[toast0]

> MS earned a reputation for the battleship; relatively stable, plays nicely with their other products, LTS, backward compatibility, etc.

Microsoft earned thst reputation with a lot of development and organizational practices that they've since abandoned. It may take people a while to notice, but today's Microsoft is not prioritizing stable software interfaces and backwards compatability.

It took a lot of testing to ensure existing software and hardware continued to work with new operating systems, and they're not doing as much testing anymore.

[jiggawatts]

Microsoft had some of the best documentation in the world. People really don't understand how valuable that is, and how important. Microsoft in 2020 certainly doesn't understand. They produce vast reams of auto-generated "documentation" where the only text is the function names with spaces added between the words.

[TeMPOraL]

Reminds me of PowerShell. There's extensive, detailed and super-useful documentation for pretty much all the commandlets available... but it's not installed by default. Get-Help ... will happily tell you that you need to download help if you want to see any details beyond command signature. Who in their right mind though this is a good idea? Such documentation should be shipped with the default install.

I have it on the top of my mind because it bit me twice in recent month. I had to do some PS work on some VMs that didn't have Internet access (beyond RDP). Sure, I can Alt+Tab to a browser on my machine, but at this point, why even have Get-Help? Contrast that with Emacs experience, where everything is documented, and documentation is easily accessible, off-line, and by default.