Are you sure it’s not bad from a technical perspective? I saw a story from a former programmer talking about how changes would be made the to the interface in the new settings app that’s trying to replace control panel and the shit was like a horror story.
The windows kernel isn’t all that great, particularly in the realm of memory security or scheduling.
You know, to each their own. Question is really whether windows maintaining a closed source kernel even makes sense from a maintenance burden perspective when it really doesn’t give them much money in return. (Most of their money in 2025 comes from cloud services, not operating systems)
Rumors (Yes, just rumors, I know) have it that MS is working on a shim to be able to just use the Linux kernel under the hood. That’s what spawned WSL. It is a side effect of the work to get the shim between the Win64 userland and Linux kernel. The shim will probably be a temporary thing, until all the ABIs are done.
Mostly because Microsoft tries to maintain backwards compatibility to ridiculous extents, and their customers grew accustomed to it so they kinda rely on it, no ?
Sure, and for home users the backwards compatibility feature only really comes up for people into retro-gaming, but a significant portion of their customer base is government agencies that haven’t updated their software since the '90s. The old hardware is dying, so they need new stuff, and that means something with a new OS to run it, but it also needs to be able to run an ancient program that can only be replaced if some some seventy-something who calls every console a Nintendo can be made to understand why software older than their grandkids isn’t the best thing to have, and they might need to introduce and pass a bill to get it done, not to mention budgeting to commission a company to code the replacement.
Are you sure it’s not bad from a technical perspective? I saw a story from a former programmer talking about how changes would be made the to the interface in the new settings app that’s trying to replace control panel and the shit was like a horror story.
You could keep the kernel tho while changing the gui
The windows kernel isn’t all that great, particularly in the realm of memory security or scheduling.
You know, to each their own. Question is really whether windows maintaining a closed source kernel even makes sense from a maintenance burden perspective when it really doesn’t give them much money in return. (Most of their money in 2025 comes from cloud services, not operating systems)
Rumors (Yes, just rumors, I know) have it that MS is working on a shim to be able to just use the Linux kernel under the hood. That’s what spawned WSL. It is a side effect of the work to get the shim between the Win64 userland and Linux kernel. The shim will probably be a temporary thing, until all the ABIs are done.
Mostly because Microsoft tries to maintain backwards compatibility to ridiculous extents, and their customers grew accustomed to it so they kinda rely on it, no ?
Surely it’s less work to maintain security patches for a few prior versions of windows than it is to indefinitely maintain backwards compatibility
Sure, and for home users the backwards compatibility feature only really comes up for people into retro-gaming, but a significant portion of their customer base is government agencies that haven’t updated their software since the '90s. The old hardware is dying, so they need new stuff, and that means something with a new OS to run it, but it also needs to be able to run an ancient program that can only be replaced if some some seventy-something who calls every console a Nintendo can be made to understand why software older than their grandkids isn’t the best thing to have, and they might need to introduce and pass a bill to get it done, not to mention budgeting to commission a company to code the replacement.
maybe, but there are also things it arguably does better than Linux, e.g. user access control
(If you can still find this story, I’d be very interested in it, please do link to it here.)
https://lemmy.world/post/24613381
Thank you arse assassin