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

https://gamesbymason.com/blog/2026/microsoft/

by AndyKelley • 6 months ago

197 262 6 months ago

malkamius• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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.

pjmlp16• 6 months 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.

ocdtrekkie3• 6 months 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.

Alupis4• 6 months 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...

ajb• 6 months ago

The competitor of Group Policy is not really an implementation of that running on Linux clients. It's that the client doesn't need that level of management because 99.5% of your users only use cloud based services. Microsoft know that, which is why they are keen for everyone to use their cloud ecosystem, but that's not a monopoly today in the way windows was.

whatshisface• 6 months ago

The present future of top down Linux management is NixOS. Who knows what the eventual future will be. ;)

tapete1• 6 months ago

Of course Linux clients in your network can be controlled by group policy. You just need to roll out a enterprise-grade distribution like red hat.

See for example:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

https://documentation.ubuntu.com/adsys/latest/how-to/use-gpo...

p_ing20• 6 months ago

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

TacticalCoder• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

I think it’s going to happen in 10 years, not in 15.

ocdtrekkie3• 6 months 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.

p_ing20• 6 months ago

Your post lacks understanding of the NT executive and the ways (IOCP, personalities, VMM, WM) where it does a better job than the Linux kernel.

Or the only stable ABI, even on Linux - Win32.

Linux running on 'billions of devices' doesn't mean much when Azure is built on Hyper-V and ODSP/EXO/Dynamics on Windows Server and makes gobs of money for Microsoft.

ThrowawayB7• 6 months 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• 6 months 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”!

Alupis4• 6 months 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_ing20• 6 months 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.

nashashmi• 6 months ago

His take is that for consumers Microsoft will abandon windows in favor of Linux. He predicts Linux will get better. And windows will get worse in development and support. And so Microsoft will give up on windows. And that worsening trend plus abandonment plus Linux improvements will cause Microsoft supporting Linux.

The probability of each event happening is high enough. But the probability of all three happening at once is low. And that is why this prediction is difficult to believe.

I think it is true windows dev is much more difficult now. The platform has an identity split. It used to favor power users. Now it favors the rich mac users. And upcoming kids who are attached to iPhones. And this means… it gets worse … Or it changes audience. The latter will be hard to pull off.

I think Microsoft also has less need for windows. We know this because its core business has been shifting. They are platform agnostic now.

So what becomes the incentive for Microsoft to continue windows?

sodafountan2• 6 months ago

Because they're a corporation that makes money. They have incentives to employ people, and the vendor lock-in with Windows is far too large to change anything at the moment or anytime in the foreseeable future. Changing Windows to become a Linux-based distro would be a massive corporate undertaking; Microsoft isn't in the business of pleasing tech-minded people. They're a business that makes money.

Linux isn't a corporation; it's really more of an idea. They don't have marketing departments or people trying to sell you licenses. They don't have vendor lock-in or active-directory or a cloud based infastructure. They don't have an entire advertising division or a search engine. There aren't any shareholders to please or paid employees to keep on payroll for government kickbacks. They're not targeting the casual, media-focused, average computer user like Microsoft, which makes a lot of money by doing so.

In my last job, I worked in a mid-sized suburban office. There weren't any "Linux reps" knocking on our door, making sure we were getting the most out of Ubuntu.

pjmlp16• 6 months ago

Hardly, SteamDeck will get those Windows games, that game developers write using Visual Studio on Windows, because they push Proton instead of making the studios interested into native ports.

wavemode2• 6 months 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?

JohnFen2• 6 months 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.

wavemode2• 6 months 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• 6 months 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_x9• 6 months 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• 6 months 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_x9• 6 months 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.

p_ing20• 6 months ago

with legacy apps etc run seamlessly in VMs or containers?

We kind of have examples of that already in DOSBox. Even where Windows OOTB compatibility fails, getting some ancient piece of software running in DOSBox is often not an issue.

okanat6• 6 months ago

Why do you need VMs or containers? Windows's architecture allows much granular control of applications, so it should be possible to limit what the applications can access to a great extent already. Unlike Linux the system ABI is stable so you can run older applications without shipping the entire userspace.

