Apple's base is big enough where if a problem like this happens, it's a big deal. Apple has the benefit of controlling both hardware and software.

With Linux, being open source helps it out since so many people can test and chime in.

MacOS only has ~10-15% market share (depending on which stats you read) so something breaking in MacOS has much less impact compared to Windows. Apple also control the hardware, so there's fewer things that can go wrong.

Microsoft stopped trying a long time ago. The benefits of having a monopoly. Windows would have to cease functioning entirely for them to lose their position.

The is a genuine question that I don’t have the answer to.

I would say that because nobody can muster the consensus on any real policy. There's plenty of legacy, with many different people and teams responsible, knowledge lost and so on.

And then this requires some sort of unified vision. Despite, eh, all the downsides, Apple can do that. MS can't.

They'd honestly have to make a separate "neowin" subsystem with new GUI and everything, and make win32 and win64 and all the old tooling optional and parallel. Because their approach to backward compatibility means keeping everything around. They can't fix the mess maintaining that.

This kind of shit happens with a similar frequency... on Arch Linux. It's rolling release, shit happens sometimes. archlinux.org's homepage actually lists past major packaging issues.

Debian however is rock-fucking-solid. But so is Windows Server, I hear. The problem is that Microsoft is treating Windows Home/Pro like a rolling release distro, and the users are guinea pigs. I guess Microsoft is right though, their users will eat it up 'till shit is spilling out from both ends, so why bother?