Microsoft Announces Windows 11 (techcrunch.com) 157
After weeks of leaks and hype, Microsoft today officially announced Windows 11, the next version of its desktop operating system. From a report: While the company may have once said that Windows 10 was the last version of Windows, forgoing major point launches for a regular cadence of bi-annual upgrades, but it clearly believes that the changes -- and especially the redesigned user interface -- in this update warrant a new version number. Microsoft plans to release Windows 11 to the general public by the holidays, so we can probably expect it sometime around late November. Before that, we'll likely see a slew of public betas. If you followed along with the development and eventual demise of Windows 10X, Microsoft's operating system with a simplified user interface for dual- and (eventually) single-screen laptops, a lot of what you're seeing here will feel familiar, down to the redesigned Start menu. Indeed, if somebody showed you screenshots of Windows 11 and early previews of Windows 10X, you'd have a hard time telling them apart.
As Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay noted in today's announcement, the overall idea behind the design is to make you feel "an incredible sense of calm," but at the same time, the Windows team has also worked to make it a lot faster. Windows Updates, for example, are supposed to be 40 percent faster, but Panay also noted that starting up your machine and even browsing should feel much faster.
As Microsoft Chief Product Officer Panos Panay noted in today's announcement, the overall idea behind the design is to make you feel "an incredible sense of calm," but at the same time, the Windows team has also worked to make it a lot faster. Windows Updates, for example, are supposed to be 40 percent faster, but Panay also noted that starting up your machine and even browsing should feel much faster.
Start menu is located at the bottom middle (Score:2)
Redmond, start your copiers?
Re:Start menu is located at the bottom middle (Score:4, Insightful)
Another hope is that they've buried the control panel under yet another layer of obfuscation and/or iconification. Always fun to figure out whether changing screen resolution is a System setting or a Personalization or what.
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Are we really at the point that centering some icons is seen as copying Apple? The rounded corners thing was bad enough...
Quite possibly because there's no technical advantage to centering the Start button. In fact there are many technical and UI disadvantages to doing so which means they are going entirely for visual appeal, and as your windows 1.0 example shows the icons were never centrered in Windows, unlike ... how many versions of OSX have there been?
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Yeah, the corners of the screen are prime real estate. For a mouse, toss your mouse vaguely in a corner direction, it'll be there without being precise. For touch, it's probably closer to where your hand is resting.
Centering being possible is fine and being the default even to show off that it can be centered, sure, since it's an option, it doesn't matter too much so long as left-justified or top-justified is still an option.
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In the absence of all other logical reasoning what better thing can you think of than "we see a competitor's product doing this successfully"?
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Kinda like Windows 10 "feels" so much faster because it happened to coincide with SSD's becoming cheap and standard everywhere. Not that MS didn't do anything to improve it but they get to piggyback some success off of that in general.
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feeling faster *is* faster, in so far as it means the ui responds faster
it also doesn't exclude actually being faster in other areas
how is a more responsive ui a gimmick? would a slower responding UI be something you'd be happy to accept, as the faster feeling UI is just a gimmick?
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I agree with the general sense of trying to treat 'it will feel faster' as weasel wording that it won't be faster, however, there are things that can make things 'feel' faster despite not being so.
Utterly trivial example? A slow 'spinner' and a fast 'spinner' denoting the same time interval will cause a false sense of 'responsive'. If you have a UI to draw but the actual data will take a while to load, having the UI load without data and then having the data 'pop-in' will feel more responsive. There are ple
Ready your earplugs (Score:2)
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Looks More Like a Windows 8 Reboot (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Looks More Like a Windows 8 Reboot (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually it looks more like MacOS X than Windows 8. I never had much of an issue with Windows 8 (or Windows 10) UI. But I did have Issues with early Windows Server 2012 UI, Because I really don't want a touch UI for my freaking server, and still I am not a big fan of the Power Off Icon, being right next to the Search Icon, with a very similar looking Icon. These things can fly on a PC, but for a Server you are just asking for trouble. Especially as most people will connect with RDP.
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Ah but when one's interface looks like this [youtu.be] then touch is perfect.
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I'm still on Windows 8.1 and was going to move to 10, but it looks like I need to wait until at least next year (not going to beta test the first version of 11).
