Windows Archive
Raymond Chen shares some history regarding Windows 8’s development: During the development of Windows 8, we needed a name for “that thing we’re creating.” Not being a particularly clever bunch when it comes to code names, we just called it “the modern experience,” to distinguish it from what we had in Windows 7, which was called “the classic experience.” And then, as Microspeak demands, we started abbreviating like mad. ↫ Raymond Chen Basically, they added “mo” for “modern” in front of everything, so the Metro shell became “MoSh”, the Settings application “MoSet”, and so on. And yes, the code name for the Photos application was exactly what it sounds like.
For the past few years, Microsoft has been phasing out NTLM in Windows in favor of Kerberos-based alternatives. Starting with the next versions of client and server editions of Windows, Microsoft will also be disabling the legacy authentication protocol by default. In the latest security baseline package for Windows Server 2025, the company is already allowing customers to audit incoming configurations. Now, it has announced a wave of changes to further reduce dependencies on NTLM. With an upcoming Insider release of Windows 11 client and server, certain scenarios which previously required NTLM will be able to fall back on Initial and Pass-Through Authentication using Kerberos (IAKerb) and Local Key Distribution Center (LocalKDC). ↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin I’m sure this is very important to “IT Pros”.
At its Build conference, Microsoft announced coreutils for Windows. Coreutils for Windows is a Microsoft-maintained set of UNIX-style command-line utilities that run natively on Windows — the same commands and pipelines you use on Linux, macOS, and WSL. It ships as a single multi-call binary that exposes each utility under its standard name (cat.exe, grep.exe, find.exe, and so on), giving you the everyday tools developers already use on other platforms to script, automate, and process text. For the full list, see Commands. The goal is to remove friction when moving between Linux, macOS, WSL, containers, and Windows. The same commands, flags, and pipelines work the same way, so existing scripts and habits carry over without translation. Each command supports the standard --help flag for full syntax and options. ↫ Windows Developer Tools website It’s a port of the Rust-based rewrite of the GNU coreutils, findutils, and grep. There are a few caveats though, since these ports have to deal with a number of Windows-isms. The first thing that comes to mind for most of us are path separators; these ports will handle both the correct and incorrect Windows/DOS one, but since some tools may output only the incorrect one this may affect piping. You should also take into account things like Windows’ ACLs vs. POSIX permission bits, the lack of /dev/null, and a few other oddities. Furthermore, there are a bunch of commands that rely on POSIX-only concepts, so those aren’t included, and a few other commands that aren’t useful on Windows are excluded as well. Since a number of commands conflict with built-in commands from cmd.exe and PowerShell, which commands run will depend on the shell, the PATH order, and PowerShell’s alias table. Everything’s in preview, and installable through WinGet.
WinUtils started in 1996-1997 as a way to build my programming chops. I was poking around the Windows 95 shell APIs, found the file operation functions, and thought it would be cool to have CLI tools that called them instead of doing raw file I/O. The payoff was practical: because the operations went through the shell, the same confirmation prompts, progress dialogs, and Recycle Bin behavior you got from Windows Explorer came along for free. ↫ Code Naked Code Naked – their alias, not mine – recently dug these old executables and code back up, and published them on GitHub. Back then, though, there were no centralised distribution platforms, so they just uploaded them to various download and shareware websites and kept track of the download tickers. Very neat little tools, and fun to have them immortalised.
