I sit here looking at ntfsresize rapidly chew through resizing the Windows partition that I had been given at work. I did my best to make Windows work for me however it just didn’t pull it’s weight. But as I move to Linux I can’t help but think that it has been helped in the interoperability department by Windows being slovenly in it’s upgrade cycle.

Because of this Linux has been able to catch up with the staid Windows versions and become more and more compatible with various items. With Windows XP looking like it won’t disappear any time soon (at least until six months after Windows 7 has passed and it there is Windows 7 SP1) it looks like people like Wine are catching up with their API, the filesystems people have had a good chance to get a head up on things and we’re seeing better compatibility with things like MAPI with the OpenChange project.

So at the end of the day I wonder having installed Linux in all of its glory, did Microsoft taking forever help Linux more than we expect?