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Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro

197 points by AndyKelley 9mo ago

malkamius 9mo ago
The "Microsoft Tax" is often cheaper than the "Linux Engineering Salary." While Linux alternatives exist, they require "assembly"—integrating LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, and config management (Ansible/Salt) to do what AD does out of the box. Most businesses don't want to be in the business of maintaining their own identity infrastructure. They want a utility. Between Group Policy’s granular control over the endpoint and the tight integration with Exchange/M365, Microsoft has created a "sticky" ecosystem. I've tried the "DIY" route with Linux mail servers, and the friction of maintaining deliverability and security patches manually is a nightmare compared to the "it just works" nature of the Microsoft ecosystem. I am not a system admin, so maybe this is a crappy take.
- Spooky23 9mo ago
  You’re thinking apples and oranges. Remember that every K-12 student for the last decade is getting it done on the cheapest low bid Chromebook possible. They are true pieces of shit, too-down managed by barely qualified people and yet the kids persevere. That’s the baseline. Windows is an evolution of 1999, slowly shifting to the shitty cloud based model. It is the worst of both worlds. It’s like Peoplesoft in computer form. Even my IT crew at work is all Mac now. Apple is an unreliable partner and a sole source. I think Linux is the pragmatic choice going forward.
  - stock_toaster 9mo ago
    > Remember that every K-12 student for the last decade is getting it done on the cheapest low bid Chromebook possible. > They are true pieces of shit, too-down managed by barely qualified people… I feel like this is even underselling how bad it often ends up being.
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    K-12 american student... I am quite certain there are zero of those devices on my German school neighborhood, or the school on my home district back in Portugal.
    - rootusrootus 9mo ago
      > K-12 american student... And Sweden, and Austria, and there are probably others.
      - pjmlp 9mo ago
        Might be, I am only used to countries where families are still expected to buy their own computers, or get to share one among the family, and school life is still quite analog. Actually I would love to see a report per worldwide schools, to settle this argument about high adoption of Chromebooks outside USA.
        rootusrootus 9mo ago
        > to settle this argument It's really a one-sided argument, I don't need to participate. You assert that this is an America-only phenomenon. Austria and Sweden are just easy examples that falsify your assertion. There is no debate about adoption rates or anything else.
        pjmlp 9mo ago
        Some people tell it is. Just because I find some random Chromebooks at FNAC doesn't mean all schools are racing to adopt them. Thus numbers will be welcomed.
- ocdtrekkie 9mo ago
  I am a sysadmin and Group Policy is the entire moat Microsoft has. Linux has nothing like it, and it probably can't because it requires a level of top down authority over a platform's design and implementation that would be hard in the Linux space. Maybe something like systemd could do something similar which defined policy over all the components they've taken over, but a distro doing it would be pointless, we're not a Linux shop and have at least three different Linux distros in service.
  - Alupis 9mo ago
    Nothing in the linux world would forbid something like Group Policy. A commercial distro that targets large-scale enterprise customers could implement something exactly like Active Directory + friends. Ansible, FreeIPA, and more can be used individually or together to achieve what AD provides. There are large enterprises that are non-windows...
    - ocdtrekkie 9mo ago
      My comment above already addresses this. I'm aware there are large enterprises that are non-Windows. All of them are technology companies. They are well equipped to pay their own developers to compensate for not having Group Policy, and may even be Microsoft competitors who don't want to spend money on them. Ansible being a replacement for Group Policy is very funny. That is like saying Postgres is a replacement for Excel.
      - rtpg 9mo ago
        Not to argue too much against what you're saying but I thought that some EU gov't entities had moved off of Windows a while ago. I know at least one university that doesn't put Windows on its machines either. While Uni requirements are not the same as "enterprise" requirements, it does feel close-ish. Having said all this, I am very primed to believe that they have a Group Policy-sized hole in their systems. Just thinking they are doing ... something.
      - p_ing 9mo ago
        Home Depot used to have a large fleet of RHEL machines within the stores. Looks like they've more recently rolled to SuSe. https://linuxdevices.org/linux-based-pos-rolls-into-home-depot-stores/ https://linuxdevices.org/linux-based-pos-rolls-into-home-dep... (2001!) https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-site-selection/home-depot-upgrades-2-300-retail-edge-locations-using-suse-rancher-k3s https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-site-selecti...
p_ing 9mo ago
M365 and Azure run on the NT kernel. This blog post makes zero sense.
- TacticalCoder 9mo ago
  Linux runs on billions of devices, including billions of phones, Internet routers, 100% of the world's Top 500 supercomputers, etc. This post makes lots of sense: Windows is and has always been (but it's getting worse now, as TFA notes) a turd whose level of turdiness cannot be understated. At some point they may just throw the towel in and use an OS that powers tens of billions of devices (which is where Linux is headed).
  - dotcoma 9mo ago
    I think it’s going to happen in 10 years, not in 15.
  - ocdtrekkie 9mo ago
    In every case an enterprise is using Windows they are fundamentally not using the version that is getting worse. For a pricey enough SKU, every antifeature is actually optional. And in a lot of ways the underlying engineering of Windows remains superior, once you scrape away all of the layers of garbage the services offerings have foisted on it. Windows 10 Mobile was so much more performant than Android it isn't even funny. Linux OSes still have an annoying habit of not automatically recovering their disk drive when the power cuts out. The occasional moment you discover that shadow copies/journaling is like... not something Linux machines generally do unless you very specifically choose otherwise... If someone actually scraped the turds off the top of Windows, everyone would move to it. The problem is the turds are profitable. The primary difference between Linux and Windows is not engineering, it's capitalism.
    - imtringued 9mo ago
      >Linux OSes still have an annoying habit of not automatically recovering their disk drive when the power cuts out. I don't know how to respond to this, because it seems like a statement so obviously untrue/false it might as well be slander. It's like saying the sky is red. >The occasional moment you discover that shadow copies/journaling is like... not something Linux machines generally do unless you very specifically choose otherwise... ext4 is the default and it is a journaling filesystem. The only other default I could possibly imagine is xfs on Redhat, but even that is a journaling filesystem. You must be really going out of your way to pick a filesystem that doesn't support journalling.
ThrowawayB7 9mo ago
This guy is in for a disappointing future since he seems to be unaware that Windows is more than than the consumer editions. Revenue from Windows Enterprise (which has management tools like Active Directory and backwards compatibility with non-game apps needed for large corporate deployments) and Windows Server (needed for Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) is still in the billions and there's nothing on the horizon in the Linux ecosystem to replace those. Given that Microsoft is going to have to continue to develop Windows anyway, there's not much reason for them to throw in the towel on the consumer desktop.
- zbentley 9mo ago
  > Given that Microsoft is going to have to continue to develop Windows anyway, there's not much reason for them to throw in the towel on the consumer desktop. That would make sense … if Microsoft didn’t have the second most bonkers track record in history (after Google) in the domain of “fragmenting and releasing competing reimplementations of products already in your core portfolio”!
- Alupis 9mo ago
  None of the software and services you mentioned require Windows though - they could be made to run on Linux, and some already do. As more and more revenue shifts from desktop/servers to cloud and services, it doesn't seem too far-fetched for Microsoft to decide maintaining the entire OS stack themselves makes less and less sense. A Microsoft Windows linux distro would free up resources to focus on what makes Windows unique.
  - p_ing 9mo ago
    Exchange is very dependent on Win32 and .NET Framework. As is ODSP and Dynamics. Azure under the hood is Hyper-V with most services built upon that dependency. Yes, millions of man hours, monkies, and typewriters you could transform this to Linux. The economics aren't there when Azure/M365 keeps pulling in money running on it's current platform hand over fist.
    - 9mo ago
notherhack 9mo ago
Clickbait spoiler: "I predict that within 15 years Microsoft will discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows themed Linux distribution."
- dang 9mo ago
  Funnily enough I just edited the title to say that (shortened to fit HN's 80 char limit) and then saw your comment! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1pmptO47zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1pmptO47zs
wavemode 9mo ago
I can't really envision what Microsoft stands to gain by doing this. If Windows were to become a Linux distribution, what reason would anyone have anymore to buy Windows, or Windows Server? I can run Linux for free. Any kernel modifications Microsoft makes would have to be open-sourced, due to the GPL, so I'm not missing out on those either. What's the unique value proposition at that point?
- JohnFen 9mo ago
  The amount that Windows contributes to Microsoft's revenue has been falling for years. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Windows accounted for 11.35% of their revenue (including enterprise and OEM sales). They make most of their money in cloud services these days. I think Microsoft has been aiming for the effective retirement of Windows for a long time, and this will continue. That's why they don't care that Windows is getting increasingly irritating for people, and why they keep pushing their services so hard. Windows being replaced by Linux (or something similar) would make perfect sense. It would reduce their maintenance and development costs by a lot, and for a product that isn't their breadwinner, that is likely very tempting.
  - wavemode 9mo ago
    > In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Windows accounted for 11.35% of their revenue That's over 25 billion dollars. > They make most of their money in cloud services these days. And why, if you had to take guess, do large companies tend to buy those cloud services? Microsoft killing Windows would be like Amazon killing Prime. Like, no, it itself is not keeping the company afloat in terms of revenue - but, take a wild guess where most Prime members buy most of their online products?
RomanPushkin 9mo ago
Prediction for the next 15 years: new operating system called Uni. AI will finally get to the point when it can actually reliably replicate the entire OS stack and it will be Windows. I mean Windows stack will get integrated into Linux, but not by Microsoft. It will be done by AI/Linux enthusiasts. Won't happen in 2026, since AI coding is still dumb, and Cursor failed to produce a working version of a browser (despite claiming that). But soon binary files will be reverse engineered, and the whole NT kernel stack will be transferred to Linux. At the same time there is a chance that new, AI-produced, fully Windows-compatible operating systems will start to emerge. OS similar to Windows 95.
delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
As a Windows system and user-mode dev, I absolutely never understand these sorts of drive-by posts with nearly zero technical depth. If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture, and absolute plethora of user-mode libraries that come with the OS, that can be programmed against with a variety of languages from ancient to brand-new, all maintained by the vendor. Doing the same thing on a given distro of Linux is a headache at best, and impossible at worst (which is partly why game developers don't target native Linux). The problems with Windows have always been in the user-mode (with the notable exception of Vista, and I still maintain that Vista was OK; its problems were due to Intel strong-arming MS into certifying a broken version of Vista for its sub-par integrated GPUs of the time). Windows 11 control panel sort-of gone? There's still the god-mode menu introduced in Vista. Right-click menu gone, or too much Copilot? Go to Group Policy editor, switch off what you don't need; revert what you can. People complain you 'cannot create local user accounts any more'. Also not true, that feature is a fundamental part of Windows and probably won't ever be removed. There are workarounds. Any Windows user or sysadmin worth their salt will have a GPE fleet-wide policy, and registry settings. Everything one sees on Windows can be stripped out and reverted to Windows 2000 mode. That grey boxy UI is literally still there. Compile a program for 32-bit, set the compatibility mode to Windows 2000, and bam, there you go. If you add in the manifests for UTF-8 and high pixel density, the UI is scaled pixel-perfect by the system. Speaking of high pixel density, Windows is the only OS that does scaling properly. macOS just pretends non-'retina' displays don't exist, Linux distros are a minefield of Xorg, Wayland, a million different conf.d files, command-line arguments, and env variables. Why would anyone want to replace their core product with something that a) they cannot control, and b) does not satisfy their business and customer needs?
