> What I wonder about is if MS wants to keep people on windows, what methods they can use to do that

Microsoft doesn't give a fuck about private customers any more. They don't have money.

What has money though is enterprise/government sales, and MS got these customers tightly locked in. Compliance audits and tooling for insurances or legal stuff (SOX, GDPR, ...) are built against a full Microsoft stack of MS Server, Active Directory, Azure, Teams, Office 365 and Windows desktops.

You might be able to get away with replacing AD and GPO with Samba servers but even that is already a pain when the auditors come knocking. Everything else? There is no single FOSS based "standard offering" (i.e. a combination of everything needed to run an on-prem enterprise site, Office replacement, remote collaboration tooling), so every audit for such setups must be custom made and involves a lot of extra work.

A second leg is industrial control machines, medical devices and the likes. That's all stuff built by third party vendors and integrators. They need to continue on Windows because switching to an alternative OS would require redoing everything from scratch on the software and certification side. These customers buy the LTSC IoT stuff.

And that is why you see Microsoft pushing enshittification so hard on private customers... extract the last few cents you can from them. But the real money comes from the large customers.

For a while it seemed like Microsoft wasn't taking Windows seriously as a product. And the easiest way to cut costs on that is to use a solution someone else is building and maintaining. They did retire Internet Explorer in favor of a Chromium browser, so it wouldn't be unprecedented.

By the time we get to version 40k the kernel will just be AI hallucinating a UI for you at 60fps.

Secondly, I do acknowlege your 40k reference.

Once I had to use a Mesa3D build for Windows and use the zink driver to render OpenGL to Vulkan, otherwise it would use Windows' software renderer.

16-bit software won't run natively in 64-bit mode. It requires some programmatic emulator, like DosBox. Or am I missing something?

Time to dust off my cd copy of Stars! (From the disk backup, the cd had terminal illnesses and has died). The only win16 game I've ever seen distributed on CDROM. Wine already ran it ok (iirc there were some issues but nothing gamebraking), but now it can do so without i386 libs.

MS got such a black eye for that that they're developing a build of windows specifically for handhelds, optimized, without the bloat and power hungry extras. Would be nice if it ran on laptops

If enough people cared it seems like someone would have created a MacOS32 in MacOS64 like WoW64.