none which haven't been there from the beginning

If you try and switch out the host computer to something newer, the software may or may not work, but you will definitely fail your audits for changing software without the vendor's approval.

For their part, the vendor supports you buying the new version of their device for a few million quid and it now runs via USB attached to a Windows 10 computer running their proprietary software.

Defining better OS is almost as complicated as defining better philosophy. Somebody is leftist, somebody is rightist you know what I mean. When you see what's better usually you can not unseen it.

For me Woedows 7 can give:

1. years of uptime (still with regular browsing! and with using S-states!);

2. native support of god-like NTFS, all my personal backups has it;

3. better support on laptops, for example just try to ditch the UnneededD (Devuan) and you are going to say buy-buy to predictabrle S-states, stable USB performance when using multiple devices and who knows what else;

4. the best battery time among all the market;

5. some old hardware like ATI videocard can not be run on modern kernell, also some old hardware like my digital oscilloscope, my friend's digital syntheiser - all of that makes me not just use but love he Bill Gate's crap. You don't even tied to any version of your appreciated Debian.

6. A lot of industry-best software at least requires me to have Wine. Foobar as the best audio player, STDU as the best book reader, Viktoria as the best HDD tester etc. I have a terabyte of music, hundreds gigs of books and dozens of external disk drives, consuming all of that is my typical non-work activity.

7. I also still use it for my daily job which involves using Internets. No viruces gotten, no unexpected behaviour observed, just working.

With Nim on weird targets you usually want:

- OS target = any

- Memory Management = ARC

- malloc instead of default Nim allocator

- turn off signal handler (if not POSIX)

- disable threads (most of the time)

Then look at how C is compiled and copy all compiler+linker flags to your Nim configuration. Here's an absolute minimal `config.nims` I used to compile Nim for C64 with LLVM-MOS[1] toolchain:

    import std/strutils
    
    --cc:clang
    --clang.exe:"mos-c64-clang"
    
    --os:any
    --cpu:avr
    --mm:arc
    
    --threads:off
    --define:usemalloc
    --define:noSignalHandler
    
    let args = [
      "-isystem $PWD/../mos-platform/c64/include",
      "-I$PWD/../mos-platform/c64/asminc",
      "-L$PWD/../mos-platform/c64/lib",
      "-mlto-zp=110",
      "-D__C64__",
    
      "-isystem $PWD/../mos-platform/commodore/include",
      "-I$PWD/../mos-platform/commodore/asminc",
      "-L$PWD/../mos-platform/commodore/lib",
      "-D__CBM__",
    
      "-isystem $PWD/../mos-platform/common/include",
      "-I$PWD/../mos-platform/common/asminc",
      "-L$PWD/../mos-platform/common/lib",
      "--target=mos",
      "-flto",
      "-Os",
      ].join(" ")
    
    switch("passC", args)
    switch("passL", args)

[1] https://github.com/llvm-mos/llvm-mos

Windows actually has some special cased support for (at least some of) the problematic 16 bit InstallShield installers to run a 32 bit version instead on AMD64.

Nope, that would be Windows 11! There is a 32-bit version of Windows 10.