Great timing Microsoft, didn't even consult me!
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Your computer is not your tablet
Speak for yourself. Some of us actually think releasing a tablet with a full blown OS was the best thing Microsoft ever did. Also if you think this looks like Windows 8 reboot then I can only assume you found that so tragic and traumatising that you erased it from your memory. I mean I do get it, I tried to do the same.
Windows 10 has actually shown quite well that with a few clever tweaks you can make a windowed OS functional with a touch input without impacting the desktop users one bit, which is also why
two fifths of forever (Score:5, Funny)
Windows Updates, for example, are supposed to be 40 percent faster
so now it's going to take only 40% of infinity
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and a constant Internet connection. if it drops, you have to start over. sorry.
Re:two fifths of forever (Score:5, Insightful)
So Microsoft removed the time delays? Does that mean it now "gets the fuck on with doing shit" instead of claiming that it is "downloading" while doing no network I/O, and "installing" while doing no disk I/O, and no more "getting ready to think about getting ready to do something" while doing no I/O and using no CPU?
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Speaking of delay...
Back when I was running the Windows 10 beta (pre-release), the darndest thing happened--
I ran calc to do a quick calculation.
A window for calc popped up instantly, but instead of the program in the window, it was the calc "flat" icon. The window stayed like that for 3 seconds before fully loading calc.
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On the other end of the scale, my Win10 installation manages to sit at 50% CPU for hours on end.
25% for bloody OneDrive and 25% (i.e. two cores fully pegged) for "Windows Explorer" (I highly suspect they shoved their antivirus under that headline). With only the occasional file changing and needing to be synced.
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You mean 60%, Einstein.
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Thanks, I was waiting for that, Cantor (I presume).
What's the difference between 40% of infinity and 60% of infinity?
(apart from 20% of infinity) :-)
Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
the overall idea behind the design is to make you feel "an incredible sense of calm,"
They've really got their finger on the pulse, this was definitely what I was after in my operating system.
I realize now that all that other stuff like being able to set the size of the paper in my printer was just superfluous.
Re:Awesome (Score:5, Funny)
Nothing enhances my calm like a bunch of my applications no longer working properly.
The apps made by Microsoft...
Used in the Microsoft operating system...
That was just updated by Microsoft.
Yep, I feel the calm washing over me now.
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What really calms me down is all the adverts and the sending me to the MSN and/or Bing home pages.
I hope they're still there in abundance.
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Ah yes Windows 11: Zen edition.
Re:Awesome (Score:4, Funny)
Sure beats Windows 11: Zune Edition
Re: Awesome (Score:2)
That makes me want to squirt.
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From your anus, I presume.
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Actually, yeah. Calm is underrated. Otherwise known as "get out of my way and let me do the things I want to do and nothing else". To the exclusion of advertising, UI churn, excessive notifications, and all the other trash that's thrown into technology nowadays.
Yes you also need functionality like setting the printer page size. Hopefully that wasn't mentioned because it already works.
No I don't expect Microsoft to actually deliver this calm even if they promise it.
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Yes you also need functionality like setting the printer page size. Hopefully that wasn't mentioned because it already works.
Um, no. It's never worked.
Every time I go to print it sets the paper size to "Letter". I have no idea what "Letter" is but it's not the size of the paper in my printer.
I can set all the defaults to A4 but Letter keeps on coming back.
This is with three or four printers and various versions of Windows over the last 20 years.
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Might be keyed to the slot that the printer considers "letter". In other words my printer has a "letter" tray which is more than just a name, but also a separate "legal" paper tray. If I swapped the paper and selected "letter" It would be a "legal" printout. Far as knowing which is which the legal tray plugs into the bottom.
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What does it mean though? Fewer of those stupid notifications that apps spam out? Not inducing rage by randomly restarting for updates? No more feeling like Microsoft is looking over your shoulder with telemetry?
I'll take all of those.
PITA (Score:4)
Recently disk corruption forced me to rebuild my work environment from scratch, which reminded me how much of a PITA it is to have to reapply all of the changes that move Windows from bloody annoying to somewhat tolerable. And how much time it takes to install everything I use. Not looking forward to Windows 11, which undoubtedly will add another layer of shit to wade through.
