With Win 3.11 aka W4WGs, I used a boot menu with 6 sets of config.sys / autoexec.bat files. Part of that was to isolate wife and kids use / access to any partition with my files on it. Another part of it was to break the 640k limit for AutoCAD using Helix memory management. And the rest was for a gaming specific boot as most games of the time were DOS based. I'd give anything to go back to having easily editable boot files to resolve issues.
As for the Win95 disaster, I remember getting PC Magazines annual PC Round Up that year, post Win95 release and was a bit befuudled why in the "100 PC Roundup", about 40% of the PCs submitted had W4WGs on it. That was odd i thought ... and was puzzled even further when the usual 3 pages of ads ein the middle of the article turned into 60 pages of other stories and ads.
It soon became apparent that all of the major builders had submitted muktiple machoines, often of the exact same configuration ... some with minor changes (i.e. IDE vs SCSI drive) ... why the heck would they do that. Then, looking at the performance tables ... it was obvious. On average the W4WGs boxes were 40% faster than the Win95 boxes. It seemed no vendor wanted to have their reputation hit by the fact that "their brand" was 40% slower and have their sales plummet because of the OS performance penalty.
Infoworld reported that US businesses had spent $2500 - $4500 per box (adding memory, other physical modifications, training, testing, etc) transitioning between W4WGs and upon arrival PC performance dropped. The big sales pitch for Win95 was it was a transition from 16 to 32 bit, but W4WGs already had the 32 bit APIs so Win95 offered nothing but disadvantages. We set up a new triple boot box and spent a year with W4WGs, Windows NT4 and Win95. After the test period, we deleted Win95 and W4WGs as NT4 was the fastest in every category. We left the W4WGs boxes till they were retired and migrated to NY when new noxes were built. We tested each new OS head to head and the one thing that was obvious ... taking an existing box and changing the OS always resulted in a performance decrease. After NT, we went to Windows 2000, XP and Win 7. All the others were tested, but felt there was nothing to be gained by switching.
Linux is not an option cause all of our machines are SOHO usage. They gotta work for AutoCAD during working hours and they gotta do the gaming thing as a stress reliever after wok apps get closed. However, the MMO (
https://ryzom.com/) I have been playing for 14 years has Linux, Mac and Windows versions and I'd say Linux users represent about 30 - 35% of the player base. There's also 3 means to make the installation.... so 9 different installation options.
Steam Client - It's has some issues, not the least of which is that patches / upgrades arrive last. Another problem... 2 identical boxes using the Steam Client, one has issues one don't. And the latter has issues resolved when it moves to one of the others....
https://store.steampowered.com/app/373720/Ryzom/
Native Client - When the moved to a 64 bit client (Version 3.x) , they took the best technical thing about th game IMO, and ruined it. It's now like any other windows game / program in that in addition to tthe ganme's root folder, various user related files are installed all over the place. The instalaltion packages for all 3 OS's can be found here...
https://ryzom.com/
Single Folder Install - This is the method I use, Like vesion 2.x, all the files associated with the game are installed in a single folder. You can copy the folder and copy / paste it on any machine, double click the exe and load game. So you can have mulltiple versions of the game, all existing in the same folder. The files for this method can be foun d here...
https://sourceforge.net/projects/ryzom/files/installer/