Now that my one-month sentence of using Windows 11 has begun (you can follow along!), I’m also a bit more perceptive of news and developments regardingMicrosoft’s latest and greatest operating system version. Despite claims to the contrary, we already know the company isn’t really removing “AI” features from Windows, merely renaming them instead, but it turns out they’re planning something more all encompassing: the Copilot Design System. Long-time Microsoft veteran Jon Friedman published a blog post introducing this new concept. As Copilot steadily evolves into a thought partner—an intelligent presence woven into your workflow—its backbone will become the Copilot Design System, an AI-forward design system we’re crafting to feel intentional and humane. From orchestration patterns to iconography, the experience we’re building will ultimately have components that work together to amplify thinking, guide decisions, and unlock creativity—seamlessly, wherever you work. Anchored in customer feedback around creating better experiences, a fundamental question guides our system’s evolution: how would a thoughtful partner look and behave? ↫ Jon Friedman at Microsoft’s design blog I’ve read the whole post and I still have no idea what most of it is supposed to mean in practice. It feels like the written equivalent of someone trying to put lipstick on a pig, and pretty much anyone is going to see right through the fancy words and phrases and realise what we’re really dealing with here: a company trying to figure out just how far they can shove “AI” down your throat before you gag reflex kicks in. You can hide behind flowery language all you want, but if you’re selling shit, it’s going to stink regardless. The only concrete user interface idea that’s come out of this Copilot Design System was a floating Copilot button that permanently floated on top of your workspace area in Word, Excel, and so on, obscuring the actual things you were working on. Users hated it so much that Microsoft had to quickly release what is essentially a hotfix to give people the ability to remove that floating button, putting it in a toolbar instead. Like I said: people see right through these thinly-veiled attempts at baiting them into using your pachinko machine. Anyway, yes, I’m working from Windows 11 now, just as you people paid me to do. Here’s the proof: Only 30 days left to go. I can do this.
We’re a mere €124 away from the first incentive during our fundraiser: making me use stock Windows 11 for a month. Since the writing appears to be on the wall, and the donation pulling us across the line can come in any moment, I figured I’d better take a peek at how things stand with Windows. I came across a story about Yusuf Mehdi, an executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, who apparently became the face of Microsoft’s “AI” push. After 35 years, he’s leaving the company, but not after pledging to continue pushing “AI” deeper into Windows 11. Despite this intense backlash, Mehdi is doubling down on the AI vision during his final months at the company. In his LinkedIn announcement, he stated: “I will work through the next fiscal year to help reimagine Windows for the agentic era, grow Microsoft 365 services, and bring our One Copilot vision to life.” Microsoft has recently scaled back on some intrusive Copilot features in Notepad, Snipping Tool, and Photos, but the executive leadership team still views AI agents as the inevitable future of the Windows desktop experience. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest The numbers for Microsoft and every other software company who dove head-first into “AI” are clear: it’s one of the biggest bottomless pits of all time, and they’re all throwing money down the pit hoping it’ll eventually fill up and overflow. Meanwhile, 100 metres down in the pit, a dude in a leather jacket is holding out a bucket and collecting some of the money before it disappears into the void below. For Microsoft, “AI” represents a $235 billion loss (so far!), so the company had to do something – anything – to stop the bleeding. They tried shoving Copilot buttons in every nook and cranny of its products, but users rightfully and understandably revolted. They’re toning it down in Windows, and recently, they’ve also had to tone it down in Office as users were horrified to discover a floating Copilot button in Word, Excel, and so on. People really do not want this shit, which puts these companies in a hugely precarious position: just how badly can they abuse the geese? We’ll see just how much Microsoft will actually roll back its force-feeding practices, and I’m not excited to be partaking in the Windows 11 experiment soon.
I’ve seen some wild projects in my day, but this one is definitely up there as one of the more ambitious. Stock Microsoft Windows CE 2.11 running on a real Nintendo 64. A custom HAL drops the unmodified nk.lib kernel onto VR4300, brings up the CE 2.11 GWES desktop and shell, mounts the EverDrive-64 X7’s SD card under \SDCard, treats the N64 controller as a mouse, plays sound through the N64 AI hardware via the standard CE wave stack, and runs third-party CE 2.11 EXEs straight off the SD card. This is a hobby reverse-engineering project: there is no official CE 2.11 port to N64 from Microsoft. Everything below the unmodified nk.lib (HAL, OAL, display driver, FSD, kbd/mouse PDD, wave PDD, RDP-accelerated GDI fill, ed64-X7 driver) is part of this repo. ↫ ThroatyMumbo Getting a fully operational desktop on Windows CE 2.11 is a lot harder than it appears at first sight, because this earlier version of Windows CE didn’t come with many of the reference implementations of components that later versions would add. OEMs were supposed to develop their own user interfaces for Windows CE 2.11, so the entire desktop you see here on this N64 port – window manager, taskbar, file manager, and so on – consists of custom code developed by ThroatyMumbo, using the standard Windows CE APIs. That’s not all, though, as the same applies to the various drivers needed to make Windows CE 2.11 talk to the hardware in the Nintendo 64. Windows CE 2.11 contains the interfaces for drivers but OEMs were supposed to write their own device drivers. So ThroatyMumbo did: the display driver, input drivers, sound driver, cartridge driver, and so on, are all written from scratch. Absolutely incredible. Note: it seems “AI” has been involved in this project, but it’s unclear to what extent. I didn’t see any telltale signs, but readers have reached out to me about this. The result of all this is that you can now run Windows CE 2.11, including a familiar shell, on your N64, and run any Windows CE applications as well. Absolutely wild.
