[Zak]

I'm reminded of Paul Graham writing

> the CTO couldn't be a first rate hacker, because to become an eminent [Windows] NT developer he would have had to use NT voluntarily, multiple times, and I couldn't imagine a great hacker doing that

https://www.paulgraham.com/gh.html

[pjmlp]

Meanwhile Valve has to make use of Proton, because the CTOs of game studios prefer to ignore GNU/Linux existence as gaming platform.

Maybe first rate hackers don't play games. /s

[Zak]

Maybe first rate hackers aren't a large market for games. Maybe long-term binary compatibility has created difficulties for game studios. Maybe Windows isn't as unusable as it was in 1995.

[pjmlp]

It was usable enough in 1995 for the same game studios.

[Zak]

Games in 1995 were targeting DOS and Windows 95, not Windows NT. They were doing so because that's what was on the majority of consumer PCs, and their objective was to sell games. People selecting a server-side OS and dev tools didn't have to worry about what ran on end user machines.

If you look hard enough, you'll find exceptions of course. I think Ebay was built on Windows servers, but in the late 1990s, building your web startup on Windows was a sign that your technical leadership had bad taste and a competitor would run circles around you.

[pjmlp]

Still it was Windows, and not first rate hackers operating systems.