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My understanding is that the portion of revenue Microsoft makes from Windows these days is nearly negligible (under 10%). Both XBox and Office individually make

My understanding is that the portion of revenue Microsoft makes from Windows these days is nearly negligible (under 10%). Both XBox and Office individually make more money for Microsoft than Windows, which indicates that they don't have a compelling incentive to improve it technically. This would explain their infatuation with value extraction initiatives like ads in Explorer and Recall. My understanding is that the main thing keeping Windows relevant is the support for legacy software, so they'd be hesitant to jeopardize that with any bold changes to the kernel or system APIs. That said. Given my imagined cost of maintaining a kernel plus my small, idiolistic, naive world view; I'd love if it Microsoft simply abandoned NT and threw their weight behind the Linux kernel (or if GNU is too restrictive, BSD or alternatively write their own POSIX compliant kernel like MacOS). Linux would be ideal given its features; containers, support for Android apps without emulation, abundance of supported devices, helpful system capabilities like UNIX sockets (I know they started to made progress there but they abandoned further development), and support for things like ROCm (which only works on Linux right now). Microsoft could build Windows on top of that POSIX kernel and provide a compatibility layer for NT calls and Win32 APIs. I don't even care if it's open source. The biggest value for me is development capabilities (my day job is writing a performance sensitive application that needs to run cross-platform and Windows is a constant thorn in my side). Cygwin, msys2/git-bash are all fantastic but they are no replacement for the kind of development experience you get on Linux & MacOS. WSL1 was a great start and gave me hope, but is now abandonware. WSL2 is a joke, if I wanted to run Linux in a VM, I'd run Linux in a VM. I guess a less extreme option would be for Microsoft to extend NT to be POSIX compliant - If I could target unix syscalls during development and produce binaries that worked on Windows, I supposed I'd be happy with that.

