MicrosoftChris,
Not a sheep here, I have serious concerns about win11 and will be exploring those once I finally have hardware that is allowed to run it (sore spot #1). But that's a different topic.
What I suggest you do is join the ReactOS community and help develop it into a real release that works on real hardware. Or pick a Linux system and go with it. I'm guessing that most of your applications are old, and therefor probably work fine under the Wine (or others) emulation.
Yes XP was good, so was win7, and so is (for the most part) win10. I do wish that Microsoft had kept the XP emulation that they allowed for win7pro so that we could keep some old applications running, but being a big project like XP was, there were security holes and you just can't keep going forward constantly patching the past. But still should have included the VM since they already made the code and image. (yes I know, virtual box, et. al.)
I will throw this back out there for Microsoft... Why don't you allow anyone with a Pro license to "downgrade" to LTSC? It is a subset of features so there shouldn't be any real issues other than lack of (some) telemetry. And lack of bloat, it would be worth an extra $30 (one time) to be able to downgrade from Pro to LTSC if you are going to claim that Candy Crush and other bloat helps pay for the OS. Or is it really about selling all our data? Is it time for a GDPR in the USA and at the OS level where we can control it? (different discussion)
Critical yet polite, and much better than some discussions on these topics at other places. People are very passionate about some of these changes, and not in a good way. I hope that the executives will take Windows in a slightly different direction than where they seem to be going.
