What? Windows made tons of progress while maintaining this principle and became the most popular operating system in the world. Are you trying to tell me that you believe the evolution of Windows from 1.0 all the way to 7 - the entire time trying to operate according to this principle - doesn't constitute meaningful progress?

The recent stagnation of the OS has nothing to do with attempting to maintain backwards compatibility.

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acdha 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It’s true that they’ve made some progress but my work laptop running Windows 11 still has UI elements from Windows 95/NT 4. The file system hasn’t improved since then and the keyboard responsiveness is actually worse. BeOS on 90s hardware absolutely torches Windows 11 on things like UI responsiveness, ability to multitask without degrading UI performance, and the file system (not networking, of course, it wasn’t perfect).

I think it’s fair to question whether the decisions around backwards compatibility have been worth the cost but I’d imagine they’re already doing that. Enterprise IT departments love Windows but nobody else does, and the generation of people who grew up using iOS/Android and macOS/ChromeOS for school aren’t going to jump at the chance to bring that enterprise IT experience into their personal lives.

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wk_end 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> The file system hasn’t improved since then

The file system is a great example of how Windows has evolved, actually. Windows 95 was (initially) still using FAT16! NT4 was using NTFS 1.2, we're now on NTFS 3.1. To the file system itself MS added (per Wikipedia): disk quotas, file-level encryption, sparse files, "reparse points" (dunno), journaling, "distributed link tracking" (also dunno), "the $Extend folder and its files" (ditto), and better MFT recovery. Also, apparently not part of the file system itself: symbolic links, transactions, partition shrinking, and self-healing. And that's just what I gleaned from the History section on Wikipedia's NTFS article; I'm sure there's more.

Apple specifically was much slower catching its file system up with Microsoft, despite their disinterest in backwards compatibility. And if Apple jumped ahead a little with APFS, well, NTFS holds its own just fine against APFS for 99% of users. And for when it doesn't, there's also ReFS, an entirely new next gen file system used on Windows Server, and is now slowly making its way onto the desktop.

	▲	acdha 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Okay, I’ll grant that links and mountpoints were good but NTFS is still missing integrity checks, fast queries, etc. For most users nothing had changed since the Clinton administration.

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cyberax 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can actually tell the old controls from the Win NT by how fast and responsive they are. They also properly follow the best practices by showing keyboard accelerators when you press "alt".

It's the new stuff that is slow and unusable.

	▲	1718627440 7 hours ago \| parent [-]
		And they also explain themself to the user. The new UI often doesn't tell you at all, what exactly you are modifying here, while the old often has paragraphs of explanation.

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sgjohnson 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can still find applications written for Windows 3.1 in the latest builds of Windows 11. Something regarding database drivers if I recall correctly.

Now imagine if you could get rid of all that legacy crap to make it work in the first place. Microsoft CAN’T do that, because the entire premise of Windows is backwards compatability.

Apple? They don’t care. Killing 32bit apps? Just make an announcement saying that in 2 major macOS releases, macOS won’t be able to run 32 bit apps. It cuts down bloat, and it cuts down on the potential attack surfaces for malicious actors.

Obviously just about everyone would agree that Windows 1 -> 7 was progress. I don’t think you’ll find too many people who’ll say the same about Windows 7 -> 11.

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wk_end 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Now imagine if you could get rid of all that legacy crap to make it work in the first place.

What would be the consequence of this? What harm does this do? Would it be worth Spotify and Slack breaking when I upgrade my OS?

	▲	jojobas 9 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> Now imagine if you could get rid of all that legacy crap to make it work in the first place. Yeah, and someone will wake from the dead and rewrite all the programs that run the world, written 20-40 years ago, that are to a large degree perfectly working under these compatibility layers. You should be eternally grateful to MS for dedicating tons of money and some of its best people to maintaining backwards compatibility. Apple can only afford it because pretty much nothing critical ever ran on macos.

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badsectoracula 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Now imagine if you could get rid of all that legacy crap to make it work in the first place.

That's easy to imagine: people would have zero reason to use Windows.

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FireBeyond 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I mean macOS Settings were decidedly schizophrenic until quite recently. Audio MIDI Setup last got a version update in 2017.

AirPort Utility? Apple disbanded that team in 2016. There hadn't been a new AirPort since 2013.