The Windows NT kernel is generally excellent and has a lot of nice things that make it more appropriate for things like the desktop (the existence of a stable d

The Windows NT kernel is generally excellent and has a lot of nice things that make it more appropriate for things like the desktop (the existence of a stable driver model/API comes to mind). People clamor for Linux to be everywhere, but the effects of never really being designed are clear; it is an amazing collection of kludge accumulated over decades in an attempt to catch up to NT. The only real advantage of Linux over NT for the x86 desktop is that it is free. Making NT open source in some way (kind of like the macOS model of open kernel + closed userland) would be a better move for the community; NT is part of a fundamentally different family of operating system designs. I'm personally not a fan of giving up on diversity and wholly adopting an OS monoculture. Without NT, your options would be Unix variants (*BSD), kludged Unix variants (macOS), and Unix clones (Linux).