Times have changed, its now the corpos dictating what you should be happy with.

Because 16 bit reasons. Also a lot of Windows API is called Win32 regardless of the used bits, as it was the API created for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 originally, with some things added onto it later, and even some kind of deprecated parts

Too many hard coded absolute references to fix now.

if Europe could just generalise and open source the NT kernel, Windows could actually be usable again.

I guess it would be useful just for running software that only works on Windows but I can't think of any other actual benefits to NT when compared to any Unix/Unix-like kernel

Plese don't be giving the EU ideas to help MicroSlop. Let them die please

So, you want ReactOS.

How'd you suppose Europe would open-source one very very commercial software? It's practically like asking McDonalds to pay you for eating their burgers.

If I were to take the first part seriously, the kernel is actually the thing that's holding up the best out of everything nowadays

I don't think so anymore. You could probably do some damage if you clicked through the hundred warnings but I don't think you can remove the whole directory anymore.

Windows has a secret "System" user which owns most if not all if that, and permissions are now set up such that not even Administrator can touch it. From what I understand those are now hardcoded into the system.

That folder (or rather whatever serves its purpose) has been around since the beginning, so all the 16-bit applications at the time would look for OS libraries in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\.

Then 32-bit comes along, and you can't exactly drop 2 files with the same name in the same folder, so the 32-bit ones got put in their own named folder.

Then 64-bit comes along, and it turns out way too many applications hardcoded the System32 path to change it, so they kept the name the same and inserted a filesystem redirection for legacy 32-bit apps so when they try to read from System32 the kernel redirects that to SysWoW64.

Yes, they'll be thrilled! They love this kind of challenges, they call them 'absolute fucking dumbass tickets' - satirically of course. They like me.