Yep, absolutely. It may not happen next year, but it will happen. The point at which this move became obvious is when they gave up on EdgeHTML and switched to B

Yep, absolutely. It may not happen next year, but it will happen. The point at which this move became obvious is when they gave up on EdgeHTML and switched to Blink. Just like web engines, operating systems are hard. They require a lot of experienced, highly paid engineers to keep working at the leading edge of tech. When you have a free, open source, collaboratively developed competitor at a similar or better level of tech as your product, why bother spending all that money on making your own? Just use Linux! Basing Windows on Linux means MS gets the benefit of thousands of contributors from other companies and individual users. Their users don't care because Word and Photoshop still run fine on a light virtualization layer, and for less involved apps a MS-supported Wine will run them with 0 performance loss. Hardware vendors will initially be unhappy, as they may have to rewrite their drivers for Linux, but in the longer term it is a great advantage to them - a single driver could power their hardware in literally every computer on earth except macs. That's an unparalled level of compatibility we've never seen before. Windows would also run 100% flawlessly on other CPU archs. It would be trivial to port Windows to ARM and take advantage of the laptop-class ARM chips coming out recently. Old x86 programs run happily in the virtualized environment, and everything else is probably open source. (Admittedly a lot of companies will still ship closed source apps for Windows, so they will have to port in-house). I think UWP apps are already arch-independant and run on NET, which is already open source and I think runs on ARM. I think the business case for WindowsLinux over plain Linux would still come from the NT kernel and userland, though. The VM delivered to every WindowsLinux user would still be a big blob of proprietary code, running on an OSS VM. Microsoft would be charging enterprise for a guaranteed-flawless and seamless way of running their legacy and big commercial apps on WindowsLinux. No need for a 'virtual desktop', all apps will run with no window decorations on the native desktop and be decorated natively. The VM would be entirely invisible. Perhaps even the GUI could be drawn outside the VM, with drawing/GPU commands going to virtual components inside the VM which redirect them outside.