NT is a better consumer kernel that Linux. It can survive many driver crashes that Linux cannot. Why should Microsoft drop a better kernel for a worse one?

Can you expand on this? I've used Windows 10 for 2-3 years when it came out and I remember BSODs being hell.

Now I only experienced something close to that when I set up multiseat on single PC with AMD and Nvidia GPUs and one of them decided to fall asleep. Or when I undervolt GPU too much.

Of course that depends on the component and the access level. RAM chip broken? Tough luck. A deep kernel driver accessing random memory like CrowdStrike; you'll still crash. One needs an almost microkernel-like separation for preventing such issues.

However, there are certain APIs like WDDM timeout detection and recovery: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d... . It is like a watchdog that'll restart the driver without BSOD'ing. You'll get a crash dump out of it too.

Meanwhile in Linux we cannot even restart compositor without killing all GUI apps.

I swear sometimes progress goes backwards..

Is this a Wayland issue? This works fine for me on X. But yes, progress goes backwards in Linux. I had hope for the Linux desktop around 2005-2010, since then it only got worse.

If your $DISPLAY managed by Xorg server goes away your X apps will also crash. Wayland combines the server with the parts that draw your window decoration into the same process.

Under Windows everything including the GPU driver can crash. As long as it didn't take the kernel with it, causing a BSOD. Your applications can keep running.

I can restart window manager and compositor just fine in X. Also it is not generally true that X apps crash when the server goes away. This is a limitation of some client libraries, but I wrote X apps myself that could survive this (or even move their display to a new server). It is of course sad that popular client libraries never got this functionality under Linux, but this is a problem of having wrong development priorities.

People that comment things like this probably have their heart in the right place, but they do not understand just how aggressive Microsoft is about backwards compatibility.

The only way to get this compatibility in Linux would be to port those features all over to Linux and if that happened the entire planet would implode because everyone would say “I knew it! Embrace Extend Extinguish!” At the same time.

I agree. For years I supported some bespoke manufacturing software that was written in the 80s and abandoned in the late 90s. In the installer, there were checks to see what version of DOS was running. Shit ran just fine on XP through W10 and server 2016. We had to rig up some dummy COM ports, but beyond that, it just fuckin worked.