- dbcooper 9mo ago
  Would it be possible to ship a high performance, lean "modern" Windows, with legacy apps etc run seamlessly in VMs or containers?
  - delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
    This is probably the hypervisor that Azure VMs run on, or perhaps Windows Server. Unlike Linux, (most) legacy apps (if they target NT) don't need VMs or containers; they run natively. You can compile for Windows 2000 on Windows 11 25H2 and run it natively on the host to test.
stego-tech 9mo ago
I think they’re right, but for the wrong reasons. In enterprise land, managing Windows endpoints is an exponentially larger PITA for the very reason that Microsoft can’t even secure their own OS by default or design, and spend more time shoehorning more surveillance and telemetry into OSes than actually improving them. As “traditional” enterprises increasingly move away from on-prem Active Directory and GPOs in favor of MDM policies and SSO providers, the traditional Microsoft central stack becomes more of a liability than an asset. From a manufacturing perspective, Microsoft is arguably one of the worst partners you could have - especially if your product has to be operated offline or in restricted modes. I’ve spent two weeks trying to debug kiosk mode on W11 creating wildly inconsistent logon times compared to W10, and this is just the latest wrinkle in a year of triage and wildfires directly caused by trying to use online-first Microsoft kit in offline-only products. I’ve spent my entire year banging on about how Linux solves much of our product line issues, but the old guard is coasting until retirement with no drive or incentive to change until after they’ve left - a cohort that’ll be 90% gone by 2030. Then you add in the waves made by gaming companies and communities on the platform, and an increasing focus on the OS by developers worldwide seeking to free themselves of Microsoft and Apple taxes, and the memory shortage/AI bubble driving a need to operate with less capable machines, and at the very least it’s plausible that Linux does indeed become the de facto OS. Really, the only things effectively holding back wider adoption are: * User experience remaining wildly inconsistent between Linux distros and Windows machines. Enterprise distros don’t focus on bridging that gap at the moment (they’re more aligned to Mac or Unix users migrating to Linux), but I’d be shocked if there isn’t a direct Windows-alike by 2030 with Enterprise support options. * Endpoint management remains a bugbear for MSPs and Enterprise teams precisely because Linux wasn’t engineered for non-technical usability so much as security. As more distros bake in support for Ansible or other endpoint management schemes out of the box, and more sweatshop-tier technical talent gain experience in Linux, this is going to gradually become a non-issue. The infinitely harder sell will be convincing businesses they don’t need stupid automated scores and algorithms like Microsoft shoehorns into M365, as those are privacy and security (and thus, legal) risks. * Linux is software-secure but not hardware-secure, as in anti-theft or recovery mechanisms. Businesses want parts-pairing so we can better detect or identify intrusions, as well as remain compliant with the bevvy of frameworks and standards out there that mandate strict hardware controls. This is what mandates Windows and Microsoft tooling in a lot of environments, as they expose and utilize these controls by default. That said, Linux is also making major inroads in addressing these issues, and I expect them to be at or better than parity with Windows long before 2030; it’s also not fair to begrudge Linux about this, since a lot of it comes from Microsoft trying to kneecap competition. Folks like to point to the gaming situation and say that’s why Microsoft will kill Windows, but I say the opposite: businesses want to kill Windows to save on costs, and will take the first affordable off-ramps they come across. A RHEL/SUSE/Ubuntu Enterprise distro that is immediately compatible with most Windows binaries and is backed with documentation and support will devour Microsoft’s lunch.
ggm 9mo ago
I would never predict this, but I think it's an idea which has occurred to many people over the years. the name WSL always hinted to me at a group inside MS who wanted Windows to BE the subsystem. I think people who have run UNIX over non-traditional FS get this vibe too. We're used to thinking it has to be some linear progression from FS to VFS to UFS to "all the other FS" and the idea "nah, I can run on NTFS just fine thanks" never occurs to us. But DOSBOOT.EXE to boot unix from DOS...
- poly2it 9mo ago
  WSL was originally going to be named LSW, but had to switch name AFAIR.
  - wiredpancake 9mo ago
    [dead]
- asdf1280 9mo ago
  IIRC, from back when I worked there, they had to name it windows subsystem for linux instead of linux subsystem for windows because there was a copyright problem with putting a term that is copyrighted by someone else (linux) first.
  - skissane 9mo ago
    I think you mean trademarks, not copyrights “X Subsystem for Y” vs “Y Subsystem for X”, where you own one of those trademarks but the other is somebody else’s, is the kind of thing that seems irrelevant to most developers, but pays the salaries of trademark lawyers
- patmorgan23 9mo ago
  I mean it's not totally crazy, Microsoft did rip out Window's original networking stack and replace it with BSDs (which has probably been heavily modified/evolved since then)
  - 9mo ago
deleted 9mo ago
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rpiguy 9mo ago
This is possible… but surely it will be Linux with a walled garden on top. The first clue will be a version of the Xbox running an OS with this model.
- JohnFen 9mo ago
  This is pretty much what I expect. Windows will be "Linux" in a similar sense as Android is "Linux". Or BSD, or whatever. It won't necessarily be Linux specifically, but I expect it will be something.
- jsheard 9mo ago
  The console vendors are deathly allergic to GPL code and won't touch it with a ten foot pole, so even if the Xbox does move away from NT there's almost no chance of it moving to Linux. They'd sooner use a BSD like Sony does, or roll a custom kernel like Nintendo did.
  - Mic92 9mo ago
    Is not steam exactly doing that and other vendors follow their footsteps?
1970-01-01 9mo ago
Tldr: "Prediction: 2041 will be the year of the Linux Desktop!'
- Dylan16807 9mo ago
  Microsoft giving up on Windows entirely is way way beyond year of the Linux desktop.
mortsnort 9mo ago
I think they're going to do the least funny thing imaginable: make Windows software require a valid Windows install. It might all be moot tho if nobody can buy RAM and we're all pushed to cloud computing (yay Azure...). Then your terminal's OS will be pretty irrelevant.
hougaard 9mo ago
Because the "UX" of Windows sucks, Microsoft will switch the "Kernel" to Linux? I don't get the argument. There are parts of Windows I don't like, so I have chosen a 3rd-party (often open-source) replacement. The exact same process as I do on Linux. I don't see why I have to switch to Linux to have that freedom. (and to be honest, I don't care where the taskbar is)
- keyle 9mo ago
  This is a good point. The kernel stuff of Windows isn't really the problem. I've been on macOS for eons, but I still hope that some day, someone at microsoft will have the balls to make a Windows Redux. Which is just Windows 7 with a coat of paint; and less stuff, installable separately; geared towards speed and not stuffings.
  - wincy 9mo ago
    It’ll be like WoW classic servers or old school RuneScape, only for your OS.
    - keyle 9mo ago
      I am completely oblivious to what you stated but it sounds about right :')
  - daviddever23box 9mo ago
    ReactOS has entered the chat.
    - okanat 9mo ago
      Oh man. That would be awesome. However they are already struggling to catch up with Vista-era APIs.
    - keyle 9mo ago
      Yes that project unfortunately just doesn't seem to get there, or is terrible at marketing itself.
stackskipton 9mo ago
Checks the bio Ahh, Zero Sysadmin experience so does not know about amount of legacy garbage being run at many companies and Enterprises. Amount of software running on .Net Framework is mind boggling. If there is not 100% compatibility with .Net Framework on Windows running on Linux, forget it. I know of a company still using Visual FoxPro in 2020 and it was still being maintained. Just like COBOL, across insane amount of businesses/enterprises/government, there are hordes of Windows machines, using technology that last saw updates in early 2000 computing away. Their last supported Windows Server was probably 2008 but somehow they still run on Windows Server 2019 and those licenses are not cheap. Sure, Windows Desktop is clearly becoming "Whatever" by Microsoft but it's also pretty cheap. NT Kernel and UI work has to be done for server side and until that cash cow is dead, shoving slop into Windows Desktop is cheap revenue stream on work they have to do anyways.
- asdff 9mo ago
  You can run .net over wine no?
  - nubinetwork 9mo ago
    It's complicated... there's Windows .net apps (which run in wine through mono), there's Linux .net apps (that get run with dotnet), and there's apps that have to be run through mono directly.
    - flomo 9mo ago
      IIUC, Microsoft bought-out Mono and donated it to Wine, making it effectively legacy. It probably still 'works', but not many big IT departments are going to run critical apps on some old unsupported hackjob.
      - nubinetwork 9mo ago
        Unless the app is also an unsupported hackjob. ;)
  - 9mo ago
tinyhouse 9mo ago
Microsoft's future depends on OpenAI.
leejongyon 9mo ago
Microsoft will likely distribute its own Linux distro someday; however, there is no chance they will ever discontinue the NT.
- wilsonnb3 9mo ago
  They already do that for Azure
- sho_hn 9mo ago
  It already does: Azure Linux (formerly CBL-Mariner).
AndyKelley 9mo ago
In effort to imagine something even funnier: ReactOS developers use Copilot to extract and copyright launder Windows source code, and then rather than fight it, Microsoft starts shipping ReactOS.
- scott01 9mo ago
  But if legal system decides the output of LLMs belongs to the entity that trained it, and given that Copilot has the capability to generate any possible code, that means Microsoft, via Copilot, will own copyright to all possible code in the universe, which will naturally allow Microsoft to acquire ReactOS.
  - okanat 9mo ago
    That would cause huge big and small tech clashes.
  - geon 9mo ago
    Your reasoning makes no sense. It is the output that could be copyrighted, not potential future output. Otherwise anyone could allready claim copyright on everything.
    - scott01 9mo ago
      Obviously, I wasn’t serious :)
aizk 9mo ago
Really the only thing that will move this is market share. With Claude Code and other tools making it super easy to interact with a computer, and Microsoft repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot adding AI everywhere to Windows 11, I've seen a noticeable amount of people actually switch to Linux, despite every year being the year people switch to Linux - AI in your OS that you can't control seems to be the actual tipping point. First it would start with the personal / hobbyists, then very slowly the corporate world (they will always play things safely and slowly), assuming Windows continues to decline, which it almost certainly will.
sodafountan 9mo ago
I think stranger things have happened, but I don't really believe this is all that likely. Windows has sucked for 30 years now; tacking on another 15 probably won't change all that much about the current state of things. Microsoft is an enterprise, and enterprises will continue to crank out enterprisey stuff. Linux is free and open source, developed by people with passion - some of it, I assume, is out of necessity. Unless the working world dramatically changes over the next 15 years, Microsoft is still going to Microsoft. Windows sucks, Azure sucks, Office sucks. Microsoft is a corporation designed to make money, they have a deadlock on the market. From an investor's point of view, they're doing just fine. From a shareholder's point of view, uprooting the entire Windows base to make tech people happy isn't worth the investment. Microsoft hasn't been about making tech people happy since it went public. Microsoft makes money and employs people. People half-heartedly go to work to earn a living, they produce enterprise-grade software. Enterprise software makes money. That's all the investor cares about. Actually, as a matter of fact, having Windows around to drive the continued development of Linux might be a good thing. I know Windows sucks, I know virtually anything technical is dramatically easier on Linux, but anything without competition eventually stagnates. Even if Windows exists simply as a "What not to do" in Linux, it's probably good that it remains around. Currently typing this on a machine that dual-boots both Windows and Linux. Why? Because my laptop came installed with it.
