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Vista is Slower, But XP Is Still Dying
An anonymous reader writes "Though the Redmond software giant may be extending the lifetime of XP on low-end laptops, the end is nigh for the aging OS. That extension makes perfect sense, as recent studies have shown XP is far faster than Vista across a number of platforms. Still, Microsoft is 'sticking to its guns' when it comes to drop-dates for most other uses of the XP operating system. 'There are several dates that apply, but the one you're probably thinking of is the June 30 deadline that Dix referred to. That's the last day when large computer makers -- the Dells, HPs and Lenovos of the world -- will be allowed to preinstall Windows XP on new PCs. It also marks the official end of XP as a retail product.'"
For now it's up to the users to decide if and when XP "dies". There are two ways I can think of for Microsoft to kill XP: (1) They could develop and release a useable next-generation OS(which remains to be seen) or (2) Putting on the tinfoil hat, I guess Microsoft could "accidentally" leak hitherto-unknown XP vulnerabilities so that XP will be so exploitable and unpatchable that it will eventually be unuseable...but that scenario is unlikely given Microsoft's support lifecycle policy. I doubt that they could handle lack of innovation and 1 or 2 more crappy OS releases before *NIX and Apple eat MS' marketshare. Also, MS' foray into the services market may go bust and after that, supporting their legacy software may be one of the few things that will earn them money.
MSDOS is even faster! Seriously you can't just say "Vista is slower so it must be worse". There are other factors to consider - functionality, aesthetics, hardware support, security, and so on.
There is a significant difference between "dying" and "being killed."
As in "the death was ruled a suicide after the victim died from three self-inflicted gunshots to the head."
Good riddance. With a new LTS release of Ubuntu coming up in a scant few weeks and support for the entire Adobe creative suite in Wine, I don't see as there's much reason to bother with it.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Really? How do I run Office 2007 and VS 2008 under Linux? What about current and next gen games? How do I get those to work?
Last I checked, it was competing with free software remarkably well. In fact, it owns something like 70-90% of the market, depending on which market you look at.
Surely someone as open-minded, intelligent and non-biased such as yourself must stand back and admit that it must be doing SOMETHING right in order to maintain that lead, as well as for so many people to kick up a fuss now that it looks like it's going to be killed off.
Surely, I mean surely in the near-25-years that Microsoft has been developing windows, they hit the nail on the head and released a genuinely good Operating System at least once! Surely!
Or maybe not. Maybe nearly 90% of the users out there are all idiots or forced to use it because Microsoft has a proverbial gun stuck to their head. Those same users are also being forced to cry out loud "please no, please don't kill off XP! Please!". Or maybe it's just you.
Just a thought.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
I've had to reactivate my legal copy of Windows XP so many times that I finally gave up and downloaded a pirate version...I expect many people will do the same...I purchased a copy of XP, I think it's reasonable that I should be able to replace my hard drive without having to contact Microsoft and convince them that I'm not stealing their product...If you treat your customers like thieves they just might meet your expectations...
Running them under a VM or under Citrix is still running them under windows. I was told I could do it all under Linux. And I don't do console games. You don't have an answer.
The problem is not the increase in resource use. This is nothing new. Every release of Windows, most releases of OS X and even some new flavors of Linux have increased resource use because they do more. The big problem for Microsoft this go-'round is that Vista really doesn't give you enough reason to accept the increased resource use. XP is a perfectly fine OS and to get people to move away, especially if that move is to a resource hog, you really need to drop the hammer and give people a kick-ass must-have OS. MS clearly failed to do that in Vista and they're paying for it now.
Seriously, can we just stop doing this everytime there is a new release of windows? When XP was released it was "OH MY GOSH, NOBODY LIKES XP!!! WINDOWS2000 WILL BE AROUND FOREVER!!!!". Now we're doing it all over again with Vista. There isn't a pattern or ANYTHING. Like maybe large enterprises that move at a snail's pace tend to adopt one rev behind.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/15/0035209
This is so cool, you've just given me an insight into the difference between
Linux users and Windows users:
Linux users care about data formats. They want open standard data formats
so they can run their *choice* of software that understands the data formats.
That's why you find a bazillion text editors for example for editing code,
or why there are so many multimedia apps under Linux (vlc, mplayer, xine, kaffeine,
totem just to name a few) --- they all understand and speak the same open standards formats.
