Sorry but your argument is baseless. There is nothing in NT kernel that forces a certain UI toolset nor it deals with the UI anymore (it briefly did when PCs were less powerful via GDI API, not anymore). Linux kernel and its modesetting facilities are quite a bit invasive and it is Linux that forces a certain way of implementing GPU drivers.
Windows just requires a set of functions from the driver to implement. Win32 drawing APIs are now completely userspace APIs and Windows actually did implement a couple of different ones.
Browsers switched to using a single graphics API canvas component long ago. Instead of relying on high level OS graphics API, they come with their own direct renderers that's opaque to the OS apart from the buffer requests. This approach can utilize GPUs better. Windows was among the first systems to implement the same as a UI component library. It is called WPF and it is still the backbone of many non-Win32 UI elements on Windows. On the Linux side, I think Qt was the first to implement such a concept with QML / QtQuick which is much later than WPF.
Moreover your argument that Unix evolves better or more freely falls apart when you consider that we had to replace X. On Unix world, the tendency to design "minimal" APIs that are close to hardware is the source of all evil. Almost any new technology requires big refactoring projects from application developers in the Unix world since the system programmers haven't bothered to design future-proof APIs (or they are researchers / hobbyists who don't have a clue about the current business and user needs nor upcoming tech).
Windows didn't need to replace Win32 since it was designed by engineers who understood the needs of businesses and designed an abstract-enough API that can survive things like introduction of HiDPI screens (which is just a "display changed please rerender" event). It is simply a better API.
On the Unix side X was tightly designed as around 96 or 72 DPI screens and everything had to be bolted on or hacked since the APIs were minimal or tightly coupled with the hardware capabilities at the time. Doing direct rendering on X was a pain in the ass and had an intertwined web of silly hacks which was why the DEs in 2010s kept discovering weird synchronization bugs and it was why Wayland needed to be invented.
> There is nothing in NT kernel that forces a certain UI toolset
Unfortunately, Windows the OS and the NT kernel are not completely independent - you can’t really run one without the other.
> we had to replace X
We did so because we wanted to continue to run apps made for it. The fact it was done without any change to the Linux kernel is precisely because the graphical environment is just another process running on top of the OS, and it’s perfectly fine to run Linux without X.
Windows just requires a set of functions from the driver to implement. Win32 drawing APIs are now completely userspace APIs and Windows actually did implement a couple of different ones.
Browsers switched to using a single graphics API canvas component long ago. Instead of relying on high level OS graphics API, they come with their own direct renderers that's opaque to the OS apart from the buffer requests. This approach can utilize GPUs better. Windows was among the first systems to implement the same as a UI component library. It is called WPF and it is still the backbone of many non-Win32 UI elements on Windows. On the Linux side, I think Qt was the first to implement such a concept with QML / QtQuick which is much later than WPF.
Moreover your argument that Unix evolves better or more freely falls apart when you consider that we had to replace X. On Unix world, the tendency to design "minimal" APIs that are close to hardware is the source of all evil. Almost any new technology requires big refactoring projects from application developers in the Unix world since the system programmers haven't bothered to design future-proof APIs (or they are researchers / hobbyists who don't have a clue about the current business and user needs nor upcoming tech).
Windows didn't need to replace Win32 since it was designed by engineers who understood the needs of businesses and designed an abstract-enough API that can survive things like introduction of HiDPI screens (which is just a "display changed please rerender" event). It is simply a better API.
On the Unix side X was tightly designed as around 96 or 72 DPI screens and everything had to be bolted on or hacked since the APIs were minimal or tightly coupled with the hardware capabilities at the time. Doing direct rendering on X was a pain in the ass and had an intertwined web of silly hacks which was why the DEs in 2010s kept discovering weird synchronization bugs and it was why Wayland needed to be invented.