I worked at MSFT for eight years as a full-time, Flavorade-guzzling employee, and fifteen years later rarely a day goes by that I don't question how Microsoft manages to get anyone to buy that steaming pile they call an operating system.
Kids get accustomed to Windows and Microsoft Office in schools thanks to Microsoft's lobbying, so when they grow up they keep using Windows and pay for Office.
Everyone uses Windows and Microsoft Office, so most companies and organizations have to pay for licenses for each of their employees.
People know Windows, so they develop on Windows, so they get locked into yet more Microsoft products and libraries and have to run Windows on servers. That's yet more licenses for a Windows and for Visual Studio.
Their business strategy would almost be impressive if it weren't terrifyingly harmful.
I actually really like the rest of what Microsoft does though.
VS Code, TypeScript, creating the Language Server Protocol, the .NET Foundation/.NET in general and C#, the list goes on and on. They're an impactful organization which (depending on what kind of software you build/what you write) probably has a significant impact on your day-to-day experience as a developer.
The benefits of vertical integration can have when you (for lack of a better word) "own" these things can be beneficial for the end-user/developer, ignoring whatever kind of anti-competitive arguments there are.
It's the same argument I hear from Apple users -- Apple stewards their digital experience and gives them continuity end-to-end.
Microsoft -- by nature of owning my OS, IDE, the specification and dev team driving my primary language, a cloud provider, and having their fingers in all of these parts of my digital life -- has the ability to be really awesome for me.
They could also do really sinister things if they wanted and I'd be real fucked I suppose, but that's a(n unlikely) risk I accept.
"But muh games!"
The Windows filesystem has dismal performance. The Windows graphics stack is arguably better than Linux’s. And it’s not just the drivers, so you can’t just blame it on GPU vendors, though poor support from a certain popular GPU vendor definitely doesn’t help.
Some of it is just the little things, like doing mouse movement at very high priority in kernel space [1] [2]. Other parts are bigger and more impressive, like allowing the graphics driver to crash/upgrade/restart without you also losing all of your open windows.
[1]: https://reactos.org/wiki/Techwiki:Win32k/desktops#win32k.21P...
[2]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20061117-03/?p=28...
Couple decades ago for me.
> Yeah, 'cause the incredible fragmentation of Linux GUI toolkits and windowing systems is so fun to deal with.
Sounds like probably "never" for you. You seem hostile toward Linux, so you're probably better off sticking with whatever you use currently.
With Linux, the main difference is whether your desktop is primarily Qt or GTK. Sometimes an app using the other toolkit will look kind of funny, but most of those differences are paved over by any competent distro (eg: Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE...).
GUI toolkits are irrelevant to games.
Haha. Maybe because it works? I do miss XP though. It felt like the only OS that can work as well on a PC and a Tank.
Try the command line: "rmdir /s" and it's quick.
>I think for the purpose of this discussion, explorer IS Windows.
The article is about the file system, not the UI.
I'm actually a big fan of Windows on the desktop, and as long as I avoid Explorer, I have no issues at all with file system performance while I'm developing, working from the command line, VS Code and Rider, and working with containers and WSL - all works great. But Explorer is such a central component of Windows that it affects pretty all users. I genuinely don't understand how it can be so rubbish ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I once had a PDF file on the desktop and for some reason this file was causing explorer.exe to freeze under certain circumstances. It's all a big mistery.
Such is the nature of closed source black box software.
And even its Item Handler system is flawed. Still about .ts, it could stutter when I open context menu on ts files, then freeze forever if I hover over just 1 bit on "Open with" menu.
Also, is there a better way to hunt down the background process than sysinternals? It seems pretty ridiculous that a low level debugging tool is required to do something as modest as reliably move and delete files, but I never heard of a better workaround.
This is how it is on Windows. Linux handles open file deletion a lot better.
I'm struggling to understand why one shouldn't treat the behaviour of explorer.exe as simply part of the Windows system.
Are there third-party explorer.exe alternatives available?
If so, during Windows install, where do I click to _not_ install the MSFT explorer.exe and instead select one of the better alternatives?
You'd set a regkey to your program. There used to be a 3.1 style Program Manager - I miss that one
Although Windows remains my favorite environment I share the annoyance at how MS really polishes some things while failing on basic functionality, when they definitely have the resources and skills to fix that. Every time my wifi or WAN hiccups I wonder why Windows still lacks decent network history/QOS tools out of the box.
For power users, you're much better off using the command line tools
EDIT: Does the CLI override the "open in background" check? Or do you still need Mark Russinovich sysinternals to reliably perform elementary file system administration tasks in Windows?
Hey, maybe they could put rounded corners on the file deletion window, I bet that would fix it!