Windows users: They want what they think is "ease of use". So they spend $$$$$$$ on
proprietary software that does a "task" "easily", but uses a funky proprietary format
that only *that* particular proprietary software understands. Consequently,
the windows users are stuck on Windows because that's the only platform that
runs their proprietary software.
No wonder so few windows users migrate to Linux --- it's going to take a lot of pain
of using windows (windows activation, windows genuine advantage, windows spyware,
windows viruses, etc.) before a windows user ditches windows and moves over to
either Linux or OS X, or one of the BSDs. Now it makes sense to me whenever
I see such a story about some windows user moving over expressing "frustration"
as the reason for the move. The stories didn't say they moved because Linux
made them happier (although in most stories they were surprised to find out, that
they were indeed happier after the learning curve), they moved because windows
made their pain grow worse. It wasn't that Linux was "too hard" (after all they
did make the transition), or that Linux was so much "easier" (in *my* opinion it's
easier, but that is after all just *my* opinion), it was that giving up on windows
meant losing so much proprietary data that there had to be a compelling reason to
abandon windows (i.e. frustration with windows)
Linux users on the other hand can use (and lots do) use OS X, because that OS
also speaks to open stardards formats and can run whatever applications on OS X\
that understand the open standards formats. It's no wonder then why it's relatively
painless to go from Linux -> OS X, or the other way OS X -> Linux if all you're doing
is moving data encoded using open standads formats.
--Johnny is grateful for the epiphany.
So in the big swap from M$ to Linux there are going to be a lot of delays and a lot of hassles. People will just stretch out the old stale piss (and yo will it get stale) for as long as they can, as they stop investing (throwing away) money into windows.
So basically you stop buying or upgrading applications unless they are Linux variants and you get used to dual booting, windows the toy OS for play and Linux for work and the web. M$ with their consistent lies and customers abuse have forced the situation, Linux didn't create the alternate OS market M$ did.
For the PC games companies, Linux will be a huge bonus, as all the old windows boxen die, all those games will have to be replaced, all the way back to win98, literally a market of hundreds of millions of games.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
How does he run them under Linux, as you suggested? Citrix or a VM STILL USE WINDOWS. The point is to NOT USE WINDOWS, remember?
He does have a point. If using your software on Linux means you need to run Windows in a VM, then that isn't dropping the Microsoft OS altogether, is it?
Until you can come up with a solution other than "Stop using proprietary software" or "VM Windows", it isn't going to work out.
Not on the eee they don't. Nor under any of the 50 low cost MIDs and mini notebook pc's coming out in the next few months. For the two pound laptop with six hours of battery life Vista is dead on arrival.
Lies, damn lies and statistics. All the way up at 14% after a year and a half with under a year to go before the next version is out? That means it's going to peak at something under 30%. Sure, they sold lots of licenses nobody is using. They made Billions doing that. I hope that's not the kind of trick you can get people to fall for over and over. I wish I knew it for sure.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Depends on the game.
If you mean all current and next gen games, you'd better have a few consoles, too.
If you just mean enough, there are quite a few games with Linux ports (more than you'd think), and more run under Wine. I honestly don't have time to play all the games that I could play on Linux. I will confess I dual-boot, though -- to XP.
The answer to Office and VS is to run alternatives -- in particular, if you have to run VS at all, chances are you're not developing anything that would run on Linux anyway.
Personally, I'm much more willing to put up with the pain of getting games to work on Linux, then getting everything else to work on Vista -- or simply working with Vista at all. Right now, I'd sooner give up games than boot Vista.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
What I'd like to see is a more concerted effort to address the problems with Vista. Microsoft could make Vista as fast and usable as XP today if they would just get through their thick heads that some of the policies they came up with for vista are bone headed.
Consider:
1. Drivers. There's no reason Vista can't be made compatible with XP's faster video drivers, except that Microsoft is being stubborn.
2. 64 bit support. Microsoft has willfully hamstrung Vista 64 by not providing compatibility with 32 bit drivers, and by making the Vista 64 driver model more restrictive than the Vista 32 bit. If you look at Apple's systems, they have a much better model where 32 bit drivers work *fine* on a 64 bit system. There's no reason your video card driver needs to be 64 bit anyway...
3. Background tasks. Here's a hint: Let us easily turn them the fuck off. There should be some kind of Windows performance control panel that provides a central place to switch off file indexing, and the endless other miscellaneous tasks that spin the drive on Vista *constantly*.
