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> I might get some heat for this but I must say Windows is still the OS with the least closed garden or heck even a garden.

The Windows App Store is as closed as Apple's, just not as successful - and I was comparing interests, not achievements.

> To get even the legitimate and popular x86 applications you still have to manually browse to websites and download it. You can install whatever you want whether it has a digital signature or not and yes it also includes the plentitude of crapwares and spywares.

It's not as open as Linux, or Android, and about as open as OSX. You can't load unsigned drivers anymore without much work. I have no idea why you'd think Windows is "least closed garden" - unless you've never used any of the others.

> Or maybe some people like a touch OS with their touchscreen laptop and its just MS thinking forward? I don't know what other OS can you recommend that is touch friendly for my Surface pro?

Stockholm syndrome? How can it be "forward looking" to force you to use a touch interface when you don't want to? You want it? fine, use it. I don't. But if I use Win8, I still have to use it. Forward looking? Bullying is the only description I can give it.

> No sure what you mean by this.

Then read skrebbel's post I was replying to. He is under the mistaken assumption that because he was paying for Windows, he had any control over the direction it went in the last 10 years.

> Then read skrebbel's post I was replying to. He is under the mistaken assumption that because he was paying for Windows, he had any control over the direction it went in the last 10 years.

You sure like putting words into people's mouths.

I apologize, I understood the words "less control over" in your post implying that you believed you had "nonzero control" to start with. Can you please explain what you meant (and what words I put into your mouth)?

> I might get some heat for this but I must say Windows is still the OS with the least closed garden or heck even a garden.

Surely you meant "OS with a significant market share" or something, because there's no way Windows is more "open" in any way than Linux!

At least it's more reliable as a platform. Try to compile, let alone run, a program written for Linux 5 years ago on a distribution today. I compile and run 20 year old software, unmodified, on Windows 8, without any problems.

What? This usually works just fine. The only area where it doesn't is Gnome, who like making breaking changes.

Quite a lot of the core tools (shellutils) are 20+ years old with only minor updates.

Yes, anything that only uses posix functions is less fragile, obviously. It's the user space libraries: UI, sound, notifications (for those last two, it's not just the API's that change, it's complete subsystems being pulled from under you), ...

Look, I'm not saying there is no Linux software that doesn't keep working, it's the overall time you spend over the lifetime of your software to keep up with updates in its dependencies. I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue that Windows isn't a whole lot better than Linux at that.

(I've been using Linux since 1998, I'm not new to this game)

> I don't see how anyone can reasonably argue that Windows isn't a whole lot better than Linux at that.

My colleague is wondering how can he install latest copies of Office and Visual Studio Express on Windows XP SP2 for quite some time, without success.

What this have to do with reliability of windows as a platform.

Reliable platform means, that new versions of OS do not break your old program. Which is true for windows.

Of course, as OS becomes more capable, it's possible to write programs that can't work on less capable older versions. But even then, windows tries to add fallbacks so that most new programs still work on old versions.

I'm doing this on a daily basis with problem. However, in 2003 I had great problem compiling a Win3 program written in 1996 (only 7 at the time, not yet 20 year old today) program to run on Win2000.

The secret to being able to do this properly is to keep a curated development environment that has the old tools/libs in their proper form -- which I suspect is why you don't have a problem (20 years ago you had VC5/VB5 - do you compile the same program with VS2013?).

YMMV, but my experience is that the Microsoft environment is worse than Linux in this regard.

You must have had some amazing luck because my colleagues tried to install some DBs (it was a combination of Oracle 11g Weblogic and Maximo) and had miserable luck. And it was working on Win7.

Didn't Win 8 jetisson most of the compatibility?

I think the difference between installing applications that are basically written for Unix (Oracle for example) on Windows and compiling software is a vast chasm.

The parent to you is correct in that you can compile really really really old software on Windows with ease and very few changes. This is not possible on Linux.

Of course, that's because the libraries in fashion change on Linux very quickly and nobody cares about backwards compatibility that much. They say "just grab the latest version!" or "why are you trying to compile such OLD software?!", particularly if written in C or C++. I don't know about Python or scripting language support.

But a rubbish installer written by a company that has much of its UI written in Java (last time I checked years ago) doesn't really compare to the excellent backwards-compatibility of the Windows API and surrounding libraries.

This isn't even an anti-Linux rant; the same problem is found on Mac OSX. That runs into both problems - impossible to run old software (Rosetta support please?!) and impossible to compile it because the system has changed so much.

I meant as a developer platform. Yes it's true that, depending on the way it's implemented, it's common that software can't be installed on the exact versions the vendor tested it on or 'approved' it for. What I meant was that Microsoft bends over backwards to provide compatibility, although I guess I should qualify that by saying 'at the lower levels', i.e. on C/C++ code written not too far away from the OS dll's. Silverlight of course is a higher-level counter-example.

There is nothing wrong with a touch UI, the issue was trying to force the touch UI on all users.

Which funnily enough was done to aid them in creating enough demand for their app store to become a player in the closed garden model. If it had worked I bet Win 9 would have been closed garden by default, with a special edition for enterprises.