> The only thing windows has focused on has been dark patterns to force users towards cloud and figuring out more and more ways to collect data to sell ads.

And backwards compatibility.

They're really good at it. And I'd say that's the reason Windows is still dominant. There's this unfathomably long tail of niche software that people need or want to run.

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.