Billions of people in this planet instinctively associate the concept of “operating system” to Microsoft Windows by antonomasia. Through perhaps resignation, corporate coercion, laziness, or just sheer ignorance, most cannot fathom a world in which laptops do not boot without a “Start” menu or do not randomly display a Blue Screen of Death every time they plug a new device.
This is the reality of our world in 2025. Says who? Well, according to StatCounter, at the time of this writing between 71% to 74% of all “desktop” computer users worldwide (that is, not counting smartphone and tablet users) are booting some version of Windows for their daily computing needs, while only 15% use macOS, and not even 5% use Linux.
These statistics, however, are vastly different among our cohort. According to Statista,
In 2024, over 59 percent of developers worldwide reported using the Windows operating system for personal use, but only 48 percent reported using the OS when working. MacOS, based on Unix, had the second-largest share at 32 percent of developers using it for both personal and professional use, respectively.
These numbers are confirmed by (and, I suspect, might be even inspired by) those reported on the Stack Overflow 2024 Developer Survey. The number of Linux users among developers jumps to more than 40%, all distributions considered.
But the gist of the latter developer survey is this gem: around 17% of participants declared using the Windows Subsystem for Linux, also known as WSL.
Ouch.
What happened to the famous “Developers, Developers, Developers” mantra of yesteryear? Well, turns out, a lot.
Let us go back in time 25 years. In June 2000 Joel Spolsky wrote a review of REALBasic, a cross-platform development environment compatible with Microsoft Visual Basic and nowadays marketed with the horribly sounding name of Xojo:
Windows has 90% or 95% of the desktop market. Macintosh has 5% or 10%. If you’re talking about office users, Windows is even more dominant; Macintosh has a bit more of the home users, but probably not even near 15%. What this means is that if you are a software developer, the only thing that makes sense financially is to develop a Windows version first.
How do things change!
Arguably, the only valid reasons to use Windows as a developer in 2025 are, first, to comply with corporate rules, and second, if you are developing apps for it, in which case you most probably use some combination of Visual Studio, C#, C++, and some other piece of Microsoft-sanctioned technology. Which, do not get me wrong: it is a terrific business, with an installed base of billions of potential customers for your product, not to mention the lucrative corporate market, an entire category in and of itself.
But, yes, that is as good as it gets. Vast numbers of developers are writing apps without Windows that run without Windows, and are very happy to ignore its mere existence. (Disclaimer: the author of these words falls in this category, precisely.)
Like for example “the Cloud”, with a capital C, where Linux reigns on production environments, and is also a prominent choice on the lap of developers. Or for Mobile, with a capital M, where, again, the Linux kernel and the Kotlin programming language power the most widely used category of devices, and where macOS and Swift are the technologies of choice (and necessity) for those writing iOS apps. In those two categories, Windows is effectively absent; or, if mandatory through corporate policy, then the WSL provides a refuge for productivity.
Honorable mention as well to all those Web developers out there, these days usually referred to as “Frontend Engineers”, who would most probably settle for a Mac and an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription anytime.
Ask any developer working on Cloud, Mobile, or Web apps whether they would consider Windows a viable choice for their work, and their gasp would be heard from the Pitcairn Islands. And let us not even start talking about LLMs, AI, or other golden nuggets in vogue these days.
(Yes, Horace, Unix has had its revenge.)
Even more damning is the statistical truth that the biggest fortunes in tech of the past 25 years (social media, cloud computing, gig economy, AI, mobile gaming, and more) have not been made through Windows apps. If anything, the only one who made insane amounts of money with Windows during the same period was, precisely, Microsoft.
When in doubt, follow the money.
Windows is celebrating a few milestones in 2025. Version 1.0 went RTM 40 years ago, in November 1985. Windows 3.0, released 35 years ago in May 1990, was the first commercially successful version, with ten million copies sold versus two million for Windows 2.
(If you are curious about those relics, you can try them online for free nowadays.)
And of course, Windows 95 went on sale almost 30 years ago, in August 1995, with an orgasmic corporate feast fueled by dancing to Rolling Stones’ music, hysteria in shopping centers, sketches by Jay Leno, and insane sales figures.
