As the joke goes, Win32 is the Linux ABI.

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.

Unfortunately for Microsoft, condumers are as wedded to legacy apps as enterprise customers are. A lot of Steam's library immediately vanishes if you lose 32-bit support for example.

> ultra-slow ‘Enterprise’ ring and a move-fast (think about the speed of macOS changes) ‘consumer’ ring

They do: Long-term Servicing Channel releases: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/l...

> Couldn't get Deadly premonition working. Windows recommended XP compatibility mode and it worked!

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.

Which is why you need a Dos Box to play DOS games.

That wasn't true for Windows XP, which shipped with the NT Virtual DOS Machine (ntvdm.dll). Unfortunately, this was dropped in 64-bit Windows and finally axed in Windows 10.

You're welcome to try getting Deadly premonition working in Linux!

I was about to gloat, as it's so cheap to buy, I thought it was a good opportunity to test Steam proton by selecting "enforce compatibility" which so far has worked for everything I threw at it (CIV V, hitman absolution, bunch of other obscure windows only titles).

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.

> Windows had a big, discontinuous shift when they abandoned the DOS-centric Windows codebase in the move to XP.

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 had a big, discontinuous shift when they abandoned the DOS-centric Windows codebase in the move to XP.

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.