Eh? A lot of things have been lost ("taken away") on Windows.
I can think of a few off the top of my head:
64-bit versions can't run 16-bit applications (including MS-DOS software), for instance, which broke all kinds of stuff for people who never knew that they still needed this.
Ye Olde Windows Help system disappeared starting with Vista, which broke a huge amount of the online documentation that still-functional software had been using (including, maddeningly, my own bought-and-paid-for copy of QuickBooks).
Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications is gone. It used to be a thing, and now it is not.
32-bit hardware compatibility: Gone in Windows 11 (and Windows 10 EOLs in about a year and a half).
OS/2 binary compatibility: Windows included the ability to run [some] OS/2 software in NT-based versions, up to (and including) 32-bit XP.
And that's just some stuff that me, a complete non-expert, can think of straight-away.
Maybe it was all cruft, or maybe it was useful. Maybe it's better that these things are gone, or maybe it is not.
But these are all things that used to be present, and that are now no longer present.
Comments
Plus backward compatibility. They add code but never take it away.
Eh? A lot of things have been lost ("taken away") on Windows.
I can think of a few off the top of my head:
64-bit versions can't run 16-bit applications (including MS-DOS software), for instance, which broke all kinds of stuff for people who never knew that they still needed this.
Ye Olde Windows Help system disappeared starting with Vista, which broke a huge amount of the online documentation that still-functional software had been using (including, maddeningly, my own bought-and-paid-for copy of QuickBooks).
Subsystem for UNIX-based Applications is gone. It used to be a thing, and now it is not.
32-bit hardware compatibility: Gone in Windows 11 (and Windows 10 EOLs in about a year and a half).
OS/2 binary compatibility: Windows included the ability to run [some] OS/2 software in NT-based versions, up to (and including) 32-bit XP.
And that's just some stuff that me, a complete non-expert, can think of straight-away.
Maybe it was all cruft, or maybe it was useful. Maybe it's better that these things are gone, or maybe it is not.
But these are all things that used to be present, and that are now no longer present.
Windows 11 won't run most DOS or Windows 3.1 or Win16 Windows 95/98/ME programs.
XP does.
W10 32-bit will still do this (while W10 is still with us) after enabling NTVDM so it works like XP in this regard.
It will, but using different methods.
Isn't that going away with the new ARM-based Windows systems?