But all of that awkward dancing on stage might not have happened at all. Unbeknownst to many, and as explained by Nina Kalinina, Windows 2 could have been the last ever version, were it not for the work of an engineer called David Weise. Larry Osterman told the world what David did that was so groundbreaking for Microsoft to crush IBM’s OS/2 once and for all:
You see, at this time, Microsoft’s systems division was 100% focused on OS/2 1.1. All of the efforts of the systems division were totally invested in OS/2 development. (…)
And here was this little skunkworks project in building three that was sitting on what was clearly the most explosive product Microsoft had ever produced. (…) It ran Windows applications in protected mode, breaking the 640K memory barrier. (…)
There was just no comparison between the two platforms - if they had to compete head-to-head, Windows 3.0 would win hands down.
And win it did, all right. Peak Windows, as explained by Joel Spolsky above, happened around 2000; by 2005 the Longhorn and Vista debacle started eroding some of that success, but Windows is still here, still widely crashing, and still unbearable.
We are very far away from the “engineering odyssey” that Dave Cutler, Lou Perazzoli, and Mark Lucovsky undertook in the late 1980s. We are very far from the purported inspiration of Windows on the Unix design, something that Bill Gates himself openly stated at his Unix Expo keynote in 1996:
And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design. In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix. There are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that environment. And that’s no accident. I mean, we knew that Unix operability would be very important and we knew that the largest body of programmers that we’d want to draw on in building Windows NT applications would certainly come from the Unix base.
Windows is not only bad, it is, was, and will be a train wreck of an operating system:
Microsoft released Windows XP on Oct. 25, 2001. That same day, in what may be a record, the company posted 18 megabytes of patches on its Web site: bug fixes, compatibility updates, and enhancements. Two patches fixed important security holes. Or rather, one of them did; the other patch didn’t work.
Chances are that, as you read these lines, thousands of new employees are starting the first day at their new jobs, and as they sign their paperwork, they are all greeted by their IT department with a brand-new laptop (HP? Lenovo? Your guess is as good as mine), automatically bundled with Windows 11, Microsoft Office, and that new torture device called Microsoft Teams. Welcome to the company, kid.
The overall shitty Windows experience has not gotten any better in 30 years, and for those billions we keep talking about, this is precisely the normal state of things, no matter how much Mary-Jo Foley or Paul Thurrott rave about it.
These days Microsoft is more interested in shoving something called “Recall” down their users’ throats, potentially threatening the privacy and security of billions. They are showing ads on the Start Menu, because why not. Satya gleefully states that at least 30% of all code produced by Microsoft is generated by AI as we speak.
And then, one day, CrowdStrike happened. Microsoft quickly and rightfully offloaded all and any responsibility out of their legal system. After all, that is precisely what their EULA explicitly said all along, have you read it?
Unfortunately, and thanks to the mighty powers of the Windows platform ecosystem, there is no other option than Windows for a large majority of those billion people. Because, no, neither ReactOS nor Free95 nor Wine are entirely valid (or even usable) replacements for Windows at this point in time (seriously kids, stop the nonsense). This state of things is also the fault of all those other commercial vendors, including (but most prominently) IBM and Digital Research, who threw the towel as soon as Windows 95 hit the shelves, with the blissful complicit ignorance and ineptitude of a US government that knows nothing about technology.
Le sigh.
The lyrics of Lana Del Rey’s extraordinary 2019 song “Norman Fucking Rockwell” conjure veiled mockery, mind-numbness, and hypocrite praise, effectively conveying l’air du temps and a general feeling of mental fatigue in our society:
Goddamn, man-child
You act like a kid even though you stand six foot two
Self-loathing poet, resident Laurel Canyon, you know-it-all
You talk to the walls when the party gets bored of you
But I don’t get bored, I just see you through
Why wait for the best when I could have you?
And that last one is, precisely, the phrase I have in mind every time I have to (reluctantly) boot a Windows laptop up.
Cover photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash.