I'm just curious - do you mind elaborating on your thought that Microsoft has been stale and dormant? This just seems so far from reality, so I'm wondering what about them gives you that impression.
The server side is a totally different story. Windows Server, system center, sql, etc have been going gangbusters for years.
Speaking as an ex-Microsoftie, my guess is that you'll see some of the innovation behind ModernUI apps back-propagated to thick client desktop stuff in the next major release of Windows.
Microsoft has been moving, but there is so much more movement outside the Microsoft ecosystem that it's easy to miss when Microsoft makes changes to its technology, even those that shake their entire ecosystem. Microsoft is just one more ecosystem among many and a very insular one.
No Microsoft launch since .NET has had any significant impact on my daily life and it would be perfectly rational to completely ignore them.
By this I can say that Apple is stale and dormant. No launch since the iPhone has any impact on my daily life, and even that is simply because it's influence on Android.
I see a steady flow of news of new Ubuntu releases, new PostgreSQL functionality, and miscellaneous HPC/Big Data technologies, but that's because I pay attention to that. I wonder if it would be different if I spent my day writing code in Windows, for a Microsoft stack.
I've actually been finding MS products more easy to work with lately, while Ubuntu has been getting more frustrating. Some of that is due to familiarity, but there's also a lot of decisions I've not agreed with. In general, I like that I can write something that works for a few years in Windows - I don't have to worry if the latest package updates are going to break everything. I've lost weeks fixing dependency bugs, and I don't seem to have the same issues on Windows.