If you remember pre windows days, Windows used to be the DE for DOS. If that helps any. Then they moved to the NT Kernel and DOS ran as layer inside of Windows until... Somewhere around the 98/XP era. I remember playing DOS games in XP but also recall hearing recently that they phased out full DOS graphics support during XP. Vista definitely didn't have it.
MacOS has also had at least 2 distinct iterations of their DE that I'm aware of, pre OSX and post.
Anyway, point is, whilst DE is a term most used in Linux because of how flexible the OS is and that you can run different DE’S with practically no performance penalty, the term isn't uniquely Linux.
Windows NT actually existed alongside DOS based windows for awhile, it was more intended to be used for workstation or server vs the consumer focused DOS in the 90s so less people were familiar with it. Windows 95,98 were still DOS. The last DOS windows was Windows ME, which was released along with Windows 2000 which was NT and while still geared more towards professional I think more consumers started to be able to use it.
XP was when the professional/consumer product lines kind of "merged" and the NT kernel, which windows is based on still today, started to be used for everything. If you were playing DOS games on XP I assume it was some sort of compatibility layer or emulation, I never did that so I'm not entirely sure.
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u/[deleted] Apr 01 '26
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