>it'd offer a solution to keeping niche HW running
Preservation. It ensures WinNT survives as a platform even if Microsoft abandons it, which some would argue the present state of Win11 counts as doing.
If MS abandons WinNT, then people will likely continue to use the existing versions of Windows which are out there for any existing software (just as people continue to use MS-DOS and Win 9x for old games and software).
As for new software - I think it's open to debate just how much new Win32 software will be created after a hypothetical abandonment by Microsoft of Windows.
Windows 11 is the enshitification late stage advertisement economy product that no one asked for, and everyone in the C Suite at Microsoft is excited about. Probably the only thing they are more excited for is yet another terrible branding decision.
i don't get this take. i've been on win11 since the closed "beta" (i think, it's been a real long time). i wrote guides on how to "fix" the most common and also tricky issues with the upgrade path from win10 to win11, as well as guides from 7/8 to winten.
however, i should note that i actually don't like windows 11 at all, but for different reasons. for the first two years or so, third party apps would crash to desktop if a folder had a literal "@"[0] in the name. That was patched on the "big patch" that a lot of people complained about, about 8-10 months ago.
Currently i have another issue, for brevity's sake, i'll just list these two. If i reboot, but don't log in, my computer will freeze. if i log in fast (within about 5 seconds of the login screen accepting input (enter, mouseclick, etc)), and get to the desktop, if i walk away, computer will freeze. My computer freezes (hard freeze, reset button/power button to fix) if it is idle. it's the silliest thing i've ever seen, surpassing even crashing with "@" in the directory name.
my fix? I run an idle game (nomad idle or idle pins) and that stops it from crashing forever. But once a month i wake up to a hard-locked computer because of an automatic update + reboot.
ugh.
[0] i think the newer windows terminal and/or the newer powershell API used to assume an "@" was something else, on powershell, it turns green and autofills stuff like "@Alias" and "@args". My assumption is they didn't sanitize it and let powershell hook everything when that's just silly. Windows 11 is silly.
Preservation. It ensures WinNT survives as a platform even if Microsoft abandons it, which some would argue the present state of Win11 counts as doing.