[sneak]

…except for the inconvenient fact that Windows is the most developed-for (and thus developed-on) desktop OS in the world.

Linux is catching up (mostly in gaming) but nothing comes close to the amount of engineer-hours poured into building Windows desktop apps.

[jmclnx]

I have no opinion on Windows Apps, but as a Developer, Windows Applications gives me nothing that is better than what Linux has. In fact, for development Linux (or BSD) is what developers should use.

In fact, I was trying to convince developers at work (fortune 500 company) to move from Windows to Linux for a long time, only 1 person moved.

For a bit of cruel fun, have a Finance person use Libreoffice scalc instead of Excel. Doing that is probably the worse thing you can do to a Finance person, I think after a few days of that, they will end up in ICU.

FWIW, we were allowed to use RHEL, Fedora or Ubuntu on our workstations instead of Windows.

[p_ing]

Win32 gives you a stable ABI.

[1718627440]

The Linux kernel also has a stable API, glibc has it, most proper libraries have it. The problem on Linux is not that a single tool doesn't have a stable API, but that the tool changes. But that's kind-of like complaining that Windows doesn't have a stable API, when you replace it with macOS.

[sneak]

glibc does not have a stable api on the timescales we are speaking about it here, and neither do any of the GUIs on linux. you are sort of moving the goalposts here.

you cannot take a compiled gui app for linux from 20 years ago and run it on a modern system and have it work. on windows it will work just fine.

not to bring out that old trope, but windows is an OS (and desktop environment) - linux is a kernel. you know what they meant, and your rebuttal isn’t one.

also, GP clearly said ABI and you jumped to API - one is much harder than the other.

[benterix]

So does ReactOS.

[immibis]

It's interesting you have to hedge it with "desktop" OS and the reason that's interesting is that desktops are mostly irrelevant.

Microsoft has their niche, which is offices. This used to be the main application of computers, but now it is just a very large niche.

The overwhelming majority of computer interactions are Android clients talking to Linux servers.

[sneak]

Desktops aren’t irrelevant. Desktops run llvm and Xcode and Excel and Autocad and Blender and Premiere and After Effects and a thousand others that are absolutely essential to designing, producing, testing, and marketing the thousand complex products you use daily.

Just because lots of people use their phones primarily doesn’t mean that desktop computers aren’t responsible for producing literally trillions of dollars of shit every month. All those mobile apps? Developed and built and tested on desktops. The mobile phones themselves? Designed and built and QA’d using desktops. The payroll for the 200,000 people in the supply chain to get them to you? Desktops.

The power grid. Airline reservation systems. CNC mills. MRI machines. Mortgage underwriting. Computer factories. Pick-n-place machines. These aren’t run off phones.

You get the idea. Real business runs on real computers, still, no matter how many billions spend how many hours playing Candy Crush.

[linhns]

True. And it’s baffling to see the flak it gets on here

[sneak]

It’s not baffling. The OS was always sort of bad, and under the current Microsoft leadership of the last dozen years it has gone to absolute and total shit.

It’s bordering on unusable. There is no amount of money you could pay me to daily-drive the current release of consumer windows.