Because the "UX" of Windows sucks, Microsoft will switch the "Kernel" to Linux?<p>I don't get the argument. There are parts of Windows I don't like, so I have chosen a 3rd-party (often open-source) replacement. The exact same process as I do on Linux. I don't see why I have to switch to Linux to have that freedom.<p>(and to be honest, I don't care where the taskbar is)
This is a good point. The kernel stuff of Windows isn't really the problem.<p>I've been on macOS for eons, but I still hope that some day, someone at microsoft will have the balls to make a Windows Redux. Which is just Windows 7 with a coat of paint; and less stuff, installable separately; geared towards speed and not stuffings.
I’m sure that MS knows that NT is the one thing that’s right with their platform…
I'll consider switching to Linux when the GUI becomes as configurable as Windows 10 or earlier.<p>For example, this is my taskbar layout:
<a href="https://i.ibb.co/1GqKH27L/taskbar-layout.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.ibb.co/1GqKH27L/taskbar-layout.png</a><p>To my knowledge, it's not possible to achieve anything like this layout on Windows 11, Linux or Mac. I did try it in various Linux distros a few times but frankly got sick of navigating the maze of window managers et cetera. I think something like XFCE came close to providing a Windows-like taskbar but it was still far, far behind what Windows NT can offer.
Took me about 2 minutes to replicate on KDE Plasma[0][1]. I have a lot more things in my taskbar that I don't want to remove for this test, so it looks a little more crammed up.<p>[0] <a href="https://i.imgur.com/esNjPNg.png" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/esNjPNg.png</a><p>[1] I didn't try to replicate it perfectly; things like smaller icons/etc are settings but cba
You can definitely do this with KDE Plasma. Plasma is so configurable you can make things that are almost impossible to use!<p>And probably good layouts too.
Wow! I used to love doing something very similar. I think it was my last year with Windows (XP). <a href="https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-windows-homescreen-2005.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-windows-homescree...</a><p>Nowadays, I just have as few as visible, and everything is either Keyboard Shortcuts or some form of `CMD + K` or `CMD + Spacebar`, and start typing.
I think he might be right<p>The massive amount of legacy .NET and older software still running in many enterprises isn’t a problem, but a huge business opportunity.<p>My prediction is that Microsoft will push hard their “Azure Virtual Desktop” product: remote, virtualized Windows instances hosted on their own servers to these enterprises.<p>In this model, the operating system running on the client devices will becomes largely irrelevant.
As a Windows system and user-mode dev, I absolutely <i>never</i> understand these sorts of drive-by posts with nearly zero technical depth.<p>If there is <i>one</i> thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture, and absolute plethora of user-mode libraries that <i>come with the OS</i>, that can be programmed against with a variety of languages from ancient to brand-new, all maintained by the vendor. Doing the same thing on a given distro of Linux is a headache at best, and impossible at worst (which is partly why game developers <i>don't</i> target native Linux).<p>The problems with Windows have <i>always</i> been in the user-mode (with the notable exception of Vista, and I still maintain that Vista was OK; its problems were due to Intel strong-arming MS into certifying a broken version of Vista for its sub-par integrated GPUs of the time). Windows 11 control panel sort-of gone? There's still the god-mode menu introduced in Vista. Right-click menu gone, or too much Copilot? Go to Group Policy editor, switch off what you don't need; revert what you can. People complain you 'cannot create local user accounts any more'. Also not true, that feature is a fundamental part of Windows and probably won't ever be removed. There are workarounds. Any Windows user or sysadmin worth their salt will have a GPE fleet-wide policy, and registry settings.<p>Everything one sees on Windows can be stripped out and reverted to Windows 2000 mode. That grey boxy UI is literally still there. Compile a program for 32-bit, set the compatibility mode to Windows 2000, and bam, there you go. If you add in the manifests for UTF-8 and high pixel density, the UI is scaled pixel-perfect by the system.<p>Speaking of high pixel density, Windows is the <i>only</i> OS that does scaling properly. macOS just pretends non-'retina' displays don't exist, Linux distros are a minefield of Xorg, Wayland, a million different conf.d files, command-line arguments, and env variables.<p>Why would <i>anyone</i> want to replace their core product with something that a) they cannot control, and b) does not satisfy their business and customer needs?
