9 ms·

I suggested on Mini-Microsoft about 10 years ago that Microsoft do an 'Apple'. Apple took a free OS from BSD and put their own GUI over the top of it. I suggest

I suggested on Mini-Microsoft about 10 years ago that Microsoft do an 'Apple'. Apple took a free OS from BSD and put their own GUI over the top of it. I suggested that MSFT do the same sort of thing, that being to put their Windows GUI on top of the Linux OS instead of using the Linux X11 GUIs. This had the advantage that the underlying OS base would no longer need maintaining by Microsoft, and all their coding efforts could be allocated to the Windows GUI, thus permitting Windows versions to be released far more often than every 5 years as was the case back then. Being full of Softies, the crowd on Mini-Microsoft dismissed my suggestion out of hand, it being sacrilege of course to even think of marrying the 'upstart' Linux with the 'sacred' Windows code. Naturally, today I am smiling to myself that MSFT could have taken my idea and run with it, but were too hidebound to do so and have lost 10 years in the process.

j1vms 8y ago
Never too late for them to make a go for it, even today. But, to avoid alienating their huge existing developer community, they would first do well to get behind Mono [0] and maybe even, make it official (edit: Mono is "Sponsored by Microsoft", so already quite official indeed). In fact, as of 2014, there have been very promising signs in that direction. [1] [0] https://www.mono-project.com/ https://www.mono-project.com/ [1] https://opensource.com/business/14/11/microsoft-dot-net-empower-open-source-communities https://opensource.com/business/14/11/microsoft-dot-net-empo...
- daeken 8y ago
  Mono isn't sponsored by Microsoft; they bought it. They also publish an insane number of things completely open source, developing them in the open. .NET Core being a huge one, but ASP.NET, VSCode, ChakraCore, TypeScript, and so many others. There are 2181 repositories in the MS Github account.
- geofft 8y ago
  Microsoft acquired Xamarin, the corporate sponsors of Mono, in 2016.
innagadadavida 8y ago
While Linux is faster and more scalable, Using BSD like Apple has many advantrges - especially when there are thousands of closed-source windows drivers which will never be released as open source. The other big hurdle is the sad state of Linux graphical facilities in the kernel. For Apple, this was never a problem due to limited hardware choices.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  Well if I were them I'd implement my own stable driver ABI so companies wouldn't be forced to open source them (like it really makes a difference anyway with all the firmware blobs) and you wouldn't have to recompile every single driver for every single kernel revision. I'd also move more stuff into user space like they did in Windows, which is why a video or sound driver crash usually just wigs out the screen for a second instead of crashing the whole system. Given that, maybe it would also be possible to implement a compatibility layer so some amount of current Windows drivers could be used anyway. I don't know if that's feasible, but if it is they're in a position to pull it off.
  - bpye 8y ago
    There is a project called NDISWrapper which attempts to do that. It used to be used quite a bit for WiFi drivers before Linux had decent WiFi drivers for most chipsets.
  - innagadadavida 8y ago
    Not likely to happen - not very long ago, MS likened GPL to a virus. Since then, they have changed a lot, but fundamentally, they need to protect vendors interests, IP, profitability - not appease some open source proponents.
geofft 8y ago
Apple only needed to support their own hardware. Microsoft would need to make Linux work wherever NT works, and would need to figure out a solution for third-party closed-source NT drivers. Besides, in a sense, Microsoft did this when they moved the desktop product line to NT. It wsa a similar compatibility break and a similar improvement in stability and switch to a robust, multiuser, preemptively-multitasking kernel as classic Mac OS to XNU; it's just that the kernel Microsoft already had in house was NT, and the one Apple/NeXT had was XNU.
- MR4D 8y ago
  A shortcut (perhaps the wrong word here) would be to migrate the Xbox to Xbox libraries on top of a Linux core. This would minimize the hardware for them to start with. After a couple years, they could make Windows server run on a Linux core, and then another couple years have Windows run on Linux. The whole progression could be pretty smooth, covering several years and taking a milestone-driven approach. With the surface, im sure hey could use that to their advantage and have kore control over hardware. Perhaps the best impetus to do this would be if they ever really wanted to migrate to ARM and reduce their reliance on the intel platform. The hardware piece is important, but definitely controllable. Just like you mentioned NT, but this time with a smaller set of vendors to work with.
