I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Updating the OS is one thing, there will be change, and none of us likes change, but it doesn't cascade down to having to change every detail of my work flow.
So maybe it's the only thing Windows has, but for me anyway it's a pretty big "only".
It's also the bane of its existence, because it means that they can NEVER retire anything, because by doing so they would break backwards compatability.
And that's actually how we ended up here. They can never get rid of even Win16 GUI (let alone Win32) because it would break shit written for Windows 3.1 (yes, there are still some dialogs in Windows 11 that use Windows 3.1 file select dialog, namely the ODBC Data Source Administrator (32-bit)[0].
So they are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Win32 isn't being used for anything they are making now, but it's used by other people, and more importantly it's used by all the old apps.
So now they have to justify ETERNAL support for an essentially deprecated API. Which they obviously aren't doing, which is why we're here.
> I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Unless they are extremely domain specific, surely there are modern alternatives?
Actually windows 64 bit won't run 16 bit programs, that part has been gone for a decade or so.
Yes there are probably alternatives, but that's the point, I like the way it's working now - I don't want to find new equivalents and then discover what's missing from them.
But I'm not sure what the existance of win32 has to do with anything - it's not like it stops win64 from working.
I'm still using programs daily that I acquired in the 90's,some of which was last updated in the 90s.
Updating the OS is one thing, there will be change, and none of us likes change, but it doesn't cascade down to having to change every detail of my work flow.
So maybe it's the only thing Windows has, but for me anyway it's a pretty big "only".