Until those issues are addressed, it's stupid to expect gamers who need good graphics drivers, and laptop users who can't have the spinning harddrive wearing down the battery constantly to take a second look at Vista.
I gave Vista a good 6 months, and really did appreciate things like not having to run as administrator constantly. I felt much more secure running with lower privileges user like I do on my Ubuntu and OSX installs. However, dispite the fact that I tweaked the hell out of my system (including turning off file indexing and switching off aero in favor of the win2k look), and the fact that my system *should* be ridiculously overpowered by looking at the hardware specs, the background services made my system run like a *dog*.
I've switched back to XP, and it is like night and day. Suddenly, my machine no longer locks up doing some stupid task in the background. Suddenly, the stutter is gone from my games. Suddenly, everything is snappier.
What's more, I now actually get to run with file indexing ON, by using the google desktop. This gives me all of the same search functionality as I got on vista, but with no noticeable performance overhead. Hell, I could probably start running as a non admin user on XP, now that applications have finally been forced to learn to live with reduced permissions for Vista compatibility...
It isn't as though MS changes driver requirements all that often. There has been a real long time between XP and Vista. MS isn't requiring people to release new drivers every 6 months, more like every 5-6 years. That isn't unreasonable. Have a look at how often nVidia has to change their Linux drivers and tell me who requires more.
Also, as you noted, it isn't as though there hasn't been some time. Vista has been on the open market for over a year now, and MS told their developers at Beta 2 that all the driver interfaces were stable. That's a lot of time to have developed a new driver. If you still haven't, well I have trouble feeling that it is MS's fault. If you can't learn the new (very well documented) interfaces in a year's time, well then there is something wrong on your end.
Computers change, that is simply a fact of life. If you can't deal with that, then you are in teh wrong business. You can't expect to release something and not have to change it for 30 years. Interfaces (serial, USB, firewire, etc) will change, buses (PCI, PCIe) will change. OSes will change. You are going to have to update to support those.
When Vista first came out, I told people to lay off the hardware companies. It takes time to build a stable driver on new architecture, especially the video card companies who had some really massive changes. Now, I don't defend the hardware companies at all. You've had a year, and just about everyone does have a stable, tested driver out. If you still can't, well that is your problem, not MS's.
He's not asking "How do I use Linux to solve a problem?" He's asking "If I use Linux, how do I still give Microsoft money?" If the question were the former, the question would have been "How do I deal with these .docx documents?" In that case my answer would be to use OO.o to convert them to a standard format, except for the ones that stupidly require vendor specific software. For those you still have to use MSOffice apps to convert them until you can get your contacts to use an interoperable format, and that means probably Citrix.
We don't tolerate people sending us .WP documents or VisiCalc spreadsheets any more, do we? Unless we must, and then we convert them.
For gaming the problem is the same. Game developers are developing on the Windows platform not because DirectX is such a joy to work with or because it's a nice reliably consistent platform. Neither of those things are true. They're doing it because they sell a lot of copies and because they're evangelised to do it. The sooner they're weaned from that the better, and shifting to console games for a while can ease the transition. The point of playing games after all is not to play them on your PC. It's to play them. So play them on a platform that's designed for them. Duh.
If he wants to just give Microsoft money for no reason, he can continue to overlicense unused software like most enterprises are doing right now. That's a hearty way to flush some serious cash down the Redmond toilet for no reason if that's what you want to do. As abhorrent as the idea is, it's still better than actually using that stuff.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Mandatory activation.
Vista in all of its flavors requires activation either at the mothership, or via an activation server on your network.
This one requirement, has ZERO benefit for the end user. Microsoft made this mandatory to close the "Volume License Key loophole" that allowed corporate copies of XP to be widely and easily pirated.
Now the anti-piracy cost falls to the end user. Corporations that deploy standard images must now manage the activation process in addition to all the other things that make a Microsoft network tick. There are a million ways that activation causes problems - remote users, computer rental companies that re-image after every use, schools that re-image labs frequently...etc.
I don't see Microsoft "fixing" this problem ever.
-ted
I use linux very extensively and find a number of niceties (compiz has far more practical features than Vista and OSX, and a number of general benefits of running a platform that is comprised entirely of things I can examine transparently myself but also is a healthy competitive landscape from the commercial vendor perspective). Making the hardware consist of interchangeable commodity parts has done wonders for the pricing of components, and the similar phenomenon is even more pronounced in software. Every user including gamers should appreciate what that means. Especially as MS increasingly treats the customers as the enemy (embracing DRM, increasingly bold 'anti-piracy' measures).