>Windows is the only OS that does scaling properly. macOS just pretends non-'retina' displays don't exist<p>Not true. I use a high-DPI (~250) MacBook with a non-high-DPI (~100) external monitor [0] and the transition between the two is seamless. Windows are identically sized when dragging from one screen to another. The same holds true when I use the laptop with a mid-DPI (~150) monitor.<p>I could not say the same was true a few years ago when I tried a high-DPI Windows 10 laptop with a non-high-DPI external monitor; it looked something like this [1]. Perhaps this has since been fixed.<p>macOS is able to achieve consistent sizing across displays irrespective of pixel density because it uses a compositor to render the whole screen at a high resolution and, if necessary, downsamples it proportionally for each screen. (Wayland on Linux can do the same, though it's certainly a much bigger headache to get consistently working than macOS.) When I tried using Windows 10 at two DPIs simultaneously, it just let me scale the font size and other UI elements on a per-screen basis, but not the screen as a whole, since I assume it does not use a compositor.<p>[0] Not my setup, but here is someone doing just that with a 30" 2560x1600 (~100 PPI) display and a ~250 PPI MacBook: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/macsetups/comments/tfbpid/my_macbook_pro_14_setup_ft_30_cinema_display_3/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/macsetups/comments/tfbpid/my_macboo...</a><p>[1] Again, not my setup, but the Windows UI is rendered at different sizes on displays of different resolutions: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/computers/comments/16y1dux/how_do_i_make_my_second_monitor_look_smaller/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/computers/comments/16y1dux/how_do_i...</a>
I have a long blog post stewing here. I'll give you the gist.<p>Moving windows between monitors of different pixel densities is a rather difficult problem. Windows handles pixel density per-application, not globally, and it uses something called device-independent pixels (DIPs). macOS and every desktop environment I've tried on Linux does it globally, or at least globally per-display.<p>On Windows, when a window is moved across two displays with different scaling factors, a simple algorithm is used. It will choose the display that the greater fraction of the window is in to select the DIP, render, compose and rasterise, and hence and one part of the window may appear too small or too large on the other display.<p>On the other hand, macOS, GNOME, and KDE take the easy (but IMO very lazy) way out by rasterising the entire application window to the pixel density of whichever display that the greater fraction of the window is in, copying that framebuffer to the viewport of the other displays, scaling with some filtering algorithm, and then composing, leading to blurring on at least one display. I am happy to bet that you're just not noticing the early rasterisation and filtered scaling going on. Having used all 3 OSs across a variety of monitors, I am extremely particular about blurry text; enough that I will <i>stop</i> using a certain setup if it doesn't satisfy me (it's why I stopped using Linux on my personal system).<p>I'll concede neither is good enough. The real solution here is:<p><pre><code> 1. Render the application to as many viewports as there are displays that the application window is in, with the appropriate DIP for each display's scale factor
2. Compose the application viewports into each display's viewport depending on the apparent window position
3. The above will automatically clip away the fraction of the window that is outside each display
4. Rasterise the composed viewport for each display
</code></pre>
Another concession: I personally prefer pixel-perfect rendering rather than having the same visual size, and hardly ever use windows spanning multiple displays (especially of different pixel density), so Windows' behaviour is less of a problem to me.<p>My bigger issue is other desktop environments not supporting subpixel anti-aliasing, not supporting 'fractional' scaling (macOS is by far the biggest offender), and edge artifacts that result from bad clipping. I have a few photos I took of KDE, where random pixels are lit up at the bottom of my secondary display, with my laptop below it.
They might be referring to when Apple removed subpixel antialiasing around ~2018. It caused some consternation at the time because there were still plenty of non-retina Macbook Airs in service. While it technically works, macOS really is not meant for non-high DPI displays.
> Speaking of high pixel density, Windows is the only OS that does scaling properly.<p>Haven't tried Windows 11, but a bunch of Microsoft applications in Windows 10 render text using sub-pixel rendering in 2x high dpi mode, resulting in every character having a two-pixel coloured border around it. That's about as far from "scaling properly" as it gets.
You "never understand" these posts and then list off a ton of crap I shouldn't have to do to an OS to make it usable.<p>The default experience of using windows is downright user-hostile and it reveals the thinking of the corporation behind it. Yeah, you _can_ do all that to make it somewhat usable, but when alternatives exist that are much less of a pain, I'll be taking those.
My point was that the article is logically flawed. The user mode of the OS sucks, so let's run the same user mode with a different kernel? What?<p>I don't care about configuration. I've had to do plenty of configuration on Linux as well; it's just <i>different</i>. I'm not sure I can list all the Arch Linux wiki articles I've read trying to get one driver or another feature working.<p>I am not here to convince anyone to stop using one platform or another. They're different tools that solve different problems, and I run all of them. I have a Linux laptop for work, a Proxmox hypervisor on my homelab running a variety of LXC containers, Linux and Windows Server guests.