Microsoft is finally rolling out one of the most requested set of features to Windows 11: a movable and resizable taskbar. Windows 11 did away with the ability to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, as well as a various other taskbar customization options, that had been there since the very first iteration of the taskbar in Windows 95. Now they’re finally bringing it back. Microsoft is finally rolling out two of the most requested features: the ability to move the taskbar and make it smaller, so you have more screen space. I tested Windows 11’s new movable taskbar integration, and it’s just as good as the original Windows 10 version, which let you move the taskbar to the top or sides. ↫ Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest It works exactly as you’d expect it to, with icons, text, menus, and other user interface elements adapting to their new location on the sides or top of the screen. I feel absolutely stupefied that I need to make a news item about this in this, the year of Our Lady 2026, but I know a lot of people stuck on Windows 11 were really missing these basic features. Rejoice.
One of the top pieces of customer feedback in the graphics driver area is clear: “Windows Update downgrades my drivers.” Today, we are announcing a policy change to how display drivers are published through Windows Update — allowing 2-Part HWID + Computer Hardware ID (CHID) targeting for new devices. This change gives customers more control over their display driver of choice while preserving OEM control over the devices they ship. ↫ Garrettd at Microsoft’s Hardware Dev Center Windows Update randomly downgrading your graphics drivers seems to be a common enough occurrence that its supposed fix deserves its own feature announcement and blog post. This is a real operating system that runs on most of the world’s PCs.
Interest in classic user interface design is spiking, and today we’ve got another great example, highlighted yesterday by Micheal MJD. Classic 7 combined Windows 10 LTSC with a whole slew of themes and deep modifications to deliver Windows 10, but made to look, feel, and even act like Windows 7. Classic 7 is a Windows 10 (IoT Enterprise LTSC 2021) modification made to look 1:1 to Windows 7. It has all of the goodies that Windows 7 had along with some extras included! Classic 7 features a 1:1 OOBE recreation, meaning it’ll feel just like your PC simplified once more. ↫ Classic 7 website As Micheal MJD’s video shows, this is much more than a mere theme, and extends far deeper into the operating system than these kinds of projects generally do. I have no idea how stable this really is, or if it’s even remotely legal to do something like this, but who the hell cares – this is incredibly fun, and seems quite well done.
Microsoft is currently testing a brand new performance-enhancing feature in Windows 11. Microsoft, too, is introducing something to Windows 11 called “low latency profile” and it this will work irrespective of the processor, be it AMD64 CPUs like Intel or AMD or ARM64 ones like from Qualcomm. Essentially what this new tech will do is apply a maximum available clock frequency boost for a very small span of time, like for one to three seconds, when a user launches any app. The idea is that the app launch time will reduce while the quick clock burst should not impact the overall efficiency of the system by much. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin Unsurprisingly, boosting the processor’s clock speed to its maximum for a few seconds will make a menu or application open a little faster. I’m not entirely sure why anyone seems surprised by this, but here we are. Yes, the Start menu will load faster and applications will be ready quicker if you boost the processor to its full potential, but that does raise the question of why Windows 11 would need to do that just to open a menu or load an application in the first place. According to Microsoft’s Scott Henselmann, who defended Microsoft’s approach (weirdly enough he did so on a nazi platform called “Twitter” that I’m obviously not linking to), every other modern operating system does the exact same thing, pointing specifically to macOS and GNOME and KDE on Linux. He also pointed out that the Start menu today does a lot more than the same Start menu back in Windows 95, including making network requests and rendering everything in HiDPI. I just want a cascading menu of stuff I can run and don’t want my launcher to make network requests, but alas, I guess I’m old. Anyway, I don’t know enough about the intricacies of how modern processors work to make any statements about how this affects battery life, but instinctively, you’d think this would not exactly be conducive to that. I also wonder if this will trigger a lot of laptops to spin up their fans whenever you open the Start menu, because the few seconds your processor goes full tilt raises its temperature just enough to make that happen. Once this new feature comes out of testing and is generally available, I’d be quite interested in seeing battery tests, as well comparisons to other operating systems to see how it fares.