That said there are certain approaches:
-Ignore Linux and gaming. The highly immediately pragmatic stand, probably what you would justify. The question here becomes are you forced up the upgrade trail by Vista? A weaker, yet not currently aggravating stance is to at least boycott Vista and tell microsoft you won't pay, and by extension boycotting games if they make DirectX 10 a requirement, hardware if they fail to provide XP drivers, etc.
-Use Linux and cave if Wine will run the game. Wine runs a surprisingly large number of games (Orange Box a popular example). This, of course, doesn't necessarily send the desired message, but it goes a ways. I have seen software patches and graphics drivers note Wine-specific issues, so some developers are seeing Wine as a valid demographic to target given the effort. This requires being vocal about your mode of usage, or else face game patches screwing up your experience by making Wine-incompatible design choices.
-Use Linux and refuse to buy any non-native games. There are some publishers that released native games. NeverWinter Nights (but not 2), id games, Savage 2. Reward them for publishing quality games for your platform, while being vocal about refusal to buy other titles. There are some decent Free games too, I was surprised how decent Nexuiz was (though I confess the artwork isn't as nice as other games, but the engine seems pretty good at its core).
I'm a hybrid of sorts. I'll check out a demo under wine if the game is overwhelmingly interesting (i.e. orange box) to see if I want it and would risk it, but will be much much more likely to buy a random game with a native linux binary. A lot of my gaming is reserved for console games, but FPS and RTS and the like I feel no console has an adequate interface (though metroid prime on wii was not too shabby). BTW, server-only binaries on linux aren't enough for me. I know it seems like being partly evangelical, but the reality is I want more out of my core platform experience and don't want to be beholden to a single corporate entity. The PC architecture is great for that, with multiple compatible vendors for practically every part except the OS platform, so long as MS is the dominant vendor. Making moves to change that is a good thing for consumers.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If you're a developer and you need a full-blown IDE you may need to run VisualStudio and XP or Vista on the machine you use for development. Same if you're a graphics artist. You might have to spend $600.00 or whatever it is to get Photoshop, and get used to the idea that you'll have to run it in Vista whether you want it or not.
But that's not most people. Most people's needs are actually better met with FOSS projects if they are mature enough (just like proprietary software) and have a healthy community of users and developers supporting them.
If you are a pro, or a serious amateur, it may be worth your the investment to buy Photoshop, even if you have to purchase a machine dedicated to the task of using it. But if you have a cubicle farm full of people using email, a word processor and an accounting package and maybe sharing printers and doing some simple file sharing, you can do that all very efficiently with Linux. Spend the money on the departments that may need an expensive piece of proprietary software - and the hardware required to run it. But don't assume it is the only solution, or even the best solution, especially for departments (and users) with more modest needs.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Until they sell out the rest of the way Eclipse makes a nice development platform to replace Visual Studio. If they do sell out there will be a fork. You'll find that if Eclipse isn't included in your distribution you'll find it in the Applications installer. All linux users can develop applications on day one if they want to. They don't have to, but since it's built by developers they served their own needs first. It turns out programming is not some occult science after all.
As for J#, C#, VB and WebDev, we're back to the same "How do I keep giving Microsoft money" question again. Those are not standards. They're proprietary solutions and stuff you build on them will obsolete every time Microsoft decides it needs more of your money. It's a trap. Don't fall into it. If you must program in those soon-to-be dead languages then you've created your own predicament and nobody can help you.
Photoshop? Enough with the photoshop. I don't care about photoshop. If you need a dedicated photoshop box it's no excuse to chain everyone in your enterprise to Windows when it's only you that is determined to suffer.
3d? You have to be frimping kidding. You don't really think Windows is a cutting edge 3d platform do you? On what planet?
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Of course no one can switch their business overnight, that's what WINE, Xen and other such projects are for. But I'm here to pick you on your point about IDEs. Photoshop not running on Linux isn't Linux's fault; it's entirely Adobe's fault..
But, Visual Studio? Well, we're talking about a completely different philosophy, and a different development model here. First of all, the greatest functionality of all that Visual Studio provides to developers is easy access to documentation. A *nix developer will have his reference documentation in a browser, as many windows as he can have. In-code reference? We all know about Eclipse's C-H etc., or even Vim's cscope plugin, and Emacs users also have more than one solution. The possibilities are endless. *# languages, as well as VB, are belong to Microsoft. I don't believe in Mono. And, frankly, beginner developers, those that Microsoft cater to with their Studio products, should hone their skills on a college or university and learn how to program properly before entering the market.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
Did my XP licenses all just disappear in a puff of smoke? That's one of the advantages to have at least a few beige boxes running off-the-shelf XP Pro. If the hardware dies, you can install the OS in a VM and still get use out of it.