ww520 9mo ago
Nope. The Windows NT kernel is fantastic. It's the Windows user mode apps that people complain about. Replacing the Windows NT kernel with the Linux kernel while keeping the user mode crust serves no purpose.
_moof 9mo ago
I don't disagree with the overall point. I do want to say one thing though. > As a professional programmer, I no longer consider Windows a viable option for serious work. Please get over yourself. There's plenty of actually serious programming work being done on Windows. > If you’re a programmer who’s used to Windows and you think I’m being overly harsh, I encourage you to spend a couple weeks in any other operating system. For the record, I've spent decades in many other operating systems. It's interesting because the OS used to matter. Now 90% of the apps we use are either on the web or are web apps repackaged as desktop apps. Of course I can still tell when I switch between OSes, but it makes much, much, much less of a difference than it used to.
- dang 9mo ago
  "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  There is a certain current that equates being a developer with UNIX, as if the software for other platforms materializes out of fairy wishes from management.
wackget 9mo ago
I'll consider switching to Linux when the GUI becomes as configurable as Windows 10 or earlier. For example, this is my taskbar layout: https://i.ibb.co/1GqKH27L/taskbar-layout.png https://i.ibb.co/1GqKH27L/taskbar-layout.png To my knowledge, it's not possible to achieve anything like this layout on Windows 11, Linux or Mac. I did try it in various Linux distros a few times but frankly got sick of navigating the maze of window managers et cetera. I think something like XFCE came close to providing a Windows-like taskbar but it was still far, far behind what Windows NT can offer.
- LeoPanthera 9mo ago
  You can definitely do this with KDE Plasma. Plasma is so configurable you can make things that are almost impossible to use! And probably good layouts too.
  - tombert 9mo ago
    I haven’t used KDE in more than a decade, but I remember it being irrationally funny to me that I could rotate the desktop icons to any weird angle. I have no idea why anyone would do that, but it was really fun to make my desktop look like it was arranged by someone who hadn’t developed motor skills yet.
- Brajeshwar 9mo ago
  Wow! I used to love doing something very similar. I think it was my last year with Windows (XP). https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-windows-homescreen-2005.jpg https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-windows-homescree... Nowadays, I just have as few as visible, and everything is either Keyboard Shortcuts or some form of `CMD + K` or `CMD + Spacebar`, and start typing.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
  Took me about 2 minutes to replicate on KDE Plasma[0][1]. I have a lot more things in my taskbar that I don't want to remove for this test, so it looks a little more crammed up. [0] https://i.imgur.com/esNjPNg.png https://i.imgur.com/esNjPNg.png [1] I didn't try to replicate it perfectly; things like smaller icons/etc are settings but cba
dzonga 9mo ago
> In 2017 I predicted that most programmers would lose their employer <-> employee bargaining power in the next 15-25 years. even if written in retrospect - this would've been interesting to see. since likely some of the reasons wouldn't include A.I
numpad0 9mo ago
yay beat the author by a year[1]. Which means I would be hardly the first, considering that I'm just a random nobody. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41923011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41923011
phendrenad2 9mo ago
Oh man, it's been too long since someone made this prediction. Last one was Eric "Equivalent Series Resistance" Raymond 5 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j2k9ph/open_sources_eric_raymond_windows_10_will_soon_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j2k9ph/open_so... It's not any more true now than it was then. Windows isn't going anywhere. The author talks about Windows getting worse, and cites someone's low-tier computer taking 5 minutes to start an Unreal game. Nah, not convincing when my NVMe drive works fine. The author talks about games running on Linux. I guess the author missed the part where half of the most popular PC games have been consistently unplayable for 6+ years because the company doesn't believe that they can make anti-cheat work. Ironically, based on that theory, the author says that everyone will "follow the gamers". Yeah, they're currently following the gamers... to where the anti-cheat works.
nomdep 9mo ago
I think he might be right The massive amount of legacy .NET and older software still running in many enterprises isn’t a problem, but a huge business opportunity. My prediction is that Microsoft will push hard their “Azure Virtual Desktop” product: remote, virtualized Windows instances hosted on their own servers to these enterprises. In this model, the operating system running on the client devices will becomes largely irrelevant.
- Uvix 9mo ago
  But in that case, Microsoft still has to support and maintain the Windows OS running within the Azure Virtual Desktop. If they're doing that, why not support it on the end user compute as well, and get that sweet sweet recurring Windows license revenue from businesses?
dmitrygr 9mo ago
NT is an objectively better-designed kernel. Windows userspace is a mess, but replacing the kernel won’t help there. Maybe MS can ship XFCE — that I’d buy.
est 9mo ago
... and support legacy win32 apps with.... wine ?
nxobject 9mo ago
I’m sure that MS knows that NT is the one thing that’s right with their platform…
jasoneckert 9mo ago
With WSL2, Windows can run a real Linux kernel and Linux apps with tight integration into the graphical, network, and storage subsystems. In that configuration, I guess you could say it's already a Linux distribution.
villgax 9mo ago
If they just get a new team and agents to maintain Wine or equivalent, they’ll announce the biggest layoff ever for support, QA and security roles
gmuslera 9mo ago
Besides of the advantages and disadvantages of Linux and/or Windows on this, the problem I see on a Microsoft Linux distribution is not the Linux part, but the Microsoft one. The problem that is driving away users are the company policies, not what the OS can or not do, they were mostly OK with how things were in previous version. So putting the Microsoft policies in a Linux desktop will probably have the same results.
- wmf 9mo ago
  Agreed; the ads and OneDrive and such are not mistakes. They're in Windows because they make money.
  - Ekaros 9mo ago
    I don't really understand why anyone expect similar crap not happening if there ever was some actually popular commercial consumer Linux distribution.
  - mlrtime 9mo ago
    The icloud/google ads are worse IMO. They are impossible to remove once you fill up icloud. Try filling your icloud photos to fill up your space, then try to figure out how to download them all and clean your space efficiently, or don't care it's 100% full, remove any icloud ads.
    - jfoster 9mo ago
      Also if you try to avoid signing in to iCloud on a Mac, prepare to be nagged regularly.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  Linux distros for Netbooks, Chromebooks, Android and Cloud VMs, prove the point of how OEM driven Linux distro experience would look like. Just like with CP/M, MS-DOS, UNIX, and any other OEM driven platform, everyone wants to make differentiation part of their story. Welcome to Asus Linux, Dell Linux, Microsoft Linux, HP Linux,....
dev1ycan 9mo ago
This is never going to happen for obvious reasons, it would mean Adobe and others would release on linux would instantly kill Windows. Anyways, I cannot stress enough how good Linux is today, hell, using Hyprland is so light years ahead of Windows, it's really like going back to Windows 98 when I try to split my screen across my programs or swap desktops compared to Hyprland (personally use Omarchy although I know people dislike all the stuff it comes bundled with). KDE Plasma is also beautiful and incredibly customizable, etc. Linux is just a marvel of an operating system nowadays, the missing software (that can be run with stuff like winboat and other program) is really not a deal breaker compared to having to deal with a beyond terrible OS on a daily basis.
AlienRobot 9mo ago
My prediction is that in 5 years I'll try to drag an image from Chrome into Nemo, my file manager, and it still won't work. I also predict that Mint still won't ship with a font manager. That the workspaces tasklet still won't support dragging and dropping tasks into it to move them between workspaces. That there still won't be a multi-step wizard for creating launchers on the desktop. That there still won't be a proper shortcut format on Linux and people will be forced to still use symlinks, which are a terrible experience for folder shortcuts. And that file managers still won't support creating hard links. That some applications still will have 1 pixel of padding at the top that prevents me from clicking the close button by moving my mouse to the top-right corner. That Nemo still won't tell you that you need to make an appimage executable to run it. That DE's still won't tell you that you need to install and configure flatseal to make some flatpaks actually work. That you'll still be able to change your account password without changing the keyring password and then forgetting your old password and losing your keyring. And that the Linux community will still be telling themselves that the real reason nobody uses Linux is because some lootbox game needs a kernel level anti-cheat, or because the latest gamer keyboard with rainbow-colored LEDs doesn't have a Linux driver, or that the average person just absolutely needs features that only photoshop/microsoft office have.
skissane 9mo ago
What I’d like to see them do, is add more POSIX APIs to Win32 (not some separate environment like WSL is). It would make porting apps from Linux/macOS/etc to Win32 a lot easier, and remove the amount of code required in cross-platform apps/frameworks
- tombert 9mo ago
  I am an avid Linux user, but honestly I think Windows’ lack of POSIX is arguably a benefit. I feel like POSIX has effectively codified mediocrity. It’s not “bad” but I don’t think it’s the be all end all either. Even NT 1 was arguably ahead of the POSIX standard.
  - skissane 9mo ago
    You can have POSIX while having a radically different "not-POSIX" API. A good example of this is IBM's flagship mainframe operating system z/OS – it is a certified Unix, and recent releases have even added a big subset of the Linux namespaces API (to support Kubernetes), but that whole radically different mainframe world is all there too – and Unix processes have direct access to most of it. The official Windows POSIX model – from the NT POSIX system, to Interix/SFU/SUA, through to WSL1/WSL2 – has always been that a process is either POSIX or Win32, never both at once. By contrast, the z/OS model is any mainframe process [0] can turn on POSIX mode ("POSIX(ON)"), gaining access to Unix APIs, but still able to call all the classic mainframe APIs. This is also basically the Cygwin model. But the Cygwin team have to do all kinds of expensive and complex hacks to make it work, while Microsoft could provide the same functionality far more easily. To give a real example – NT lacks an exec() system call, the ability to replace a process with another executable while keeping the same PID. So Cygwin fakes it by starting a child process, but then maintaining "Cygwin PIDs" separate from the NT/Win32 PIDs, and a child process started by exec() inherits the parent's Cygwin PID, so looks to POSIX code like the same process. Microsoft could just implement an exec() system call. Or if for some reason that's too hard, move this "two PIDs" thing into the OS kernel, where everyone would get it for free. [0] not quite true, there are some special types of processes which operate in modes which are incompatible with the use of POSIX APIs; but your average/normal/run-of-the-mill process can.
bfrog 9mo ago
More like windows market share will continue to erode from hostility towards the customer. Who wants SpywareOS 11 with AI-fail on the side while it locks up and freezes the ui on my 16 core machine because it was downloading a file off the internet. It’s abysmal quality control, likely derived from AI centered development and KPIs about user activity monitoring rather than stability, usability, and performance.
sourcegrift 9mo ago
This guys news to meet another guy called Paul Graham who will then tell him that Microsoft was dead in 2008.
voidfunc 9mo ago