With Windows being as old and long-running as it is, there’s a ton of old and outdated bits and pieces lurking in every nook and cranny. I have always found these old relics fascinating, especially now that over the past few years, Microsoft has attempted to replace some of those bits and pieces with modern replacements (not always to great success, but that’s another story). One of those parts of the UI that’s been virtually unchanged since the release of Windows 95 is the Run dialog, but that’s about to change: Microsoft has released a completely new Run dialog to early testers. Windows Run, also known as the Run dialog, is a surface that has been around for over 30 years. It has become a heavily relied upon tool for developers and advanced users alike. Users have decades of muscle memory where they hit Win+R, navigate through their Run history, and hit Enter to quickly access various paths and tools. We all have our favorite tool we launch there as well. For us, some of our favorites are wt (Windows Terminal), mstsc (Remote Desktop) and winword (Microsoft Word). But it’s more than jUsT a TeXt BoX tHaT rUnS tHiNgS. The Run dialog can handle navigating both local and network file paths as well. And everything it does, it does fast. Win+R opens the run dialog seemingly instantly. If we wanted to modernize the Run Dialog to fit the modern Windows 11 design style, we had to make sure it did everything just as well as before. We needed to maintain the same performance while also keeping the user interface minimal, just as Windows 95 intended. ↫ Clint Rutkas at the Microsoft Dev Blogs The new Run dialog looks like it belongs in Windows 11, which is a nice improvement, but the most important part is that they actually seem to have made it a little faster. Sure, they may have only shaved off a few milliseconds from its opening time, but considering virtually everything else they’ve touched in Windows over the years got considerably slower, that’s a good showing for Microsoft. The new feature they’ve added is that by typing ~\, you can open your home directory. The one casualty is the browse button, which according to Microsoft’s data, literally nobody ever used. I know it’s just a small thing and in the end not even a remotely consequential one, but with an operating system as old and storied as Windows, replacing these ancient parts that millions of people rely on every day absolutely fascinates me. There must be a considerable amount of pressure on the people developing something like this new Run dialog, especially with Windows’ reputation being at one of its lowest points, so it’s good to see them being able to deliver. The new Run dialog is available today for testers, and if you’re on the Windows Insider Experimental Channel, you can enable it in Settings > System > Advanced. Coincidentally, on my Windows 11 machine that I use for just one stupid video game, this Advanced page displays a loading spinner for five minutes and then just dies. Also, Notepad won’t start (one time it showed this dialog), and using the terminal to load it causes the old Win32 version of Notepad to open after 5 minutes of waiting, which then hangs and crashes. People pay money for this.
Raymond Chen published a blog post about how a crappy uninstaller on Windows caused a mysterious spike in the number of Explorer (Windows’ graphical shell) crashes. It turns out the buggy uninstaller caused repeated crashes in the 32bit version of Explorer on 64bit systems, and – hold on a minute. The how many bits on the what now? The 32-bit version of Explorer exists for backward compatibility with 32-bit programs. This is not the copy of Explorer that is handling your taskbar or desktop or File Explorer windows. So if the 32-bit Explorer is running on a 64-bit system, it’s because some other program is using it to do some dirty work. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing So I had no idea that 64bit Windows included a copy of the 32bit Explorer for backwards compatibility. It obviously makes sense, but I just never stopped to think about it. This made me wonder though if you could go nuts and do something really dumb: could you somehow trick 64bit Windows into running this 32bit copy of Explorer as its shell? You’d be running 32bit Explorer on 64bit Windows using the 32bit WoW64 binaries where you just pulled the 32bit Explorer binary from, which seems like a really nonsensical thing to do. Since there’s no longer any 32bit builds of Windows 11, you also can’t just copy over the 32bit Explorer from a 32bit Windows 11 build and achieve the same goal that way, so you’d really have to go digging around in WoW64 to get 32bit versions. I guess the answer to this question depends on just how complete this copy of 32bit Explorer really is, and if Windows has any defenses or triggers in place to prevent someone from doing something this uselessly stupid. Of course, there’s no practical reason to do any of this and it makes very little sense, but it might be a fun hacking project. Most likely the Windows experts among you are wondering what kind of utterly deranged new designer drug I’m on, but I was always told that sometimes, the dumbest questions can lead to the most interesting answers, so here we are.