As far as I know Office 2007 runs just fine in XP. If it doesn't, run Office 2003. Or OpenOffice.org. Or run Office 2007 on a Vista box if you just have to.
But don't tell me it's Office 2007 and VS 2008 or nothing. For most users that's not the case. If you need it, spend the money on it and be happy.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Windows 2000 is still getting updates. I have a laptop which I've lent out to a friend and she has it hooked up directly to her cable modem. No problems at all.
The major vector for infection is IE, so obviously she doesn't use that. And she's not running as Administrator, but under a user account.
All I see from the statistics you offered that Vista climbed in the time from Jan 2007 to Feb 2008 by about 8%. Could you explain where you get the confidence from that it will multiply its market share by 2.5 within two month?
THAT it grows is a given. It's the new OS from MS. Anything but a growth in market share would be a complete and utter desaster for MS. Interesting is which OSs Vista takes market shares from. You'll notice that it gains about as much from 2k users as it does from XP (with "alternative" systems staying pretty much stable). It seems that at least half of the "early adopters" had to, since the support for 2k has died, and they went for Vista, skipping XP altogether.
Also, please take note what this statistic measures. It counts the machines that connect to that certain page via the internet. So I would probably be counted as a Windows XP machine, even though this is only a virtual machine running on linux. We're also not counting any servers here. Else I'd say that MS is really, really in big doodoo, considering that according to that statistic, more than twice as many Macs or Linux machines are running than 2003 servers.
Makes sense for the W3Schools, since they are mainly concerned with the question which machines access webpages on the net (and even more so, what browser they use). But taking this as a measurement for the amount of machines on certain OSs doesn't hold enough water to make me a cup of Java.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Using distrowatch as a source to show where to migrate to? No thanks. That will only tell me what distro all the fanboy-types prefer as they are the type to go to that site to get their hits counted. Most of the Linux servers or professional workstations don't visit that site for their hit quota.
I never said that you literally can't migrate, I said that the solution given to that particular problem doesn't actually solve the issue. The ironic thing is that this post is coming from a Linux box, so don't try to tell me that I'm all for sticking with Windows.
As for the poster below: Did my XP licenses all just disappear in a puff of smoke? That's one of the advantages to have at least a few beige boxes running off-the-shelf XP Pro. If the hardware dies, you can install the OS in a VM and still get use out of it. No, you can't. The license does not permit you to move OEM copies to a different host. So if the machine dies, the license did just go up in a puff of smoke. I don't think I have ever seen a retail license on business owned machines, but if you did then that might leave that option open.
Since when did I say that it has to be Office 2007 over 2003? It was the original poster that asked about those specific versions. However, the point still stands. It may not be Office specifically tying someone to Windows, it could be something else. Let's say I want to perform a task, and my financial security depends on my performance. I choose the best piece of software for that specific task. I then use the OS that is required for that piece of software. Choosing the OS first and then using sub-par software as the "free choice alternative" is not the smartest way to go. Not all free alternatives are sub par and in fact are often better for mainstream tasks. But don't try to convince everyone that they must be using free software when their situation may be different.
Eventually gaming on Linux will catch up. In the interim, console gaming is a good substitute. When you're striking the chains some pain is to be expected.
When Microsoft's goal was to save us from the evil monolith that was IBM, I was their biggest fan. Now I'm a big fan of IBM and not Microsoft. This isn't difficult to understand. I haven't changed sides. They have.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Exactly, but what's even more stupid is the assumption that Linux has something to offer Microsoft. Of all the problems MS faces, developing a desirable core OS isn't one of them and Linux wouldn't be at the top of their list even it it were. MS could develop an entirely new OS using a Windows emulation environment, but they wouldn't need either Linux OR WINE to make that happen.
Features don't come for free. The different in speed for most things is negligible.
Processor time is cheap, programmer time is expensive. *If* the new features mean we get better quality apps due to shared libraries/services built into the OS, then I don't see the problem.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
If it's made today, you cannot define it as "not modern". If it's not even released yet you're revealing your bias completely. Tomorrow's technology is by definition "post modern".
