And then I accidentally found this article on ACPI debugging, which references the memo written by Bill Gates in 1999:

One thing I find myself wondering about is whether we shouldn’t try and make the “ACPI” extensions somehow Windows-specific. If seems unfortunate if we do this work and get our partners to do the work and the result is that Linux works great without having to do the work. … Maybe we couid define the APIs so that they work well with NT and not the others even if they are open. Or maybe we could patent something relaled to this.

What. The. Heck.

This is insane.. Isn’t it like the textbook definition of lobbying? I wasn’t expecting to find a whole conspiracy while trying to fix my Deck, perhaps the memo is a hoax or something, but this all just lines up so naturally. If it really was his plan, then he succeeded.

Given that the the memo was submitted in court as evidence in a 2002 case, Comes v. Microsoft, it's probably real. If anything, it didn't succeed enough. It probably would have been possible to lock Linux out entirely, but by 1999, there were already too many Linux and *BSD x86 server deployments. Couldn't ignore them. Had to make it just kinda shitty rather than battening it all up.