A few weeks ago, Microsoft made some concrete promises about fixing and improving Windows, and among them was removing useless “AI” integrations. Applications like Notepad, Snipping Tool, and others would see their “AI” features removed. Well, it turns out Microsoft employs a very fringe definition of the concept. Microsoft seems to have stripped away mentions of the “Copilot” brand in the Windows Insider version of the Notepad app. The Copilot button in the toolbar is gone, and instead, you’ll find a writing icon which will present you AI-powered writing assistance, such as rewrite, summarize, tone modification, format configuration, and more. Additionally, “AI features” in Notepad settings has been renamed to “Advanced features” and it allows users to toggle off AI capabilities within the app. ↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin If the recent changes to Notepad are any indication, it seems Microsoft is, actually, not at all going to “reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points”, as they worded it, but is merely just going to rename these features so they aren’t so ostentatiously present. At least, that seems to be the plan for Notepad, and we’ll have to see if they have the same plans for the other applications. I mean, they have to push “AI” or look like fools. I just don’t understand how a company like Microsoft can be so utterly terrible at communication. While I personally would want all “AI” features yeeted straight from Windows, I’m sure a ton of people are just fine with the features being less in-your-face and stuffed inside a normal menu alongside all the other normal features. They could’ve just been honest about their intentions, and it would’ve been so much better. Like virtually every other technology company, Microsoft just seems incapable of not lying.
Today, we’re excited to announce a significant step forward in our ongoing commitment to Windows security and system reliability: the removal of trust for all kernel drivers signed by the deprecated cross-signed root program. This update will help protect our customers by ensuring that only kernel drivers that the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) have passed and been signed can be loaded by default. To raise the bar for platform security, Microsoft will maintain an explicit allow list of reputable drivers signed by the cross-signed program. The allow list ensures a secure and compatible experience for a limited number of widely used, and reputable cross-signed drivers. This new kernel trust policy applies to systems running Windows 11 24H2, Windows 11 25H2, Windows 11 26H1, and Windows Server 2025 in the April 2026 Windows update. All future versions of Windows 11 and Windows Server will enforce the new kernel trust policy. ↫ Peter Waxman at the Windows IT Pro Blog The cross-signed root program was discontinued in 2021, and ran since the early 2000s, so I think it’s fair to no longer automatically assume such possibly old and outdated drivers are still to be trusted.
I’ll never grow tired of reading about the crazy tricks the Windows 95 development team employed to make the user experience as seamless as they could given the constraints they were dealing with. During the 16bit Windows days, application installers could replace system components with newer versions if such was necessary. Installers were supposed to do a version check, but many of them didn’t follow this guidance. When moving to Windows 95, this meant installers ended up replacing Windows 95 system components with Windows 3.x versions, which wasn’t exactly a goods thing. So, they came up with a solution. Windows 95 worked around this by keeping a backup copy of commonly-overwritten files in a hidden C:\Windows\SYSBCKUP directory. Whenever an installer finished, Windows went and checked whether any of these commonly-overwritten files had indeed been overwritten. If so, and the replacement has a higher version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the replacement was copied into the SYSBCKUP directory for safekeeping. Conversely, if the replacement has a lower version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the copy from SYSBCKUP was copied on top of the rogue replacement. ↫ Raymond Chen All of this happened entirely silently, and neither the installers nor the user had any idea this was happening. The Windows 95 team tried other solutions, like just making it impossible to replace system components with older versions entirely, but that caused many installers to break. Some installers apparently even went rogue and would create a batch file that would replace the system components upon a reboot, before Windows 95 could perform its silent fixes. Wild. I used Windows 95 extensively, and had no idea this was a thing.