Help stamp out iliturcy.
In my house I run Windows XP Media Edition, 2x Windows XP Pro, and Vista Ultimate 64. Hands down Vista is my favorite OS to use. Granted, early versions were harder to swallow, as I have been using Vista since early Beta.
However, the major problems I had initially have been addressed. Driver compatibility, Stability and Memory usage - since SP1 at least, all of these problems have gone away for me, most of them long before SP1.
While Vista may not be the best choice for everyone, I use it for Office 2007, Photoshop, Video Encoding, and Gaming (Crysis/2142) and have nothing but praises to sing for those uses.
Of course, I realize gamers that use basic photo editing software and office applications are in the minority....
you trailed off before you came up with a suitable alternative to VisualStudio
I'm sure that you can come up with all sorts of programs which justify keeping Windows. ("well I *must* run microsoft office")What about Photoshop?
I'm sure you can come up with all sorts of features which prevent you from using free alternatives. ("a fully-featured graphics editor? that's no use; it doesn't support CMYK natively")
I'm sure that no matter what the free software world provides for you, you'll be able to find some fault with it.
And that's fine. You can stick with your current supplier and hope that it all works out okay.
This article is about their next-generation OS being unusable though, and about the end-of-life for the OS which everyone uses. Still feel confident about keeping all your computing tasks tied to that supplier?
The answer isn't to respond to every offer of free software with "well it doesn't do x, therefore I'll pour scorn on its authors and remain with a homogenous Microsoft solution to everything". A more sensible approach would be to start moving what you can to free platforms while you still have a chance.
It does sound crazy because it would be completely retarded for them to do that. In Windows the kernel is NOT the problem. The kernel is a well designed microkernel based on Dec VMS written by a team who had written a series of very successful OSes prior to working at Microsoft. The Windows kernel is very well designed and is in many ways superior to Linux. It was written to be highly modular, highly portable and highly reliable. It has multiple application subsystems that run in user mode that can be launched independently and concurrently, and debugged across subsystem. If that sounds familiar it's what GNU has been trying do to with Hurd, spectacularly unsuccessfully, for over 20 years (and for those who dare to claim that Hurd is not unsuccessful, if after 20 years all you have is a 0.2 release on top of someone else's kernel, that ain't success.)
The problem with Windows is the Win16/32 API. That API set was designed for Windows 3.x which set out to achieve a completely different set of goals, and executed in a completely different environment where multithreading and hardware protection domains did not exist. The intended API for Windows NT was OS/2, which retained that application subsystem up until the Windows 2000 release, after which it was removed because nobody used it.
But you already don't have to use the Win32 user-mode subsystem in Windows. Microsoft has released a largely functional POSIX subsystem called Interix in the Services for Unix toolset, which was originally developed by SoftWay Systems and called OpenNT. Unlike cygwin, which is a POSIX API layer running within and on top of the Win32 subsystem, Interix is a complete implementation of an environment subsystem and runs independently of the Win32 subsystem.
Microsoft's core problems have to do with legacy. It's easy to forget that DOS and Windows 3.x ran on hardware on which UNIX and Linux simply could not run. Those architectures lacked many of the features we take for granted, especially hardware protection domains. Applications expected and often required total hardware access. There could be no concept of security because nothing could enforce it. Microsoft takes legacy very seriously, so much so that a large percentage of those DOS applications still execute on Vista, although within a virtual machine. You could argue that Microsoft should do what Apple did and simply cut their losses and break every application that does not adhere to the proper security guidelines that Microsoft published 15 years ago, and I wouldn't disagree with you. Microsoft is slowly trying to unbury themselves, first by cutting everyone over to a hardware protected kernel in Windows XP, and now by curring everyone over to a constrained execution environment with virtualized file system access in Windows Vista. Instead of everything not working all at once, a segment of the software stops working and most of it chugs on fine. I personally think it's admirable that Microsoft has managed to change so many things and retain so much legacy support. How many other platforms can you name where 25 year old software will run without a hitch? Certainly not Apple, and certainly not Linux.
This all sounds a lot like Apple, MacOS X and Classic, doesn't it?
No, it does not. With MacOS "Classic" Apple had a single user OS with no memory protection, no pre-emptive multitasking, no multiprocessor support, nothing. Their OS was a technological relic.
With NT, Microsoft has an OS with everything Linux has to offer, plus more. Why on Earth would they throw that all away to create Yet Another Linux Dustribution ?