  - riffraff 8y ago
    What would they gain from this?
    - MR4D 8y ago
      Harmonization with the rest of the computing world (everything else is effectively a Unix variant) as well as lower dev costs (kernel dev cost would now be shared with everyone else). Nadella is a smart guy and has moved MSFT in the right direction. If his truly makes sense, then he’ll probably do it.
Ari_Ugwu 8y ago
For the longest time I assumed MS would buy Ubuntu. I'm not a .NET dev currently running PopOs on my XPS 13. VS Code is my primary editor for all things. If MS released a desktop that looked this good and came batteries included for their tool chains and services I'd hop in a heart beat. My only guess is that doing so would lower consumer confidence in the corporate space? I know Chrome books are making a push there and the psychological factor of "it's not Windows" does seem to be a competitive advantage for MS (for now).
- halbritt 8y ago
  I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 on an XPS 15 and VS Code is my primary editor and I totally agree.
- ThrowawayR2 8y ago
  > For the longest time I assumed MS would buy Ubuntu. Microsoft was apparently one of the candidates that was in talks to buy Red Hat. https://www.businessinsider.com/red-hat-deal-talks-with-amazon-microsoft-google-before-34-billion-ibm-acquisition-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/red-hat-deal-talks-with-amaz... According to the article, they eventually dropped out because of anti-trust concerns.
dankube 8y ago
They already did that once. It's called Windows NT, largely derived from DEC VMS. Here's an article about it: https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...
- mianos 8y ago
  Not derived at all. The design principles and operation are similar due to a few of the same people working on both. Would you say Linux is derived from Unix? I guess many would but, personally, I am working on a new trading system, would it be derived from my previous work? I would say this one is brand new, but shares common concepts due to the requirement of being a trading system. I would definitely say it is not derived at all. The way I do things similarly because they work well in practice is not derivation to me.
Endy 8y ago
That would have been the end of me using computers, right then and there. An operating system that updates or upgrades more than about once per decade is moving entirely too fast. 5 years about the fastest possible rate that even approaches being reasonable. The fact that Windows has always bent over backwards to provide backward compatibility would be totally invalidated by shifting toward Linux. I run a bunch of DOS programs in Win 7 still, without needing to go through DOSBox, and that's not counting my collection of 3.1 and 9x programs which I actively use. So yes, giving up entirely on the good things that Windows does without respect to the GUI and accepting the practices of Linux/Unix devs who have little or no respect for the past would be nothing short of a catastrophic mistake. Your idea would likely have killed computing forever, in my view, especially enterprise or professional-use computing, and within the first two rapid releases that broke necessary functions. It's the so-called 'Softies' who keep the world running and effective for normal people who don't want to have to figure out how to compile a program just to turn on their computer and do the things they need. And it would have killed home use as well - we don't need network workstations at home with limited control, we need computers that we have full control over, all the time.
- subway 8y ago
  > And it would have killed home use as well - we don't need network workstations at home with limited control, we need computers that we have full control over, all the time. looks at the state of desktop computing ..and yet, here we are.
- justinclift 8y ago
  > ... the practices of Linux/Unix devs who have little or no respect for the past Maybe some Linux devs, but many Unix devs have been around a long time and are pretty insistent on backwards compatibility too. ;)
  - Zardoz84 8y ago
    shit... There are some Unix software from 80's that runs unmodified on modern Linux. You only need to recompile it.
justinclift 8y ago
> ... put their Windows GUI on top of the Linux OS instead of using the Linux X11 GUIs. So, put the Win10 GUI on a Linux desktop? As the saying goes "Now you have two problems". :)
didibus 8y ago
I would like that quite a bit. As X11 is probably the worst part of Linux. That said, you'd lose a lot of apps and games in the process.
aasasd 8y ago
Among all the other reasons why not, I think GPL would pose a hurdle. (And I wonder if that influenced Apple's choice of BSD vs GNU―though I guess GNU didn't have a popular OS back in '95.)