By way of example — I can (and did) remove the ads from the Start Menu on Windows 10 Professional. But there's literally no reason they should've been there to begin with.
> You "never understand" these posts and then list off a ton of crap I shouldn't have to do to an OS to make it usable.<p>In the context of changes Microsoft could make, that list of instructions is there for demonstration purposes. It's about how if Microsoft wanted to clean up their mess, they have a far far easier method than what's suggested in the article.<p>> when alternatives exist that are much less of a pain, I'll be taking those<p>That's a different topic from the article and the comment you replied to.
My experience of Linux (and Mac OS) has been the opposite; they are extremely painful to make usable.<p>Yes, I have to disable a lot of stuff to get Windows the way I like it. But that's still exponentially easier than having to add, install, or perhaps even <i>buy</i> a lot of stuff to <i>maybe</i> get Linux/Mac to behave <i>kind of</i> how I want it to.
> If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture<p>Sure, but alternatively, you could just lay those guys off and bank the savings of outsourcing to Linus and co.
This could be a bait. I was going to comment how wrong you are. How much better and advanced the windows model is compared to linux and how making products that co-operate with other companies (read: people with products they want to get paid for, when did that started being a bad thing?) instead of being "gatekeepy" over ideologies will always have an upper edge.<p>But seeing how companies have worked in the past, you might be right, some middle manager there might just axe the most valuable part of their product.
> If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture,<p>Woah, back up a bit. In the article, it looks like the blue screen is a 0x0 (iopr) exception, likely a wild jump into the weeds. But back in the day, the majority of blue screens were 0xE exceptions -- page fault in the kernel. Why? Buggy driver that didn't wire down a page and it got swapped out from under the driver. Not under Microsofts direct control... BUT... they had a great example in OS/2. In WinNT, there are 2 security rings, kernel and user space. But x86 supports 4 rings. OS/2 used ring 1 for drivers, so that the kernel could both blame the correct driver and also stay alive. So simple. (Of course, it means it is hard to port to hardware with only 2 security rings.) WinNT drivers are not things of beauty. The dev experience is cranky, and validation is a nightmare -- and the lowest bidding Asian contractor that is writing your driver for your el-cheapo peripheral rarely signs up for that nightmare.
> WinNT drivers are not things of beauty. The dev experience is cranky, and validation is a nightmare<p>I think one could say the same for <i>any</i> platform; in general, developing drivers is just difficult, full stop. That driver quality for peripherals can be bad is not the fault of the platform. I'm sure I could find dodgy drivers in the Linux tree that were merged in only because '<i>shrug</i> it makes PineappleCorp's device work, who cares if it is littered with UB'.
Well, these days it seems Linux drivers get enough eye-balls on them that anything meaningful is going to get looked at. Sure, I expect there are some low usage drivers in the repo that just haven't had enough mileage. At least with Linux I can see the driver code. (The second day at my current job, somebody pointed me at a bug with an obscure symptom. A quick check of a log file showed a 0xE exception. A couple hours later I posted a link to the bug in source. Somehow, the universe decided to give me a bug I had seen many times before to get my reputation off to a good start -- it's better to be lucky than smart.)
There are performance penalties for moving drivers out of the kernel/ring 0. For some things, that matters (network, graphics), for others it doesn't, like printers.<p>And Microsoft has made the least stable of the drivers a recoverable fault, at least.
> Everything one sees on Windows can be stripped out and reverted to Windows 2000 mode. That grey boxy UI is literally still there.<p>Can the horrendous W11 taskbar be reverted to the classic taskbar, with full support for changing its size and screen position etc?<p>Can classic Explorer, without any OneDrive/Copilot nonsense, be restored?<p>Can the new "Settings" (*excuse me while I vomit) layouts be junked in favour of the Control Panel, along with all the associated modals such as the WiFi selection sidebar etc.?
We are now at the point where the average PC user can configure linux to their liking but it takes a windows sys admin with strong domain knowledge to configure windows to their liking. Im a windows sysadmin(pretty shit one but still) and I struggle to remove a lot of the w11 features and have been unable to get it working how it used to.
