I actually tried it before for my TV PC that I wanted to also use as a miniserver, with gpu pass through and everything. It was painful to get it working properly, was like 30-40% slower. I also had constant problems with USB peripherals not connecting properly, or going in a sleep state and not waking. Many games didn’t work properly.

Then I decided to just buy a cheap second second hand PC and never looked back.

Did it work? There’s a huge chance of data corruption if you are copying the disk of a running system.

Or maybe an automated system flagged it and an underpaid and overworked employee in a third world country reviewed it.

I don’t think this was malicious, these app reviews are being done by an overworked and underpaid employee in some third world country. Mistakes are made all the time.

Oh, and signed drivers aren’t about Microsoft validating and testing every driver. It’s about verifying that the driver comes from a trusted company and isn’t tampered with.

Antivirus software for Linux also has kernel access. You can’t intercept OS operations like opening files or launching executables without kernel access. And some of the companies I worked at also required antivirus software on Linux servers.

You can absolutely run Windows without an anti-virus, it has plenty of security features built-in.

It’s all a matter of trust. Do you trust your engineers to properly configure machines to be secure and not run exes from dubious sources, or do you trust a cybersecurity company to do it for you? Anti-virus software nowadays is more about restricting users from doing stupid shit.

It’s not Microsoft’s fault a third party company wrote a kernel module that crashes the OS.

Unlike the mobile world where apps are severely limited and sandboxed, the desktop is completely the opposite. Microsoft has tried many times to limit what programs can do, but encountered a lot of resistance and ultimately had to let it go.