The reasons that Windows is awful have nothing to do with code quality. Windows is awful because of intentional choices Microsoft made (e.g., bloatware that gets reinstalled with every update, mandatory Microsoft accounts, and mandatory telemetry).
Whenever I have to start windows 10, I still see the same kind of bugs, that were present on XP. One example: They seem to be simply unable to fix the icons "near the clock", which are still shown, when some app has been killed, until you hover over them. Things like that, but of course also lots of stuff that affects people more in form of annoyances, making every action take at least twice as long as on GNU/Linux distros I run. It only takes minutes, and I am already frustrated with the system, because everything takes so long to do.
One similarly ignored bug that springs to mind is the performance of the "Send To" context menu item in File Explorer. I always dreaded dragging my mouse over it by accident.
They could also cache that computed menu and proactively update the cache whenever the relevant keys are changed. Either way, pretty far from "cannot be fixed without breaking the API".
Windows 11 is an example of poor code quality. Bugs everywhere, while the same things work on Ubuntu/popos.
Past MS engineers have been commenting for a decade on how MS has grown too big, can't manage, and has become a monolith "too big to fail". By nature when engineers are small pieces of a giant machine, they don't do their best work. And those with the experience move on to better things.
My experience has also been that Windows 11 is buggy (haven't been using it for a while because it can't even reliably connect to the internet). But also in my limited experience (just one install on a single machine in ~2020, used for a few months): Ubuntu is just as bad or even worse.
Your experience its quite limited and you probably need to know how to properly update ubuntu since most of the issues I've found with it (since I started using it ~12 years ago) are usually issues caused by lack of drivers (which gets solved in 15 minutes once you know where to click) once those are solved it is sturdy and you can keep it runing for several months without having to restart it or it becoming unusably slow as it hapens with windows systems after about 4 days of uptime
This comment is funny to me because it was up to date and the particular issue wasn’t driver related: it was specifically that after not touching it at all for a couple months each subsequent time I logged in it would randomly lock up, took about 15min to boot.
It would lock up as in just take an extremely long time to do certain things in the UI. That sounds like a pretty odd way for a driver issue to manifest, but maybe I'm missing something.
The biggest issue with Windows isn't poor code or shitty engineering, it's the support for legacy software. MS engineers are some of the smartest in the world. The devs can fix the code and make a much better OS but that would break boomer software used by big banks that haven't updated since the 80s. When Microsoft write code, it has to promise support for decades, that means having to maintain the same old outdated APIs for many years.
Outdated APIs don't have to affect the shell and built in programs or anything else that is kept up to date. My linux programs are no more buggy due to having Wine installed for similar compat with legacy Windows executables.
Was it? I recall the kuro5hin analysis of the leaked Windows 2000 source code[0] that said:
>there is nothing really surprising in this leak. Microsoft does not steal open-source code. Their older code is flaky, their modern code excellent. Their programmers are skilled and enthusiastic. Problems are generally due to a trade-off of current quality against vast hardware, software and backward compatibility.
They explicitly listed the reasons they think it's awful. My personal grievances with Windows align more or less with theirs and while I wouldn't go as far as to say it's awful, I'd use something certainly stronger than "annoyance".
Specifically, clear anti-user choices that exceed by far being "annoying":
* Making it exceedingly difficult or impossible to use the OS without logging in with a Microsoft account.
* Forcing the user in various ways to surrender data to Microsoft. Some of them can be disabled if you really go out of your way, others can't.
* Prompting me again and again to switch to Edge and other MS defaults. I've had the same install for a few years now and NO, I don't want to change to "Microsoft recommended defaults", no matter how many times you ask me.
* Showing the same "OS setup" screen after some updates, requiring me to pay very close attention to what I'm clicking, lest I select something MS is trying to lead me to. The amount of attention required from the user on those screens corresponds quite well with anti-user behavior.
>Making it exceedingly difficult or impossible to use the OS without logging in with a Microsoft account
This is hilarious. I recently got a new laptop that has window$ 11. After setting it up with a Non Microsoft email (which required some good fight), I tries to install some random app from the Microsoft store, but got a "something went wrong please try again" on the first screen.
It's pathetic. I haven't used Windows since Win 7 , which I basically installed for gaming. Seeing the latest version of the OS makes me feel sorry for them. That's why Apple with all their assholery is eating their lunch (on the flip side my wife just got a MBP m1 and I was pleasantly surprised that it has hdmi port, magsafe, several USBc ports. Apple seems going in the right direction.)
You haven't had root admin on Windows since Windows 7.
The telemetry makes this clear. Reboots and updates even more so.
The UI lag and stealing of focus ("oh, you're typing a document... too bad, I want to launch a new Explorer window that will immediately steal focus") make it clear that the computer is in charge and will probably listen to your requests, but on the timeline it chooses.
The default of windows already do compatibility in some crazy way. And the compatibility mode lies to the program about system version or even fake old bugs so program relies on bug will run. And I'd imagine. To make this work, ms would need tons of most shitty code you'd imagine in the source o fake those behaviors.