Usually, when developers or programmers write articles about their experiences developing for a platform they have little to no experience with, the end result usually comes down to “they do things differently, therefor it is bad actually”, which is deeply unhelpful. This article, though, is from a longtime Windows user and developer, but one who hasn’t had to work on native Windows development for a long time now. When he decided to write his own native Windows application to scratch a personal itch, it wasn’t a great experience. While I followed the Windows development ecosystem from the sidelines, my professional work never involved writing native Windows apps. (Chromium is technically a native app, but is more like its own operating system.) And for my hobby projects, the web was always a better choice. But, spurred on by fond childhood memories, I thought writing a fun little Windows utility program might be a good retirement project. Well. I am here to report that the scene is a complete mess. I totally understand why nobody writes native Windows applications these days, and instead people turn to Electron. ↫ Domenic Denicola Denicola decided to try and use the latest technologies and best practices from Microsoft regarding Windows development, and basically came away aghast at just how shot of an experience it really is. I’m not a developer, but you don’t need to be to grasp the severity of the situation after following his development timeline and reading about his struggles. If this is truly representative of the Windows application development experience, it’s really no surprise just how few new, quality Windows applications there are, and why even Microsoft’s own Windows developers resort to things like React for the Start menu to enabler faster and easier iteration. This is a complete dumpster fire.
Earlier this year, Microsoft openly acknowledged the sorry state of Windows 11, and made vague promises about possible improvements somewhere in the near future, but stayed away from making any concrete promises. Today, the company published a blog post with some more details, including some actual concrete, tangible changes it’s going to implement over the coming two months. In coming builds, you’ll be able to move the taskbar to any side of the screen, instead of it being locked to the bottom, thereby reintroducing a feature present since Windows 95. They’re also scaling back their obsession with ramming “AI” in every corner of Windows, and will be removing Copilot integrations from Snipping Tool, Photos, Widgets, and Notepad. Furthermore, and this is a big one among Windows users I’m sure, Windows Update will be placed under user control once again, allowing them to ignore updates, postpone them indefinitely, reboot without applying updates, and so on. These are the tangible improvements we’ll be able to point to and say the company kept their word, and they all feel like welcome changes. There’s also a few promises that feel far more vague and less tangible, like the ever-present, long-running promise to “improve File Explorer”. I feel like Microsoft’s been promising to fix their horrible file manager for years now, without much to show for it, so I hope this time will be different. The company also wants to improve Widgets, the Windows Insider Program, and the Feedback Hub application. These all feel less tangible, and will be harder to quantify and benchmark. Beyond these first round of improvements that we’re supposed to be seeing over the coming two months, Microsoft also promises to implement wider improvements across the board, with the usual suspects like better performance, quicker application launches, improved reliability, lower memory usage, and so on. They also promise to move more core Windows user interface components to WinUI 3, including the Start menu, which is currently written in React. Windows Search is another common pain point among Windows users, and here, Microsoft promises to improve its performance and clearly separate local from online results (but no word on making search exclusively local). There’s some more details in the blog post, but overall, it sounds great. However, words without actions are about as meaningful as a White House statement on the war with Iran, so seeing is believing.
It’s only a small annoyance in the grand scheme of the utter idiocy that is modern Windows, but apparently it’s one enough people complained about Microsoft is finally addressing it. In all of its wisdom, Microsoft doesn’t allow you to set the name of your user’s home folder during the installation procedure of Windows 11. The folder’s name is automatically generated based on your Microsoft account’s username or email address, something I’ve personally really disliked since I have been using thomholwerda for as long as I can remember. Last year, they introduced an incredibly obtuse method of setting your own home folder name, but now the company is finally adding it as an optional step during the regular installation process. Expanding on our work which started rolling to Insiders last fall, you can now choose a custom name for your user folder on the Device Name page when going through Windows setup. This most recent update now makes it easier to choose a custom name. The naming option is available during setup only. If you skip this step, Windows will use the default folder name and continue setup as usual. ↫ Windows Insider Program Team This means you now have the option of defining your own home folder name, excluding CON, PRN, AUX, NUL, COM1, COM2, COM3, COM4, COM5, COM6, COM7, COM8, COM9, COM¹, COM², COM³, LPT1, LPT2, LPT3, LPT4, LPT5, LPT6, LPT7, LPT8, LPT9, LPT¹, LPT², and LPT³. It’s a very small change, and certainly not something that will turn Windows’ ship around, but at least it’s something that’s being done for users who actually care. It’s also such a small change, such a small addition, that one wonders why it’s taken them this long. I’m assuming there’s already some incredibly complex and hacky way to change your automatically assigned home folder name by diving deep into the registry, converting your root drive back to FAT16, changing some values in a DLL file through a hex editor, and then converting back to NTFS, but this is clearly a much better way of handling it.
