Although WinUI is a brilliant improvement, much of the OS remains seriously substandard. When compared to DEs such as KDE (and to a lesser extent, GNOME) the interface of Windows 11 (and especially its predecessors until approximately Windows 7) are ridiculously and ultimately unnecessarily inconsistent.Additionally, the commandline utilities are lacking. For instance, `hostnamectl`, provided by the `systemd` package for the `linux` kernel (rather than the custom, proprietary NT kernel that Windows includes) provides `--pretty`, `--transient` and `--static` hostnames. These are a brilliant invention totally absent in Windows. In fact, in some parts of Windows, the hostname is still limited to 8 characters! How ridiculous is that?However, my primary gripe is the lack of package standardization. At least the recent innovation of `winget` has allowed non-interactive/silent installation and upgrade to be slightly improved, but “packages” as a concept still don't exist. They're just a collection of binaries in system32 for system software.MSIX and ProgramData are a brilliant step in the correct direction, but I know 2nd-hand that developing software that supports that format is more difficult than packaging software for `.rpm` or `.deb`.It doesn't even use UTF-8 unless configured to. Additionally, the Win32 API does not allow paths of more than approximately 64 characters, and severely limits cross-platform naming schemes by mandating that certain characters not be used, despite the former limitation not even being a limitation of NTFS. For comparison, Linux allows any character for paths except / and null, and 4096 bytes of text for a path (255 for a filename) which is even able to be modified simply by modifying $PATH_MAX and recompiling the kernel.In that regard, whereas most Linux-based distributions/OSes (except Android) support hundreds of filesystems perfectly, Windows 11 solely supports FAT(16/32), exFAT, and NTFS. These are archaic, basic filesystems when compared to the likes of BTRFS.Despite all of this inconsistency, both in exposed APIs and the GUI, Microsoft itself creates some incredible software for Windows, which makes installation of it worthwhile. The Windows Subsystem for Android and Linux provide perfect Android and Linux compatbility, somewhat mitigating the problems incurred by the legacy compatibility that Microsoft strives for in Windows – the origin of the aforestated problems.
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Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology company with headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
