Comment by rkagerer

Thank you for sharing that last paragraph. It's nice to know I'm not the only one out there who feels let down by the trajectory Microsoft has taken.

I've likewise got a lifetime of experience on the Windows / MS stack, decades of custom tooling I've adapted or coded from scratch, etc. It's frustrating to see so many great advancements to core fundamentals like the kernel, tracing tools, I/O performance, etc. get completely overshadowed by such chronically user-hostile and frankly stupid business decisions.

I wish I could have the good bits without all the nasty cruft. I wish they stopped assigning junior devs who haven't even heard of Win32 to work on UI touched by millions of end users. I wish they hired back QA staff and rediscovered proper quality control methodologies like, say, regression testing. I remember a story from back in the day when they bought up one of every software title from the local tech store and had staff each pick one to dogfood on their prerelease OS. That passion to ensuring a good user experience.

I don't look forward to the time it will take to recreate all my infrastructure in Linux (including no doubt several detours tinkering into source codes to fix little issues and upstream little enhancements). But I fear Microsoft as a whole will never get their heads screwed on straight in time for me to avoid having to do so.

I would pay good money for something like ReactOS, Wine, or whatever, to offer the equivalent for business applications as Proton is for games. I applaud all the hard work done by people on those projects. I expect one day when kids have never heard of the word Microsoft, the code those heros wrote will still be in use by some grateful beneficiaries.

Anyway, that's the end of my rant. And in the meantime, just in case you haven't tried it yet... Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC is the least offensive flavor I've found, and works as a daily driver.