I ran it, and it was a (poorly) rebadged version of server 2003.
At least one app I used, refused to install on it because they “didn’t support server operating systems” … Yeah. That actually happened. It picked it up as the server 2003 version that XP 64bit edition was based on.
The main point of 32-bit Windows 10 wasn’t to make it run on non-64-bit hardware, it’s that x86 processors can’t run in 16-bit mode if they were booted in 64-bit mode, so if you’ve got an old 16-bit Windows/DOS/CPM app that you’ve absolutely got to run natively instead of through DOSBox and have to use modern Windows instead of an older version, it needs to be 32-bit. By the time Windows 11 released, Microsoft had decided that nearly no one still wanted to do that anymore.
holy crap I just looked it up and there are supposedly 32bit only versions of windows 10. I thought for sure that ended with xp.
Running 64-bit XP was actually kind of rare
I ran it, and it was a (poorly) rebadged version of server 2003.
At least one app I used, refused to install on it because they “didn’t support server operating systems” … Yeah. That actually happened. It picked it up as the server 2003 version that XP 64bit edition was based on.
I just about jumped right off a bridge.
Nobody wanted XP without Space Cadet Pinball
The main point of 32-bit Windows 10 wasn’t to make it run on non-64-bit hardware, it’s that x86 processors can’t run in 16-bit mode if they were booted in 64-bit mode, so if you’ve got an old 16-bit Windows/DOS/CPM app that you’ve absolutely got to run natively instead of through DOSBox and have to use modern Windows instead of an older version, it needs to be 32-bit. By the time Windows 11 released, Microsoft had decided that nearly no one still wanted to do that anymore.
Technically it was just only recently that ms no longer has mainstream support for 32bit oses, as they only dropped that with windows 11.
Makes me think that might be the reason for valve choosing now to do this.