It’s a long, desperate and complicated tale as the Windows team, frightened by their own shadows, attempted to head off any and all possible competition. From web views to tablet interfaces and every other mistake you can see the legacy of it in windows 11. The tablet/touch screen panic also affected Linux as well but at least most of the worst of that has been fixed.

When I get jobs to work on older systems I get a visceral sick feeling whenever the server version of windows with the touch screen interface comes up in RDP. Hideous and useless.

Win2k was easily the best thing they ever did. Every version of server since then has pushed admins to linux