For all of its faults, Windows 11 is the world's most popular operating system, and Microsoft has made a lot of strides to make the operating system better over the years. It can be easy to glance over it, but features like the Windows Subsystem for Linux, Phone Link, and Winget have made the platform much better than it used to be.

But when you take a closer look at it, it's interesting to note that so many of the things that make Windows 11 great are actually taken from someone else. Sometimes Microsoft buys the tools it wants to add, and other times it may just copy existing concepts. Either way, third-party developers deserve a lot of credit for many of the things you probably love about Windows 11.

It just runs Linux now

Why make a better operating system in the first place?

There's no way I couldn't start this article without touching on the gigantic elephant in the room: the Windows Subsystem for Linux. It truly says something that, for all the benefits Windows may have over a typical Linux distro, Microsoft decided that one of the ways to make Windows better was to simply... put another operating system inside of it.

WSL initially made its debut back in 2016, and since then, it has progressed significantly, going from a purely terminal-based tool to adding support for GUI apps, as well as adding support for systemd, a key component in many Linux distros. The fact of the matter is Microsoft now lets you run Linux — a wide variety of distros, in fact — directly inside Windows without needing a third-party tool, so you can use the commands, apps, and tooling developers often prefer on the Linux side of things. It doesn't get more blatant than that.

It's not just that Linux tools can be better on their own, either. In some cases, you can even use a Linux tool to interface with your Windows system in ways that Windows itself may not make as easy or convenient. Just recently, we wrote about how Cron in WSL makes for a great Windows automation tool that can sometimes be easier to use than the Windows-native Task Scheduler.

When Microsoft just buys tools

If you can't beat them, purchase them

Microsoft has a long history of purchasing things it deems valuable, rather than use its never-ending resources to build viable alternatives. We can go as far back as the creation of Internet Explorer, which was the result of Microsoft acquiring the license to build on top of Spyglass Mosaic, one of the earliest commercial web browsers on the market. The company even used some sneaky licensing tricks to get out of paying royalties to Spyglass.

Then we can jump ahead to things like Skype, which Microsoft bought in 2012 to replace Windows Live Messenger, or Groove Music, which become Windows 10's music player app and streaming service for a few years. Both of these services are gone now, but there are still examples we can discuss that exist on Windows 11.

One big one is support for extracting ZIP files within File Explorer, which was developed by Dave Plummer while he was working at Microsoft way back in the 90s. While he was a Microsoft employee, Plummer developed the tool, called VisualZip, on his own time and sold it through his company. Not long after that, though, Microsoft bought the technology off of him and integrated it into Windows, where it remained virtually unchanged for decades. It was only recently that Microsoft expanded support for other compressed archives, and even that relies on the libarchive open-source project.

But maybe you want something that was added to Windows 11 this decade. In that case, we can point you to Clipchamp, a web-based video editing tool that Microsoft acquired just before the launch of Windows 11, just so that it could be bundled with the OS. Clipchamp has been preinstalled on Windows 11 systems (or at least pinned to the Start menu) since the very beginning, and it's a kind of tool that was requested for a long time. Also, while Microsoft has owned the SysInternals suite since 2006 when it acquired the company and hired its lead developer Mark Russinovich, it was only earlier this year that the company integrated SysMon (short for System Monitor) to Windows 11 natively, so you can count that as well.

Drawing inspiration

"We can do that too"

Finally, there are the times when Microsoft simply looks at what other companies or developers have been offering and builds something of its own that does essentially the same thing. This in itself isn't a criticism, as it's not really surprising that third-party developers can sometimes come up with new ideas faster than Microsoft, but it has happened a lot.

We've already mentioned Internet Explorer in this article, but the current version of Microsoft Edge is also a great example of this. Microsoft developed Internet Explorer and Microsoft Edge on its own engine for many years, but the company just couldn't compete with the rapid development of Google's Chromium project and the fact that it was so dominant on the market. So, the current version of Edge is built off of the same Chromium engine. This would be somewhat understandable, but when an organization like Mozilla manages to keep supporting its own in-house engine, it's clear that Microsoft could, too — it just didn't want to make that investment.

Winget is another example of this. For years, third-party package managers gave Windows one of the best ways to install and manage apps, borrowing the same philosophy used by Linux platforms, and Microsoft finally decided to make its own. It was quickly revealed that Microsoft had (allegedly) interviewed the developer of another package manager called AppGet under the pretense of hiring him, but the company only let him know he would not be hired the day before it announced Winget. When this information was made public, Microsoft attributed many features of Winget to AppGet, which shows the company took more than a little inspiration from its competitors. This didn't stop AppGet from shutting down, however.

And just like those, you could point to features like Phone Link, which had long existed through platforms like AirDroid or Dell Mobile Connect, or virtual desktops, which were beloved on Linux for years before Windows got them.

And then there was PowerToys

Third-party developers are its lifeblood

PowerToys isn't really a part of Windows, but it is a tool published and maintained by Microsoft developers that makes Windows far better. The thing is, Microsoft may be responsible for PowerToys project, but almost all the tools in it were originally designed and proposed by the community, with some cooperative work taking place to bring them to the final product. Bug fixes and smaller improvements are very often submitted via pull requests not made by Microsoft developers, so this entire suite of tools is really made by third-party developers.

And while they're mostly not part of Windows itself, Microsoft recently announced that the Run dialog in Windows 11 would now use the same logic as PowerToys' Command Palette. The company even thanked everyone who "helped build a part of Windows" in its official announcement blog post.

Microsoft has a lot to be thankful for

Microsoft has a lot of products and services under its purview, and having a structure that maintains all of that inevitably means that the company isn't as agile or inventive as it sometimes could be when it comes to developing new features, so relying on third-party developers to push some features forward isn't a bad thing. It is curious, however, that Microsoft seems to rely on it so much for features that are so important to its platform, and even then it tends to be very late to the party when it comes to implementing them. With all the money the company has, you'd think it would lead the market much more often.