While they do use Windows PE for modern versions of Windows, it still often looks like the previous version. Windows 8 all the way to pre-24H2 Windows 11 have Windows Vista basic decorations in the installer, like they basically never updated the installer environment.

[–] 9point6@lemmy.world 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

FWIW I think the underlying parts of the setup environment change with every version, there's just no need to port the modern UI toolkit when the Vista Aero Basic one does the job, and doesn't expect GPU drivers or anything like that.

I'm not even sure if the windows modern UI works at all without some level of GPU acceleration actually.

[–] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 2 points 4 days ago

It does work with plain VGA still, it'll even use 32 CPU cores to render that. It is still pretty slow though, slower than RDP into the same VM even.

The old stuff just runs great for a minimal bootstrap environment. It's there, might as well use it instead of designing a stripped down Windows 11 UI just for the installer.

It's all there in the final install too, if you kill dwm you'll get those same Vista decorations (and broken modern apps).

[–] Gurfaild@feddit.org 2 points 4 days ago

As far as I know, the Windows UI technically doesn't need GPU acceleration, but it does depend on DirectX - the Windows 8 developer preview included a software renderer so that Aero Glass worked even without GPU drivers.