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Comments (212)

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  hougaard
  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)
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  gmuslera
  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.
• jemmyw
  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.
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  malkamius
  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.
• hoyhoy
  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.
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  wackget
  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.pngTo 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.
• benterix
  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.
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  delta_p_delta_x
  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?
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  AndyKelley
  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.
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  beAbU
  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.
• bfrog
  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.
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  fsckboy
  >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 eitherthe 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.
• aizk
  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.
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  rpiguy
  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.
• bni
  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.
• barelysapient
  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.
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  stackskipton
  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.
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  p_ing
  M365 and Azure run on the NT kernel. This blog post makes zero sense.
• pjmlp
  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.
• numpad0
  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
• mortsnort
  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.
• jasoneckert
  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.
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  wooptoo
  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.
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  ggm
  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...
• voidfunc
  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.
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  nomdep
  I think he might be rightThe 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.
• ww520
  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.
• AlienRobot
  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.
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  leejongyon
  Microsoft will likely distribute its own Linux distro someday; however, there is no chance they will ever discontinue the NT.
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  skissane
  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
• dmitrygr
  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.
• anon
  undefined
• dzonga
  > 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
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  ThrowawayB7
  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.
• firecall
  I’m not even convinced that Microsoft knows how to ship a Windows-themed version of Windows these days! ;-)
• RomanPushkin
  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.
• sourcegrift
  This guys news to meet another guy called Paul Graham who will then tell him that Microsoft was dead in 2008.
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  _moof
  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.
• nxobject
  I’m sure that MS knows that NT is the one thing that’s right with their platform…
• anon
  undefined
• ritcgab
  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.
• villgax
  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
• jrflowers
  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.
• fchicken
  God help us
• nurettin
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45875486
• bitwize
  Eric S. Raymond wrote the same erotic fanfic a few years back just before his blog went kaputski (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.
• dev1ycan
  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.
• phendrenad2
  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_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.
• tinyhouse
  Microsoft's future depends on OpenAI.
• est
  ... and support legacy win32 apps with.... wine ?
• sodafountan
  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.
• stego-tech
  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.
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  notherhack
  Clickbait spoiler: "I predict that within 15 years Microsoft will discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows themed Linux distribution."
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  1970-01-01
  Tldr: "Prediction: 2041 will be the year of the Linux Desktop!'
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  wavemode
  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?