Yeah it sure can install these programs but thei'll either run like dogshit or not at all.

Yes, install your 25-year-old software on your 30-year-old NTFS filesystem (it's that old).

EDIT: I just looked it up and NTFS turns 30 on July 27th, 2023 LOL

Maybe so, but all that spaghetti code to ensure the backwards compatibility comes at a cost of endless Windows jank.

I use both Windows and Mac machines for my audio work and while everything is consistently just 'plug and play' on my Mac, on the PC side I'm constantly fighting a losing battle with Windows ASIO audio driver issues, multi-monitor issues, Microsoft constantly asking me to make an account every 3 days...

For gaming, I love Windows. Still yet to find anything it does better and with less fuss than MacOS in a work environment though.

My dosbox and multiple attempts to build VMs of windows 3.1 say this isn't completely true

While not confirmed (AFAIK), it's likely we went from Windows 8 straight to 10. With 95/98 being so similar, it wasn't rare for software to recognize it by looking for "Windows 9" in the OS name.

Oh look, OP never used a Mac but he’s hating on it.

Windows after launching the exe: Monitor flickers, mouse freezes and here is free blue screen!

I have to send files from my Mac to my PC in order to get them printed cause my old printer's driver won't work with the newer MacOS but they work fine on windows 11.

That's because somewhere deep inside every x64/x86 compatible processor is an 8086 from 1980. The architecture has more or less remained the same for 40 years with more and more shit piled on top.

You can literally still natively boot DOS from a floppy on a modern PC if you can get it to recognize and boot from a USB floppy drive and it has legacy boot enabled. You wont get very far without drivers for anything, but you'll get to the command prompt.

For real. We run windows server R 2008 or something at work, never update it. Works like a dream with our other less ancient servers