Lets looks at Nvidia that supporting WinXP/Vista faltform with all of their hearts, still can't even developed a stable drivers for their own GPU chips. In the end, users feel cheated with what they've paid for a stable and secure personal computing. While their Win9x based driver was the best and more stable. So, what give?
I would only assumed, everything started when MS changed Win95 GDI code to escape the leaking problem. They've not fixed it. Instead, they create a new problems and these code inherited in WinXP/Vista with the DX8/9/10.
Win9x platform seem very linear and fast too if the hardware permitted. Of course, most of thes complaint was security and stability. But, it's much more easier to fix than NT based OS. These factors has made Win9x (WinME excluded) OS is popular even to games vendors. And not to forget, hackers and Virus makers simply because the OS was too popular, user-friendly and forgiving.
Since MS dropped Win9x supported and followed by hardware vendors, everywhere we hear all nothing but cries for helps because old and new games doesn't works properly on WinXP and Vista. There are millions of problems has yet being solved by them since they do not know how to answer to the end users.
So, here is where and open source project like ROS could get it's strength by making the OS is compatible with Win9x and added value with capability could also do what WinXP or Vista feature had. The real situations is Win9x cannot go further becuase the supports had been dropped. Otherwise, Win9x were much better OS than bloated and resource hungry WinXP and Vista.
ROS should make the OS stay with FAT12/16/32 and 32bit processing as it's main strength features and use a 'plug-in' a-like for supporting NTFS or 64bits hardware and environments until 64bits devices era coming for real.
Another things is to make DirectX and COM as internal built-in features to avoid version dependencies like what has happened now in Windows worlds. So, any version of DirectX applications could run in ROS as long as the components GUID existed in ROS registry. May be, to solve the latest feature of DX capabilities, ROS could do by adding a plug-in script interpreter to it.
Generally, ROS would becoming a script-able OS and 100% compatible with Win9x and Win32 flatform
Sorry that my English not very good. I hope you could understands most of what I've said above.
