> I must be the only one to write something like this on HN, but I sincerely like Windows' technical fundamentals and architecture; its design is sensible and extensible.

Nah, NT always had... mostly... good guts. (The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices, but otherwise.) As a die hard Unix guy, I've always been quite fond of NT's core tech. It's just made by a terrible company and shoved inside of an operating system that actively hates me. But the core OS is cool.

> The filesystem layer apparently made some really poor life choices

NTFS is plenty fast, even for thousands of small files; it is the Windows Defender file system filter driver that slows things down. Specifically, it slows down CloseHandle[1].

> NT's core tech

I'm not just talking about NT. I think most of the user mode is great, too. Office blows the pants off most other 'office' suites. D3D is generally very forward-looking, and many extensions are released on D3D first, sometimes years before they're ported to Vulkan (ray-tracing, mesh shaders, descriptor heaps, etc). Windows has had a superb low-latency audio subsystem in WASAPI since Vista, which is something like a decade before Linux got Pipewire. There are many other examples of random cool stuff in Windows that Linux 'rediscovered independently' but Windows got there much earlier just because of the sheer install base and surface area.

[1]: https://gregoryszorc.com/blog/2021/04/06/surprisingly-slow/