Torvalds: With NT you are already seeing signs of bad design -- like, NT 5.0 has been slipping for a while. From all I've heard, they have this behemoth that is so big, they couldn't get it to build reliably when people made changes. They definitely have problems maintaining a sane source base.
What's do you hate about Windows 95?
Torvalds: What's fundamentally wrong is that nobody ever had any taste when they did it. Microsoft has been very much into making the user interface look good, but internally it's just a complete mess. And even people who program for Microsoft and who have had years of experience, just don't know how it works internally. Worse, nobody dares change it. Nobody dares to fix bugs because it's such a mess that fixing one bug might just break a hundred programs that depend on that bug. And Microsoft isn't interested in anyone fixing bugs, they're interested in making money. They don't have anybody who takes pride in Windows 95 as an operating system.
People inside Microsoft know it's a bad operating system and they still continue obviously working on it because they want to get the next version out because they want to have all these new features to sell more copies of the system.
The problem with that is that over time, when you have this kind of approach, and because nobody understands it, because nobody REALLY fixes bugs (other than when they're really obvious), the end result is really messy. You can't trust it because under certain circumstances it just spontaneously reboots or just halts in the middle of something that shouldn't be strange. Normally it works fine and then once in a blue moon for some completely unknown reason, it's dead, and nobody knows why. Not Microsoft, not the experienced user and certainly not the completely clueless user who probably sits there shivering thinking "What did I do wrong?" when they didn't do anything wrong at all.
That's what's really irritating to me.
You mentioned that you're proud of Linux Do you not think programmers at Microsoft have the same philosophy?
Torvalds: I think there's a lot of programmers who aren't in it for the money primarily. They're probably programming because they really like programming and Microsoft pays them and they're doing what they're used to doing. There's a lot of Microsoft programmers that are really proud, but they aren't really proud of the OS itself.
They're really proud of being part of something that's really successful. That has its own Pride. You want to be on the winning side, right?
So there's a lot of proud Microsoft programmers. But the pride is not in the products. Some Microsoft programs are actually fairly good. Microsoft applications may be buggy, but hey, bugs are acceptable in an application; it's when it's in the operating system and it brings down the whole machine or when it messes up with another application that doesn't have the bug that's when the bug is serious.
I actually like some of Microsoft applications. I used to use PowerPoint to make my slides when I was talking about Linux for example. I don't think Microsoft is evil in itself; I just think that they make really crappy operating systems.
What about Windows NT?
Torvalds: NT isn't much better. It tries to be secure and tries to do things basically the right way, but at the same time NT too doesn't really have any guiding principles in life.
The only guiding principle is it tries to be more stable than Windows, which is not saying much. Plus, it tries to make money which includes running Windows programs. But again, it doesn't have any core philosophy and because it doesn't have that people aren't thinking when they do any coding on Windows NT, they aren't thinking "Is this a really good idea or should I do it some other way?" because they don't have any guidelines on how things should be done. So they're just adding things, on top of each other and hoping that the end result is stable instead of trying to really build up a very stable base that everybody can depend on. Windows NT is a fairly young operating system. It's not much older than Linux. In fact, depending on how you look at it, most of its new features are younger than Linux. But you can already see that they're starting to have the same stability problems with NT that they had with Windows because they've been adding features. All the NT news groups for example, talk incessantly about the "blue screen of death," when NT just stops working. Or the fact that you'd better reboot some Windows NT machines every week because if you don't there seems to be a memory leak somewhere and nobody really knows where. After a week the machine still works, but it's crawling very slowlylike molasses. And if you reboot it, everything is fine again for a week, but then it starts acting strange. And that's not something you really should need to do, even though you think that "Hey, once a week, pushing the red button. Who cares? It's 15 minutes a week." Sure, it's stable again and I'm sure it's useful, but a system that acts that way is not a system you really want to depend on.