Internally, Microsoft is running more and more workloads on Linux and externally, I've had .Net team tell me more than once that Linux is preferred environment for .Net. SQL Server team continues to push hard for Linux compatibility with every release.
EDIT: Windows Desktop gets more love because they clearly see that as important market. I'm talking more Windows Server.
It's kinda funny that the DB that was once a fork of Sybase that was ported to Windows is trying to make its way back to Unix.
I don't think they'd ever admit that filesystem performance was an issue (though we all know it is; NTFS is over 30 years old!).
ext2, which is forwards compatible with ext3 and ext4, is slightly older than NTFS
A lot of the weirdly bad performance comes from all of the machinery that Windows wraps around file access for things like filter drivers. As long as you don't, say, indiscriminately follow every CreateFile() with a CloseHandle() and instead treat handle closure like garbage collection, you can actually eke out pretty good performance.
That all said, yeah, Windows containers are less than great for what I'd argue is one strikingly glaring flaw: Docker container images are built from smss.exe upward. That makes them not immediately portable between ntoskrnl.exe releases.
There are costs to it, in the form of architectural baggage and slower iteration, but what windows brings to the table is a deck swept mostly clear of footguns. That can give you a different form of robustness.
But SQL Server is in the unique position of being able to optimize Windows for their own needs. So they shouldn't have this kind of problem.
When NTFS came out it was way better than anything on Linux. Heck even in 2006 NTFS was better.
But Linux keeps getting new file systems while Windows keeps NTFS.
But yeah, kernel features are few and far between.
Off the top of my head, limiting myself to just NT kernel stuff: WSL and Hyper-V, pseudo-terminals, condvars, WDDM, DWM, elevated privilege programs on the same desktop, font driver isolation, and limiting access to win32k for sandboxing.
Off the top of my head, built-in bluetooth support, an OS-level volume mixer, and more support for a wider variety of class-compliant devices. I'm sure there are a lot more, and if you actually care about the answer, I don't think it would be hard to find.
Modern crypto ciphersuites that aren't utterly broken? Your best options for symmetric crypto with XP are 3DES (officially retired by NIST as of this year) and RC4 (prohibited in TLS as of RFC 7465).
(And if you think 3DES isn't totally broken by itself, you're right... except for the part where the ciphersuite in question is in CBC mode and is vulnerable to BEAST. Thanks, mandated ciphersuites.)
XP->Vista alone brought a bunch of huge changes that massively improved security (UAC), capability (64 bit desktops), and future-proofing (UEFI) among many many other things.
Some helpful Wikipedia editors have answered this question in excessive detail, so I'm just going to link those for more info. Also I'm going to start with what XP changed from 2003 both because it makes a good comparison and I'd argue 2000/NT 5.0 is the root of the modern Windows era. Your next sentence after the quote implies you probably won't have a problem with that.
* XP/2003: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_XP
* 2003R2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2003#Windows_Se...
* Vista: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista
* 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008#Features
* 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_7
* 2008R2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2008_R2#New_fea...
* 8: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_8
* 2012: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2012#Features
* 8.1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_8.1#New_and_changed_fe...
* 2012R2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2012_R2#Feature...
* 10: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_10
* 2016: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2016#Features
* 2019: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2019#Features
* 2022: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Server_2022#Features
* 11: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_11
* 2025: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/get-started...
Obviously some of this will be "fluff" and that's up to your own personal definitions, but to act like there haven't been significant changes in every major revision is just nonsense.