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And now you know the power of virtualization [techtarget.com] and Puppet. [guru99.com] Plus backups of all data.
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Chocolatey is great for installing apps after a clean install. Keeps them up to date too.
I for one.... (Score:2)
I for one welcome our new, post-last-Windows-version-ever overlords.
What I wish they'd do (Score:2, Insightful)
I wish they'd just lock the UI team in a room or something and then not let them out until they have gone through every dialog box and other aspect of Windows and replace all of the legacy UI elements with a consistent one. Even in Windows 10, if you know where to look, you can find dialog boxes that are clearly from the NT 3.x days. You can find little leftover bits from all of the previous incarnations of Windows if you look in the right places.
Personally I wish they'd go back to the Vista style instead o
Re:What I wish they'd do (Score:5, Insightful)
Except those legacy boxes are the only places where you can actually do any serious sysadmin work.
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I wish they'd just lock the UI team in a room or something and then not let them out until they have gone through every dialog box and other aspect of Windows and replace all of the legacy UI elements with a consistent one.
I was with you right up to the word "until".
Re:What I wish they'd do (Score:5, Insightful)
Those ancient dialog boxes still work better and have the features you want. I keep looking for how to change the IP address and all it would give me was a switch to toggle it on or off.
Re: What I wish they'd do (Score:2)
Agreed. On the rare occasions I monkey with Windows, I fight through those 'improvements' in search of the control panels that actually do useful things.
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I actually like the flat UIs. The point of the computer is to do some work, not to look nice. Windows 7 was the worst there, too much shine and sparkle for no reason, and even the GPUs could get into the game to speed up that sparkle.
They should focus on usability first and foremost. The move of the start stuff to the center of the task bar is weird. The easiest thing to do with a mouse is to move to any of the four corners; you don't even have to aim or see the mouse. I can activate the start button W
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Even with laptops, in the office most seem to be plugging them into monitors and keyboards if they're doing significant work. Having two large monitors when you have lots of stuff to look at helps, compared to a tiny 15" screen. Docs on one screen, schematics and spreadsheets on the other screen. No one's doing real work on a tablet only unless they're just is just to attend meetings and do a lot of talking and listening. Now that's not the majority of Microsoft customers, however the enterprise is defi
Does the "Every Other Windows" Concept Still Hold? (Score:5, Interesting)
- Windows 3.1 was revolutionary
- 95 set the new standard but was really rough around the edges
- 98SE was amazing for the time
- ME was atrocious. (Those in the know went to 2000.)
- XP was a home computing messiah
- Vista was ME's conjoined twin, removed, and re-presented as the next big thing
- 7 was a breath of fresh air. So good that MANY people still refuse to willingly upgrade.
- 8 brought an abomination of a start button/bar
- 10 was not only free to many people, but amazingly stable. The primary gripe with 10 is the privacy issue (telemetry, phone home).
- 11 -- Does this mean 11 will be horrible?
Who has the inside track here?
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I've never really agreed with this sentiment. I do agree that every other Windows was *disliked*, but I think this was a perception issue not a software issue.
The cycle:
- New version of Windows is released, people hate change
- People are forced to live with this hated version of Windows for a while
- New version of Windows is released, people interpret this as "fixing all the problems"
- People go about happily for a while, convinced that all the problems are fixed
- Repeat
No Windows version has been much to w
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Oh I'd say ME was more than a "perception issue" especially since I had to work with USB on a daily basis as part of my job.
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All of the hate for ME and Vista was 100 perception.
I used Vista every day for 18 months and the only problems I had were things that weren't Microsoft's fault. Like having to switch to a different antivirus program because the vendor for my existing program kept dragging their feet and promising to release a new Vista-compatible version "in a few days", but never delivering.
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Vista had stuffed so many bells and whistles that were unoptimized. Notably the search indexing was pretty heavy handed with resources, so you could nearly constantly hear the clicking of the disks at work when nothing was actually being done.
Also, while UAC was an important step, Vista had the security prompts nagging constantly as they hadn't refined their privileges well yet.
I think this is the historical reason for the every-other-release phenomenon, they put in some features and get stuck as they have
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Yeah, and there are two install/uninstall *lists*, adding to the confusion. I have a legacy app that can't be uninstalled with the newer interface. Why not?? Their dedication to backwards compatibility has come at a cost.