Microsoft already has a Linux, it is known as Azure Linux or cbl-mariner depending on the variant. It is not setup for being a general purpose OS. It is what we are supposed to use as our OS for Linux based services in Azure. I just dont buy what the author is selling. Windows NT kernel is _good_. The userland is what is fucked and hated by many. But also Windows is more than just an OS it is an entire enterprise ecosystem. Stuff like Active Directory is a big deal and intimately intertwined with Windows. Also, if there was a push to replace Windows NT with Linux you would have heard about it nnow. That is going to be a huge project and almost impossible to keep under wraps and without leaks. Microsoft isnt Apple when it comes to leak secrecy.
bitwize 9mo ago
Eric S. Raymond wrote the same erotic fanfic a few years back just before his blog went kaputski (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764). It won't happen, because the NT kernel is a massive improvement in architecture over Linux or any conventional Unix—and Microsoft has proven, with WSL1 and 2, that they can achieve Linux compatibility while still basing everything on the NT kernel. Switching the Windows ecosystem to the Linux kernel is harder, because Hyrum's Law applies and some Windows binaries operate by using NT syscalls directly, bypassing msvcrt and Win32. And Windows has something Linux doesn't have, and it would take enormous effort for it to get: a sane driver model. It is possible to ship a device with a binary Windows driver and have it Just Work, even on later versions of Windows; this is just not possible under Linux. The future for Microsoft is doubling down on "security" by making the PC as a platform more restricted: requiring a signed boot path mandatory from power on down through the application level code. They can convince OEMs that this is necessary for compliance with internet safety laws in certain countries, some of which require safety checks (like age verification) even on end-user equipment. It looks to me like some of their moves point in this direction: Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 because the plan is for Windows 12 to be a completely closed platform. Xbox is being phased out because the thing that distinguishes an Xbox from a cut-down PC—the locked-down nature of the platform—is something Microsoft intends to bring to all PCs with Pluton.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  Pluton is already required on CoPilot+ PC branded devices. Those ARM laptops that people are wishing there were more to chose from.
  - pohuing 9mo ago
    The newer amd and Intel systems are also copilot certified. After getting a new laptop last month I can say that it doesn't hurt and has some nice advantages. If you just ignore the stupid names. The NPU means your images can now get indexed by content without ruining your battery life for example, same thing with recall. Without certain hardware requirements there's no way these things could run on device. Now MS just needs to keep working and refining these features that don't sell copilot subscriptions...
fchicken 9mo ago
God help us
ritcgab 9mo ago
These posts are just new slops. An operating system is far more than what you see. And the NixOS + Hyprland + Ghostty combo is clearly a meme now.
barelysapient 9mo ago
I think there’s even odds Microsoft does this. The cost savings would be immense. This ignores the fundamental problem: Microsoft has poor taste. It’s everywhere. Cloud products to operating systems. After peaking in 2010 or so, their products have declined to the point that I’ll do anything to avoid using or interacting with them.
fsckboy 9mo ago
>In 2017 I predicted that most programmers would lose their employer <-> employee bargaining power in the next 15-25 years. This was a pretty controversial take at the time, and I never wrote about it publicly, so it’s hard to claim too much credit for being right. but that didn't happen either the highest skilled programmers still make bank. the huge influx of more marginal "boot camp engineers" are in more precarious economic positions, but they weren't in the population of programmers that form the baseline for your comparison.
- koonsolo 9mo ago
  Maybe it's a US specific thing? I do a lot of hiring, and here in Europe it's quite challenging to find good developers. Once we do, we try to keep them. So at least for us, developers still have a lot of bargaining power.
nurettin 9mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45875486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45875486
prima-facie 9mo ago
I don't want Linux to become as popular as Windows currently is. Its quality would decline drastically as it would be subjected to all sorts of corporate forces. I don't want it to become a commercially driven, adversarial OS like Windows and Mac OS. I want it to remain the free, stable and decent OS it currently is, in a comfortable 3rd place.
- barbs 9mo ago
  Surely the fact that it's open-source means that it can always be forked if it trends in a direction you don't like?
  - pjmlp 9mo ago
    Distrowatch already has too many options.
- shiroiuma 9mo ago
  >I don't want Linux to become as popular as Windows currently is. Its quality would decline drastically as it would be subjected to all sorts of corporate forces. Wrong. Linux is open-source: if you don't like it, you're free to fork it and do it your own way. If some forces tried to make Linux too Windows-like, surely someone would do this. We already have a bunch of different desktop environments because Linux people can't agree on one (one distro, Mint, even replaced Gnome with not one, but two different DEs: Cinnamon and MATE). "Corporate forces" aren't going to somehow take over Linux and make everyone use a Linux distro that looks like Windows 11 (or worse, Windows 8). They can try of course, and they might get a ton of new people using Linux that way, but it isn't going to kill off the more traditional distros, just like Android didn't somehow kill off Ubuntu/Fedora/Debian/Mint/openSUSE/etc. >I don't want it to become a commercially driven, adversarial OS like Windows and Mac OS. Like Android? >I want it to remain the free, stable and decent OS it currently is Its open-source nature guarantees this.
firecall 9mo ago
I’m not even convinced that Microsoft knows how to ship a Windows-themed version of Windows these days! ;-)
bni 9mo ago
People have been predicting this for 30 years. None of the problems in Windows are related to the kernel. In Fact Windows NT and its display server and compositor, most APIs are fine. In some cases superior to Linux. Its just that they ship several giant UI turds on top of it, and candy crush copilot apps preinstalled.
jrflowers 9mo ago
I remember when people said that Windows ME/Vista/8 was so bad that Microsoft would fold/abandon Windows. I don’t think they’re going to going to give up on all that enterprise support money because they made an operating system that ordinary users hate. They have done that so many times already.
pjmlp 9mo ago
They already do, it is called WSL. Really, people want so much The Year of Desktop Linux, yet everyone is busy fighting each other for the last 25 years. The "everyone will switch in droves into Linux" meme keeps popping up every time Windows sentiment is down, since the early 2000's. But then nothing really happens, because Linux distros keep being for highly technical people, or those that happen to have free technical support from their children or grandchildren. Without Proton Valve doesn't even have games for SteamDeck, as they failed to create a business case that even studios that already have games using the technology stack available on GNU/Linux, targeted to Android NDK, don't bother with porting their games. When buying devices online like the Dell XPS Developers edition, the usual "works best with Windows" was still all over the place. Year of Desktop Linux is already here, on WSL and Apple Virtual Framework, and those companies have no commercial reason to go beyond that, regardless of Internet wishes.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
beAbU 9mo ago
I'm not so sure. The article starts by stating MS does not have the resources to properly support Windows any more. And the solution is to roll their own linux distro? Also, NT, the Windows kernel, is actually pretty good. Is that the bit MS will swap out? Also also, for better or worse, Windows is famously backwards compatible. Will they throw all that out? But who knows, stranger things have happened.
- Sammi 9mo ago
  Like MS ditching Internet Explorer in favor of basing Edge on Chrome?
- shiroiuma 9mo ago
  >Also also, for better or worse, Windows is famously backwards compatible. Will they throw all that out? Sure, why not? Because after all, Windows is not actually backwards compatible; it's why they have something call "WoW" (Windows on Windows). Basically, when you run older Windows software, you're not running it natively, you're running it through a compatibility layer, exactly how "WINE" works in Linux. Doing the same thing in Linux would be mostly trivial, since WINE already exists, and they could even improve it since they own all the important DLLs. >Also, NT, the Windows kernel, is actually pretty good. Is that the bit MS will swap out? It is? How so? It's tied to a crappy and obsolete filesystem, and its device driver support isn't that great since it relies on vendors a lot still, rather than being under MS's control. Perhaps the scheduler is nice, I dunno, but there's a lot more to a kernel than that, and I'd say filesystems and drivers are the most important parts, and parts where MS is behind Linux.
  - p_ing 9mo ago
    > Windows is not actually backwards compatible; it's why they have something call "WoW" (Windows on Windows) Boring semantics. Windows can run it. That's backwards compatibility. NTFS is neither crappy or obsolete. Nor is ReFS. exFAT is crappy, but not obsolete. FAT32 is crappy and obsolete. UDF is well, UDF. I think that's all of the on-disk formats Windows supports OOTB. But you can FUSE if you want more. > device driver support isn't that great since it relies on vendors a lot still As does Linux. Who do you think contributes those drivers to the kernel? Linus himself?
benterix 9mo ago
I don't get it, why is this on the front page? None of the arguments make any sense. The "Windows is getting terrible" aspect is not an accidental or uncontrollable phenomenon, it's a result of deliberate strategy to onboard all Windows users to Microsoft's cloud just like Apple and Google did. There is no single reason ditching Windows for Linux would help MS in any way.
jemmyw 9mo ago
I remember talking about this 10 years ago. Not as a prediction but as a sensible business move for MS. What is the value in the Windows client now? The consumer side seems like more of a liability. The parts that make money don't need to be in their own operating system. Just like the browser engine no longer made sense, does the OS make sense? They could release all their point and click enterprise tooling on top of a Linux based client. That would be plenty of work but I'm sure enterprises would love to be able to fully manage Linux and Windows machines. Then they could just phase out their own kernel. People point out that the NT kernel is better in several ways to Linux. But that's not really what is important to a company, it's the effort vs value. Linux is so good at running win32 apps now that a moat is drying up. MS could contribute to that effort, and benefit from the Linux development ecosystem in general. It probably won't come to pass.
hoyhoy 9mo ago
I looked through the Windows SDK header files recently due to reasons, and there are very few additions since Windows Vista. MS isn’t actively developing the core functionality of Windows anymore.
rdsubhas 9mo ago
B2C Windows has no growth for year after earnings reports. No growth == It's already Dead. It's now hanging on as slightly useful guinea pigs for B2B. There is no point trying to actively compete in a market for guinea pigs. MS has tried going down the ladder (Chromebook competition route), up the ladder (Mac competition route), side-the-ladder (Windows for Mobile), nothing worked. I agree with the premise of this blog: A compatibility break (which equates to a new product line) with B2C Windows will definitely happen in the next 15 years. But I disagree it will be a Windows themed Linux. It's too huge an effort and support overhead for guinea pigs. My prediction is: A merger of Windows engineering division (which exists as a shared division now between B2C and B2B) into the Windows Enterprise workforce, laying off of the B2C workforce, and thereby making Windows B2C a severely dumbed-down version of Windows B2B where it becomes a new line that actually breaks compatibility with games and downloaded software.
h0ek 9mo ago
They can just acquire one of the existing ones. https://winuxos.org/ https://winuxos.org/ or https://zorin.com/os/ https://zorin.com/os/
estimator7292 9mo ago
This makes zero sense. Microsoft can't and won't do this without abandoning half a century of obsessive backwards-compatability.
daft_pink 9mo ago
Will it be a spyware and ad themed too?
tempodox 9mo ago
This idea has a certain perverse logic. Windoze is already enshittified to the max, enshittifying Linux next will be easier than finding ways to make Windoze worse.
ivanstepanovftw 9mo ago
And call it "Windows Copilot"

