not sure what exactly you mean with applets and especially advanced window management

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).

I used to run this version of enlightenment + slackware(?) on a 25MHz 386 with 8MB (or was it 4MB?) of RAM:

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.

> Coding in pure Win32 is quite difficult.

True, but Delphi with its VCL showed it didn't have to be.

Delphi produced quite bloated code.

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.

300kB. How goalposts moved since then.

LMAO.

Yeah, an average HTML page nowadays without graphics and built-in fonts is easily above 500KB considering all the embedded JS and CSS.

If you use an alternative set of libs, such as KOL&MCK, you get fully featured GUI programs in tens of KB range (about 50KB for an empty window with a button, IIRC) while having all the benefits of the coolest RAD which Delphi/Lazarus provide.

...And then you UPX it to shave some more bits. ;)

IIRC it included the runtime libraries. In the case of VB you had to install them in addition to your software (and I think they were bigger).

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...