this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2024
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so by now even Microsoft acknowledges that it has lost the battle of making computing synonymous with Windows?
FOSS release of Windows when?
Can you imagine if that entire code got released tomorrow, without Microsoft selectively cleaning it up first?
I remember WinXP getting decompiled a while back and people thought it was pretty wild. Can you imagine Win8+?
Bet we'd find a few comments like
#Yes it's a massive security hole but don't ask questions.LOLI think we'd still be shocked at how much data collection it does. And probably how "I don't know why it works but don't touch it." The code is. (It was written by people, after all)
I've always felt a lot of Windows' "dependability" is really just slick presentation and the mystique of a black box that sounds solid when you knock on it.
But what bothers me so much, as a non-career-coder and DIY-computing learner, is whenever a corporate product breaks, everything is obfuscated with nonsense that is only meant for a company engineer.
At least good FOSS tries to tell you exactly where the issue is.
If Windows went FOSS I bet it would get a lot of human-friendly fixes...and MS would get a lot of new scandals lol.
i read a blog post by a former MS employee who shed some light on the situation. apparently the windows dev team is entirely made up of junior developers. As soon as anybody gets any experience, either MS tries to promote them to management, or they leave to find a better job.
what that means is there is nobody at MS who has deep knowledge of the Windows kernel. So instead of re-writting, re-factoring or making additions, all they know how to do is add things on top of the existing OS.
I don't think this is strictly true. They do tweak parts of the kernel such as the CPU scheduler to deal with new CPU designs that come out which have special scheduling requirements. That's actually happened quite a bit recently with AMD and Intel both offering CPUs with asymmetric processors with big and little cores, different clock speeds, different cache, sometimes even different instructions on different cores. They also added ReFS not long ago, which may have required some kernel work.
I can understand though if they have few experienced people and way more junior devs. It would probably explain a lot to be honest. A lot of Microsoft stuff is bloated and/or unreliable.
Imagine Microsoft decided to open source windows they would act like mozilla firefox management or smth