Also Windows 10 LTSC exist (not 11 with all the rounded modern UI BS). It shows how good Windows could be.

blackcatsec• 6 months ago

The Intel thing is extremely true, but also equally true is the god awful Nvidia drivers that existed in the early days of Windows Vista. I don't even think Nvidia had a non-beta driver until 6 months after Windows Vista went gold. I think I recall seeing that Nvidia was responsible for something like 30% of crashes on Windows Vista.

Now, we could split hairs over where the failure was with that one--whether Microsoft not working enough with Nvidia, or whichever; but the point still stands.

Windows Vista walked so Windows 7 could run, essentially.

delta_p_delta_x9• 6 months ago

Windows Vista walked so Windows 7 could run, essentially.

Good point. Although I personally have a soft spot for the all the Longhorn castles in the sky that MS were building, and for Vista in general.

klooney• 6 months ago

If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture

Sure, but alternatively, you could just lay those guys off and bank the savings of outsourcing to Linus and co.

adithyassekhar• 6 months ago

This could be a bait. I was going to comment how wrong you are. How much better and advanced the windows model is compared to linux and how making products that co-operate with other companies (read: people with products they want to get paid for, when did that started being a bad thing?) instead of being "gatekeepy" over ideologies will always have an upper edge.

But seeing how companies have worked in the past, you might be right, some middle manager there might just axe the most valuable part of their product.

dbcurtis2• 6 months ago

If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture,

Woah, back up a bit. In the article, it looks like the blue screen is a 0x0 (iopr) exception, likely a wild jump into the weeds. But back in the day, the majority of blue screens were 0xE exceptions -- page fault in the kernel. Why? Buggy driver that didn't wire down a page and it got swapped out from under the driver. Not under Microsofts direct control... BUT... they had a great example in OS/2. In WinNT, there are 2 security rings, kernel and user space. But x86 supports 4 rings. OS/2 used ring 1 for drivers, so that the kernel could both blame the correct driver and also stay alive. So simple. (Of course, it means it is hard to port to hardware with only 2 security rings.) WinNT drivers are not things of beauty. The dev experience is cranky, and validation is a nightmare -- and the lowest bidding Asian contractor that is writing your driver for your el-cheapo peripheral rarely signs up for that nightmare.

delta_p_delta_x9• 6 months ago

WinNT drivers are not things of beauty. The dev experience is cranky, and validation is a nightmare

I think one could say the same for any platform; in general, developing drivers is just difficult, full stop. That driver quality for peripherals can be bad is not the fault of the platform. I'm sure I could find dodgy drivers in the Linux tree that were merged in only because 'shrug it makes PineappleCorp's device work, who cares if it is littered with UB'.

p_ing20• 6 months ago

There are performance penalties for moving drivers out of the kernel/ring 0. For some things, that matters (network, graphics), for others it doesn't, like printers.

And Microsoft has made the least stable of the drivers a recoverable fault, at least.

MontyCarloHall2• 6 months ago

Windows is the only OS that does scaling properly. macOS just pretends non-'retina' displays don't exist

Not true. I use a high-DPI (~250) MacBook with a non-high-DPI (~100) external monitor [0] and the transition between the two is seamless. Windows are identically sized when dragging from one screen to another. The same holds true when I use the laptop with a mid-DPI (~150) monitor.

I could not say the same was true a few years ago when I tried a high-DPI Windows 10 laptop with a non-high-DPI external monitor; it looked something like this [1]. Perhaps this has since been fixed.

macOS is able to achieve consistent sizing across displays irrespective of pixel density because it uses a compositor to render the whole screen at a high resolution and, if necessary, downsamples it proportionally for each screen. (Wayland on Linux can do the same, though it's certainly a much bigger headache to get consistently working than macOS.) When I tried using Windows 10 at two DPIs simultaneously, it just let me scale the font size and other UI elements on a per-screen basis, but not the screen as a whole, since I assume it does not use a compositor.

[0] Not my setup, but here is someone doing just that with a 30" 2560x1600 (~100 PPI) display and a ~250 PPI MacBook: https://www.reddit.com/r/macsetups/comments/tfbpid/my_macboo...

[1] Again, not my setup, but the Windows UI is rendered at different sizes on displays of different resolutions: https://www.reddit.com/r/computers/comments/16y1dux/how_do_i...

delta_p_delta_x9• 6 months ago

I have a long blog post stewing here. I'll give you the gist.

