Windows has changed the kernel interface more often than Linux.

This fact alone throws this commonly held belief to the wind.

Glibc provides binary compatibility to newer versions too.

Shims exist in both, “windows compatibility layer” for example, but pulseaudio can emulate ALSA- and pipewire can emulate pulseaudio and ALSA.

It’s actually a quagmire, but I would contend that either has solid story for backwards compatibility depending on the exact lens you’re looking at. Microsoft is worse than Linux in many ways.

Microsoft sort of only wins in the closed-source, “run this arbitrary binary” race - if you totally ignore the w10/11 UWP migration that killed a lot of win32 applications, but drivers for older hardware are much more long lived under linux.

>backwards compatibility

They are getting worse at this. I bought a Surface Laptop Studio 2 two years ago. Windows Mail and Windows Calendar, two nice minimalist programs from Microsoft, were actively killed in this time. If you open them, it will redirect you to a new ad-laden Outlook app. If you somehow get a workaround going through the registry, they still fuck with it because the (incredibly simple) UI somehow has network dependencies.

I use MailSpring for email and no longer have a native calendar on my fairly expensive laptop from Microsoft. This is actually what drove me over the edge to switch to Linux for my workstation. Unclear exactly what I'll do for my next laptop but it won't be from MS.

Yep! I can compile a program on Windows and expect it to work on any Windows OS from the past ~15 years that has the same CPU architecture. Linux? Each binary is more provincial. I want to try some of the tricks like MUSL though; haven't explored the space beyond default compiler options.

Linux also doesn't have as good hardware support. While Linux will probably run on most hardware. It doesn't run well. Like you may just immediately give up half or more of your laptop battery life if you switch from Windows to Linux on a particular machine, even if you use a lightweight and up-to-date environment and use TLP and whatever else to tweak kernel settings. I used Linux on my personal laptops for many years. No amount of tweaking could make it perfectly smooth and have comparable battery life and cooling.

New apple-silicon Macbooks also get such good battery life and performance now that if you are switching from Windows to a Unix-y personal computer, is is increasingly hard to not say that you should go to Mac.

I recall lots of reports of printers and scanners becoming unsupported during one of the Windows version upgrades (possibly the Windows 7 upgrade?).

> And backwards compatibility.

I have plenty of printers that have stopped working on Windows over the years, my current Brother laser doesn't have drivers that Windows will allow to be installed anymore. Its fine with Linux, so I just print share it as a generic so the Windows clients can connect.

Windows struck the iceberg back in 8. It took until 11 for people to finally start to abandon ship in numbers.

Everything I’ve seen suggests that Microsoft has entered the metaphorical private equity phase of investment in Windows. They’ve already given up any expectation of it being a viable competitor long-term and are purely focused on milking as much short-term revenue from the product as possible before it dies.

I’m sure windows will continue to exist and maybe be relevant for at least a decade. But it will be in zombie/revenue-extraction mode from here on.

One would assume but I do wonder how much long term damage they are doing for short term gains with this drive?

I'm not a believer in "the year of linux desktop!?!!?" and all that, but it achieved a level of robustness about 5-10ish years ago that I openly encourage non technical users to give it a try. For the few people that actually did try, they did stick with it.

At this point it is Microsoft's position to lose through quality degradation rather than Linux to openly out wit. There is still a long way to go and MS could turn their boat around but they would have to stop chasing this data scrapping scheme of theirs to begin with. But how addicted are they to that cash flow? They are probably far more interested in keep share holders happy short term than customers long term and that is not a brilliant strategy if you want to have a life time of decades.

Perhaps the aims of these dark patterns were not to benefit Microsoft overall, but perhaps an individual or a team? For example, produce good numbers for particular KPIs at the expense of unmeasured or unmeasurable aspects.

I think their earnings are detailed here:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2025-Q3...

IIRC Windows is considered “more personal computing.” It looks like that also includes:

> Search and news advertising, comprising Bing (including Copilot), Microsoft News, Microsoft Edge, and third-party affiliates

So, maybe that’s where they get their enshittification revenue.

But yeah, the Azure company should be worried about associating with this unfortunate legacy Windows thing.

Perfectly put.

> Microsoft knows the strength of Windows lies in the desktop environment for workstations, casual laptop use, and gaming systems, and it is excellent at all those things.

Sure, Microsoft seems to have some great developers behind Windows and those developers are improving the underlying operating system. The trouble is that Microsoft is also using Windows to push their other products. Coming from a Linux environment, I find that pushiness unbearably crass.

On top of that, Windows' main strength has always been application support. I don't even know if that is relevant anymore with commercial developers shifting to subscription models (for native applications) and web based applications (for everything else). The latter makes Windows nearly irrelevant. The former makes open source more desirable to at least some people.

I've also noticed that things appear to flipping when comparing Linux to Windows. I can take a distribution that is intended for desktops, install it, and expect almost everything to work out of the box. It doesn't seem to matter whether it is printer or video drivers or pre-installed applications. Meanwhile, I'm finding that I have to copy drivers to a USB drive and drop to the command line to get something as simple as a trackpad or touchscreen to work under Windows. Worse yet, I've had something similar happen with network adapters. Short of bypassing the OOBE, a Windows installation will not complete without a working network adapter and Internet connection. Similar tales can be told for applications: there is a never ending stream of barriers to climb to get software to install ("look, we care about privacy since we are asking you half a dozen questions about what you're willing to share," while ignoring dozens of other settings that affect your privacy) or prevent advertising from popping up. You don't deal with that nonsense under Linux.

I don't know what the future of Windows is. I don't much care, as long as I get to use the operating system I want to use in peace. That seems to be much more true today than it did 20 years ago.

It was interesting to read your comment and find myself disagreeing with every single point you made. I'm not invested enough to argue about anything of it, it's really just a meta observation that stood out to me: Obviously it's still possible to have substantially different points of view on even the most basic aspects. I guess that's a good thing, at least it feels kinda reassuring to me. We could both be right, and the truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

> I don’t find that windows has forced me to cloud

Have you tried performing a fresh Home install recently without command line hacks? It's now impossible for a normal person to set up Windows without creating a MS account, forcing them to dip a toe into their cloud service connectivity and facilitate taking the next step towards paying them. They don't "force" you, but they sure will nag you incessantly about it, plopping that shit in Explorer, the Start Menu, tossing One Drive in the menubar at startup, shoving it in your face on login after a big update, etc. It's a pathetic cash grab everywhere you look.

And then you still have to wonder if “My Documents” is actually “My Office 364 One Drive Copilot Pro” or something

And people complained that GTK file picker didn't have thumbnails.

In what application is it like this? I don’t find this true at all. It’s a completely customizable sidebar.