In fairness to Windows, the kernel and the drivers are the few of the objectively good things about it.
Neither NT nor its age are the problem. It should be a testament to how well it works for the things we’re using it for today.
The problem is the userspace. The things that you interact with and see. That is what you’re referring to when you mention “the format dialog”. Not NT. Win32 isn’t a kernel, it’s an API that is used to sometimes talk to NT indirectly and give userspace functionality.
Where NT is truly starting to show its age is with things like scheduling on AMD Ryzen chips with 2 different CCDs. That is a Microsoft skill issue. Had this issue cropped up not even 10 years ago, they would’ve figured it out. This is what is gonna age NT. New hardware, not new software.
Precisely. MS didn’t do a very good job maintaining it for Ryzen CPUs recently, though. I remember the whole fiasco with Zen 4, when it just came out, it ran better on Windows 10 than 11.
Then, more recently, 9950X3D needs manual thread pinning to run some games better.
Like, come on… this isn’t something any user should even be worried about.
But also keep in mind that “just talking to the hardware” is one hell of a reduction and oversimplification, too.
Keep in mind, these issues with Ryzen scheduling are fairly new. People yap about NT being an issue when it wasn’t for many years and it still isn’t even the primary issue (and it usually gets fixed by the vendors themselves in one way or another).