The Intel thing is extremely true, but also equally true is the god awful Nvidia drivers that existed in the early days of Windows Vista. I don't even think Nvidia had a non-beta driver until 6 months after Windows Vista went gold. I think I recall seeing that Nvidia was responsible for something like 30% of crashes on Windows Vista.<p>Now, we could split hairs over where the failure was with that one--whether Microsoft not working enough with Nvidia, or whichever; but the point still stands.<p>Windows Vista walked so Windows 7 could run, essentially.
> Windows Vista walked so Windows 7 could run, essentially.<p>Good point. Although I personally have a soft spot for the all the Longhorn castles in the sky that MS were building, and for Vista in general.
Would it be possible to ship a high performance, lean "modern" Windows, with legacy apps etc run seamlessly in VMs or containers?
This is probably the hypervisor that Azure VMs run on, or perhaps Windows Server. Unlike Linux, (most) legacy apps (if they target NT) don't need VMs or containers; they run natively. You can compile for Windows 2000 on Windows 11 25H2 and run it natively on the host to test.
> with legacy apps etc run seamlessly in VMs or containers?<p>We kind of have examples of that already in DOSBox. Even where Windows OOTB compatibility fails, getting some ancient piece of software running in DOSBox is often not an issue.
The start menu sometimes glitches out for a few seconds, so it makes total sense to replace the whole OS from the kernel up.<p>Signed, a npm jockey who lives in the world of churn
>If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture<p>Article did hang a lantern on that. Big issue is that, it doesnt matter how good the Kernel is if you cant use it. I think dropping Windows is more likely than fixing windows. Windows 11 is more than just the usual Headache Edition of Windows like ME, Vista, 8 or what have you. Its definitely a new strategy.<p>>with the notable exception of Vista, and I still maintain that Vista was OK; its problems were due to Intel strong-arming MS into certifying a broken version of Vista for its sub-par integrated GPUs of the time<p>Agreed honestly. The reason it bricked my wifes computer was because HP dragged its feet adopting the new driver model. The reason it stuffed my laptop was that Asus refused to release a supported laptop lid driver for my hardware. Games for Windows live was comorbid with Vista which pissed off gamers.<p>>Windows 11 control panel sort-of gone? There's still the god-mode menu introduced in Vista. Right-click menu gone, or too much Copilot? Go to Group Policy editor, switch off what you don't need; revert what you can. People complain you 'cannot create local user accounts any more'. Also not true, that feature is a fundamental part of Windows and probably won't ever be removed. There are workarounds. Any Windows user or sysadmin worth their salt will have a GPE fleet-wide policy, and registry settings.<p>I mean, we have the AI stuff blocked at a policy level, they just started ignoring that policy and its everywhere. They have done the same with a few other feature deployments. Group Policy has really turned into "Do you want to enable the grace period for the new thing we are pushing". Windows App, hilariously, just got boned by a windows 11 update except the older Remote Desktop App (Support ending in march) still works, and the Mac version of the App still works fine too.<p>>Why would anyone want to replace their core product with something that a) they cannot control, and b) does not satisfy their business and customer needs?<p>Control is a deep topic. But the biggest issue is Business needs. Linux is currently only 50% of the way into being anywhere decent in a Microsoft shop. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint however, is growing like a cancer and is starting to look like a testbed for bringing a lot of Microsoft command and control into a linux environment. This guys making a prediction now, but really theres nothing in Windows that cannot be ported officially by Microsoft to Linux given enough time. Honestly I think the bigger question is "When Microsoft inevitably does this will the FLOSS community get anything out of it".
I would never predict this, but I think it's an idea which has occurred to many people over the years. the name WSL always hinted to me at a group inside MS who wanted Windows to BE the subsystem.<p>I think people who have run UNIX over non-traditional FS get this vibe too. We're used to thinking it has to be some linear progression from FS to VFS to UFS to "all the other FS" and the idea "nah, I can run on NTFS just fine thanks" never occurs to us. But DOSBOOT.EXE to boot unix from DOS...
IIRC, from back when I worked there, they had to name it windows subsystem for linux instead of linux subsystem for windows because there was a copyright problem with putting a term that is copyrighted by someone else (linux) first.
WSL was originally going to be named LSW, but had to switch name AFAIR.
I mean it's not totally crazy, Microsoft did rip out Window's original networking stack and replace it with BSDs (which has probably been heavily modified/evolved since then)
The "Microsoft Tax" is often cheaper than the "Linux Engineering Salary." While Linux alternatives exist, they require "assembly"—integrating LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, and config management (Ansible/Salt) to do what AD does out of the box.<p>Most businesses don't want to be in the business of maintaining their own identity infrastructure. They want a utility. Between Group Policy’s granular control over the endpoint and the tight integration with Exchange/M365, Microsoft has created a "sticky" ecosystem. I've tried the "DIY" route with Linux mail servers, and the friction of maintaining deliverability and security patches manually is a nightmare compared to the "it just works" nature of the Microsoft ecosystem.<p>I am not a system admin, so maybe this is a crappy take.