Moving windows between monitors of different pixel densities is a rather difficult problem. Windows handles pixel density per-application, not globally, and it uses something called device-independent pixels (DIPs) for scaling. macOS and every desktop environment I've tried on Linux does scaling globally, or at least globally per-display.

On Windows, when a window is moved across two displays with different scaling factors, a simple algorithm is used. It will choose the display that the greater fraction of the window is in to select the DIP, render, compose and rasterise, and hence and one part of the window may appear too small or too large on the other display.

On the other hand, macOS, GNOME, and KDE take the easy (but IMO very lazy) way out by rasterising the entire application window to the pixel density of whichever display that the greater fraction of the window is in, copying that framebuffer to the viewport of the other displays, scaling with some filtering algorithm, and then composing, leading to blurring on at least one display. I am happy to bet that you're just not noticing the early rasterisation and filtered scaling going on. Having used all 3 OSs across a variety of monitors, I am extremely particular about blurry text; enough that I will stop using a certain setup if it doesn't satisfy me (it's why I stopped using Linux on my personal system).

I'll concede neither is good enough. The real solution here is:

  1. Render the application to as many viewports as there are displays that the application window is in, with the appropriate DIP for each display's scale factor
  2. Compose the application viewports into each display's viewport depending on the apparent window position
  3. The above will automatically clip away the fraction of the window that is outside each display
  4. Rasterise the composed viewport for each display

Another concession: I personally prefer pixel-perfect rendering rather than having the same visual size, and hardly ever use windows spanning multiple displays (especially of different pixel density), so Windows' behaviour is less of a problem to me.

My bigger issue is other desktop environments not supporting subpixel anti-aliasing, not supporting 'fractional' scaling (macOS is by far the biggest offender), and edge artifacts that result from bad clipping. I have a few photos I took of KDE, where random pixels are lit up at the bottom of my secondary display, with my laptop below it.

bhj• 6 months ago

They might be referring to when Apple removed subpixel antialiasing around ~2018. It caused some consternation at the time because there were still plenty of non-retina Macbook Airs in service. While it technically works, macOS really is not meant for non-high DPI displays.

hollerith• 6 months ago

macOS is able to achieve consistent sizing across displays irrespective of pixel density because it . . . downsamples it proportionally for each screen

For me, the most important consideration is to complete avoid downsampling -- because it makes everything blurry.

On both macOS and Linux, the way I do that is to choose to scale the UI by an integral factor (usually 200% in my case) and then (since 200% makes things a little bigger than I prefer) fine tune the apps in which I spend most of my time (namely, Emacs and my browser).

Specifically, on Linux, Emacs relies on GTK to draw its window, which IIUC cannot do fractional scaling, so if I were to set a fractional scaling factor in Gnome Settings, then Emacs would be blurry whereas there is no blurriness when I set an integral scaling factor in Gnome and use something like (set-face-attribute 'default nil :height 90) to adjust the size of text in Emacs.

protocolture• 6 months ago

If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture

Article did hang a lantern on that. Big issue is that, it doesnt matter how good the Kernel is if you cant use it. I think dropping Windows is more likely than fixing windows. Windows 11 is more than just the usual Headache Edition of Windows like ME, Vista, 8 or what have you. Its definitely a new strategy.

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

Agreed honestly. The reason it bricked my wifes computer was because HP dragged its feet adopting the new driver model. The reason it stuffed my laptop was that Asus refused to release a supported laptop lid driver for my hardware. Games for Windows live was comorbid with Vista which pissed off gamers.

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.

I mean, we have the AI stuff blocked at a policy level, they just started ignoring that policy and its everywhere. They have done the same with a few other feature deployments. Group Policy has really turned into "Do you want to enable the grace period for the new thing we are pushing". Windows App, hilariously, just got boned by a windows 11 update except the older Remote Desktop App (Support ending in march) still works, and the Mac version of the App still works fine too.

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?

Control is a deep topic. But the biggest issue is Business needs. Linux is currently only 50% of the way into being anywhere decent in a Microsoft shop. Microsoft Defender for Endpoint however, is growing like a cancer and is starting to look like a testbed for bringing a lot of Microsoft command and control into a linux environment. This guys making a prediction now, but really theres nothing in Windows that cannot be ported officially by Microsoft to Linux given enough time. Honestly I think the bigger question is "When Microsoft inevitably does this will the FLOSS community get anything out of it".

bschwindHN• 6 months ago

You "never understand" these posts and then list off a ton of crap I shouldn't have to do to an OS to make it usable.

