[shiroiushi]

>The thing is - making a consistent, easy to use well thought out operating system experience is a gargantuan task and it must take gargantuan time money and effort to do it well.

Not really: Apple did it long before they were as large and rich as they are now. The key is forcing limitations on everyone, including independent software vendors, and mostly ignoring backwards compatibility. Apple has always controlled their environments to a large extent, and used that to push their vision of how a UI should work. And having a highly centralized company with a dictatorial and perfectionist CEO contributed to this. MS, by contrast, seems to have long been a company that more closely resembled an organized crime syndicate, with different factions constantly fighting or backstabbing each other, and the central leadership not strong enough (or perhaps not caring enough) to enforce a single vision unless it was about monopolizing the market and putting competitors out of business.

[Dalewyn]

>mostly ignoring backwards compatibility

>MS, by contrast, seems to have long been a company that more closely resembled an organized crime syndicate

I think we all need to give more credit to Microsoft for being the only one who cares about backwards compatibility, and to an insane extent at that.

We take for granted the sheer convenience of running something written 30+ years ago today almost seamlessly.

[shiroiushi]

From what I've read, you can't actually run a 30-year-old Windows program natively on Windows today: when you do, it actually runs in "WOW" (Windows On Windows), which is basically an emulator built into Windows to handle old programs. It's not really much different than running that same program on Linux with WINE, which many people claim works even better than running it on modern Windows.

[Dalewyn]

WoW64 is practically native because Windows keeps 32-bit copies of all system libraries for 32-bit binaries to refer to. There is a very minor performance hit when Windows thunks calls to SysWOW64 behind the curtains, but it's impossible to notice.

You can see it for yourself, the 32-bit libraries are stored at C:\Windows\SysWOW64; the 64-bit libraries are stored at C:\Windows\System32.

Yes, the naming dissonance is not missed. The glory of backwards compatibility. :V

You're probably using WoW64 right now and not realized it because it's so seamless; there are still plenty of new/current 32-bit programs including Steam and many games.

As for running a 30 year old program, it's not exactly 30 years old (yet!) but I run stuff like Winamp and Paint Shop Pro 5 daily without fuss to this day in Windows 11 thanks to Microsoft's devotion to backwards compatibility.

The older WoW which was based around NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine) for running 16-bit programs on 32-bit Windows was actual emulation, as evidenced by the name.

[shiroiushi]

>You're probably using WoW64 right now and not realized it because it's so seamless

That's very unlikely, since I'm typing this on a Debian system.

[Dalewyn]

:V