Julio Merino writes about operating system internals, DOS memory models, build systems, and comparisons between Windows NT and Unix.
HN links it for his NT versus Unix design comparison, where a commenter says he found NT well made, and for his DOS and Bazel posts.
I checked, and it was Win3.11 that came on 8 floppies! https://archive.org/download/dos-622-3
Windows 95 was almost 30: https://ia803207.us.archive.org/view_archive.php?archive=/22/items/windows-95-oem-floppy-disk-version/Windows%2095%20OEM%20-%20Floppy%20Disk%20Version.rar
Another fun article currently on the front page, diving into the insanity that is 8086/286/386 addressing modes: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/from-0-to-1-mb-in-dos
Even these "simple" operating systems managed to pack an incredible amount of complexity - again, just to deal with hardware, portability, different APIs, etc. Consumers - we, we demanded all of that.
If we really wanted/needed simpler software, OpenBSD is right around the corner. I've used it on&off as a daily driver for a bit, and it has an incredibly high ratio of code quality/readability vs how practical it is for everyday things (while remaining very portable). But simplicity is an uphill battle.
Two years ago, I spent time studying the Windows NT kernel internals and ended up writing a comparison against Unix here: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design . What I came out of that exercise with is that NT is actually well-made and was very ambitious and advanced at the time it was designed (although free systems have caught up by now).
But what I also came out thinking was: none of that shows. The kernel is great, sure, but all of the crap that has been built on top doesn't let it shine, and that's what people interact with. Take Windows 11 with is dog-slow file manager and the overall feeling that everything is bloated and designed to annoy you. I wish there was a simpler edition... but it ain't gonna happen.
That's a good reason, I might do the same. I certainly used to twiddle that setting trying to make space for Sim City 2000 on an 80MB disk.
I see a major footgun in memory compression that Linux doesn't care about - it'll just oomkill your shit, hence TFA. But footguns are not acceptable in mass-market software. Apple also removes them.
It's easy to look at the half-baked ui libraries and fucking Teams and fucking SharePoint and conclude that Microsoft engineers are stupid. But, for your interest: https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/windows-nt-vs-unix-design
https://blogsystem5.substack.com/about
https://www.twoscomplement.org/#podcast
The latter includes full text transcripts so I think it fits your spec
Eg. 1 in 10 open source projects abandon bazel within 2 years. https://blogsystem5.substack.com/p/bazelcon-2024-recap