EvanAnderson 2y ago
> I guess a less extreme option would be for Microsoft to extend NT to be POSIX compliant... Microsoft had this and abandoned it. I was building GNU software on NT in 2000 under Interix. It became Services for Unix and then was finally abandoned.
- lproven 2y ago
  > was finally abandoned. Was finally _replaced_ by WSL.
  - pxc 2y ago
    By WSL1. But WSL2 is a VM running a Linux kernel, not POSIX compatibility for Windows. There's still all kinds of pain and werodness surrounding the filesystem boundary with WSL2. And contemporary Windows still has lots of inconsistency when trying to use Unix-style paths (which sometimes work natively and sometimes don't), and Unix-y Windows apps are still either really slow or full of hacks to get semi-decent performance. Often that's about Unix or Linux expectations like stat or fork, but sometimes other stuff (see for instance, Scoop's shim executable system that it uses to get around Windows taking ages to launch programs when PATH is long). WSL2 also just isn't a real substitute for many applications. For instance, I'd like to be able to use Nix to easily build and install native Windows software via native toolchains on Windows machines at work. You can't do such a thing with WSL2. For that you need someone who actually knows Windows to do a Windows port, and by all reports that is very different from doing a port to a Unix operating system. Idk if what people are asking for when they say 'POSIX compliant' with respect to Windows really has much to do with the POSIX standard (and frankly I don't think that matters). But they're definitely asking for something intelligible and real that Windows absolutely lacks.
    - EvanAnderson 2y ago
      > But they're definitely asking for something intelligible and real that Windows absolutely lacks. Interix was what Windows lacks, but it was abandoned. It wasn't a Linux compatibility layer like WSL1 (or just a gussied-up Linux VM like WSL2). It was a freestanding implementation of POSIX and building portable software for it was not unlike building software portable to various *nixes. GNU autotools had a target for it. I built software from source (including upgrading the GCC it shipped with). It was much more elegant than WSL and was built in the spirit of the architecture of NT.
      - 2y ago
delta_p_delta_x 2y ago
> I'd love if it Microsoft simply abandoned NT and threw their weight behind the Linux kernel I don't understand why people keep repeating this wish, rather than the arguably better, more competitive option: open-source the NT and Windows codebase, prepare an 'OpenWindows' (nice pun there, really) release, and simultaneously support enterprise customers with paid support licences, like places like Red Hat currently do. > Cygwin, msys2/git-bash are all fantastic but they are no replacement for the kind of development experience you get on Linux & MacOS. I couldn't disagree more. As someone who comes from a mostly-Windows pedigree, UNIX is... pretty backwards, and I look upon any attempt to shoehorn UNIX-on-Windows with a fair bit of disapproval, even if I concede that their individual developers and maintainers have done a decent job. Visual Studio (not Code) is a massively superior development and debugging tool to anything that the Unix crowd have cooked up (gdb? perf? Tell me when you can get flame graphs in one click).
- cherryteastain 2y ago
  > open-source the NT and Windows codebase May be very difficult or impossible if the Windows codebase has third-party IP (e.g. for hardware compatibility) with restrictive licensing
  - jen20 2y ago
    Sun managed it with Solaris (before Oracle undid that work) - indeed they had to create a license which didn't cause problems with the third party components (the CDDL).
    - p_l 2y ago
      The license happened less about third party components (GPLv2 would have worked for that, too, even if it's less understood area), but because GPLv3 was late, Sun wanted patent clause in license, and AFAIK engineers rebelled against licensing that would have prevented BSDs (or other) from using the code. (For those who still believe "CDDL was designed to be incompatible with GPL", the same issues show up when trying to mix GPLv2 and GPLv3 code if you can't relicense the former to v3)
therein 2y ago
> Cygwin, msys2/git-bash are all fantastic but they are no replacement for the kind of development experience you get on Linux & MacOS. > WSL1 was a great start and gave me hope, but is now abandonware. Exactly my thoughts. I really admired the design and how far WSL1 got. It is just sad to see it abandoned. > WSL2 is a joke, if I wanted to run Linux in a VM, I'd run Linux in a VM. I couldn't have said it better. If I wanted to run Linux in a VM, I'd run Linux in a VM, why are we pretending something special is going on.
- wkat4242 2y ago
  Yes WSL1 was really special. Talking to the NT kernel from a Linux environment. I think it was mainly the docker crowd that kept asking for compatibility there :(
  - pxc 2y ago
    Microsoft could have implementes the Docker API as part of WSL1 instead of loading up a real Linux kernel for it. That's how LX Zones on Illumos work for running Docker containers on non-Linux without hardware virtualization. I'm sure it's tricky and hard (just like WSL1 and WINE are tricky and hard), but we know it's at least possible because that kind of thing has been done.
- michalf6 2y ago
  >Exactly my thoughts. I really admired the design and how far WSL1 got. It is just sad to see it abandoned. But why was it better, other than aesthetic preference?
486sx33 2y ago
Pulling WSL from windows 10 was particularly nasty
shiroiushi 2y ago
>threw their weight behind the Linux kernel (or if GNU is too restrictive The GPL isn't too restrictive. Google has no issue with it on Android (which uses a modified Linux kernel). GPL doesn't mean you have to open-source everything, just the GPL components, which in the case of the Linux kernel, is just the kernel itself. MS already contributes a bunch of drivers (for their hypervisor) to the Linux kernel. They could easily make a Linux-based OS with their own proprietary crap on top if they wanted to. >support for Android apps without emulation They wouldn't need CPU-level emulation, but the API would need some kind of compatibility layer, similar to how WINE serves this purpose for Windows applications on Linux. >Microsoft could build Windows on top of that POSIX kernel and provide a compatibility layer for NT calls and Win32 APIs. They don't need to: they can just use WINE. They could improve that, or maybe fork it and add some proprietary parts like CodeWeavers does, or they could even just buy out CodeWeavers.
SideQuark 2y ago
20+B annually is not “nearly negligible.” That’s more revenue than all but 3 other software companies: oracle 46B, SAP $33B, and salesforce 430B. It’s more annual revenue than Adobe and every other software company.
PeterStuer 2y ago
In Microsoft's perfect world your local machines would just be lightweight terminals to their Azure mainframe.
- alt227 2y ago
  This is coming. IMO in 20 years this will be how all devices, including phones, work.
  - alternatex 2y ago
    Without massive (exponential) battery/efficiency improvements it won't happen. Networking isn't something you can magically wave away. It has a cost.
    - alt227 2y ago
      Yes but by removing pretty much all processing on the end device and making it a thin client, you can extend battery life exponentially.
      - pxc 2y ago
        Is it actually the case that local computation on mobile devices is much more expensive than running the radios? I was just the impression that peripherals like the speakers, real radios, and display often burn up much more power than local manipulation of bits.
        alt227 2y ago
        You are definitely correct ni that the screen takes a bit chunk of the power, but it is my understanding that the cpu is taking the most. This is why you cannot run x86 systems on battery power very efficiently. Look at it this way. Older laptops on x86 have the same screens as the newer arm based laptops, but the arm laptops have significantly more battery life using the same battery tech. This is definitely a sign that the processor is the biggest user of power in the system.
PeterStuer 2y ago
"I guess a less extreme option would be for Microsoft to extend NT to be POSIX compliant" Their was a time MS sales posted NT to be more POSIX compatible than UNIXes.
ruthmarx 2y ago
> I'd love if it Microsoft simply abandoned NT and threw their weight behind the Linux kernel Oh hell no! Diversity in operating systems is important, and the NT architecture has several advantages over the Linux approach. I definitely don't want just one kernel reigning supreme, not yet at least - although that is probably inevitable.
7bit 2y ago
> My understanding is that the main thing keeping Windows relevant is the support for legacy software, so they'd be hesitant to jeopardize that with any bold changes to the kernel or system APIs. Without Windows, there would be no platform to sell office (macOS aside). That as a side note. The important piece you are missing is this: The entirety of Azure runs on an optimized Variant of Hyper-V, hence all of Azure runs on Windows. That is SUBSTANTIAL!
lproven 2y ago
> I'd love if it Microsoft simply abandoned NT and threw their weight behind the Linux kernel This entire article is an elegant argument why this would be a terrible idea. Didn't you RTFA? > I guess a less extreme option would be for Microsoft to extend NT to be POSIX compliant Way to expose and highlight your ignorance. :-( NT 3.1, the first release, was POSIX compliant in 1993, and every release since has been.

