I believe the correct term is Desktop Window Manager (dwm.exe). That's the compositor. "Aero and the Win8's new one" are just themes. :)

Anyway, which apps?

More specifically, it is governed by the Continuum feature, which means that when you go mobile (for example detach the screen unit from a hybrid device's base), it will switch to Modern UI. The apps that you have open are arranged nicely depending on the use case.

Take a look at bug trackers of OSS projects sometimes. They are full of known bugs which have been waiting for fix for months or years. Around the time when Heartbleed was discovered, there was another bug reported 4 years ago and no one had taken the responsibility to fix it. It even had a CVE record.

For security it is not enough that anyone can read the source code. In practice people rarely have the time or patience to churn through projects that can be 10k or 100k lines of code, just looking for dragons for fun. If we really want to get this right, there must be professional, thorough, provable and documented code audits.

No, they don't.

Try this mental experiment. What if the article described Microsoft using camels for Bing map service? Would it change your view?

The background of that app is a grey gradient with lots of uneven banding. Over that there is text drawn with white MS Sans Serif font. When you change Windows DPI setting, the text becomes larger, but also horribly aliased and can't fit the window anymore. There is a button to check for updates, but you have never seen it find one. "Check update ..." "No update found !" When you restore the app from system tray you can see how it slowly paints its GUI. Then when you exit the app, it pops up a message box with the text "Error: NULL".

Almost no one but the actual developers of the project read the source code. Software projects are so large these days that people seldom wade through the multiple thousands lines of code just for fun.

Here's an experiment people here can do: download the source code of some small project and read it thoroughly. Just try what it feels like. Understanding how the program actually works can take surprisingly big amount of time.

Do that experiment now.

This is also the reason why I cringe when the backend of Linux distros is often woven together with shell scripts. You have to be super careful to write code with proper input validation, and all the related tools must retain their interfaces or you get weird "Invalid argument" type of breakage. Then there are things like Shellshock which immediately made the dhclient script vulnerable. It's all just too dangerous. And I didn't even begin to talk about the slow parsing of scripts and the forking overhead of every little process the script calls.

That can be true if the hardware company is writing the Linux driver. I have seen it only happen with Intel though.

You mean The Pirate Bay? They have just outsourced the trackers, that's all. Or if you meant Magnet links, if you read through them, you can see that they contain a bunch of tracker addresses too.

Cloud distribution is probably also much more efficient.

Don't get me wrong, I think BitTorrent is very cool technological achievement. But transferring data between semi-random hosts around the globe and opening hundreds of TCP connections per computer while doing it, is like the ultimate way to clog the pipes.