You’re thinking apples and oranges.<p>Remember that every K-12 student for the last decade is getting it done on the cheapest low bid Chromebook possible. They are true pieces of shit, too-down managed by barely qualified people and yet the kids persevere.<p>That’s the baseline. Windows is an evolution of 1999, slowly shifting to the shitty cloud based model. It is the worst of both worlds. It’s like Peoplesoft in computer form. Even my IT crew at work is all Mac now.<p>Apple is an unreliable partner and a sole source. I think Linux is the pragmatic choice going forward.
I am a sysadmin and Group Policy is the entire moat Microsoft has. Linux has nothing like it, and it <i>probably can't</i> because it requires a level of top down authority over a platform's design and implementation that would be hard in the Linux space.<p><i>Maybe</i> something like systemd could do something similar which defined policy over all the components they've taken over, but a distro doing it would be pointless, we're not a Linux shop and have at least three different Linux distros in service.
Nothing in the linux world would forbid something like Group Policy. A commercial distro that targets large-scale enterprise customers could implement something exactly like Active Directory + friends.<p>Ansible, FreeIPA, and more can be used individually or together to achieve what AD provides. There are large enterprises that are non-windows...
My comment above already addresses this.<p>I'm aware there are large enterprises that are non-Windows. All of them are technology companies. They are well equipped to pay their own developers to compensate for not having Group Policy, and may even be Microsoft competitors who don't want to spend money on them. Ansible being a replacement for Group Policy is <i>very</i> funny. That is like saying Postgres is a replacement for Excel.
Not to argue too much against what you're saying but I thought that some EU gov't entities had moved off of Windows a while ago.<p>I know at least one university that doesn't put Windows on its machines either. While Uni requirements are not the same as "enterprise" requirements, it does feel close-ish.<p>Having said all this, I am very primed to believe that they have a Group Policy-sized hole in their systems. Just thinking they are doing ... something.
The competitor of Group Policy is not really an implementation of that running on Linux clients. It's that the client doesn't need that level of management because 99.5% of your users only use cloud based services. Microsoft know that, which is why they are keen for everyone to use their cloud ecosystem, but that's not a monopoly today in the way windows was.
Really the only thing that will move this is market share.
With Claude Code and other tools making it super easy to interact with a computer, and Microsoft repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot adding AI everywhere to Windows 11, I've seen a noticeable amount of people actually switch to Linux, despite every year being the year people switch to Linux - AI in your OS that you can't control seems to be the actual tipping point.
First it would start with the personal / hobbyists, then very slowly the corporate world (they will always play things safely and slowly), assuming Windows continues to decline, which it almost certainly will.
This is possible… but surely it will be Linux with a walled garden on top.<p>The first clue will be a version of the Xbox running an OS with this model.
This is pretty much what I expect. Windows will be "Linux" in a similar sense as Android is "Linux". Or BSD, or whatever. It won't necessarily be Linux specifically, but I expect it will be something.
The console vendors are deathly allergic to GPL code and won't touch it with a ten foot pole, so even if the Xbox does move away from NT there's almost no chance of it moving to Linux. They'd sooner use a BSD like Sony does, or roll a custom kernel like Nintendo did.
In effort to imagine something even funnier:<p>ReactOS developers use Copilot to extract and copyright launder Windows source code, and then rather than fight it, Microsoft starts shipping ReactOS.
> In 2017 I predicted that most programmers would lose their employer <-> employee bargaining power in the next 15-25 years.<p>even if written in retrospect - this would've been interesting to see. since likely some of the reasons wouldn't include A.I
yay beat the author by a year[1]. Which means I would be hardly the first, considering that I'm just a random nobody.<p>1: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41923011">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41923011</a>
<i>Checks the bio</i> Ahh, Zero Sysadmin experience so does not know about amount of legacy garbage being run at many companies and Enterprises.<p>Amount of software running on .Net Framework is mind boggling. If there is not 100% compatibility with .Net Framework on Windows running on Linux, forget it. I know of a company still using Visual FoxPro in 2020 and it was still being maintained.<p>Just like COBOL, across insane amount of businesses/enterprises/government, there are hordes of Windows machines, using technology that last saw updates in early 2000 computing away. Their last supported Windows Server was probably 2008 but somehow they still run on Windows Server 2019 and those licenses are not cheap.<p>Sure, Windows Desktop is clearly becoming "Whatever" by Microsoft but it's also pretty cheap. NT Kernel and UI work has to be done for server side and until that cash cow is dead, shoving slop into Windows Desktop is cheap revenue stream on work they have to do anyways.
