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Well, everyone has their view, I don't think I'm any more right than you. You can give a technical definition of an OS from a CS textbook, but ultimately all of these are consumer/retail products created to benefit the end-user, not so much to create a technical design masterpiece. But that is just my view. I tend to side on the practical aspects more than design purity.

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> I tend to side on the practical aspects more than design purity.

I do too, but as someone who doesn't use Outlook or Edge, having those two specific products integrate doesn't give me any practical benefits, whereas having the OS try to force products like Edge that I don't use on me because they happen to also be made by Microsoft gets in the way of me just trying to use a computer the way I want.

Oh yeah, I completely understand. I'm not necessarily in favor of forced bundling. All I'm saying is that sometimes there are benefits when there is a single vendor who can do tight integrations. Apple being the other obvious example with their (supposedly) seamless hardware ecosystem integration.

In theory, something like Linux has a good model with multiple distributions, with each making different choices for the end-user. In practice, only a handful of distributions get any kind of traction and/or support.

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