We are so far removed from 1997 that this statement means nothing.
> the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.
So different that Windows muscle memory works on most main stream Linux UI's, Many (most?) Steam games run on Linux, and now we have Windows in the Linux kernel.
Rather, several missing, useful APIs that were hard to emulate efficiently have been added. That's not "Windows in the Linux kernel".
> several missing, useful APIs
Windows API's.
> That's not "Windows in the Linux kernel".
How is that not?
Does Windows muscle memory work? The vast majority of shortcuts are completely different for the casual user, and for the power user, there's no regedit or control panel and other such things.
> there's no regedit or control panel and other such things
That's not a bug, it's a feature.
Be that as it may, it means that the muscle memory (or more accurately, the mental model of the system) is gone. I've long held the belief that power users or knows-enough-to-be-dangerous users have a harder time switching for that exact reason.
A control panel (or cross-distro YaST) would be very welcome in the ecosystem I think.
> muscle memory (or more accurately, the mental model of the system)
That's not "more accurately", that's just a completely different thing. When I'm on Mac, my muscle memory is thrown off. I'll be typing and my ctrl+s, alt+tab, win+4, ctrl+left* all cause wildly unpredictable (to me) things. I'm currently using Linux, and all of those things work how I expect (with a tiny asterisk on win+#). When I want a control panel, I press the windows button on my keyboard to open something functionally equivalent to the start menu, and open System Settings to get something functionally equivalent to the control panel.
I have no doubt that I could learn the deep differences between Windows and Mac over time, but the initial muscle memory causes me stress before I get to that point. When I switch to Linux I don't have that stress, and so I've been comfortably learning those differences.
* - save, switch to the previously in-focus window, switch to the 4th program on the taskbar, move the cursor one word to the left
We weren't talking about whether the registry was better or worse, we were talking about how similar the two OSes were.
... in case of the registry, you were also talking about replacing a unix philosophy system (each application has its own standalone config file) with a windows like monolith (everything goes into the registry).
Tbh it's not even muscle memory, how often do you edit config files?
Alt-Tab to cycle windows.
How do we "have Windows in the Linux kernel"?
Um... Are you referring to WSL? Wouldn't that be the linux kernel running under windows?
WSL 1.0 was doing something like that. Doing syscall translation in real time. Eventually edge cases forced them to abandon that architecture and now it's just a VM.
Was it edge cases? I thought the main driver for WSL2 was better filesystem performance.