197 points by AndyKelley 9mo ago

The "Microsoft Tax" is often cheaper than the "Linux Engineering Salary." While Linux alternatives exist, they require "assembly"—integrating LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, and config management (Ansible/Salt) to do what AD does out of the box. Most businesses don't want to be in the business of maintaining their own identity infrastructure. They want a utility. Between Group Policy’s granular control over the endpoint and the tight integration with Exchange/M365, Microsoft has created a "sticky" ecosystem. I've tried the "DIY" route with Linux mail servers, and the friction of maintaining deliverability and security patches manually is a nightmare compared to the "it just works" nature of the Microsoft ecosystem. I am not a system admin, so maybe this is a crappy take.

Spooky23 9mo ago
You’re thinking apples and oranges. Remember that every K-12 student for the last decade is getting it done on the cheapest low bid Chromebook possible. They are true pieces of shit, too-down managed by barely qualified people and yet the kids persevere. That’s the baseline. Windows is an evolution of 1999, slowly shifting to the shitty cloud based model. It is the worst of both worlds. It’s like Peoplesoft in computer form. Even my IT crew at work is all Mac now. Apple is an unreliable partner and a sole source. I think Linux is the pragmatic choice going forward.
- stock_toaster 9mo ago
  > Remember that every K-12 student for the last decade is getting it done on the cheapest low bid Chromebook possible. > They are true pieces of shit, too-down managed by barely qualified people… I feel like this is even underselling how bad it often ends up being.
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  K-12 american student... I am quite certain there are zero of those devices on my German school neighborhood, or the school on my home district back in Portugal.
  - rootusrootus 9mo ago
    > K-12 american student... And Sweden, and Austria, and there are probably others.
    - pjmlp 9mo ago
      Might be, I am only used to countries where families are still expected to buy their own computers, or get to share one among the family, and school life is still quite analog. Actually I would love to see a report per worldwide schools, to settle this argument about high adoption of Chromebooks outside USA.
      - rootusrootus 9mo ago
        > to settle this argument It's really a one-sided argument, I don't need to participate. You assert that this is an America-only phenomenon. Austria and Sweden are just easy examples that falsify your assertion. There is no debate about adoption rates or anything else.
        pjmlp 9mo ago
        Some people tell it is. Just because I find some random Chromebooks at FNAC doesn't mean all schools are racing to adopt them. Thus numbers will be welcomed.
ocdtrekkie 9mo ago
I am a sysadmin and Group Policy is the entire moat Microsoft has. Linux has nothing like it, and it probably can't because it requires a level of top down authority over a platform's design and implementation that would be hard in the Linux space. Maybe something like systemd could do something similar which defined policy over all the components they've taken over, but a distro doing it would be pointless, we're not a Linux shop and have at least three different Linux distros in service.
- Alupis 9mo ago
  Nothing in the linux world would forbid something like Group Policy. A commercial distro that targets large-scale enterprise customers could implement something exactly like Active Directory + friends. Ansible, FreeIPA, and more can be used individually or together to achieve what AD provides. There are large enterprises that are non-windows...
  - ocdtrekkie 9mo ago
    My comment above already addresses this. I'm aware there are large enterprises that are non-Windows. All of them are technology companies. They are well equipped to pay their own developers to compensate for not having Group Policy, and may even be Microsoft competitors who don't want to spend money on them. Ansible being a replacement for Group Policy is very funny. That is like saying Postgres is a replacement for Excel.
    - rtpg 9mo ago
      Not to argue too much against what you're saying but I thought that some EU gov't entities had moved off of Windows a while ago. I know at least one university that doesn't put Windows on its machines either. While Uni requirements are not the same as "enterprise" requirements, it does feel close-ish. Having said all this, I am very primed to believe that they have a Group Policy-sized hole in their systems. Just thinking they are doing ... something.
    - p_ing 9mo ago
      Home Depot used to have a large fleet of RHEL machines within the stores. Looks like they've more recently rolled to SuSe. https://linuxdevices.org/linux-based-pos-rolls-into-home-depot-stores/ https://linuxdevices.org/linux-based-pos-rolls-into-home-dep... (2001!) https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-site-selection/home-depot-upgrades-2-300-retail-edge-locations-using-suse-rancher-k3s https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/data-center-site-selecti...

p_ing 9mo ago

M365 and Azure run on the NT kernel. This blog post makes zero sense.

TacticalCoder 9mo ago
Linux runs on billions of devices, including billions of phones, Internet routers, 100% of the world's Top 500 supercomputers, etc. This post makes lots of sense: Windows is and has always been (but it's getting worse now, as TFA notes) a turd whose level of turdiness cannot be understated. At some point they may just throw the towel in and use an OS that powers tens of billions of devices (which is where Linux is headed).
- dotcoma 9mo ago
  I think it’s going to happen in 10 years, not in 15.
- ocdtrekkie 9mo ago
  In every case an enterprise is using Windows they are fundamentally not using the version that is getting worse. For a pricey enough SKU, every antifeature is actually optional. And in a lot of ways the underlying engineering of Windows remains superior, once you scrape away all of the layers of garbage the services offerings have foisted on it. Windows 10 Mobile was so much more performant than Android it isn't even funny. Linux OSes still have an annoying habit of not automatically recovering their disk drive when the power cuts out. The occasional moment you discover that shadow copies/journaling is like... not something Linux machines generally do unless you very specifically choose otherwise... If someone actually scraped the turds off the top of Windows, everyone would move to it. The problem is the turds are profitable. The primary difference between Linux and Windows is not engineering, it's capitalism.
  - imtringued 9mo ago
    >Linux OSes still have an annoying habit of not automatically recovering their disk drive when the power cuts out. I don't know how to respond to this, because it seems like a statement so obviously untrue/false it might as well be slander. It's like saying the sky is red. >The occasional moment you discover that shadow copies/journaling is like... not something Linux machines generally do unless you very specifically choose otherwise... ext4 is the default and it is a journaling filesystem. The only other default I could possibly imagine is xfs on Redhat, but even that is a journaling filesystem. You must be really going out of your way to pick a filesystem that doesn't support journalling.

ThrowawayB7 9mo ago

This guy is in for a disappointing future since he seems to be unaware that Windows is more than than the consumer editions. Revenue from Windows Enterprise (which has management tools like Active Directory and backwards compatibility with non-game apps needed for large corporate deployments) and Windows Server (needed for Active Directory, Exchange, SQL Server, etc.) is still in the billions and there's nothing on the horizon in the Linux ecosystem to replace those. Given that Microsoft is going to have to continue to develop Windows anyway, there's not much reason for them to throw in the towel on the consumer desktop.

zbentley 9mo ago
> Given that Microsoft is going to have to continue to develop Windows anyway, there's not much reason for them to throw in the towel on the consumer desktop. That would make sense … if Microsoft didn’t have the second most bonkers track record in history (after Google) in the domain of “fragmenting and releasing competing reimplementations of products already in your core portfolio”!
Alupis 9mo ago
None of the software and services you mentioned require Windows though - they could be made to run on Linux, and some already do. As more and more revenue shifts from desktop/servers to cloud and services, it doesn't seem too far-fetched for Microsoft to decide maintaining the entire OS stack themselves makes less and less sense. A Microsoft Windows linux distro would free up resources to focus on what makes Windows unique.
- p_ing 9mo ago
  Exchange is very dependent on Win32 and .NET Framework. As is ODSP and Dynamics. Azure under the hood is Hyper-V with most services built upon that dependency. Yes, millions of man hours, monkies, and typewriters you could transform this to Linux. The economics aren't there when Azure/M365 keeps pulling in money running on it's current platform hand over fist.
  - 9mo ago

notherhack 9mo ago

Clickbait spoiler: "I predict that within 15 years Microsoft will discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows themed Linux distribution."

dang 9mo ago
Funnily enough I just edited the title to say that (shortened to fit HN's 80 char limit) and then saw your comment! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1pmptO47zs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1pmptO47zs

wavemode 9mo ago

I can't really envision what Microsoft stands to gain by doing this. If Windows were to become a Linux distribution, what reason would anyone have anymore to buy Windows, or Windows Server? I can run Linux for free. Any kernel modifications Microsoft makes would have to be open-sourced, due to the GPL, so I'm not missing out on those either. What's the unique value proposition at that point?

JohnFen 9mo ago
The amount that Windows contributes to Microsoft's revenue has been falling for years. In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Windows accounted for 11.35% of their revenue (including enterprise and OEM sales). They make most of their money in cloud services these days. I think Microsoft has been aiming for the effective retirement of Windows for a long time, and this will continue. That's why they don't care that Windows is getting increasingly irritating for people, and why they keep pushing their services so hard. Windows being replaced by Linux (or something similar) would make perfect sense. It would reduce their maintenance and development costs by a lot, and for a product that isn't their breadwinner, that is likely very tempting.
- wavemode 9mo ago
  > In the 2024-2025 fiscal year, Windows accounted for 11.35% of their revenue That's over 25 billion dollars. > They make most of their money in cloud services these days. And why, if you had to take guess, do large companies tend to buy those cloud services? Microsoft killing Windows would be like Amazon killing Prime. Like, no, it itself is not keeping the company afloat in terms of revenue - but, take a wild guess where most Prime members buy most of their online products?

RomanPushkin 9mo ago

Prediction for the next 15 years: new operating system called Uni. AI will finally get to the point when it can actually reliably replicate the entire OS stack and it will be Windows. I mean Windows stack will get integrated into Linux, but not by Microsoft. It will be done by AI/Linux enthusiasts. Won't happen in 2026, since AI coding is still dumb, and Cursor failed to produce a working version of a browser (despite claiming that). But soon binary files will be reverse engineered, and the whole NT kernel stack will be transferred to Linux. At the same time there is a chance that new, AI-produced, fully Windows-compatible operating systems will start to emerge. OS similar to Windows 95.

delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago

As a Windows system and user-mode dev, I absolutely never understand these sorts of drive-by posts with nearly zero technical depth. If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture, and absolute plethora of user-mode libraries that come with the OS, that can be programmed against with a variety of languages from ancient to brand-new, all maintained by the vendor. Doing the same thing on a given distro of Linux is a headache at best, and impossible at worst (which is partly why game developers don't target native Linux). The problems with Windows have always been in the user-mode (with the notable exception of Vista, and I still maintain that Vista was OK; its problems were due to Intel strong-arming MS into certifying a broken version of Vista for its sub-par integrated GPUs of the time). Windows 11 control panel sort-of gone? There's still the god-mode menu introduced in Vista. Right-click menu gone, or too much Copilot? Go to Group Policy editor, switch off what you don't need; revert what you can. People complain you 'cannot create local user accounts any more'. Also not true, that feature is a fundamental part of Windows and probably won't ever be removed. There are workarounds. Any Windows user or sysadmin worth their salt will have a GPE fleet-wide policy, and registry settings. Everything one sees on Windows can be stripped out and reverted to Windows 2000 mode. That grey boxy UI is literally still there. Compile a program for 32-bit, set the compatibility mode to Windows 2000, and bam, there you go. If you add in the manifests for UTF-8 and high pixel density, the UI is scaled pixel-perfect by the system. Speaking of high pixel density, Windows is the only OS that does scaling properly. macOS just pretends non-'retina' displays don't exist, Linux distros are a minefield of Xorg, Wayland, a million different conf.d files, command-line arguments, and env variables. Why would anyone want to replace their core product with something that a) they cannot control, and b) does not satisfy their business and customer needs?

