> though we all know it is; NTFS is over 30 years old!

ext2, which is forwards compatible with ext3 and ext4, is slightly older than NTFS

It's my understanding, having done benchmarks on file access on Windows, that NTFS itself is not the problem. It's old, but the revision of the on-disk structure that we use today hails from Windows XP, and it's about on par in terms of feature parity (and backwards compatibility, given that I can still read native NT 3.51 volumes on Windows 11) with ext4.

A lot of the weirdly bad performance comes from all of the machinery that Windows wraps around file access for things like filter drivers. As long as you don't, say, indiscriminately follow every CreateFile() with a CloseHandle() and instead treat handle closure like garbage collection, you can actually eke out pretty good performance.

That all said, yeah, Windows containers are less than great for what I'd argue is one strikingly glaring flaw: Docker container images are built from smss.exe upward. That makes them not immediately portable between ntoskrnl.exe releases.

Operating system can be more robust, depending on admin skill. Let idiots configure and operate your rhel and you may not get those five nines.

There are costs to it, in the form of architectural baggage and slower iteration, but what windows brings to the table is a deck swept mostly clear of footguns. That can give you a different form of robustness.

The file system is almost 30 years old.

When NTFS came out it was way better than anything on Linux. Heck even in 2006 NTFS was better.

But Linux keeps getting new file systems while Windows keeps NTFS.