Windows 11 has never pretended to be a clean backward-compatibility story. Since its launch, Microsoft has systematically trimmed support for aging APIs, drivers, and runtimes — and developers maintaining legacy codebases are absorbing the consequences. The question worth asking in 2026 isn’t whether these deprecations cause friction. They clearly do. The real question is whether that friction is severe enough to push serious developers away from Windows entirely. The answer is complicated. Microsoft’s deprecation schedule is aggressive, but the ecosystem response has been pragmatic rather than revolutionary. Developers aren’t fleeing en masse — they’re adapting, often through containerization and virtualization workarounds that add complexity without solving root problems. Where Regulated Software Sectors Feel It Most Industries running long-lifecycle software — healthcare, manufacturing, financial services — feel Windows 11’s deprecations most acutely. These environments commonly depend on legacy Visual C++ redistributables, hardcoded system paths, and DLL dependencies that assume a Windows 7 or Windows 10 runtime environment. Refactoring isn’t a sprint; it’s a multi-year program. The October 2025 end-of-support deadline for Windows 10 accelerated these conversations significantly. Organizations that delayed migration decisions now face either extended security update costs or forced compatibility work — neither of which was budgeted under normal refresh cycles. Some sectors exploring digitally-adjacent tools, from productivity software to platforms like New York Casinos online, face analogous pressures around maintaining software that runs consistently across evolving OS environments. Which Legacy APIs Windows 11 Actually Breaks According to Microsoft’s deprecated features documentation, APIs including NPLogonNotify and NPPasswordChangeNotify have had their password payload functionality disabled by default starting in Windows 11 version 24H2, with potential full removal signaled for future releases. This matters most for authentication middleware and enterprise SSO integrations built years ago with assumptions about credential pipeline access. The kernel-level changes arriving in April 2026 compound this. Microsoft is now blocking legacy cross-signed drivers by default — a policy shift affecting toolchain components that have operated uninterrupted for decades. Older trusted drivers retain compatibility for now, but the direction of travel is clear: unsigned or legacy-signed kernel code is getting progressively harder to run without explicit policy overrides. How Developers Are Responding to Forced Migration Containerization has become the dominant short-term response. Vendors like Numecent and Cloudhouse offer packaging solutions that isolate legacy runtimes — including 16-bit emulation and Windows XP compatibility modes — inside containers that run on Windows 11 without requiring refactoring. This buys time, but it doesn’t eliminate technical debt. As XMA’s migration analysis notes, while 99.7% of applications are compatible with Windows 11, the remaining 0.3% are disproportionately critical legacy systems that can block entire enterprise upgrade pipelines. For development teams maintaining those systems, workarounds like Azure Virtual Desktop or Windows 365 are Microsoft’s preferred answer — cloud-hosted compatibility rather than native resolution. Does Linux Finally Win the Developer Desktop? No direct evidence suggests Windows 11 is triggering a meaningful migration of developers to Linux or macOS as a primary environment. Microsoft’s own response to compatibility pressure consistently points back to Windows-native solutions. Tools like UiPath Studio, for instance, still maintain Windows-Legacy .NET Framework 4.6.1 support — signaling that the ecosystem isn’t yet willing to cut that rope entirely. What’s actually shifting is the developer mental model around dependency management. The assumption that Windows will perpetually run anything from any era is visibly eroding. Developers building new toolchains today are making different architectural choices — favoring cross-platform runtimes, containerized builds, and abstracted driver interfaces precisely because Windows’ compatibility guarantees feel less permanent than they once did. Linux gains ground not through dramatic defection but through incremental preference shifts among developers who simply want fewer surprises.