The default experience of using windows is downright user-hostile and it reveals the thinking of the corporation behind it. Yeah, you _can_ do all that to make it somewhat usable, but when alternatives exist that are much less of a pain, I'll be taking those.

wackget7• 6 months ago

My experience of Linux (and Mac OS) has been the opposite; they are extremely painful to make usable.

Yes, I have to disable a lot of stuff to get Windows the way I like it. But that's still exponentially easier than having to add, install, or perhaps even buy a lot of stuff to maybe get Linux/Mac to behave kind of how I want it to.

delta_p_delta_x9• 6 months ago

My point was that the article is logically flawed. The user mode of the OS sucks, so let's run the same user mode with a different kernel? What?

I don't care about configuration. I've had to do plenty of configuration on Linux as well; it's just different (text files instead of GPO/registry). I'm not sure I can list all the Arch Linux wiki articles I've read trying to get one driver or another feature working.

I am not here to convince anyone to stop using one platform or another. They're different tools that solve different problems, and I run all of them. I have a Linux laptop for work, a Windows laptop/desktop for personal use, a Proxmox hypervisor on my homelab running a variety of LXC containers, Linux and Windows Server guests.

Dylan168072• 6 months ago

You "never understand" these posts and then list off a ton of crap I shouldn't have to do to an OS to make it usable.

In the context of changes Microsoft could make, that list of instructions is there for demonstration purposes. It's about how if Microsoft wanted to clean up their mess, they have a far far easier method than what's suggested in the article.

when alternatives exist that are much less of a pain, I'll be taking those

That's a different topic from the article and the comment you replied to.

pdpi2• 6 months ago

By way of example — I can (and did) remove the ads from the Start Menu on Windows 10 Professional. But there's literally no reason they should've been there to begin with.

pjmlp16• 6 months ago

Large majority of population considers Windows usable as is, that is why you still see Windows at best buy and not Linux powered desktops, other than castrated Chromebooks.

topranks2• 6 months ago

Thing is there is no reason Microsoft’s Linux distro wouldn’t be just as horrible to use “out of the box”.

torginus4• 6 months ago

UX problems != low-level engineering issues.

I think most people agree that current Windows sucks due to a combination of engineering neglect and deliberate enshittification.

But how the OS is put together and some of the debug tooling (WinDbg, ProcDump, Windows Performance Analyzer, ttd, graphics debuggers etc) mean that it's much easier to debug complex apps like games on Windows. Windows had this stuff since forever.

And due to the stability of the system architecture and the QA MS does mean that Windows might be shitty in some ways, but institutional knowledge has built up over the decades.

Linux in contrast is like the ship of Theseus.

A lot of the work Valve has done on Linux was to plug these gaps and had to develop similar tooling on Linux, otherwise its impossible to fix full-stack problems where the user clicks in a videogame, and something does or does not happen on the screen.

I'm not glazing Windows, I'm just infuriated by the persistent feeling of technical superiority of Linux people, who don't even bother to understand the problems, and explain away the lead Microsoft has as some sort of shadowy anti-user conspiracy, rather than the fact that Windows does a lot of things that users care about better than Linux.

AuthAuth• 6 months ago

We are now at the point where the average PC user can configure linux to their liking but it takes a windows sys admin with strong domain knowledge to configure windows to their liking. Im a windows sysadmin(pretty shit one but still) and I struggle to remove a lot of the w11 features and have been unable to get it working how it used to.

okanat6• 6 months ago

Average PC user doesn't even know what an OS is. All they know is clicking certain icons. Newer GUIs are designed to be anti-intellectual. It has started to gain speed with iPhones and has been consistently worse.

What you remove/configure also depends on what you expect. Windows and its ecosystem is GUI-first so I can do most of my customizations using a GUI app like Winaero Tweaker. I can use Powershell to remove certain Windows components too. It usually takes 1 or 2 hours and it stays as it is even with semiannual updates.

