As a server OS it's not much better. I can't find a way to force a NTP sync; things that should be simple (creating a service with logon rights) takes 10's of lines of PowerShell; you can't use SSL with the core image because it requires IE, which is not included in the core image. Its full of little surprises which make it difficult to understand (.../windows32 == 64bit, .../SysWOW64 == 32bit). It takes 10 minutes to fully boot a Windows instance in AWS, which is mostly the result of how large it is, and the fact that it has to recompile its DCOM DLLs (or some such thing).
I know that no OS is perfect, but Windows has had years and years to mature and a company with billions of $$$ and thousands of developers behind it. I expect more.
The focus on backwards compatibility means, among other things, Windows is carrying around multiple ways to render fonts. None of them deliver sufficient clarity. In Windows 10, Cleartype does not affect "Modern" apps.
All the applications I use 90% of the time are available for Windows and Linux. Text in each is more difficult to read in Windows.
I find, on a Dell 27-inch 2560x1440 display,that I can see individual pixels in normal fonts from my usual viewing distance. Bold fonts are often smeary, especially at smaller sizes. Segoe UI looks acceptable in parts of the Windows interface. But, in apps that use older font rendering approaches, it's poor.
If you spend your days reading and writing, as I do, this is an important issue.
I long for the day we can say something similar about PC gaming.
So I think MS is just as capable of throwing new shiny things at developers as anyone else. Typescript and free Xamarin are recent examples.
I think that speaks more towards engineers that like shiny new things that do something in particular in a new way which then help drum up excitement and an ecosystem around it.
C# is a very good language, but there's nothing new or shiny about it now. The tools and ecosystem around it are well established and managed by Microsoft and often involve spending some money.
The excitement for new things like Go, Rust or Julia etc are really not a signal for new support for C#. I think if anything Microsoft should continue their new support for llvm[0]. Windows is a fine operating system, I'd like to use it to do development and the closer I can get to developing things that then run on linux the easier my life will get and the more likely it will be that devs use Windows.
[0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/12/04/clang-wit...