Or on a Linux system.
hardened, of course. the defaults on Linux (and I presume, [Free/Open]BSD) are a lot more secure then most windows installations. MS is certainly doing better since XP SP2 with proper selection of defaults. They finally realized, "hmm, maybe everybody doesn't need to have terminal server running by default" and other silly services that most people would never need or use, but were a security risk.
On the other hand, Windows Vista and 7 can still run nearly any properly written Win32 program; AFAIK Linux (and Mac OS) are less forgiving in that regard. There is certainly some leeway there as well, though.
It's not just backward compatibility of public interfaces that Windows provides, either. Sometimes application developers
rely on totally undocumented behaviour. Since, inevitably, a program that worked fine with a previous version of windows suddenly not working on a new version (when the windows developers so foolishly think they can change the undocumented internals) is blamed on the new version of windows, it usually falls to MS to fix it (since the program developer already has the customers money in most cases).
Now, that being said, there is no such thing as an undocumented function in Linux or FreeBSD, since, at the very least, the source is available. On the other hand, that doesn't mean that such functions won't change in future versions; but when that happens it usually falls to the programs original creator that was calling the function to fix the issue (which is alright, since it was almost certainly free, so the developer doesn't "already have their customers money").
So I guess, in a way, Microsoft, while basically saying "don't use this function" for a lot of stuff, will "fix" the issues that arise of somebody does if that somebody's product is popular enough; if Wordperfect, for example, crashed catastrophically when tested on 98 but worked fine on 95, MS would usually fix the problem, not Corel- simply because the problem, in many users eyes, was the new version of windows.
It's really more a religious issue in a lot of ways; as can be illustrated easily via the comments on the blog post I linked to. Each Operating System, (Mac, Linux & BSD and variants, Windows) subscribes to a different paradigm, and these paradigms clash on a lot of issues- including the backward compatibility one illustrated in the blog post. It is these paradigm shifts that drive a wedge between devotees of each sub-culture.
