Any version of windows on a small screen is a bad idea. I had couple of windows mobile devices back in the day. (Early 2000s). Then a htc phone with windows mobile (2004) Really clunky. Microsoft should’ve realized then that windows should’ve stayed on the desktop.

Early WinCE/WinMo devices were just taking the desktop UI concepts and transferring them to mobile with minimal tweaks to optimize it for pen (not even touch) input. But it doesn't mean that it has to be that way - if you've seen Windows Phone, and the later Win10 Mobile, those were actually designed from grounds up for small screens, and didn't have the problems you describe.

The problem that still remained, and ultimately killed the platform, is the lack of third party apps also optimized for small screen and touch. These days, it doesn't matter how good the base UX is if the OS doesn't have a good YouTube app, for example.

>if you've seen Windows Phone, and the later Win10 Mobile, those were actually designed from grounds up for small screens, and didn't have the problems you describe.

Indeed. The flipside of Windows 8 Metro being fucking horrible on desktop is that it's awesome on actual tablets and other mobile devices.

>The problem that still remained, and ultimately killed the platform, is the lack of third party apps also optimized for small screen and touch. These days, it doesn't matter how good the base UX is if the OS doesn't have a good YouTube app, for example.

Windows's value lies with the Win32+x86 ecosystem, and every single iteration of Windows that failed to practically implement them (I'm looking at you Windows RT and Windows XP 64-bit Edition) has failed miserably to the surprise of noone except for Microsoft themselves.

Win32 has singlehandedly slain and foiled every single one of Microsoft's plans for expansion.

Everyone buys and runs Windows because we want to use our favorite Win32 programs from today to thirty years ago.

I don't think Metro was even that bad on desktops, more of a "bad because different" reaction in my view. Not saying it was perfect but it was a direction I think could have worked well.

What was wrong with WinXP 64-bit? I don't recall any compat issues running that back in the 00s, at least beyond what was normal for 9x/NT era software running on 2K/XP.

Lack of drivers.

It couldn't run any 16 bit(dos) software at all.

Let's clarify one thing, there were two 64-bit releases of Windows XP:

Windows XP 64-bit Edition. This runs specifically on Itanium only and was wholly impractical due to steep performance overheads emulating x86.

Windows XP Professional x64 Edition. This runs on x86-64 and is the direct predecessor to the 64-bit releases of subsequent Windows versions including the latest which is Windows 11. This was impractical due to a lack of drivers, it was essentially too advanced for its time.

In my parent comment I am specifically referring to the former.

It doesn't help that they messed up everyone that actually bought into the WinRT dream, forcing us to go through multiple rewrites across the WinRT evolution and at the same time dowgrade in tooling.

WinRT 8 => WinRT 8.1 (UAP gets introducted) => WinRT 10 (UWP gets introduced) => WinUI/XAML Islands/XAML Direct => Project Reunion => Back to Win32 with WinAppSDK/WinUI 3.0

In the process, .NET Native and C++/CX get deprecated, Native AOT and C++/CX are not at the same feature parity level, there is no designer, hardly any updates, Github issues keep growing exponentially.

Except for WinDev with Windows 11 UI updates, and everyone that has gotten too deep into WinRT, everyone else went back to classical .NET and Win32 frameworks, or Web alongside "Azure OS".

Even the XDK has dropped WinRT support and refocused on Win32 with the new GDK.

This is exactly why programming for windows now stinks so hard. There is no clear 'build this kind of application'. They pop out a new 'this is the best framework ever' every 2-3 years now (since about 2003). Then pretty much abandon whatever it was the previous 'best ever'. Whoever is in charge of their dev tools is driving the windows devs mad. We have 2 IDEs from them and about 10 different SDKs targeting random niches. Then MS being MS they sort of drag it along because someone is paying for it. But not making it clear to anyone else what is going on and you should not use that. The other 6 eco systems out there are not much better with whoever their champion is and doing very similar things.

For windows itself they also abandoned their style guides. So now you get random levels of win3.1 to win11 GUI popping out with different amounts of how does this work. Nothing is consistent and sort of half 'we are a tablet' and half 'we are a desktop' motif.

Them 'abandoning' win32 was a serious misstep. They should have built that up and had any of their new fancy frameworks building on that.

Windows Phone 7 had promise and 8 was even better, it’s a shame it never really caught on.

Windows 8 tablet mode was way better than Windows 11 on the tablet.

> Windows 11 on a small touchscreen sounds like an awful idea to me.

If only Microsoft had come up with a new kind of UI that was suited for use on touchscreens... oh well.

Some of their employees did.

https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/micr...

I was thinking of Metro.

Would you like some toast? Some nice hot crisp brown buttered toast. No? How about a muffin then? Nothing? You know the last time you had toast. 18 days ago, 11.36, Tuesday 3rd, two rounds. I mean, what's the point in buying a toaster with artificial intelligence if you don't like toast. I mean, this is my job. This is cruel, just cruel.

So that's what ended up happening to Wheatley in robot hell.