With Linux systems I spend much more time to bend it to my wishes but the whole design philosophy is off. Most of the configuration doesn't give proper feedback. It sometimes half works. The API churn rate in Linux world is higher (a lot lower with KDE, to give them the credit). Package management is great. However you don't actually get to choose. Browsers use GTK APIs and cairo, I dislike the libraries (especially the font rendering) but have no choice unless I want to port browsers. I dislike CSDs, again no choice especially with how Wayland turned out (basically CSDs are default, apps opt-in to SSDs). Many things that can have good GUIs are terminal based. The existing GUIs break often. So it quickly turns into me fighting the basics.

I learned a lot from trying to make Linux my desktop and debugging driver issues from ATI cards (anyone remembers fglrx and editing Xorg config?) to Nvidia ones. I used Linux as my primary desktop between 2008 and 2020. I developed many software on it and still earn my living from embedded Linux stuff (I use WSL2 nowadays). However more I look into Linux's "engineering" more I hate it.

If I really want it, I need to spend some serious development time creating a more Windows-like OS out of Linux starting from libc and go up. I dislike almost every library I read the source from Linux world, especially GNU and GNOME ones. I like Qt and KDE's software architecture but the anything below (maybe except systemd) is off. Maybe Redox is a better target for this effort but I need a working system for my desktop now.

wackget7• 6 months ago

Everything one sees on Windows can be stripped out and reverted to Windows 2000 mode. That grey boxy UI is literally still there.

Can the horrendous W11 taskbar be reverted to the classic taskbar, with full support for changing its size and screen position etc?

Can classic Explorer, without any OneDrive/Copilot nonsense, be restored?

Can the new "Settings" (*excuse me while I vomit) layouts be junked in favour of the Control Panel, along with all the associated modals such as the WiFi selection sidebar etc.?

nikanj• 6 months ago

The start menu sometimes glitches out for a few seconds, so it makes total sense to replace the whole OS from the kernel up.

Signed, a npm jockey who lives in the world of churn

pdpi2• 6 months ago

Speaking of high pixel density, Windows is the only OS that does scaling properly.

Haven't tried Windows 11, but a bunch of Microsoft applications in Windows 10 render text using sub-pixel rendering in 2x high dpi mode, resulting in every character having a two-pixel coloured border around it. That's about as far from "scaling properly" as it gets.

justsomehnguy2• 6 months ago

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

Nah, it was "Vista Ready" bullshit to "certify" the utter bullshit of 512Mb RAM and 5000RPM (for the notebooks) machines already built and mostly shipped by the late 2006. Of course it ran like shit if it needed to be in the swap 95% of the time. It's even more drastic if you look at the DRAM market at the time - DDR was dead, DDR2 provided the solution to finally bring to the consumer market a cheap 4/8GB RAM machines from the OTS consumer components and DDR3 was right around the corner.

People complain you 'cannot create local user accounts any more'.

Also people forgot on how you needed a computer with iTunes for the first use of iPad - otherwise it wouldn't work. Or how the only way to use some Android phones without a Google account you literally needed to take out the SIM card or otherwise you had no way to skip "enter your google account or register one" (reminds anything?) and this was years before current situation.

Sure, MS or more likely some brain-dead manager with the the only KPI in his empty head would push for a total block of the local accounts without some enterprise (Entra?) shitfuck workaround but that would still take some time.

nunez2• 6 months ago

That's a great point about DPI scaling. I remember being extremely surprised that I couldn't get a sharp image ona 4K monitor with macOS because of this limitation

stego-tech• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

WSL was originally going to be named LSW, but had to switch name AFAIR.

asdf1280• 6 months 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.

skissane4• 6 months 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• 6 months 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)

p_ing20• 6 months ago

No.

The original NT TCP/IP stack was purchased from Spider Systems, which may have been based on BSD.

The Spider Systems stack was completely ripped out for NT 3.5 and replaced with a Microsoft-developed stack that has no basis on the BSD stack.

rpiguy• 6 months 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.

JohnFen2• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

Is not steam exactly doing that and other vendors follow their footsteps?

1970-01-01• 6 months ago

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

Dylan168072• 6 months ago

Microsoft giving up on Windows entirely is way way beyond year of the Linux desktop.

mortsnort• 6 months 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• 6 months 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)

keyle3• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

It’ll be like WoW classic servers or old school RuneScape, only for your OS.

daviddever23box• 6 months ago

ReactOS has entered the chat.

okanat6• 6 months ago

I don't know about you but I am happy with most of the stuff that Microsoft still ships with Windows userspace (surprisingly) and kernel.