j1vms 8y ago

Never too late for them to make a go for it, even today. But, to avoid alienating their huge existing developer community, they would first do well to get behind Mono [0] and maybe even, make it official (edit: Mono is "Sponsored by Microsoft", so already quite official indeed). In fact, as of 2014, there have been very promising signs in that direction. [1] [0] https://www.mono-project.com/ https://www.mono-project.com/ [1] https://opensource.com/business/14/11/microsoft-dot-net-empower-open-source-communities https://opensource.com/business/14/11/microsoft-dot-net-empo...

daeken 8y ago
Mono isn't sponsored by Microsoft; they bought it. They also publish an insane number of things completely open source, developing them in the open. .NET Core being a huge one, but ASP.NET, VSCode, ChakraCore, TypeScript, and so many others. There are 2181 repositories in the MS Github account.
geofft 8y ago
Microsoft acquired Xamarin, the corporate sponsors of Mono, in 2016.

innagadadavida 8y ago

While Linux is faster and more scalable, Using BSD like Apple has many advantrges - especially when there are thousands of closed-source windows drivers which will never be released as open source. The other big hurdle is the sad state of Linux graphical facilities in the kernel. For Apple, this was never a problem due to limited hardware choices.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
Well if I were them I'd implement my own stable driver ABI so companies wouldn't be forced to open source them (like it really makes a difference anyway with all the firmware blobs) and you wouldn't have to recompile every single driver for every single kernel revision. I'd also move more stuff into user space like they did in Windows, which is why a video or sound driver crash usually just wigs out the screen for a second instead of crashing the whole system. Given that, maybe it would also be possible to implement a compatibility layer so some amount of current Windows drivers could be used anyway. I don't know if that's feasible, but if it is they're in a position to pull it off.
- bpye 8y ago
  There is a project called NDISWrapper which attempts to do that. It used to be used quite a bit for WiFi drivers before Linux had decent WiFi drivers for most chipsets.
- innagadadavida 8y ago
  Not likely to happen - not very long ago, MS likened GPL to a virus. Since then, they have changed a lot, but fundamentally, they need to protect vendors interests, IP, profitability - not appease some open source proponents.

geofft 8y ago

Apple only needed to support their own hardware. Microsoft would need to make Linux work wherever NT works, and would need to figure out a solution for third-party closed-source NT drivers. Besides, in a sense, Microsoft did this when they moved the desktop product line to NT. It wsa a similar compatibility break and a similar improvement in stability and switch to a robust, multiuser, preemptively-multitasking kernel as classic Mac OS to XNU; it's just that the kernel Microsoft already had in house was NT, and the one Apple/NeXT had was XNU.

MR4D 8y ago
A shortcut (perhaps the wrong word here) would be to migrate the Xbox to Xbox libraries on top of a Linux core. This would minimize the hardware for them to start with. After a couple years, they could make Windows server run on a Linux core, and then another couple years have Windows run on Linux. The whole progression could be pretty smooth, covering several years and taking a milestone-driven approach. With the surface, im sure hey could use that to their advantage and have kore control over hardware. Perhaps the best impetus to do this would be if they ever really wanted to migrate to ARM and reduce their reliance on the intel platform. The hardware piece is important, but definitely controllable. Just like you mentioned NT, but this time with a smaller set of vendors to work with.
- riffraff 8y ago
  What would they gain from this?
  - MR4D 8y ago
    Harmonization with the rest of the computing world (everything else is effectively a Unix variant) as well as lower dev costs (kernel dev cost would now be shared with everyone else). Nadella is a smart guy and has moved MSFT in the right direction. If his truly makes sense, then he’ll probably do it.

