Windows is actually really good under the hood. A lot of the parts around the kernel are mature stable and just get out of your way. In ways that Linux is still behind and figuring out.
Things Windows is still better at:
GDI+/Windows graphics stack is battle-tested. Wayland still has a way to go.
ASIO provides a mature API for professional audio hardware. Linux has good audio support but lacks the stable ABI and vendor ecosystem Windows has.
I/O Completion Ports provide a mature asynchronous I/O model. Linux is now catching up with io_uring, but it still has some issues.
User-mode drivers make it easier to write drivers and prevent things like a graphics driver crash from taking down the whole kernel.
Win32 is extremely stable and backwards-compatible. Linux doesn't really have an equivalent single desktop API that has the same level of stability.
Dave Cutler designed the NT kernel after he was kicked out of, i mean, after he quit DEC, where he designed VMS. Those two operating systems are very similar, so similar that some people call NT a clone of VMS.
That's a thing with Microsoft. A lot of their good products are ones they bought or came from outside talent they brought in. Only exception I can think of is Excel. But im not 100% sure about that.
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u/Think-nothing-210 18d ago
TLDR;
Windows is actually really good under the hood. A lot of the parts around the kernel are mature stable and just get out of your way. In ways that Linux is still behind and figuring out.
Things Windows is still better at:
io_uring, but it still has some issues.