dbcooper 9mo ago
Would it be possible to ship a high performance, lean "modern" Windows, with legacy apps etc run seamlessly in VMs or containers?
- delta_p_delta_x 9mo ago
  This is probably the hypervisor that Azure VMs run on, or perhaps Windows Server. Unlike Linux, (most) legacy apps (if they target NT) don't need VMs or containers; they run natively. You can compile for Windows 2000 on Windows 11 25H2 and run it natively on the host to test.

stego-tech 9mo ago

I think they’re right, but for the wrong reasons. In enterprise land, managing Windows endpoints is an exponentially larger PITA for the very reason that Microsoft can’t even secure their own OS by default or design, and spend more time shoehorning more surveillance and telemetry into OSes than actually improving them. As “traditional” enterprises increasingly move away from on-prem Active Directory and GPOs in favor of MDM policies and SSO providers, the traditional Microsoft central stack becomes more of a liability than an asset. From a manufacturing perspective, Microsoft is arguably one of the worst partners you could have - especially if your product has to be operated offline or in restricted modes. I’ve spent two weeks trying to debug kiosk mode on W11 creating wildly inconsistent logon times compared to W10, and this is just the latest wrinkle in a year of triage and wildfires directly caused by trying to use online-first Microsoft kit in offline-only products. I’ve spent my entire year banging on about how Linux solves much of our product line issues, but the old guard is coasting until retirement with no drive or incentive to change until after they’ve left - a cohort that’ll be 90% gone by 2030. Then you add in the waves made by gaming companies and communities on the platform, and an increasing focus on the OS by developers worldwide seeking to free themselves of Microsoft and Apple taxes, and the memory shortage/AI bubble driving a need to operate with less capable machines, and at the very least it’s plausible that Linux does indeed become the de facto OS. Really, the only things effectively holding back wider adoption are: * User experience remaining wildly inconsistent between Linux distros and Windows machines. Enterprise distros don’t focus on bridging that gap at the moment (they’re more aligned to Mac or Unix users migrating to Linux), but I’d be shocked if there isn’t a direct Windows-alike by 2030 with Enterprise support options. * Endpoint management remains a bugbear for MSPs and Enterprise teams precisely because Linux wasn’t engineered for non-technical usability so much as security. As more distros bake in support for Ansible or other endpoint management schemes out of the box, and more sweatshop-tier technical talent gain experience in Linux, this is going to gradually become a non-issue. The infinitely harder sell will be convincing businesses they don’t need stupid automated scores and algorithms like Microsoft shoehorns into M365, as those are privacy and security (and thus, legal) risks. * Linux is software-secure but not hardware-secure, as in anti-theft or recovery mechanisms. Businesses want parts-pairing so we can better detect or identify intrusions, as well as remain compliant with the bevvy of frameworks and standards out there that mandate strict hardware controls. This is what mandates Windows and Microsoft tooling in a lot of environments, as they expose and utilize these controls by default. That said, Linux is also making major inroads in addressing these issues, and I expect them to be at or better than parity with Windows long before 2030; it’s also not fair to begrudge Linux about this, since a lot of it comes from Microsoft trying to kneecap competition. Folks like to point to the gaming situation and say that’s why Microsoft will kill Windows, but I say the opposite: businesses want to kill Windows to save on costs, and will take the first affordable off-ramps they come across. A RHEL/SUSE/Ubuntu Enterprise distro that is immediately compatible with most Windows binaries and is backed with documentation and support will devour Microsoft’s lunch.

ggm 9mo ago

I would never predict this, but I think it's an idea which has occurred to many people over the years. the name WSL always hinted to me at a group inside MS who wanted Windows to BE the subsystem. I think people who have run UNIX over non-traditional FS get this vibe too. We're used to thinking it has to be some linear progression from FS to VFS to UFS to "all the other FS" and the idea "nah, I can run on NTFS just fine thanks" never occurs to us. But DOSBOOT.EXE to boot unix from DOS...

poly2it 9mo ago
WSL was originally going to be named LSW, but had to switch name AFAIR.
- wiredpancake 9mo ago
  [dead]
asdf1280 9mo ago
IIRC, from back when I worked there, they had to name it windows subsystem for linux instead of linux subsystem for windows because there was a copyright problem with putting a term that is copyrighted by someone else (linux) first.
- skissane 9mo ago
  I think you mean trademarks, not copyrights “X Subsystem for Y” vs “Y Subsystem for X”, where you own one of those trademarks but the other is somebody else’s, is the kind of thing that seems irrelevant to most developers, but pays the salaries of trademark lawyers
patmorgan23 9mo ago
I mean it's not totally crazy, Microsoft did rip out Window's original networking stack and replace it with BSDs (which has probably been heavily modified/evolved since then)
- 9mo ago

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

rpiguy 9mo ago

This is possible… but surely it will be Linux with a walled garden on top. The first clue will be a version of the Xbox running an OS with this model.

JohnFen 9mo ago
This is pretty much what I expect. Windows will be "Linux" in a similar sense as Android is "Linux". Or BSD, or whatever. It won't necessarily be Linux specifically, but I expect it will be something.
jsheard 9mo ago
The console vendors are deathly allergic to GPL code and won't touch it with a ten foot pole, so even if the Xbox does move away from NT there's almost no chance of it moving to Linux. They'd sooner use a BSD like Sony does, or roll a custom kernel like Nintendo did.
- Mic92 9mo ago
  Is not steam exactly doing that and other vendors follow their footsteps?

1970-01-01 9mo ago

Tldr: "Prediction: 2041 will be the year of the Linux Desktop!'

Dylan16807 9mo ago
Microsoft giving up on Windows entirely is way way beyond year of the Linux desktop.

mortsnort 9mo ago

I think they're going to do the least funny thing imaginable: make Windows software require a valid Windows install. It might all be moot tho if nobody can buy RAM and we're all pushed to cloud computing (yay Azure...). Then your terminal's OS will be pretty irrelevant.

hougaard 9mo ago

Because the "UX" of Windows sucks, Microsoft will switch the "Kernel" to Linux? I don't get the argument. There are parts of Windows I don't like, so I have chosen a 3rd-party (often open-source) replacement. The exact same process as I do on Linux. I don't see why I have to switch to Linux to have that freedom. (and to be honest, I don't care where the taskbar is)

keyle 9mo ago
This is a good point. The kernel stuff of Windows isn't really the problem. I've been on macOS for eons, but I still hope that some day, someone at microsoft will have the balls to make a Windows Redux. Which is just Windows 7 with a coat of paint; and less stuff, installable separately; geared towards speed and not stuffings.
- wincy 9mo ago
  It’ll be like WoW classic servers or old school RuneScape, only for your OS.
  - keyle 9mo ago
    I am completely oblivious to what you stated but it sounds about right :')
- daviddever23box 9mo ago
  ReactOS has entered the chat.
  - okanat 9mo ago
    Oh man. That would be awesome. However they are already struggling to catch up with Vista-era APIs.
  - keyle 9mo ago
    Yes that project unfortunately just doesn't seem to get there, or is terrible at marketing itself.

stackskipton 9mo ago

Checks the bio Ahh, Zero Sysadmin experience so does not know about amount of legacy garbage being run at many companies and Enterprises. Amount of software running on .Net Framework is mind boggling. If there is not 100% compatibility with .Net Framework on Windows running on Linux, forget it. I know of a company still using Visual FoxPro in 2020 and it was still being maintained. Just like COBOL, across insane amount of businesses/enterprises/government, there are hordes of Windows machines, using technology that last saw updates in early 2000 computing away. Their last supported Windows Server was probably 2008 but somehow they still run on Windows Server 2019 and those licenses are not cheap. Sure, Windows Desktop is clearly becoming "Whatever" by Microsoft but it's also pretty cheap. NT Kernel and UI work has to be done for server side and until that cash cow is dead, shoving slop into Windows Desktop is cheap revenue stream on work they have to do anyways.

asdff 9mo ago
You can run .net over wine no?
- nubinetwork 9mo ago
  It's complicated... there's Windows .net apps (which run in wine through mono), there's Linux .net apps (that get run with dotnet), and there's apps that have to be run through mono directly.
  - flomo 9mo ago
    IIUC, Microsoft bought-out Mono and donated it to Wine, making it effectively legacy. It probably still 'works', but not many big IT departments are going to run critical apps on some old unsupported hackjob.
    - nubinetwork 9mo ago
      Unless the app is also an unsupported hackjob. ;)
- 9mo ago

tinyhouse 9mo ago

Microsoft's future depends on OpenAI.

leejongyon 9mo ago

Microsoft will likely distribute its own Linux distro someday; however, there is no chance they will ever discontinue the NT.

wilsonnb3 9mo ago
They already do that for Azure
sho_hn 9mo ago
It already does: Azure Linux (formerly CBL-Mariner).

AndyKelley 9mo ago

In effort to imagine something even funnier: ReactOS developers use Copilot to extract and copyright launder Windows source code, and then rather than fight it, Microsoft starts shipping ReactOS.

scott01 9mo ago
But if legal system decides the output of LLMs belongs to the entity that trained it, and given that Copilot has the capability to generate any possible code, that means Microsoft, via Copilot, will own copyright to all possible code in the universe, which will naturally allow Microsoft to acquire ReactOS.
- okanat 9mo ago
  That would cause huge big and small tech clashes.
- geon 9mo ago
  Your reasoning makes no sense. It is the output that could be copyrighted, not potential future output. Otherwise anyone could allready claim copyright on everything.
  - scott01 9mo ago
    Obviously, I wasn’t serious :)

aizk 9mo ago

Really the only thing that will move this is market share. With Claude Code and other tools making it super easy to interact with a computer, and Microsoft repeatedly shooting themselves in the foot adding AI everywhere to Windows 11, I've seen a noticeable amount of people actually switch to Linux, despite every year being the year people switch to Linux - AI in your OS that you can't control seems to be the actual tipping point. First it would start with the personal / hobbyists, then very slowly the corporate world (they will always play things safely and slowly), assuming Windows continues to decline, which it almost certainly will.

sodafountan 9mo ago

I think stranger things have happened, but I don't really believe this is all that likely. Windows has sucked for 30 years now; tacking on another 15 probably won't change all that much about the current state of things. Microsoft is an enterprise, and enterprises will continue to crank out enterprisey stuff. Linux is free and open source, developed by people with passion - some of it, I assume, is out of necessity. Unless the working world dramatically changes over the next 15 years, Microsoft is still going to Microsoft. Windows sucks, Azure sucks, Office sucks. Microsoft is a corporation designed to make money, they have a deadlock on the market. From an investor's point of view, they're doing just fine. From a shareholder's point of view, uprooting the entire Windows base to make tech people happy isn't worth the investment. Microsoft hasn't been about making tech people happy since it went public. Microsoft makes money and employs people. People half-heartedly go to work to earn a living, they produce enterprise-grade software. Enterprise software makes money. That's all the investor cares about. Actually, as a matter of fact, having Windows around to drive the continued development of Linux might be a good thing. I know Windows sucks, I know virtually anything technical is dramatically easier on Linux, but anything without competition eventually stagnates. Even if Windows exists simply as a "What not to do" in Linux, it's probably good that it remains around. Currently typing this on a machine that dual-boots both Windows and Linux. Why? Because my laptop came installed with it.

ww520 9mo ago

Nope. The Windows NT kernel is fantastic. It's the Windows user mode apps that people complain about. Replacing the Windows NT kernel with the Linux kernel while keeping the user mode crust serves no purpose.

