Windows 7 -> 8 -> 10 were fairly large jumps
But windows 10 into 11 is just stupid, nothing truly changed inside the OS

Windows 10 and Windows 11 are closer to each other than Windows Vista and Windows 7 are, and Windows 7 RTM barely added anything except a different taskbar and a few new kernel power handling functions (did you know you can add the compiler flag –DPSAPI_VERSION=1 to 90% of W7 RTM software to get it to run on Vista, all you need is sources).

Windows 10 and 11 both run NT 10 kernel and are nearly identical minus a few under the hood changes. The changes are on user level, it is what you see. But deep down no underlaying mechanism which is not visible to users, changed one bit.

There isn’t even such change that differentiates them like the few changes that differentiate Vista and 7. It is smaller between 10 and 11.

Windows 7 RTM did introduce a few things past Vista minus aesthetics but literally all of it minus one or two things was added to Vista in a Windows Update like a month after 7’s launch. Then as Windows 7 got more updates more they were backported to Vista.

>It mostly stopped when Windows 7 SP1 came out. They just stopped supporting Vista because you cant have two of the same.

That happening means that on fully up-to-date Windows Vista you can run slightly modified Firefox 141 just fine (Firefox sources are available) and you can straight up just compile Oracle Java 21 (not Microsoft Java machine) to run on Vista with that one flag I mentioned, no modifications needed.

This is semi related but they actually still push Windows Updates to Vista SP2 that include functionality like TLS 1.2 and modern SHA256 signing support. Just connect a Win Vista into internet and see how it updates the SHA all by itself. Unless you have blocked access to Microsoft server.

What even is the point of upgrading Windows versions so soon?