I know people like to make fun of niche operating systems, but for the five years I was at Microsoft I used Windows (10 then 11) as my daily driver. It’s much less stable than a professional OS, but it does kind-of work. I wouldn’t say it’s ready for the desktop. The UI is inconsistent and changes randomly between releases, a load of common software is basically useable only in a VM, it lags and freezes periodically (unlike an OS designed for interactive use, random drivers run a load of things directly in interrupt handlers, so you get latency spikes that you wouldn’t see in a more mainstream desktop OS) and the update process can hose the system, so it’s mostly of interest to people who like tinkering with their machines than people who actually want to get work done. Oh and a load of random bits of the OS have ads, but that’s what you get from a free ad-supported system instead of one developed by an active open-source community.

I don’t think I’d recommend anyone use it as their daily driver or in a work setting, but it’s not totally unusable. It’s not at the level of maturity than you’d expect from, say, Linux or FreeBSD, especially not for client workloads. If you do have to use it, I recommend that you install FreeBSD in a Hyper-V VM for real work. That’s what I did and it works quite well.

@david_chisnall

From my perspective Windows is very okay if you just want to watch videos on youtube or paramount+ and type a letter or something.

It's pretty capable for such tasks.

Instead of a VM you could consider using https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux it's no emulater (WSLine).

Windows Subsystem for Linux - Wikipedia

@deusfigendi The original WSL is still there but it isn’t the default. It lacks things like namespaces and cgroups so can’t run Docker. WSL2 is a VM. It’s a Hyper-V VM using 9p-over-VMBus to share files with the host and some truly exciting things in a custom binfmt to let you run .EXE files in the VM by translating the path to a host path (the file sharing is bidirectional) and sending it over a VMBus socket.

@resuna @deusfigendi

Yup, they did this just as everyone else was moving from 9p over VirtIO to FUSE over VirtIO. I tried to persuade them to use the FUSE commands instead of 9p but failed.

@david_chisnall @deusfigendi

So, Plan 9 lives? Sorta.

@resuna @deusfigendi

There are a load of bugs in VM-based container platforms that come from the fact Plan 9 (and therefore 9p) filesystem semantics aren't quite POSIX. I suspect that there are a lot more in WSL2 from the fact that they're also not Windows filesystem semantics and so you have to do A->B->C translations. I never used WSL2 much though (and haven't used Windows since I left MS) so I've no idea.