You do realize that it wouldn’t matter if I was installing a 7 year os unser Linux. It still wouldnt take 5 update and reboot cycles to get it current. The most it could take is 3, and that would be if you were to do a fresh install and then did a dist-upgrade in place.
It is rediculous for windows to have to do the updates in stages the way it does. Fortunately, I only very rarely have to subject myself to the lunacy that is windows.
I didn’t even get into the issues you run into with the registry when attempting to restore systems.
Regarding the hardware support you mentioned, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people complaining of fairly new printers and such not being supported after wi dows upgrades. The solution offered often to simply buy a new printer. It makes me laugh.
You do realize that it wouldn’t matter if I was installing a 7 year os unser Linux. It still wouldnt take 5 update and reboot cycles to get it current. The most it could take is 3, and that would be if you were to do a fresh install and then did a dist-upgrade in place.Yes, I understand and agree with your point. But my point was that this is a limitation of Windows in which there was a lot of investment since Windows 7. I haven't had an update cause more than 1 reboot cycle in Windows 10 since I installed it. Most updates are no reboot. And over that 7 years, there have been very large improvements in the quality of the initial Linux installion process. This was a real focus for some of the distros because it was lagging badly, and was turning a lot of users off. Similarly, Microsoft has invested in areas where there was user dissatisfaction. So my point still stands; it's unfair to compare a 7 year old version of Windows with a 0 year old version of Linux.
Personally, I'm really glad we have 3 major choices here (Windows, OS-X, and Linux). I use both Windows and Linux daily, and used to use OS-X (love the OS, but am not a big fan of Apple, so when my MBP died, I didn't replace it). I don't want any of them to go away. As an engineer, I have a fondness for Linux, but OTOH, there are Microsoft technologies (PowerShell, and .NET for example) which I love and which don't exist on other platforms.
And as an employee of MS, I can tell you that since Steve Ballmer left, and Satya Nadella took over, the company is way more open and friendly to competing platforms and the open source community. The topic of this thread (Linux subsystem for Windows) is the kind of thing that would have never happened under Ballmer. There are similar developments all over the company, for example Azure supporting "Best of Breed" software services, regardless of what platform or technology stack they are developed on, and award-winning applications developed by Microsoft for non-Windows platforms like iOS and Android. Internal to the division I work in, we're having a big event coming up (called a "Hackathon") where employees will compete to write a working prototype application on Android. The best ideas will get funded and eventually turn into Android apps.
I didn’t even get into the issues you run into with the registry when attempting to restore systems.I like the "everything's a file" design of *nix, and particularly like human-readable configuration files. However, not everyone does, and there's even been talk in the past from some of the distros of moving to a binary registry like Windows. I never did understand the reasoning for this, but I am sure there is one.
Regarding the hardware support you mentioned, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people complaining of fairly new printers and such not being supported after wi dows upgrades. The solution offered often to simply buy a new printer. It makes me laugh.It's impossible for Microsoft to directly support every piece of hardware out there. The approach that was taken with printers was to create a driver framework (IIRC it's called UniDriver) that makes it relatively simple for a vendor to create a printer driver. However, Microsoft can't force every vendor to upgrade the drivers, or even to spend the minimal effort necessary to mark the driver as compatible with a newer Windows version. That said, the amount of supported hardware on Windows still vastly exceeds Linux and OS-X.