The half of it you don't know (1/2)
Microsoft purposely breaks backward compatibility and forces upgrades every few years.
They then have "Solution Providers" which then push that upon businesses.
While most consumers will accept the fact that they have to upgrade all their software every 2-3 years, most businesses do not.
It's the main reason why non-Microsoft solutions have been taking over the network infrastructure the last decade.
E.g., Boeing can't afford to renovate its entire production line -- for a product that will be produced for 10-20 years -- every 2-3 years to deal with such bullshit.
Especially when solutions work with older Microsoft products better than newer Microsoft products.
Many of us were warning Microsoft about this in the mid-to-late '90s, and predicted all of the issues that do not affect other OSes to anywhere near the same level.
Microsoft didn't "get serious" until SQL Slammer in January 2003, and even then they tried to blame the sysadmins, instead of admitting it was their own, newer patches that screwed things up (and made systems vunerable).
Microsoft can't change the core of the shell-executive because it would break about 90% of the automation in MS IE-Office-Outlook.
So they won't -- they have introduced a "click through security" aspect, instead of redesigning all of the existing, core libraries and subsystems.
For gamers, it's all about economies of scale and number of users buying software, so no, there's not much.
But consoles are starting to replace PCs in that capacity, at least for 80% of consumers today.
What I think you were suggesting was switching to "community developed software."
Luckily there are some great "community developed software" for Windows that removes 98% of the security issues -- and don't blindly pass things on to the shell-executive like Microsoft's own, automated functions/libraries.
There are issues that are unheard of in the non-Windows world, largely because it prevents you from doing things that are stupid -- from a support, security and other standpoints.
Windows does let you do some really stupid -- and I mean stupid -- things as "standard practice."
Which is why Windows is being heavily considered less and less for most corporate networks.
Especially as Microsoft renders software -- just a few years old -- completely incompatible with its newer software.
Why buy again when you'll have to just upgrade again, and lose all your old documents, when you can have perpetual document and software compatibility?
That makes the argument about risk mitigation, and not anything that has to do with liking/disliking Microsoft.
And even NT (including 2000, XP and, now, Vista) was never designed for multi-user, much less the Internet!
People bitch about that on non-Windows systems -- but guess what? It makes those OSes 10x easier to support for people like you and I!
I have over 10,000 packages -- virtually 50 add on programs, dozens of commercial games (not to mention hundreds of free ones, a few very good), etc...
The fucker can be managed, unlike Windows, if you know what you are doing.
Windows is great if you don't know what you are doing, and it'll let you fuck itself up pretty fast.
If you're a Windows expert, you quickly find yourself frustrated "fighting" the system to do what you want it to.
It was never designed for the Internet (and Vista still is not), and it's a corporate manageability mess.
So much so that Microsoft itself pays huge money for one vendor to manage their own systems internally (long story).
Inode-based systems, especially those that segment static from dynamic files on different filesystems, virtually remove the need for fragmentation.
Inode-based systems also reverse the last 5-10% of the disk -- because when the filesystem fills up -- fragmentation increases exponentially.
Microsoft (and even IBM, sadly enough), have never understood filesystems well, and their implementations show it.
As far as running programs, there is no reason the OS' kernel can't deal with issues with user-space programs.
The problem is that Microsoft chooses to give many programs, which would be user-space in other OSes, direct kernel access -- hence why MS IE (and anything that uses it -- which is virtually everything at the core) -- can hang the whole fucking system.
Consumers may not mind that every few hours (in the days of 95/98/Me) or few days (in the case of 2000/XP/Vista), but not corporations.
Standard operating policy in reboot Windows servers every week at most corporations, typically as scheduled downtime.
Drivers are bad enough and account for 8% of all NT crashes, but select Windows subsystems (like the spooler and redirectors) are over 33%.
That means a completely native and integrated Microsoft design and subsystem is at the heart of crashes, and not always hardware or their drivers.
As much as Linux is bashed for lack of drivers, because many companies don't want to expose their source code (which is required because of its license), when Linux drivers exists -- they are typically very stable and -- more importantly yet -- more compatible (especially for USB).
The countless, little, incompatible variations between the same piece of hardware, but from a different vendor, is always a PITA with Windows.
And a great way to figure out what you have, exactly, when you have a storage or network-driver needed to boot Windows (and it won't because of it) is to boot a Linux Live CD which will detect the exact make/model and most likely the Windows driver you need to Google for.
Assuming the driver is actually, publicly available on the Internet.
There were much better options out there at the time when MS bought it from Seattle Computer Products, which was a direct source code rip of CP/M, only ported from the 8080 to 8086/8088.
The absolute greatest, moronic decision was Gates' in 1994 to keep MS-DOS going with version 7 -- aka Windows 95/98/Me.
He made a similar choice in 2001 with .NET/Longhorn (which eternally fucked Vista) to the point where Microsoft had a mass exodus.
Incoming engineers to Microsoft caused Gates to be no where near anything technical in the organization -- he has fucked the company on the technical end so many times.
Actually, it's not far from the truth.
Microsoft purposely breaks backward compatibility and forces upgrades every few years.
They then have "Solution Providers" which then push that upon businesses.
While most consumers will accept the fact that they have to upgrade all their software every 2-3 years, most businesses do not.
It's the main reason why non-Microsoft solutions have been taking over the network infrastructure the last decade.