EvanAnderson 2y ago

> I guess a less extreme option would be for Microsoft to extend NT to be POSIX compliant... Microsoft had this and abandoned it. I was building GNU software on NT in 2000 under Interix. It became Services for Unix and then was finally abandoned.

lproven 2y ago
> was finally abandoned. Was finally _replaced_ by WSL.
- pxc 2y ago
  By WSL1. But WSL2 is a VM running a Linux kernel, not POSIX compatibility for Windows. There's still all kinds of pain and werodness surrounding the filesystem boundary with WSL2. And contemporary Windows still has lots of inconsistency when trying to use Unix-style paths (which sometimes work natively and sometimes don't), and Unix-y Windows apps are still either really slow or full of hacks to get semi-decent performance. Often that's about Unix or Linux expectations like stat or fork, but sometimes other stuff (see for instance, Scoop's shim executable system that it uses to get around Windows taking ages to launch programs when PATH is long). WSL2 also just isn't a real substitute for many applications. For instance, I'd like to be able to use Nix to easily build and install native Windows software via native toolchains on Windows machines at work. You can't do such a thing with WSL2. For that you need someone who actually knows Windows to do a Windows port, and by all reports that is very different from doing a port to a Unix operating system. Idk if what people are asking for when they say 'POSIX compliant' with respect to Windows really has much to do with the POSIX standard (and frankly I don't think that matters). But they're definitely asking for something intelligible and real that Windows absolutely lacks.
  - EvanAnderson 2y ago
    > But they're definitely asking for something intelligible and real that Windows absolutely lacks. Interix was what Windows lacks, but it was abandoned. It wasn't a Linux compatibility layer like WSL1 (or just a gussied-up Linux VM like WSL2). It was a freestanding implementation of POSIX and building portable software for it was not unlike building software portable to various *nixes. GNU autotools had a target for it. I built software from source (including upgrading the GCC it shipped with). It was much more elegant than WSL and was built in the spirit of the architecture of NT.
    - 2y ago

delta_p_delta_x 2y ago

> I'd love if it Microsoft simply abandoned NT and threw their weight behind the Linux kernel I don't understand why people keep repeating this wish, rather than the arguably better, more competitive option: open-source the NT and Windows codebase, prepare an 'OpenWindows' (nice pun there, really) release, and simultaneously support enterprise customers with paid support licences, like places like Red Hat currently do. > Cygwin, msys2/git-bash are all fantastic but they are no replacement for the kind of development experience you get on Linux & MacOS. I couldn't disagree more. As someone who comes from a mostly-Windows pedigree, UNIX is... pretty backwards, and I look upon any attempt to shoehorn UNIX-on-Windows with a fair bit of disapproval, even if I concede that their individual developers and maintainers have done a decent job. Visual Studio (not Code) is a massively superior development and debugging tool to anything that the Unix crowd have cooked up (gdb? perf? Tell me when you can get flame graphs in one click).

cherryteastain 2y ago
> open-source the NT and Windows codebase May be very difficult or impossible if the Windows codebase has third-party IP (e.g. for hardware compatibility) with restrictive licensing
- jen20 2y ago
  Sun managed it with Solaris (before Oracle undid that work) - indeed they had to create a license which didn't cause problems with the third party components (the CDDL).
  - p_l 2y ago
    The license happened less about third party components (GPLv2 would have worked for that, too, even if it's less understood area), but because GPLv3 was late, Sun wanted patent clause in license, and AFAIK engineers rebelled against licensing that would have prevented BSDs (or other) from using the code. (For those who still believe "CDDL was designed to be incompatible with GPL", the same issues show up when trying to mix GPLv2 and GPLv3 code if you can't relicense the former to v3)

therein 2y ago

> Cygwin, msys2/git-bash are all fantastic but they are no replacement for the kind of development experience you get on Linux & MacOS. > WSL1 was a great start and gave me hope, but is now abandonware. Exactly my thoughts. I really admired the design and how far WSL1 got. It is just sad to see it abandoned. > WSL2 is a joke, if I wanted to run Linux in a VM, I'd run Linux in a VM. I couldn't have said it better. If I wanted to run Linux in a VM, I'd run Linux in a VM, why are we pretending something special is going on.

