edit: and goes deep into COM for device interfaces. Wow! blast from the past.

In theory you could maintain code paths for both, offering a slimmer package for Windows 10+, but that'd also cost more time and effort to maintain.

Also, not many people know Windows comes with an OCR API. It's extremely underused in my opinion.

OSes that use plain text configuration files are easy to resurrect. Windows is fixed with reinstall the OS. Linux and BSD are fixed with editing a config file or reinstalling a single corrupt application / library.

Example of bad versus good design is DirectX shader compilation. Windows can only perform this while the game is running. Linux with WINE can perform this without the game running. Windows will have bad FPS during the first run / scene with many games because of this.

PS. Windows print system is really bad in the industrial environment because they do not follow label markup language stands. Number of label DSLs have a print quantity setting to save memory. Want 1000 copies printed, one print job with print quantity set to 1000. Windows spools up 1000 copies of the label and sends each to the printer. This eats up the memory on printers in no time. It also brakes the ability to clear the print queue just on the printer. Extra steps require the Windows print job to be canceled and they the printer's queue to be cleared. Otherwise The printer will receive the next 990 of the 1000 print job.