Re: Well, it's about time (HD on Win3)

On Sun, 16 Mar 2025 04:20:09 -0000 (UTC), candycanearter07
<candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote at 14:30 this Saturday (GMT):

On Sat, 15 Mar 2025 01:28:38 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:
>

Spalls Hurgenson <spallshurgenson@gmail.com> wrote:

On Fri, 14 Mar 2025 05:51:10 +0000, ant@zimage.comANT (Ant) wrote:

>
If there's one thing I actually liked about Windows 3.x, it was how
easy it was to completely customize the user interface. To some degree
this has persisted even up through Windows 11, but with Win3.x it was
possible to change pretty much everything about the shell, and do it
very easily.

>
>
I hate how little you can really change in newer Windows releases..

I honestly don't know if you can change less in modern windows than
you could in Win3. But it was much /easier/ to make those changes
'back in the day'. Just drop an EXE in the right place, change a
single line in system.ini and you're good to go.

Modern Windows require a lot more work to do the same thing, and
becaue the system has become a lot more complex and integrated, the
end result often feels very patchwork because a change in one area
isn't reflected elsewhere. Microsoft /themselves/ have been fighting
this battle for over a decade, and are still trying to revamp some
dark corners of Windows that use legacy interfaces (and, given how low
effort and information-sparse their replacements are, may they long
fight this war!). But it just goes to show how much effort is actually
required.

Win3's shell-replacement was practically drop-in and run. That had its
own problems (from a security perspective, it's terrifying!) but it
was also really neat.