Maybe I should have made it more clear in the post itself but, what I was getting at is that windows is the last mainstream OS that is reasonably permissive. MacOS has gone too far down the walled garden road already, and besides, they never had decent backwards compatibility. And phones have just been dead from the start. Linux is too obscure, normal people never encounter in their daily lives unless they're already into tech. So, by process of elimination, there is only windows.

Your opinion is really interest and important, but it lack evidence.

What I mean, last years, I constantly gather information, on how countries grown their hackers community and programming industry, and at first I seen obvious things, but now with more info, things looking more complicated.

As example, I seen Eastern Europe and exUSSR, grown their hc and IT, mostly with cheap unlicensed local clones of PDP and IBM machines, and as I see, we in exUSSR know about Commodore/Atari and about consoles (I mean pre xBox), and we somewhere lack their taste, but we are already mature and even more or less competitive.

From other side, Japan have rich history of consoles and machines with extended graphic and sound capabilities (MSX, PC-98), and they have good achievements in enterprise machines and in hardware, but I don't see Japanese google, or Japanese facebook, or Japanese Oracle (databases). And I have not answer, how this happen.

What impress me even more - few years ago I got info, GDP in Asia/Africa and accessibility of compute devices grown very fast after Android appearance (I'm not sure if GDP connected, but smartphone became universal computing device with Android), so I see grow of games sales to Asia/Africa, why I notice - because their very specific culture, so gamedev have to made significant changes to game to enter their market. And this shocked me, as I release, Japanese just avoid to enter these markets, stay focused on their internal market and on West.

And BTW other side - East Europe and exUSSR was so poor, so having moderate access to really good Western computers, huge share of economy made accounting with pen and paper and abacus, some entities in middle 2000s. As I know, Japan have access to computers nearly as Americans, from at least middle 1980s, but looks like they lost something when most people switched from manuscript to keyboard.

Your point about backwards compatibility is the key one, I think. Windows allows space for experimentation by accidental virtue of the side effect of being so good at back compatibility.

If Windows didn't have to support a gigantic universe of old-yet-critical software, Microsoft would have radically reduced the API and feature surface and Windows would be as locked down as MacOS is.

If you can play around on Windows today you probably should be thanking some person who wrote a VB5 program to control a nuclear reactor in 1996 and insisted that it talk to COM1: (gulp).

I agree. I've been trying to use linux as my daily driver for months but aside from using it for incredibly basic things (like web browsing and watching videos) its been a genuine chore. I've settled on fedora gnome as most likely to be the one I'll stick with but it still feels less polished than windows. Funnily enough I'm having compatibility issues- there are a bunch of extensions that promise to use to fix my experience with gnome but they're only compatible with previous versions.