Ari_Ugwu 8y ago

For the longest time I assumed MS would buy Ubuntu. I'm not a .NET dev currently running PopOs on my XPS 13. VS Code is my primary editor for all things. If MS released a desktop that looked this good and came batteries included for their tool chains and services I'd hop in a heart beat. My only guess is that doing so would lower consumer confidence in the corporate space? I know Chrome books are making a push there and the psychological factor of "it's not Windows" does seem to be a competitive advantage for MS (for now).

halbritt 8y ago
I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 on an XPS 15 and VS Code is my primary editor and I totally agree.
ThrowawayR2 8y ago
> For the longest time I assumed MS would buy Ubuntu. Microsoft was apparently one of the candidates that was in talks to buy Red Hat. https://www.businessinsider.com/red-hat-deal-talks-with-amazon-microsoft-google-before-34-billion-ibm-acquisition-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/red-hat-deal-talks-with-amaz... According to the article, they eventually dropped out because of anti-trust concerns.

dankube 8y ago

They already did that once. It's called Windows NT, largely derived from DEC VMS. Here's an article about it: https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...

mianos 8y ago
Not derived at all. The design principles and operation are similar due to a few of the same people working on both. Would you say Linux is derived from Unix? I guess many would but, personally, I am working on a new trading system, would it be derived from my previous work? I would say this one is brand new, but shares common concepts due to the requirement of being a trading system. I would definitely say it is not derived at all. The way I do things similarly because they work well in practice is not derivation to me.

Endy 8y ago

That would have been the end of me using computers, right then and there. An operating system that updates or upgrades more than about once per decade is moving entirely too fast. 5 years about the fastest possible rate that even approaches being reasonable. The fact that Windows has always bent over backwards to provide backward compatibility would be totally invalidated by shifting toward Linux. I run a bunch of DOS programs in Win 7 still, without needing to go through DOSBox, and that's not counting my collection of 3.1 and 9x programs which I actively use. So yes, giving up entirely on the good things that Windows does without respect to the GUI and accepting the practices of Linux/Unix devs who have little or no respect for the past would be nothing short of a catastrophic mistake. Your idea would likely have killed computing forever, in my view, especially enterprise or professional-use computing, and within the first two rapid releases that broke necessary functions. It's the so-called 'Softies' who keep the world running and effective for normal people who don't want to have to figure out how to compile a program just to turn on their computer and do the things they need. And it would have killed home use as well - we don't need network workstations at home with limited control, we need computers that we have full control over, all the time.

subway 8y ago
> And it would have killed home use as well - we don't need network workstations at home with limited control, we need computers that we have full control over, all the time. looks at the state of desktop computing ..and yet, here we are.
justinclift 8y ago
> ... the practices of Linux/Unix devs who have little or no respect for the past Maybe some Linux devs, but many Unix devs have been around a long time and are pretty insistent on backwards compatibility too. ;)
- Zardoz84 8y ago
  shit... There are some Unix software from 80's that runs unmodified on modern Linux. You only need to recompile it.

justinclift 8y ago

> ... put their Windows GUI on top of the Linux OS instead of using the Linux X11 GUIs. So, put the Win10 GUI on a Linux desktop? As the saying goes "Now you have two problems". :)

didibus 8y ago

I would like that quite a bit. As X11 is probably the worst part of Linux. That said, you'd lose a lot of apps and games in the process.

aasasd 8y ago

Among all the other reasons why not, I think GPL would pose a hurdle. (And I wonder if that influenced Apple's choice of BSD vs GNU―though I guess GNU didn't have a popular OS back in '95.)