Microsoft will likely distribute its own Linux distro someday; however, there is no chance they will ever discontinue the NT.
NT is an objectively better-designed kernel. Windows userspace is a mess, but replacing the kernel won’t help there. Maybe MS can ship XFCE — that I’d buy.
I think they're going to do the least funny thing imaginable: make Windows software require a valid Windows install.<p>It might all be moot tho if nobody can buy RAM and we're all pushed to cloud computing (yay Azure...). Then your terminal's OS will be pretty irrelevant.
M365 and Azure run on the NT kernel. This blog post makes zero sense.
Linux runs on billions of devices, including billions of phones, Internet routers, 100% of the world's Top 500 supercomputers, etc.<p>This post makes lots of sense: Windows is and has always been (but it's getting worse now, as TFA notes) a turd whose level of turdiness cannot be understated.<p>At some point they may just throw the towel in and use an OS that powers tens of billions of devices (which is where Linux is headed).
Your post lacks understanding of the NT executive and the ways (IOCP, personalities, VMM, WM) where it does a better job than the Linux kernel.<p>Or the only stable ABI, even on Linux - Win32.<p>Linux running on 'billions of devices' doesn't mean much when Azure is built on Hyper-V and ODSP/EXO/Dynamics on Windows Server and makes gobs of money for Microsoft.
I think it’s going to happen in 10 years, not in 15.
In every case an enterprise is using Windows they are fundamentally not using the version that is getting worse. For a pricey enough SKU, every antifeature is actually optional.<p>And in a lot of ways the underlying engineering of Windows remains superior, once you scrape away all of the layers of garbage the services offerings have foisted on it. Windows 10 Mobile was so much more performant than Android it isn't even funny. Linux OSes still have an annoying habit of not automatically recovering their disk drive when the power cuts out. The occasional moment you discover that shadow copies/journaling is like... not something Linux machines <i>generally do</i> unless you very specifically choose otherwise...<p>If someone actually scraped the turds off the <i>top</i> of Windows, everyone would move to it. The problem is the turds are profitable. The primary difference between Linux and Windows is not engineering, it's capitalism.
Prediction for the next 15 years: new operating system called Uni. AI will finally get to the point when it can actually reliably replicate the entire OS stack and it will be Windows. I mean Windows stack will get integrated into Linux, but not by Microsoft. It will be done by AI/Linux enthusiasts.<p>Won't happen in 2026, since AI coding is still dumb, and Cursor failed to produce a working version of a browser (despite claiming that). But soon binary files will be reverse engineered, and the whole NT kernel stack will be transferred to Linux.<p>At the same time there is a chance that new, AI-produced, fully Windows-compatible operating systems will start to emerge. OS similar to Windows 95.
I don't disagree with the overall point. I do want to say one thing though.<p><i>> As a professional programmer, I no longer consider Windows a viable option for serious work.</i><p>Please get over yourself. There's plenty of actually serious programming work being done on Windows.<p><i>> If you’re a programmer who’s used to Windows and you think I’m being overly harsh, I encourage you to spend a couple weeks in any other operating system.</i><p>For the record, I've spent decades in many other operating systems. It's interesting because the OS used to matter. Now 90% of the apps we use are either on the web or are web apps repackaged as desktop apps. Of course I can still tell when I switch between OSes, but it makes much, much, <i>much</i> less of a difference than it used to.
Oh man, it's been too long since someone made this prediction. Last one was Eric "Equivalent Series Resistance" Raymond 5 years ago: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j2k9ph/open_sources_eric_raymond_windows_10_will_soon_be/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j2k9ph/open_so...</a><p>It's not any more true now than it was then. Windows isn't going anywhere.<p>The author talks about Windows getting worse, and cites someone's low-tier computer taking 5 minutes to start an Unreal game. Nah, not convincing when my NVMe drive works fine.<p>The author talks about games running on Linux. I guess the author missed the part where half of the most popular PC games have been consistently unplayable for 6+ years because the company doesn't believe that they can make anti-cheat work.<p>Ironically, based on that theory, the author says that everyone will "follow the gamers". Yeah, they're currently following the gamers... to where the anti-cheat works.