_moof 9mo ago

I don't disagree with the overall point. I do want to say one thing though. > As a professional programmer, I no longer consider Windows a viable option for serious work. Please get over yourself. There's plenty of actually serious programming work being done on Windows. > If you’re a programmer who’s used to Windows and you think I’m being overly harsh, I encourage you to spend a couple weeks in any other operating system. For the record, I've spent decades in many other operating systems. It's interesting because the OS used to matter. Now 90% of the apps we use are either on the web or are web apps repackaged as desktop apps. Of course I can still tell when I switch between OSes, but it makes much, much, much less of a difference than it used to.

dang 9mo ago
"Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
pjmlp 9mo ago
There is a certain current that equates being a developer with UNIX, as if the software for other platforms materializes out of fairy wishes from management.

wackget 9mo ago

I'll consider switching to Linux when the GUI becomes as configurable as Windows 10 or earlier. For example, this is my taskbar layout: https://i.ibb.co/1GqKH27L/taskbar-layout.png https://i.ibb.co/1GqKH27L/taskbar-layout.png To my knowledge, it's not possible to achieve anything like this layout on Windows 11, Linux or Mac. I did try it in various Linux distros a few times but frankly got sick of navigating the maze of window managers et cetera. I think something like XFCE came close to providing a Windows-like taskbar but it was still far, far behind what Windows NT can offer.

LeoPanthera 9mo ago
You can definitely do this with KDE Plasma. Plasma is so configurable you can make things that are almost impossible to use! And probably good layouts too.
- tombert 9mo ago
  I haven’t used KDE in more than a decade, but I remember it being irrationally funny to me that I could rotate the desktop icons to any weird angle. I have no idea why anyone would do that, but it was really fun to make my desktop look like it was arranged by someone who hadn’t developed motor skills yet.
Brajeshwar 9mo ago
Wow! I used to love doing something very similar. I think it was my last year with Windows (XP). https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-windows-homescreen-2005.jpg https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-windows-homescree... Nowadays, I just have as few as visible, and everything is either Keyboard Shortcuts or some form of `CMD + K` or `CMD + Spacebar`, and start typing.
OsrsNeedsf2P 9mo ago
Took me about 2 minutes to replicate on KDE Plasma[0][1]. I have a lot more things in my taskbar that I don't want to remove for this test, so it looks a little more crammed up. [0] https://i.imgur.com/esNjPNg.png https://i.imgur.com/esNjPNg.png [1] I didn't try to replicate it perfectly; things like smaller icons/etc are settings but cba

dzonga 9mo ago

> In 2017 I predicted that most programmers would lose their employer <-> employee bargaining power in the next 15-25 years. even if written in retrospect - this would've been interesting to see. since likely some of the reasons wouldn't include A.I

numpad0 9mo ago

yay beat the author by a year[1]. Which means I would be hardly the first, considering that I'm just a random nobody. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41923011 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41923011

phendrenad2 9mo ago

Oh man, it's been too long since someone made this prediction. Last one was Eric "Equivalent Series Resistance" Raymond 5 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j2k9ph/open_sources_eric_raymond_windows_10_will_soon_be/ https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j2k9ph/open_so... It's not any more true now than it was then. Windows isn't going anywhere. The author talks about Windows getting worse, and cites someone's low-tier computer taking 5 minutes to start an Unreal game. Nah, not convincing when my NVMe drive works fine. The author talks about games running on Linux. I guess the author missed the part where half of the most popular PC games have been consistently unplayable for 6+ years because the company doesn't believe that they can make anti-cheat work. Ironically, based on that theory, the author says that everyone will "follow the gamers". Yeah, they're currently following the gamers... to where the anti-cheat works.

nomdep 9mo ago

I think he might be right The massive amount of legacy .NET and older software still running in many enterprises isn’t a problem, but a huge business opportunity. My prediction is that Microsoft will push hard their “Azure Virtual Desktop” product: remote, virtualized Windows instances hosted on their own servers to these enterprises. In this model, the operating system running on the client devices will becomes largely irrelevant.

Uvix 9mo ago
But in that case, Microsoft still has to support and maintain the Windows OS running within the Azure Virtual Desktop. If they're doing that, why not support it on the end user compute as well, and get that sweet sweet recurring Windows license revenue from businesses?

dmitrygr 9mo ago

NT is an objectively better-designed kernel. Windows userspace is a mess, but replacing the kernel won’t help there. Maybe MS can ship XFCE — that I’d buy.

est 9mo ago

... and support legacy win32 apps with.... wine ?

nxobject 9mo ago

I’m sure that MS knows that NT is the one thing that’s right with their platform…

jasoneckert 9mo ago

With WSL2, Windows can run a real Linux kernel and Linux apps with tight integration into the graphical, network, and storage subsystems. In that configuration, I guess you could say it's already a Linux distribution.

villgax 9mo ago

If they just get a new team and agents to maintain Wine or equivalent, they’ll announce the biggest layoff ever for support, QA and security roles

gmuslera 9mo ago

Besides of the advantages and disadvantages of Linux and/or Windows on this, the problem I see on a Microsoft Linux distribution is not the Linux part, but the Microsoft one. The problem that is driving away users are the company policies, not what the OS can or not do, they were mostly OK with how things were in previous version. So putting the Microsoft policies in a Linux desktop will probably have the same results.

wmf 9mo ago
Agreed; the ads and OneDrive and such are not mistakes. They're in Windows because they make money.
- Ekaros 9mo ago
  I don't really understand why anyone expect similar crap not happening if there ever was some actually popular commercial consumer Linux distribution.
- mlrtime 9mo ago
  The icloud/google ads are worse IMO. They are impossible to remove once you fill up icloud. Try filling your icloud photos to fill up your space, then try to figure out how to download them all and clean your space efficiently, or don't care it's 100% full, remove any icloud ads.
  - jfoster 9mo ago
    Also if you try to avoid signing in to iCloud on a Mac, prepare to be nagged regularly.
pjmlp 9mo ago
Linux distros for Netbooks, Chromebooks, Android and Cloud VMs, prove the point of how OEM driven Linux distro experience would look like. Just like with CP/M, MS-DOS, UNIX, and any other OEM driven platform, everyone wants to make differentiation part of their story. Welcome to Asus Linux, Dell Linux, Microsoft Linux, HP Linux,....

dev1ycan 9mo ago

This is never going to happen for obvious reasons, it would mean Adobe and others would release on linux would instantly kill Windows. Anyways, I cannot stress enough how good Linux is today, hell, using Hyprland is so light years ahead of Windows, it's really like going back to Windows 98 when I try to split my screen across my programs or swap desktops compared to Hyprland (personally use Omarchy although I know people dislike all the stuff it comes bundled with). KDE Plasma is also beautiful and incredibly customizable, etc. Linux is just a marvel of an operating system nowadays, the missing software (that can be run with stuff like winboat and other program) is really not a deal breaker compared to having to deal with a beyond terrible OS on a daily basis.

AlienRobot 9mo ago

My prediction is that in 5 years I'll try to drag an image from Chrome into Nemo, my file manager, and it still won't work. I also predict that Mint still won't ship with a font manager. That the workspaces tasklet still won't support dragging and dropping tasks into it to move them between workspaces. That there still won't be a multi-step wizard for creating launchers on the desktop. That there still won't be a proper shortcut format on Linux and people will be forced to still use symlinks, which are a terrible experience for folder shortcuts. And that file managers still won't support creating hard links. That some applications still will have 1 pixel of padding at the top that prevents me from clicking the close button by moving my mouse to the top-right corner. That Nemo still won't tell you that you need to make an appimage executable to run it. That DE's still won't tell you that you need to install and configure flatseal to make some flatpaks actually work. That you'll still be able to change your account password without changing the keyring password and then forgetting your old password and losing your keyring. And that the Linux community will still be telling themselves that the real reason nobody uses Linux is because some lootbox game needs a kernel level anti-cheat, or because the latest gamer keyboard with rainbow-colored LEDs doesn't have a Linux driver, or that the average person just absolutely needs features that only photoshop/microsoft office have.

skissane 9mo ago

What I’d like to see them do, is add more POSIX APIs to Win32 (not some separate environment like WSL is). It would make porting apps from Linux/macOS/etc to Win32 a lot easier, and remove the amount of code required in cross-platform apps/frameworks

tombert 9mo ago
I am an avid Linux user, but honestly I think Windows’ lack of POSIX is arguably a benefit. I feel like POSIX has effectively codified mediocrity. It’s not “bad” but I don’t think it’s the be all end all either. Even NT 1 was arguably ahead of the POSIX standard.
- skissane 9mo ago
  You can have POSIX while having a radically different "not-POSIX" API. A good example of this is IBM's flagship mainframe operating system z/OS – it is a certified Unix, and recent releases have even added a big subset of the Linux namespaces API (to support Kubernetes), but that whole radically different mainframe world is all there too – and Unix processes have direct access to most of it. The official Windows POSIX model – from the NT POSIX system, to Interix/SFU/SUA, through to WSL1/WSL2 – has always been that a process is either POSIX or Win32, never both at once. By contrast, the z/OS model is any mainframe process [0] can turn on POSIX mode ("POSIX(ON)"), gaining access to Unix APIs, but still able to call all the classic mainframe APIs. This is also basically the Cygwin model. But the Cygwin team have to do all kinds of expensive and complex hacks to make it work, while Microsoft could provide the same functionality far more easily. To give a real example – NT lacks an exec() system call, the ability to replace a process with another executable while keeping the same PID. So Cygwin fakes it by starting a child process, but then maintaining "Cygwin PIDs" separate from the NT/Win32 PIDs, and a child process started by exec() inherits the parent's Cygwin PID, so looks to POSIX code like the same process. Microsoft could just implement an exec() system call. Or if for some reason that's too hard, move this "two PIDs" thing into the OS kernel, where everyone would get it for free. [0] not quite true, there are some special types of processes which operate in modes which are incompatible with the use of POSIX APIs; but your average/normal/run-of-the-mill process can.

bfrog 9mo ago

More like windows market share will continue to erode from hostility towards the customer. Who wants SpywareOS 11 with AI-fail on the side while it locks up and freezes the ui on my 16 core machine because it was downloading a file off the internet. It’s abysmal quality control, likely derived from AI centered development and KPIs about user activity monitoring rather than stability, usability, and performance.

sourcegrift 9mo ago

This guys news to meet another guy called Paul Graham who will then tell him that Microsoft was dead in 2008.

