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Originally Posted by boris  DirectX 10 is not going to be ported back. There are a lot of changes in the OS itself to make things possible in it. This has been stated by the team developing it several times already. |
It won't be ported by Microsoft but this doesn't mean that somebody else won't do it. As I said before, the Wine team has plans to create a port of their Linux implementation of DX 10 to pre-Vista Windows. The fact is that DX 10 has nothing special to make it only work on Vista. I heard directly from a Microsoft employee that restricting DX 10 to Vista was done for the sole purpose of pushing Vista.
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Originally Posted by boris The same discussions were held for XP. Now 5 years later, just 2-3% of people use Windows 98 or older. |
Windows 2000 (not XP) is actually the successor to Windows 9x and NT 4. WinXP is just a rebranded version of it. But either way, upgrading from Win98 to Win2K/XP made a lot of sense because 2K/XP were based on the NT kernel and purely 32-bit unlike the DOS based Win9x. They are in fact counted by MS as Windows NT 5.0 and 5.1 respectively. The point is that the difference between XP and Vista is not that great in terms of usefulness, especially considering that there's a 64-bit version of XP.
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Originally Posted by boris There are countless reasons to go Vista. Since it was developed for so long, the features and improvements just piled up  If you are using Windows, you will anyways. It is a matter of time. |
If you count insane memory requirements as a feature or improvement then sure, Vista's got lots of them.
Vista requires a minimum of 512 MB RAM and for "Vista Premium" it's 1 GB, while the current Ubuntu Linux requires 256 MB. Windows 2000/XP by the way, can run on 128 MB (or even 64 MB with some restrictions). But you're right that most people who use Windows will eventually use Vista. Thankfully though, Linux is finally a viable alternative. I think many power users will be switching to Linux instead of upgrading to Vista. General consumers will just use whatever their computer came with, but I think more OEMs will start shipping Linux in the future so it should gain market share.