Nope. The Windows NT kernel is fantastic. It's the Windows user mode apps that people complain about. Replacing the Windows NT kernel with the Linux kernel while keeping the user mode crust serves no purpose.
... and support legacy win32 apps with.... wine ?
This guy is in for a disappointing future since he seems to be unaware that Windows is more than than the consumer editions. Revenue from Windows Enterprise (which has management tools like Active Directory and backwards compatibility with non-game apps needed for large corporate deployments) and Windows Server (needed for Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) is still in the billions and there's nothing on the horizon in the Linux ecosystem to replace those. Given that Microsoft is going to have to continue to develop Windows anyway, there's not much reason for them to throw in the towel on the consumer desktop.
His take is that for consumers Microsoft will abandon windows in favor of Linux. He predicts Linux will get better. And windows will get worse in development and support. And so Microsoft will give up on windows. And that worsening trend plus abandonment plus Linux improvements will cause Microsoft supporting Linux.<p>The probability of each event happening is high enough. But the probability of all three happening at once is low. And that is why this prediction is difficult to believe.<p>I think it is true windows dev is much more difficult now. The platform has an identity split. It used to favor power users. Now it favors the rich mac users. And upcoming kids who are attached to iPhones. And this means… it gets worse … Or it changes audience. The latter will be hard to pull off.<p>I think Microsoft also has less need for windows. We know this because its core business has been shifting. They are platform agnostic now.<p>So what becomes the incentive for Microsoft to continue windows?
Because they're a corporation that makes money. They have incentives to employ people, and the vendor lock-in with Windows is far too large to change anything at the moment or anytime in the foreseeable future. Changing Windows to become a Linux-based distro would be a massive corporate undertaking; Microsoft isn't in the business of pleasing tech-minded people. They're a business that makes money.<p>Linux isn't a corporation; it's really more of an idea. They don't have marketing departments or people trying to sell you licenses. They don't have vendor lock-in or active-directory or a cloud based infastructure. They don't have an entire advertising division or a search engine. There aren't any shareholders to please or paid employees to keep on payroll for government kickbacks. They're not targeting the casual, media-focused, average computer user like Microsoft, which makes a lot of money by doing so.<p>In my last job, I worked in a mid-sized suburban office. There weren't any "Linux reps" knocking on our door, making sure we were getting the most out of Ubuntu.
None of the software and services you mentioned require Windows though - they could be made to run on Linux, and some already do.<p>As more and more revenue shifts from desktop/servers to cloud and services, it doesn't seem too far-fetched for Microsoft to decide maintaining the entire OS stack themselves makes less and less sense. A Microsoft Windows linux distro would free up resources to focus on what makes Windows unique.
Exchange is very dependent on Win32 and .NET Framework. As is ODSP and Dynamics.<p>Azure under the hood is Hyper-V with most services built upon that dependency.<p>Yes, millions of man hours, monkies, and typewriters you could transform this to Linux. The economics aren't there when Azure/M365 keeps pulling in money running on it's current platform hand over fist.
Well, for one, you may have noticed that MS put in the work, over years, to make .NET the same implementation across all three platforms. So that’s at least one pillar of impossibility removed.
> Given that Microsoft is going to have to continue to develop Windows anyway, there's not much reason for them to throw in the towel on the consumer desktop.<p>That would make sense … <i>if</i> Microsoft didn’t have the second most bonkers track record in history (after Google) in the domain of “fragmenting and releasing competing reimplementations of products already in your core portfolio”!
I think stranger things have happened, but I don't really believe this is all that likely. Windows has sucked for 30 years now; tacking on another 15 probably won't change all that much about the current state of things.<p>Microsoft is an enterprise, and enterprises will continue to crank out enterprisey stuff. Linux is free and open source, developed by people with passion - some of it, I assume, is out of necessity. Unless the working world dramatically changes over the next 15 years, Microsoft is still going to Microsoft.<p>Windows sucks, Azure sucks, Office sucks. Microsoft is a corporation designed to make money, they have a deadlock on the market. From an investor's point of view, they're doing just fine. From a shareholder's point of view, uprooting the entire Windows base to make tech people happy isn't worth the investment. Microsoft hasn't been about making tech people happy since it went public. Microsoft makes money and employs people. People half-heartedly go to work to earn a living, they produce enterprise-grade software. Enterprise software makes money. That's all the investor cares about.<p>Actually, as a matter of fact, having Windows around to drive the continued development of Linux might be a good thing. I know Windows sucks, I know virtually anything technical is dramatically easier on Linux, but anything without competition eventually stagnates. Even if Windows exists simply as a "What not to do" in Linux, it's probably good that it remains around.<p>Currently typing this on a machine that dual-boots both Windows and Linux. Why? Because my laptop came installed with it.