wkat4242 2y ago
Yes WSL1 was really special. Talking to the NT kernel from a Linux environment. I think it was mainly the docker crowd that kept asking for compatibility there :(
- pxc 2y ago
  Microsoft could have implementes the Docker API as part of WSL1 instead of loading up a real Linux kernel for it. That's how LX Zones on Illumos work for running Docker containers on non-Linux without hardware virtualization. I'm sure it's tricky and hard (just like WSL1 and WINE are tricky and hard), but we know it's at least possible because that kind of thing has been done.
michalf6 2y ago
>Exactly my thoughts. I really admired the design and how far WSL1 got. It is just sad to see it abandoned. But why was it better, other than aesthetic preference?

486sx33 2y ago

Pulling WSL from windows 10 was particularly nasty

shiroiushi 2y ago

>threw their weight behind the Linux kernel (or if GNU is too restrictive The GPL isn't too restrictive. Google has no issue with it on Android (which uses a modified Linux kernel). GPL doesn't mean you have to open-source everything, just the GPL components, which in the case of the Linux kernel, is just the kernel itself. MS already contributes a bunch of drivers (for their hypervisor) to the Linux kernel. They could easily make a Linux-based OS with their own proprietary crap on top if they wanted to. >support for Android apps without emulation They wouldn't need CPU-level emulation, but the API would need some kind of compatibility layer, similar to how WINE serves this purpose for Windows applications on Linux. >Microsoft could build Windows on top of that POSIX kernel and provide a compatibility layer for NT calls and Win32 APIs. They don't need to: they can just use WINE. They could improve that, or maybe fork it and add some proprietary parts like CodeWeavers does, or they could even just buy out CodeWeavers.

SideQuark 2y ago

20+B annually is not “nearly negligible.” That’s more revenue than all but 3 other software companies: oracle 46B, SAP $33B, and salesforce 430B. It’s more annual revenue than Adobe and every other software company.

PeterStuer 2y ago

In Microsoft's perfect world your local machines would just be lightweight terminals to their Azure mainframe.

alt227 2y ago
This is coming. IMO in 20 years this will be how all devices, including phones, work.
- alternatex 2y ago
  Without massive (exponential) battery/efficiency improvements it won't happen. Networking isn't something you can magically wave away. It has a cost.
  - alt227 2y ago
    Yes but by removing pretty much all processing on the end device and making it a thin client, you can extend battery life exponentially.
    - pxc 2y ago
      Is it actually the case that local computation on mobile devices is much more expensive than running the radios? I was just the impression that peripherals like the speakers, real radios, and display often burn up much more power than local manipulation of bits.
      - alt227 2y ago
        You are definitely correct ni that the screen takes a bit chunk of the power, but it is my understanding that the cpu is taking the most. This is why you cannot run x86 systems on battery power very efficiently. Look at it this way. Older laptops on x86 have the same screens as the newer arm based laptops, but the arm laptops have significantly more battery life using the same battery tech. This is definitely a sign that the processor is the biggest user of power in the system.

PeterStuer 2y ago

"I guess a less extreme option would be for Microsoft to extend NT to be POSIX compliant" Their was a time MS sales posted NT to be more POSIX compatible than UNIXes.

ruthmarx 2y ago

> I'd love if it Microsoft simply abandoned NT and threw their weight behind the Linux kernel Oh hell no! Diversity in operating systems is important, and the NT architecture has several advantages over the Linux approach. I definitely don't want just one kernel reigning supreme, not yet at least - although that is probably inevitable.

7bit 2y ago

> My understanding is that the main thing keeping Windows relevant is the support for legacy software, so they'd be hesitant to jeopardize that with any bold changes to the kernel or system APIs. Without Windows, there would be no platform to sell office (macOS aside). That as a side note. The important piece you are missing is this: The entirety of Azure runs on an optimized Variant of Hyper-V, hence all of Azure runs on Windows. That is SUBSTANTIAL!

lproven 2y ago

> I'd love if it Microsoft simply abandoned NT and threw their weight behind the Linux kernel This entire article is an elegant argument why this would be a terrible idea. Didn't you RTFA? > I guess a less extreme option would be for Microsoft to extend NT to be POSIX compliant Way to expose and highlight your ignorance. :-( NT 3.1, the first release, was POSIX compliant in 1993, and every release since has been.