Windows is the only platform with this kind of retro compatibility. If they didn’t have to worry about that, they could just hop on the Core kernel, add a compatibility layer for NT applications and end up with a superior architecture compared to that we have now.

However, that would basically murder retro compatibility support for applications and hardware drivers, and that would be a disaster. So they cannot do that, and they’re stuck on piling up layers over layers of new stuff on top of legacy code that they need to be very careful to change.

Apple fundamentally doesn’t care. They have the clout to be able to tell developers “alright, either you port your program to this new completely arbitrary set of requirements or all your Apple customers are going to be very unhappy”, because their clients aren’t really big enterprise deployments, but individual users. Regular customers, self-employed artists, and design firms. Client laptops for software companies. Nothing too important. This allows them to improve as much as they want with changes as breaking as they want, like moving through 3 different architectures over the lifetime of their desktop OS and having everyone just swallow the pill.

Linux is a different beast entirely. It has frankly not been relevant on the desktop until as of late - and right now it’s in the middle of a bit of a critical period, where development has sprung back up after being fundamentally dead / very slow for a very long time, and the community has finally decided to abandon a lot of legacy that was holding Linux back and replace it with brand new shiny stuff that is much more modern and for most purposes works better: Puleaaudio is being replaced with Pipewire, the 39 years-old X server is being phased out in favour of Wayland compositors, graphical applications are now being shipped through Flatpak, gaining several benefits (isolation, choose different install locations, option to delete all data on uninstall, very easy to install add-ons to a program like OBS through the store, deploy once and have it work on all distros), and it’s doable because the market share of Linux is in that niche where it’s now high enough to be relevant, but low enough that it is still possible to make some breaking changes without too much disruption.

Windows already has the monopoly so it’s kinda… cornered

I had not really thought about that, but you’re right. The example holds throughout my experience. I use Linux daily nowdays, but I used to be a Windows power user.

I can confidently claim Linux is easier to use than Windows. And I mean it seriously, I’m not trying to be controversial. It’s nowhere near as complex as Windows and structurally many things are easier, it has less abstraction, so, whereas it might require a bit of a learning curve in some places, when you’ve done it, you’re done because you fundamentally already know how it works. Also, while the GUIs are now slowly starting to get better and cover more of the experience, for the most part, Linux distros don’t make many attempts to hide the underlying workings to the end user, and documentation is provided for anything, so if you’re curious to know how anything works, you can just read up on it and get a decent grasp.

Windows tries to hide how it works from the user, and that is what causes it to be so hard to debug. When something breaks on Linux, after a few years of experience and a “clinical eye”, I can pretty much always accurately guess where in the stack the disruption has happened. Maybe it takes 2 or 3 takes to get it right, but at the end of the day, I have a honest grasp of how a modern Linux system is put together and I can get my hands dirty. On Windows it’s… not that simple. I feel like I am talking multiple shots in the dark and just guessing semi randomly hoping that the next attempt will fix it instead of leaving my system in an even more broken state. Because the admin tools are there - regedit, powershell, event log, performance monitor, whatever you want - but it feels like doing surgery “blindfolded” in a way. Trusting what you read on some forum and hoping this long ass powershell command will do it.

DOS troubleshooting sucked. I still have nitemares about battling QEMM 386 to free up a few more KB to get a game running.