alt Hacker NewsUI of Windows is buggy and inconsistent. Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
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> Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
In their intended applications, which might or might not be the ones you need.
The slowness of the filesystem that necessitated a whole custom caching layer in Git for Windows, or the slowness of process creation that necessitated adding “picoprocesses” to the kernel so that WSL1 would perform acceptably and still wasn’t enough for it to survive, those are entirely due to the kernel’s archtecture.
It’s not necessarily a huge deal that NT makes a bad substrate for Unix, even if POSIX support has been in the product requirements since before Win32 was conceived. I agree with the MSR paper[1] on fork(), for instance. But for a Unix-head, the “good” in your statement comes with important caveats. The filesystem is in particular so slow that Windows users will unironically claim that Ripgrep is slow and build their own NTFS parsers to sell as the fix[2].
[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/785430/
[2] https://nitter.net/CharlieMQV/status/1972647630653227054
>Kernel and low level stuff are actually very stable and good.
This. A while ago a build of Win 11 was shared/leaked that was tailored for the Chinese government called "Windows G" and it had all the ads, games, telemetry, anti-malware and other bullshit removed and it flew on 4GB RAM. So Microsoft CAN DO IT, if they actually want to, they just don't want to for users.
You can get something similar yourself at home running all the debloat tools out there but since they're not officially supported, either you'll break future windows updates, or the future windows updates will break your setup, so it's not worth it.