voidfunc 9mo ago

Microsoft already has a Linux, it is known as Azure Linux or cbl-mariner depending on the variant. It is not setup for being a general purpose OS. It is what we are supposed to use as our OS for Linux based services in Azure. I just dont buy what the author is selling. Windows NT kernel is _good_. The userland is what is fucked and hated by many. But also Windows is more than just an OS it is an entire enterprise ecosystem. Stuff like Active Directory is a big deal and intimately intertwined with Windows. Also, if there was a push to replace Windows NT with Linux you would have heard about it nnow. That is going to be a huge project and almost impossible to keep under wraps and without leaks. Microsoft isnt Apple when it comes to leak secrecy.

bitwize 9mo ago

Eric S. Raymond wrote the same erotic fanfic a few years back just before his blog went kaputski (http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764). It won't happen, because the NT kernel is a massive improvement in architecture over Linux or any conventional Unix—and Microsoft has proven, with WSL1 and 2, that they can achieve Linux compatibility while still basing everything on the NT kernel. Switching the Windows ecosystem to the Linux kernel is harder, because Hyrum's Law applies and some Windows binaries operate by using NT syscalls directly, bypassing msvcrt and Win32. And Windows has something Linux doesn't have, and it would take enormous effort for it to get: a sane driver model. It is possible to ship a device with a binary Windows driver and have it Just Work, even on later versions of Windows; this is just not possible under Linux. The future for Microsoft is doubling down on "security" by making the PC as a platform more restricted: requiring a signed boot path mandatory from power on down through the application level code. They can convince OEMs that this is necessary for compliance with internet safety laws in certain countries, some of which require safety checks (like age verification) even on end-user equipment. It looks to me like some of their moves point in this direction: Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0 because the plan is for Windows 12 to be a completely closed platform. Xbox is being phased out because the thing that distinguishes an Xbox from a cut-down PC—the locked-down nature of the platform—is something Microsoft intends to bring to all PCs with Pluton.

pjmlp 9mo ago
Pluton is already required on CoPilot+ PC branded devices. Those ARM laptops that people are wishing there were more to chose from.
- pohuing 9mo ago
  The newer amd and Intel systems are also copilot certified. After getting a new laptop last month I can say that it doesn't hurt and has some nice advantages. If you just ignore the stupid names. The NPU means your images can now get indexed by content without ruining your battery life for example, same thing with recall. Without certain hardware requirements there's no way these things could run on device. Now MS just needs to keep working and refining these features that don't sell copilot subscriptions...

fchicken 9mo ago

God help us

ritcgab 9mo ago

These posts are just new slops. An operating system is far more than what you see. And the NixOS + Hyprland + Ghostty combo is clearly a meme now.

barelysapient 9mo ago

I think there’s even odds Microsoft does this. The cost savings would be immense. This ignores the fundamental problem: Microsoft has poor taste. It’s everywhere. Cloud products to operating systems. After peaking in 2010 or so, their products have declined to the point that I’ll do anything to avoid using or interacting with them.

fsckboy 9mo ago

>In 2017 I predicted that most programmers would lose their employer <-> employee bargaining power in the next 15-25 years. This was a pretty controversial take at the time, and I never wrote about it publicly, so it’s hard to claim too much credit for being right. but that didn't happen either the highest skilled programmers still make bank. the huge influx of more marginal "boot camp engineers" are in more precarious economic positions, but they weren't in the population of programmers that form the baseline for your comparison.

koonsolo 9mo ago
Maybe it's a US specific thing? I do a lot of hiring, and here in Europe it's quite challenging to find good developers. Once we do, we try to keep them. So at least for us, developers still have a lot of bargaining power.

nurettin 9mo ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45875486 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45875486

prima-facie 9mo ago

I don't want Linux to become as popular as Windows currently is. Its quality would decline drastically as it would be subjected to all sorts of corporate forces. I don't want it to become a commercially driven, adversarial OS like Windows and Mac OS. I want it to remain the free, stable and decent OS it currently is, in a comfortable 3rd place.

barbs 9mo ago
Surely the fact that it's open-source means that it can always be forked if it trends in a direction you don't like?
- pjmlp 9mo ago
  Distrowatch already has too many options.
shiroiuma 9mo ago
>I don't want Linux to become as popular as Windows currently is. Its quality would decline drastically as it would be subjected to all sorts of corporate forces. Wrong. Linux is open-source: if you don't like it, you're free to fork it and do it your own way. If some forces tried to make Linux too Windows-like, surely someone would do this. We already have a bunch of different desktop environments because Linux people can't agree on one (one distro, Mint, even replaced Gnome with not one, but two different DEs: Cinnamon and MATE). "Corporate forces" aren't going to somehow take over Linux and make everyone use a Linux distro that looks like Windows 11 (or worse, Windows 8). They can try of course, and they might get a ton of new people using Linux that way, but it isn't going to kill off the more traditional distros, just like Android didn't somehow kill off Ubuntu/Fedora/Debian/Mint/openSUSE/etc. >I don't want it to become a commercially driven, adversarial OS like Windows and Mac OS. Like Android? >I want it to remain the free, stable and decent OS it currently is Its open-source nature guarantees this.

firecall 9mo ago

I’m not even convinced that Microsoft knows how to ship a Windows-themed version of Windows these days! ;-)

bni 9mo ago

People have been predicting this for 30 years. None of the problems in Windows are related to the kernel. In Fact Windows NT and its display server and compositor, most APIs are fine. In some cases superior to Linux. Its just that they ship several giant UI turds on top of it, and candy crush copilot apps preinstalled.

jrflowers 9mo ago

I remember when people said that Windows ME/Vista/8 was so bad that Microsoft would fold/abandon Windows. I don’t think they’re going to going to give up on all that enterprise support money because they made an operating system that ordinary users hate. They have done that so many times already.

pjmlp 9mo ago

They already do, it is called WSL. Really, people want so much The Year of Desktop Linux, yet everyone is busy fighting each other for the last 25 years. The "everyone will switch in droves into Linux" meme keeps popping up every time Windows sentiment is down, since the early 2000's. But then nothing really happens, because Linux distros keep being for highly technical people, or those that happen to have free technical support from their children or grandchildren. Without Proton Valve doesn't even have games for SteamDeck, as they failed to create a business case that even studios that already have games using the technology stack available on GNU/Linux, targeted to Android NDK, don't bother with porting their games. When buying devices online like the Dell XPS Developers edition, the usual "works best with Windows" was still all over the place. Year of Desktop Linux is already here, on WSL and Apple Virtual Framework, and those companies have no commercial reason to go beyond that, regardless of Internet wishes.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

beAbU 9mo ago

I'm not so sure. The article starts by stating MS does not have the resources to properly support Windows any more. And the solution is to roll their own linux distro? Also, NT, the Windows kernel, is actually pretty good. Is that the bit MS will swap out? Also also, for better or worse, Windows is famously backwards compatible. Will they throw all that out? But who knows, stranger things have happened.

Sammi 9mo ago
Like MS ditching Internet Explorer in favor of basing Edge on Chrome?
shiroiuma 9mo ago
>Also also, for better or worse, Windows is famously backwards compatible. Will they throw all that out? Sure, why not? Because after all, Windows is not actually backwards compatible; it's why they have something call "WoW" (Windows on Windows). Basically, when you run older Windows software, you're not running it natively, you're running it through a compatibility layer, exactly how "WINE" works in Linux. Doing the same thing in Linux would be mostly trivial, since WINE already exists, and they could even improve it since they own all the important DLLs. >Also, NT, the Windows kernel, is actually pretty good. Is that the bit MS will swap out? It is? How so? It's tied to a crappy and obsolete filesystem, and its device driver support isn't that great since it relies on vendors a lot still, rather than being under MS's control. Perhaps the scheduler is nice, I dunno, but there's a lot more to a kernel than that, and I'd say filesystems and drivers are the most important parts, and parts where MS is behind Linux.
- p_ing 9mo ago
  > Windows is not actually backwards compatible; it's why they have something call "WoW" (Windows on Windows) Boring semantics. Windows can run it. That's backwards compatibility. NTFS is neither crappy or obsolete. Nor is ReFS. exFAT is crappy, but not obsolete. FAT32 is crappy and obsolete. UDF is well, UDF. I think that's all of the on-disk formats Windows supports OOTB. But you can FUSE if you want more. > device driver support isn't that great since it relies on vendors a lot still As does Linux. Who do you think contributes those drivers to the kernel? Linus himself?

benterix 9mo ago

I don't get it, why is this on the front page? None of the arguments make any sense. The "Windows is getting terrible" aspect is not an accidental or uncontrollable phenomenon, it's a result of deliberate strategy to onboard all Windows users to Microsoft's cloud just like Apple and Google did. There is no single reason ditching Windows for Linux would help MS in any way.

jemmyw 9mo ago

I remember talking about this 10 years ago. Not as a prediction but as a sensible business move for MS. What is the value in the Windows client now? The consumer side seems like more of a liability. The parts that make money don't need to be in their own operating system. Just like the browser engine no longer made sense, does the OS make sense? They could release all their point and click enterprise tooling on top of a Linux based client. That would be plenty of work but I'm sure enterprises would love to be able to fully manage Linux and Windows machines. Then they could just phase out their own kernel. People point out that the NT kernel is better in several ways to Linux. But that's not really what is important to a company, it's the effort vs value. Linux is so good at running win32 apps now that a moat is drying up. MS could contribute to that effort, and benefit from the Linux development ecosystem in general. It probably won't come to pass.

hoyhoy 9mo ago

I looked through the Windows SDK header files recently due to reasons, and there are very few additions since Windows Vista. MS isn’t actively developing the core functionality of Windows anymore.

rdsubhas 9mo ago

B2C Windows has no growth for year after earnings reports. No growth == It's already Dead. It's now hanging on as slightly useful guinea pigs for B2B. There is no point trying to actively compete in a market for guinea pigs. MS has tried going down the ladder (Chromebook competition route), up the ladder (Mac competition route), side-the-ladder (Windows for Mobile), nothing worked. I agree with the premise of this blog: A compatibility break (which equates to a new product line) with B2C Windows will definitely happen in the next 15 years. But I disagree it will be a Windows themed Linux. It's too huge an effort and support overhead for guinea pigs. My prediction is: A merger of Windows engineering division (which exists as a shared division now between B2C and B2B) into the Windows Enterprise workforce, laying off of the B2C workforce, and thereby making Windows B2C a severely dumbed-down version of Windows B2B where it becomes a new line that actually breaks compatibility with games and downloaded software.

h0ek 9mo ago

They can just acquire one of the existing ones. https://winuxos.org/ https://winuxos.org/ or https://zorin.com/os/ https://zorin.com/os/

estimator7292 9mo ago

This makes zero sense. Microsoft can't and won't do this without abandoning half a century of obsessive backwards-compatability.

daft_pink 9mo ago

Will it be a spyware and ad themed too?

tempodox 9mo ago

This idea has a certain perverse logic. Windoze is already enshittified to the max, enshittifying Linux next will be easier than finding ways to make Windoze worse.

ivanstepanovftw 9mo ago

And call it "Windows Copilot"