> - be easily ported to different hardware architectures, which then never actually became relevant
Commercially relevant, perhaps, but it has remained technically relevant: The NT Kernel has historically operated on lots of different hardware architectures and continues to run on a small variety today. The ARM port is still active and a living branch even if total hardware sales are fewer than projected and Microsoft ceded most of that hardware space commercially when they gave up on Phones.
> - have a much more sophisticated and elaborate security model than those filthy unices (and now we're getting sudo on Windows, because 30 years later, it's still too complicated for anyone to use as intended)
That "sudo for windows" still leverages the elaborate Windows ACL model. It's not like they are also porting Linux kernel security on top of Windows. They just realized that both "RunAs.exe" and PowerShell's "Start-Process" have more complicated CLIs than necessary for simple UAC cases and decided to copy the CLI arguments of a well known CLI.
> - allow fluid switching between different userlands, be it win32, OS/2 (RIP), Unix (RIP), and anything else you could want in the future! (except no, you're getting VMs now)
Turns out users don't actually want to switch userlands on the fly and when they do VMs feel more right as an abstraction?
More (RIP) than OS/2 or the various attempts at POSIX userlands, Windows 8 actually tried to deliver a truly modern userland as a wholesale new experience, failed spectacularly. Switching was fluid and felt good if you enjoyed the new userland (which had some extraordinary, noticeable benefits in bootup and power/battery usage and other things). Coordination between the two userlands got really good in 8.1. The final lessons that seemed to come from Windows 8 was to never try that again because users hated it and didn't understand it. (I still lament how much of "didn't understand it" was so much more of a failure of education and PR and marketing and incidentals more than technical problems. There was some great technical appeal of a chance to move from win32 to a userland that was greener [both as in pastures and ecologically].)
As someone that believed into the WinRT dream, I am deeply sour with how WinDev managed the whole story, it wasn't only the users not wanting to adopt the new world.
Microsoft itself made a mess out of the developer experience.
Now I am back to distributed computing, and for anything Windows the classical frameworks are good enough.
Commercially relevant, perhaps, but it has remained technically relevant: The NT Kernel has historically operated on lots of different hardware architectures and continues to run on a small variety today. The ARM port is still active and a living branch even if total hardware sales are fewer than projected and Microsoft ceded most of that hardware space commercially when they gave up on Phones.
> - have a much more sophisticated and elaborate security model than those filthy unices (and now we're getting sudo on Windows, because 30 years later, it's still too complicated for anyone to use as intended)
That "sudo for windows" still leverages the elaborate Windows ACL model. It's not like they are also porting Linux kernel security on top of Windows. They just realized that both "RunAs.exe" and PowerShell's "Start-Process" have more complicated CLIs than necessary for simple UAC cases and decided to copy the CLI arguments of a well known CLI.
> - allow fluid switching between different userlands, be it win32, OS/2 (RIP), Unix (RIP), and anything else you could want in the future! (except no, you're getting VMs now)
Turns out users don't actually want to switch userlands on the fly and when they do VMs feel more right as an abstraction?
More (RIP) than OS/2 or the various attempts at POSIX userlands, Windows 8 actually tried to deliver a truly modern userland as a wholesale new experience, failed spectacularly. Switching was fluid and felt good if you enjoyed the new userland (which had some extraordinary, noticeable benefits in bootup and power/battery usage and other things). Coordination between the two userlands got really good in 8.1. The final lessons that seemed to come from Windows 8 was to never try that again because users hated it and didn't understand it. (I still lament how much of "didn't understand it" was so much more of a failure of education and PR and marketing and incidentals more than technical problems. There was some great technical appeal of a chance to move from win32 to a userland that was greener [both as in pastures and ecologically].)