E.g., Boeing can't afford to renovate its entire production line -- for a product that will be produced for 10-20 years -- every 2-3 years to deal with such bullshit.
Especially when solutions work with older Microsoft products better than newer Microsoft products.
No, it's the combinational design of the Windows Explorer shell and DOS/NT executives.
Many of us were warning Microsoft about this in the mid-to-late '90s, and predicted all of the issues that do not affect other OSes to anywhere near the same level.
Microsoft didn't "get serious" until SQL Slammer in January 2003, and even then they tried to blame the sysadmins, instead of admitting it was their own, newer patches that screwed things up (and made systems vunerable).
Microsoft can't change the core of the shell-executive because it would break about 90% of the automation in MS IE-Office-Outlook.
So they won't -- they have introduced a "click through security" aspect, instead of redesigning all of the existing, core libraries and subsystems.
Depends on what you do.
For gamers, it's all about economies of scale and number of users buying software, so no, there's not much.
But consoles are starting to replace PCs in that capacity, at least for 80% of consumers today.
MacOS X is BSD UNIX based, and it works very well in that regard.
What I think you were suggesting was switching to "community developed software."
Luckily there are some great "community developed software" for Windows that removes 98% of the security issues -- and don't blindly pass things on to the shell-executive like Microsoft's own, automated functions/libraries.
As Scott McNealy always says, "that's because it's all you've used."
There are issues that are unheard of in the non-Windows world, largely because it prevents you from doing things that are stupid -- from a support, security and other standpoints.
Windows does let you do some really stupid -- and I mean stupid -- things as "standard practice."
Which is why Windows is being heavily considered less and less for most corporate networks.
Especially as Microsoft renders software -- just a few years old -- completely incompatible with its newer software.
Why buy again when you'll have to just upgrade again, and lose all your old documents, when you can have perpetual document and software compatibility?
That makes the argument about risk mitigation, and not anything that has to do with liking/disliking Microsoft.
And that's because DOS (including Windows 95/98/ME -- which are MS-DOS 7) was never designed for multitasking.
And even NT (including 2000, XP and, now, Vista) was never designed for multi-user, much less the Internet!
Yes, because Windows lets you do some rather stupid shit -- like just load anything without forcing signature verification and dependency checking.
People bitch about that on non-Windows systems -- but guess what? It makes those OSes 10x easier to support for people like you and I!
I have run the same Linux system, upgraded repeatedly, since 1998.
I have over 10,000 packages -- virtually 50 add on programs, dozens of commercial games (not to mention hundreds of free ones, a few very good), etc...
The fucker can be managed, unlike Windows, if you know what you are doing.
Windows is great if you don't know what you are doing, and it'll let you fuck itself up pretty fast.
If you're a Windows expert, you quickly find yourself frustrated "fighting" the system to do what you want it to.
It was never designed for the Internet (and Vista still is not), and it's a corporate manageability mess.
So much so that Microsoft itself pays huge money for one vendor to manage their own systems internally (long story).
Defragmentation is an issue with the combination of a FAT-based (including NTFS) filesystems with a systems that does not separate static binaries from temporarily files from user files.
Inode-based systems, especially those that segment static from dynamic files on different filesystems, virtually remove the need for fragmentation.
Inode-based systems also reverse the last 5-10% of the disk -- because when the filesystem fills up -- fragmentation increases exponentially.
Microsoft (and even IBM, sadly enough), have never understood filesystems well, and their implementations show it.
As far as running programs, there is no reason the OS' kernel can't deal with issues with user-space programs.
The problem is that Microsoft chooses to give many programs, which would be user-space in other OSes, direct kernel access -- hence why MS IE (and anything that uses it -- which is virtually everything at the core) -- can hang the whole fucking system.
Consumers may not mind that every few hours (in the days of 95/98/Me) or few days (in the case of 2000/XP/Vista), but not corporations.
Standard operating policy in reboot Windows servers every week at most corporations, typically as scheduled downtime.
That has to do with drivers and select Windows subsystems.
Drivers are bad enough and account for 8% of all NT crashes, but select Windows subsystems (like the spooler and redirectors) are over 33%.
That means a completely native and integrated Microsoft design and subsystem is at the heart of crashes, and not always hardware or their drivers.
As much as Linux is bashed for lack of drivers, because many companies don't want to expose their source code (which is required because of its license), when Linux drivers exists -- they are typically very stable and -- more importantly yet -- more compatible (especially for USB).
The countless, little, incompatible variations between the same piece of hardware, but from a different vendor, is always a PITA with Windows.
And a great way to figure out what you have, exactly, when you have a storage or network-driver needed to boot Windows (and it won't because of it) is to boot a Linux Live CD which will detect the exact make/model and most likely the Windows driver you need to Google for.
Assuming the driver is actually, publicly available on the Internet.
DOS is a piece of shit OS that should have never been used, period.
There were much better options out there at the time when MS bought it from Seattle Computer Products, which was a direct source code rip of CP/M, only ported from the 8080 to 8086/8088.
The absolute greatest, moronic decision was Gates' in 1994 to keep MS-DOS going with version 7 -- aka Windows 95/98/Me.
He made a similar choice in 2001 with .NET/Longhorn (which eternally fucked Vista) to the point where Microsoft had a mass exodus.
Incoming engineers to Microsoft caused Gates to be no where near anything technical in the organization -- he has fucked the company on the technical end so many times.
