deep fakes about how much you love the stuff it bought.
FTFY.
This will be unlike MacOS (which, by then, will have probably rebranded 5 times into something like OneOS, AiOS, or ${latestFad}OS), which will simply take a percentage of your bank-account balance every month, in exchange for good feelings and a fake sense of belonging.
Taking into account the evolution of the MS OS in the latest years, i would say that in 2090 Windows will look like CP/M.
Porting Windows to run perfectly on all those different kernels may seem like a pointless exercise, but someone asked the AI for it so it happened. Some of them didn’t expose the necessary primitives, so the Windows development AI asked the AIs responsible for those kernels to make the necessary enhancements