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Comment by stewh_ | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft has a problem - poor 3rd party software and drivers make Windows extremely unreliable. Microsoft takes the blame, and Windows looks unreliable. Apple takes a different tack, they simply lock down their APIs and ecosystem to avoid this. Is Microsoft trying to go the Apple route - but maintain some openness? Giving 3rd parties core low-level APIs is ripe for chaos.

I had to install Kaspersky on my main laptop since some VPN software imposed a policy that it installed and up-to-date to connect to a contractor's secured network. It was absolutely terrible. It killed my battery, slowed my machine, killed my TCP stack at one point, interfered all the time, and became generally unbearable. It frustrated me so much, I now do all network operations via a secured VM to avoid the Kaspersky curse on my main work machine.

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And you are an educated user. I'm sure millions of users have the same user experience, but don't know why their Windows works so poorly. This happened because a few years ago they downloaded some software from download.com to "fix" a computer issue and unknowingly installed 5 antivirus packages that now compete for computer resources (or worse) at the kernel level.

Microsoft is damned if they do, and damned if they don't fix this for their users. Maybe Kasperski is collateral damage in this effort, but I think Microsoft is right to use the Windows 10 upgrade as an opportunity to try and remove these mostly terrible software from users' pc's. Let Kasperski convince users how their software is better so people actively choose it over Microsoft's solution. I do this with Chrome too: as long as it's better I reinstall it every time no matter what Microsoft tells me about Edge.

>Is Microsoft trying to go the Apple route - but maintain some openness? Giving 3rd parties core low-level APIs is ripe for chaos.

Giving 3rd parties access to low-level APIs also gives your OS ability to be used in versatile and innovative ways across the board. Also gives the ability to 3rd party software companies to allow you to add tooling and customization to your OS so that it does exactly what the user wants. And making you grow into the largest dominant OS out there.

On the other hand, I need to download more and more applications outside MAS on macOS because the sandbox doesn't even let basic apps like a custom file explorer to function properly, making a platform really usable only for a few use-cases the original vendor thought of.

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