Microsoft's future depends on OpenAI.
I think they’re right, but for the wrong reasons.<p>In enterprise land, managing Windows endpoints is an exponentially larger PITA for the very reason that Microsoft can’t even secure their own OS by default or design, and spend more time shoehorning more surveillance and telemetry into OSes than actually improving them. As “traditional” enterprises increasingly move away from on-prem Active Directory and GPOs in favor of MDM policies and SSO providers, the traditional Microsoft central stack becomes more of a liability than an asset.<p>From a manufacturing perspective, Microsoft is arguably one of the worst partners you could have - especially if your product has to be operated offline or in restricted modes. I’ve spent two weeks trying to debug kiosk mode on W11 creating wildly inconsistent logon times compared to W10, and this is just the latest wrinkle in a year of triage and wildfires directly caused by trying to use online-first Microsoft kit in offline-only products. I’ve spent my entire year banging on about how Linux solves much of our product line issues, but the old guard is coasting until retirement with no drive or incentive to change until after they’ve left - a cohort that’ll be 90% gone by 2030.<p>Then you add in the waves made by gaming companies and communities on the platform, and an increasing focus on the OS by developers worldwide seeking to free themselves of Microsoft and Apple taxes, <i>and</i> the memory shortage/AI bubble driving a need to operate with less capable machines, and at the very least it’s plausible that Linux does indeed become the de facto OS.<p>Really, the only things effectively holding back wider adoption are:<p>* User experience remaining wildly inconsistent between Linux distros and Windows machines. Enterprise distros don’t focus on bridging that gap at the moment (they’re more aligned to Mac or Unix users migrating to Linux), but I’d be shocked if there isn’t a direct Windows-alike by 2030 with Enterprise support options.<p>* Endpoint management remains a bugbear for MSPs and Enterprise teams precisely because Linux wasn’t engineered for non-technical usability so much as security. As more distros bake in support for Ansible or other endpoint management schemes out of the box, and more sweatshop-tier technical talent gain experience in Linux, this is going to gradually become a non-issue. The infinitely harder sell will be convincing businesses they don’t need stupid automated scores and algorithms like Microsoft shoehorns into M365, as those are privacy and security (and thus, legal) risks.<p>* Linux is software-secure but not hardware-secure, as in anti-theft or recovery mechanisms. Businesses want parts-pairing so we can better detect or identify intrusions, as well as remain compliant with the bevvy of frameworks and standards out there that mandate strict hardware controls. <i>This is what mandates Windows and Microsoft tooling in a lot of environments</i>, as they expose and utilize these controls by default. That said, Linux is also making major inroads in addressing these issues, and I expect them to be at or better than parity with Windows long before 2030; it’s also not fair to begrudge Linux about this, since a lot of it comes from Microsoft trying to kneecap competition.<p>Folks like to point to the gaming situation and say that’s why Microsoft will kill Windows, but I say the opposite: businesses want to kill Windows to save on costs, and will take the first affordable off-ramps they come across. A RHEL/SUSE/Ubuntu Enterprise distro that is immediately compatible with most Windows binaries and is backed with documentation and support will devour Microsoft’s lunch.
Clickbait spoiler: "I predict that within 15 years Microsoft will discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows themed Linux distribution."
Tldr: "Prediction: 2041 will be the year of the Linux Desktop!'
I can't really envision what Microsoft stands to gain by doing this. If Windows were to become a Linux distribution, what reason would anyone have anymore to buy Windows, or Windows Server? I can run Linux for free. Any kernel modifications Microsoft makes would have to be open-sourced, due to the GPL, so I'm not missing out on those either. What's the unique value proposition at that point?
The amount that Windows contributes to Microsoft's revenue has been falling for years. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Windows accounted for 11.35% of their revenue (including enterprise and OEM sales). They make most of their money in cloud services these days. I think Microsoft has been aiming for the effective retirement of Windows for a long time, and this will continue. That's why they don't care that Windows is getting increasingly irritating for people, and why they keep pushing their services so hard.<p>Windows being replaced by Linux (or something similar) would make perfect sense. It would reduce their maintenance and development costs by a <i>lot</i>, and for a product that isn't their breadwinner, that is likely very tempting.