I don't see why everything has to be Linux (which I will continue to maintain has neither the better kernel- nor user-mode). Windows and NT have their own stre

I don't see why everything has to be Linux (which I will continue to maintain has neither the better kernel- nor user-mode). Windows and NT have their own strengths as detailed in the very article that this thread links to. When open-sourced they could develop entirely independently, and it is good to have reasonable competition. Porting NT and the Windows shell to the Linux kernel for porting's sake could easily take years, which is wasted time and effort on satisfying someone's not-invented-here syndrome. It will mean throwing away 30+ years of hardware and software backward compatibility just to satisfy an imperfect and impractical ideal. For perspective: something like WINE still can't run many Office programs. The vast majority of its development in recent years has been focused on getting video games to work by porting Direct3D to Vulkan (which is comparatively straightforward because most GPUs have only a single device API that both graphics APIs expose, and also given the fact that both D3D and Vulkan shader code compile to SPIR-V). Office programs are the bread and butter of Windows users. The OpenOffice equivalents are barely shadows of MS Office. To be sure, they're admirable efforts, but that only gets the developers pats on the back.