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A reminder, XP was absolute crap until Service Pack 2.
A yes. The good old days.
If you connected to the Internet using the original release of XP (before SP 1) , you would be pwnd in a matter of minutes.
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No, XP was great in that it was a 32-bit OS. If you were on NT 4 then XP felt like a bunch of stupid Windows 95 crap shoved into your productivity machine If you were a Windows 95 user then sure it felt way to big and bulky, but it was a necessary step to move away from the micro-computer mentality and start the catching up to the the state of the art from the 80s.
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Windows 3.1 wasn't revolutionary, it was passable. What it did was saying to someone thinking on getting a Mac, well this PC doesn't have a Toy GUI (DOSSHELL, GEM Desktop, GEOS). For the most part people still Stuck with DOS, but what made it sell was MS Word, and MS Excel for Windows.
Window 95 was fine, but over promised (you had to wait for Windows 7 until you got all the hype was about in Windows 95).
Windows 98 was better than Windows 95, but mostly just the same OS with embedded browser and some UI fix
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The "every other version" was never true.
Windows ME was a bit dodgy, but everything else was fine until Windows 8 which was absolute garbage.
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Vista was not a great OS, mostly because of the poor multi-threaded performance. That was particularly important at the time, since processor speeds were plateauing, and multi-core chips were emerging at that time. The overly-intrusive permissions screen and other less-than-polished aspects didn't help either.
Windows 7 was basically a very polished and highly optimized version of Windows Vista. The substantial kernel-level optimizations occurred after MS and the industry in general realized that CPU cloc
Windows 10X (Score:3)
Who has the inside track here?
Some of us are hoping Windows 10X was the odd version. And apparently it was so odd that MS didn't even consider it releasable, so that bodes well for Windows 11 :-)
Where is my upgrade (Score:3)
Everything else is just a redesign to justify a number
Free "upgrade" from Win 10? (Score:2)
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Based on the old claim that Win 10 was to be the last version of windows. I wonder if it will be a free upgrade. Not that I have any need for it. I only use Windows at work.
From the freaking article:
Microsoft plans to release Windows 11 to the general public by the holidays, so we can probably expect it sometime around late November. Before that, we’ll likely see a slew of public betas, starting next week. It’ll be a free update to Windows 10 users.
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From the freaking article:
Microsoft plans to release Windows 11 to the general public by the holidays, so we can probably expect it sometime around late November. Before that, we’ll likely see a slew of public betas, starting next week. It’ll be a free update to Windows 10 users
Are you new here? /.
No one reads the article on
Thanks for the information though.
Incredible sense of calm? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want me to be calm using Windows 11 you better have a way to disable every single notification that currently pops up the moment you sign into 10. An ongoing stream of Bob's descendents harassing people to click here or there or "Did you see this?", not to mention any time your mouse hovers over anything there's another pop-up getting in the way.
JFC. Stop harassing people and let them get their work done. I want to turn off every notification of any kind, permanently. It should like a command line, but in GUI form. The only thing the OS should do is execute the command the user says, no questions asked.
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Get rid of the ads too.
Iterative update? (Score:3)
I wonder whether Win11 is more or less different than 21H1 as compared to between 21H1 and the original release of Win10. Perhaps with macOS going to 11, MS felt a bit inferior and wanted their own version 11.
VM Compatable? (Score:3)
TPM 2.0 (Score:5, Insightful)
It amazes me that no one is talking about the TPM 2.0 requirement.
It's pretty much going to invalidate most PC's from upgrading even though they are more than capable of running the OS.
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I'm talking about it now that it is a requirement to run windows 11. Screw that
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I have an 18 month-old high end gaming system ( ASUS Prime X-570P / Ryzen 7 3800X / 16 GB Ram)
Microsoft's tool tells me it can't run Windows 11. Something is wrong here if a recent machine won't run it.
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Might need this. [amazon.com]
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And a compatible motherboard and BIOS.
All three modern machines I use regularly are too old to get this upgrade. Looks like 10 is the end of the line for them.
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It's pretty much going to invalidate most PC's from upgrading even though they are more than capable of running the OS.
