A lot of apps still use legacy Windows APIs that don’t understand very long paths. Those APIs have been deprecated for maybe 15 years or more, but developers are lazy. Microsoft can’t add support for long paths to the old APIs because they use a fixed buffer size (which means that only a certain amount of memory space is available for the path, and increasing it would break the apps that rely on that). They can’t totally remove the old APIs because every app that uses them would break.
Windows 11 can still run old apps. My wife just installed Zoo Tycoon, a game released in 2001, on her laptop and it works perfectly. She didn’t even have to manually enable any compatibility options. Even some apps from the Windows 95 era still work.
Practically all Microsoft Office versions from Office 95 onwards still work too. Backwards compatibility is very important for businesses, since it can cost a lot of money to upgrade to newer software.
16-bit Windows 3.0 apps used to work, but only in 32-bit versions of Windows, so they’re no longer supported in Windows 11 (as it’s only available for 64-bit). You can run them on 32-bit versions of Windows 10 though, as long as you install NTVDM.
A lot of apps still use legacy Windows APIs that don’t understand very long paths. Those APIs have been deprecated for maybe 15 years or more, but developers are lazy. Microsoft can’t add support for long paths to the old APIs because they use a fixed buffer size (which means that only a certain amount of memory space is available for the path, and increasing it would break the apps that rely on that). They can’t totally remove the old APIs because every app that uses them would break.
For every other company I would buy that argument. But for one that forces customers to throw away millions of computers which can’t run Win 11… no.
Windows 11 can still run old apps. My wife just installed Zoo Tycoon, a game released in 2001, on her laptop and it works perfectly. She didn’t even have to manually enable any compatibility options. Even some apps from the Windows 95 era still work.
Practically all Microsoft Office versions from Office 95 onwards still work too. Backwards compatibility is very important for businesses, since it can cost a lot of money to upgrade to newer software.
16-bit Windows 3.0 apps used to work, but only in 32-bit versions of Windows, so they’re no longer supported in Windows 11 (as it’s only available for 64-bit). You can run them on 32-bit versions of Windows 10 though, as long as you install NTVDM.