Re: RFC: adding fd-passing to win32

On Fri, 5 Aug 2022 13:16:25 +0400, Marc-André Lureau wrote:

> There is a whole world of vendors & manufacturers around the Windows
> kernel (at least for PC) to start with.

I remember a story by Greg Kroah-Hartman, from about a couple of decades
ago. At that point, he said, both the Linux and Windows kernels had
reworked their USB stacks three times. The difference was, Windows
still had to carry around the baggage of all the older, obsolete device
driver APIs, while Linux was able to dump the old internal device
architecture and start again with a clean slate each time.

This works because the Linux kernel developers are able to rework
drivers in the source tree to keep up as necessary with changes
elsewhere in the kernel internals. This doesn’t work for proprietary
drivers for the proprietary Windows OS.

Now, add to that all the other backward-compatibility baggage Windows
has been accumulating since then, and you begin to appreciate the
magnitude of Microsoft’s ever-increasing support burden. Have you
noticed that they seem to be skimping on QA these days, relying more
and more on their users to be unpaid beta testers? Even Microsoft, with
its billions in revenues, cannot afford the expenditure it would take to
maintain Windows as a quality product any more.