Windows was never oriented around “just works”. That was Mac. Windows’s main selling point is that it never becomes incompatible, and that has largely stayed true. You can still to this day insert the disk for some proprietary application from Windows 2.0 and it will still install and run. Try that with another operating system!

Apparently tankies on Lemmy don’t like Linux any more after some Russian contributors were removed from the maintainers list.

The contributors were removed because they or their employers (or maybe ex-employers) appeared on the US list of Specially Designated Nationals (SDN). It is illegal for Americans such as Linus Torvalds to conduct business with entities that appear on that list.

Would a fork be technically viable if Americans and American businesses can’t participate (because the fork works with SDN entities)? Maybe.

The reality is that the Linux Foundation is in the United States, and Linus is a naturalized US citizen who lives in Oregon (at least on Wikipedia). So they both will have to pay attention to avoid transacting business with individuals and companies on the SDN list. That is the law in the United States.