NEVER let Freebsd become like Ubuntu

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WRT Windows. It seems to me that Microsoft started off by trying to make a great new OS without reference to anything that had gone before. And the thirty year + history of the product is a tale of Microsoft slowly realising that Unix was better. They've gradually added all kinds of Unix features over the years: msvcrt, POSIX threads, multiple user accounts, a decent shell, a proper terminal emulator, and now this monstrous-sounding Windows Subsystem for Linux thing... all that time and effort wasted because they decided to throw an OS together instead of designing one.
 
It seems to me that Microsoft started off by trying to make a great new OS without reference to anything that had gone before. And the thirty year + history of the product is a tale of Microsoft slowly realizing that Unix was better.

No, just no.

They've gradually added all kinds of Unix features over the years: msvcrt

msvcrt = Microsoft Visual C runtime, which provides basic facilities like printf. It's, of course, a Unix thing, but you can't introduce C runtime libraries in a gradual fashion; it has been there from the start.

now this monstrous-sounding Windows Subsystem for Linux thing

You should read up on Interix.

all that time and effort wasted because they decided to throw an OS together instead of designing one.

Window NT is generally considered to be very decent. It is certainly better designed than Linux, which is an actual thrown together OS. Now, win32 API is neither particularly good nor bad in my opinion. Various COM interfaces, half-assed GUI tools and obscure registry keys are indeed very annoying.
 
I do also believe that the Windows NT kernel cannot be that bad because it was developed by someone with experience. Another thing is what the whole system is. The same can be said about Linux Kernel and Ubuntu.

I said before that Windows has an economical role. Ubuntu has also a role: to win Windows Users for Linux. A Windows user needs a Windows imitate when he uses Linux as many vegetarian people need meat imitates.

But what is so bad in Ubuntu (apart from systemd)? The most programs there are the same many people use on FreeBSD. There are a lot of elementary software for Windows for which we do not find a free software equivalent. First with tesseract we got a decent OCR program. I do not know a decent free bookkeeping program (Gnucrash is awful bloat), I had to write my own.
 
Window NT is generally considered to be very decent.
Exactly and took a lot of inspiration (and developers) from VMS which although is not UNIX, has both a POSIX layer and Unix compatibility. If anything it was more Unix-like than Linux.

The NT kernel is pretty good. It is all that spyware they load ontop ;)
 
The disk bloatation in Windows is sky-high. For instance, I don't normally ever run Windows but I bought a cheap laptop, new, with a 30 GB drive, which was an HP Stream intended and marketed expressly for Windows 8, for the sole purpose of running MagicJack to provide me with a VOIP telephone line. Within a month of pressing it into service they crammed the Windows 10 upgrade down my throat and the 30 GB drive ran out of space. Brand new computer obsoleted by Microsoft almost as soon as it came out of the box. No other OS I ever used needed so much disk space for just the basic OS software plus one tiny VOIP application.

Everything is bloated in Windows. My Acer Aspire was a multi-boot job on which I installed FreeBSD and Linux Mint after shrinking the preinstalled Windows 10 partition. It always ran quietly when I booted FreeBSD regardless of whatever desktop or server software I was using. It was a different story, though, when I booted Windows 10, and the cooling fan would start gunning itself like a race car at the starting line. It fought with me to install it's huge, monstrously and obscenely bloated, unattended updates and upgrades. Got angry if I tried to shut it down too quickly, and often put the computer into an unusable state while it gorged itself on the updates. Ubuntu has very similar behavior when it comes to force-feeding you with unwanted unattended upgrades.

Linux Mint is almost as bad about unwanted updates, but at least it provides a way to prevent the update daemon from starting automatically, whereupon it will run almost as quietly as FreeBSD. There might be a way to do the same thing in Ubuntu, but if so I never figured it out. Ubuntu in my opinion is almost as bad as Windows. Out of the handful of systems I've tried, only with FreeBSD or Debian can I control the timing of my upgrades, and only with FreeBSD do I feel confident that I really know what the computer is doing at any given time, or that I'm actually even in control of the hardware that I paid good money to "own." When I run Ubuntu or Windows, I'm never sure who's in charge of the thing, but it obviously isn't me.

Edited to add: Mac OS X also let me control the timing of upgrades-- they also wanted more money for them after a certain point, but that's a separate and unrelated issue, more or less...
 
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