Windows already does this, and has for years. Under 2000 and later, 16-bit Windows apps run in WoW (Windows on Windows), and DOS applications run in the NTVDM (NT Virtual DOS Machine). On 64-bit Windows, 32-bit applications run in WOW64. It's generally not considered "virtualization" as much as API emulation or wrapping.botg wrote:Ever tried OS X? It has built-in virtualization and emulation. Run PPC binaries on Intel Macs or run binaries for OS 9 on OS X (earlier PPC versions at least, not supported anymore afaik).
Microsoft could easily do the same with the next Windows version. A fully backwards compatible VM layer for old binaries, and the rest of the system KDE
The underlying problem isn't even with the window manager. It's with the file system and the way the OS kernel resolves file deletions for shared files. Your problem is with the OS. What have KDE and GNOME got to do with the OS? Even if you ran GNOME or KDE as the window manager on Windows, you'd still have the NT kernel and NTFS limitations beneath that. Yes, I'd be happy if Windows 7 came out running with support for an ext3 inspired file system with NTFS permissions, auditing, and such added on to it because, yes, the NTFS and FAT limitations are horrible. I'm convinced that FAT is probably one of the reasons that the behavior is so bad. Yes, they ought to rewrite the whole thing and then remap the functionality of these old file sharing flags to use better functions rather like WINE (or wxWidgets, or any other toolkit) does, but they haven't done that. Maybe they have in .NET. I don't know.