I'm not sure I follow what level the EEE plays on. I think if anything, Windows has a serious issue of long-term viability because of the dominance of the brows

I'm not sure I follow what level the EEE plays on. I think if anything, Windows has a serious issue of long-term viability because of the dominance of the browser in modern desktop applications. The browser has succeeded in opening the walled gardens of OS makers, and there is really no reason for most apps to be running on a specific OS, or even for most apps to have an installation. (I know, HN is probably averse to this, but for most users this is really the truth). Your OS is basically a gateway into the internet, the days of win32 are gone, and now Windows leans into that bundling Webview2 into win11, so that your electron-like apps won't have to be so bloated, and so slow. I think this move is in the same direction: Windows admitting defeat in the developer space and trying to become the gateway to linux to avoid being obsolete. WSL is kind of the inverse of EEE from the perspective of Windows. So what about directX specifically? Maybe I'm missing something but I doubt there will be a future where Linux loses much from this: If you start building an app now, would you build it on Linux but then link to DX12 WITHOUT also having vulkan support for native linux? Not really, you would just build it on windows completely. If you have a Linux app now, and you include DX12 support, would you transition to windows? Not really, your entire app depends on the linux standard libs, and you can now have windows support through wsl anyway. If you're doing some scientific computing or ML would you now do it on windows against DX12 from Linux? Ultimately you won't deploy on WSL in the cloud, I hope. Why make your dev/prod so different? I think what Windows could be doing here is moving to become the best linux distro in 20 years. I think ultimately thats a good thing. Imagine Windows is just Linux with a proprietary desktop shell around it, and everyone uses it for their daily use. That just means that Linux adoption is much greater, and porting apps to linux from windows is already 90% done because they share a backend. I think Microsoft may realise the best way to make money is to not have to maintain an entire OS in the first place. Basically that would mean OSes become like the car market: no matter what you buy, it looks a bit different, but you get kind of the same thing under the hood. And that thing would be linux. It may mean that Desktop Linux will never make it, but I'm not so sure. Those 2.5% marketshare are not people who are easily sold to Windows, and will see it as an inferior Linux anyway.