Well, I’m not even going to get into the deficiencies of Microsoft, I spent the last twenty years of my life beating head against those.   DLL hell did not go away with the common runtime environment, the solution was a giant kludge.   The one thing I have to say about the common runtime framework is it makes so much sense it’s amazing that Microsoft came up with it…want to link programs together…just put them in the same directory.   Very UNIX like in philosophy.   Don’t get me started about GDI+…makes a lot of sense but it is inordinately slower than the legacy system and the font processing is a joke, nowhere near as complete as the original.

Anyhow MS Windows sucks as badly as you blame X.   You have to reach deep into it’s guts to get performance out of it as well.   Also, while you think all the world’s a workstation, a lot of industry is going the other way and you find out had bad Windows sucks at remote application  running when any performance is required.