You know basically every PC developed in the last 5 years has a TPM 2.0 compliant implementation in the CPU right? And most PCs made in the past 20 years can get a TPM 2.0 compliant implementation with the add on module that has been standard on every motherboard for under $20 right?
Honestly I'm surprised they didn't push this hardware with Windows 10 considering how much of their security features actually depend on TPM to provide security (Windows Hello, Bitlocker, hell even Windows Defender uses it to de
Holy Jesus Fuck (Score:4, Interesting)
Jesus fuck. It is so bad
The rounded corners look trashy. The extra white space in Explorer looks trashy. The Start Menu is even fucking worse. Now it defaults to shortcuts and guesses. You have to click a separate button to see everything on the list. Still can't edit the menu like you could in 7-. You still need to go to a pair of different explorer locations.
My system is not compatible with Windows 11... (Score:2)
Because I dont have a TPM. Well well well, didn't see that one coming.
Their spokesperson ... (Score:3)
make you feel "an incredible sense of calm" ... (Score:2)
Marketing (Score:2)
My personal conspiracy theory about this is that the marketing department convinced them that they need to have a bigger number than Apple lest people think that OSX is newer or the same version as Windows 10. The same reason they named it XBOX 360. They didn't want to call it XBOX 2 when the Playstation 3 was being sold.
This one's due to suck (Score:2)
Win10 was pretty good, so keeping in tradition with MS releases alternating "terrible suckage" with "decent OS" ...11 should be pretty bad.
Looks a little more like OSX (Score:2)
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Re:Needs Money (Score:4, Informative)
You have a funny idea of "running out of money" [geekwire.com].
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That has nothing to do with making money (revenue). It also has nothing to do with actually having anything of value whatsoever. It is merely a confabulation of imagination.
...and "Microsoft is running out of money" has nothing to do with facts.
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Here you go then:
https://www.statista.com/stati... [statista.com]
You sound like you're stuck in time capsule. Blink twice if you need help.
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Rather than talking out of your arse how about actually looking at MS's results. You know the ones that show 2020 was a record year in terms of revenue, margin, profit, and cashflow, so much in fact that they increased their dividend because they didn't know what to do with all that money you claim they don't have.
In the future when you make something up it helps when you can't be easily disproved by a public record. https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]
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Microsoft is running out of money.
Put down the crack pipe, dude. [yahoo.com] MS's strategy over the last half decade has broken the Ballmer stagnation and they're making more money than ever. The current people running the show actually appear to know what they're doing, and are not going to upset the apple cart over a market segment that is shrinking.
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Enterprise push-back. Office 2021 will essentially be a snapshot of where Office 365 is at a month or two before release. Development will continue on O365 (with release, slow track, and fast track versions), and only some functionality will get ported to O2021. While Microsoft has said that 2021 will be the last standalone version, I suspect we'll see standalone versions for at least the rest of the decade. Microsoft isn't walking away from those revenues.
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I really doubt it.
Windows 32 was Microsoft Golden Age, there are just so many Windows 32 Apps out there, and new ones being made that going 64bit only will be a disaster.
Microsoft in general had dropped the ball for decades now in the 64bit conversion. .NET Development, however when they made .NET they weren't thinking about future upgrade to 64bit CPU's, or Moving off the x86 platform. So they decided to make a Faster Java, by making a lot of the componen
They were kinda on the Right Direction with pushing
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I'm guessing GP is talking about the 32-bit OS, not 32-bit backward compatibility (the WoW64 subsystem).
Clearly, as you mentioned, they won't be dropping 32-bit app support for as long as Windows exists. MS is only now planning to build Visual Studio as a 64-bit app, from what I understand. There are undoubtedly many, many thousands of other 32-bit apps people are still using every day.
But I think there's a decent chance they may finally drop support for the 32-bit OS though. There aren't even any mainst
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Microsoft stopped allowing OEM purchase of 32-bit versions a couple of years ago. You can still get them retail, but as you said, there's no reason for it. Anything you'd realistically want to run Windows 11 on would be 64-bit native.
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16-bit apps probably do better with DOSbox or similar.
Natively executing versus dosbox managed execution won't be noticeably different for any application designed specifically prior to 1995 (when Win32 became *the* way to program windows applications)
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