Win32, stable driver APIs (I can still run Win11 on my old Nvidia GPU laptop which Linux doesn't support), COM, good remote desktop infrastructure, DirectX 12, WPF, ClearType or certain Win32 aspects like IO completiton ports (allows true async like uring does but in Windows since NT times) are all has some good engineering and widespread adoption. Many other OSes still copy what Windows offered in early 00s.

They are fucking their last mile a big time. They fuck explorer, they fuck desktop experience. All in the name of stupid fads. Silicon Valley hustler Microsoft is worse than shirts with Ballmer's fluids Microsoft.

tombert10• 6 months ago

Yeah, I was about to say. The NT kernel isn’t bad at all; it’s arguably better than Linux. It’s just that an OS is more than a kernel, and pretty much all the other crap in Windows is terrible.

Honestly, what I would like them to do is make/support a modern Copy on Write filesystem so that System Restore actually works, and so that it’s easy to roll back when Windows Update borks your PC.

You don’t need Linux for either of these things. You need software engineers to build a modern filesystem or make Windows natively support ZFS or something.

vbezhenar• 6 months ago

Does it really matter if NT kernel is good or not? I don't think so. What matters if it's cheaper to use Linux kernel instead of Windows kernel in terms of expenses.

Just an example. Microsoft developed several browser engines: first Trident, then EdgeHTML. Edge wasn't bad, it was on par with Chrome, may be slightly behind, but nothing that couldn't be fixed with time. But Microsoft decided to abandon it and use Blink, because that was cheaper.

I absolutely could see the same scenario in the future, when they would need to cut expenses. Just get Linux, wine, fix enough bugs to make explorer.exe and OneDrive.exe to run smoothly enough and ship it.

codedokode• 6 months ago

No, both NT and Linux kernels are bad because they are monolithic and not sandboxing-first.

wilsonnb32• 6 months ago

They already have a modern copy on write file system (ReFS), you just can’t use it on desktop Windows for some reason

apexalpha• 6 months ago

The NT kernel misses all modern features like containers though.

philistine2• 6 months ago

Unfortunately the other crap is probably what’s going to get ported. They’ll maintain for a long while a backwards compatible version of Windows that they’ll sell for an arm and a leg, but they’ll try to move their uncaring customers to a Windows userland running on Linux.

That’s my belief, and I’m always looking for clues that it’s what develops into their long-term plan. Right now the only thing we could glean is reduced investments in Windows.

firesteelrain2• 6 months ago

Not just that; Active Directory is unmatched.

That being said, Azure is already running a lot of Linux. So for backend, it’s somewhere between Linux and Windows depending on what you need to do

But Azure also heavily runs Hyper V.

p_ing20• 6 months ago

Azure runs Linux for networking and Windows (Azure Host OS) for services.

jesse__4• 6 months ago

I think OPs point is that people are going to eventually abandon the sinking Windows ship, because gamers are going to soon abandon ship en-masse. That certainly tracks for me (mostly a non-gaming Windows user).

It follows that, at some threshold number of users, it becomes much cheaper to ship a Linux distro than to continue to support Windows proper.

:shrug:

Guess we'll see in 15 years.

pjmlp16• 6 months ago

Yeah, that is why Valve needs Proton. /s

Game studios don't care about Linux on the client side.

torginus4• 6 months ago

Yes, this article makes very little logical sense. A logical argument should make some objective observations, and then derive interesting conclusions from said facts and perhaps a few educated guesses.

This article lists a few random grievances (which I sympathize with), says linux is good now for games, and then presents the bombastic conclusion that Microsoft will deprecate Windows, without making any connection between the two.

Sammi2• 6 months ago

What does it matter if the NT kernel is any good when the rest of the OS isn't? Sooner or later Windows will be as relevant as Internet Explorer.

notherhack• 6 months ago

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

dang2• 6 months 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

stackskipton2• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

You can run .net over wine no?

nubinetwork2• 6 months 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.

stackskipton2• 6 months ago

Some .Net Framework might be fine but unless it promises 100% all .Net calls, including ones using "unsupported APIs" or other insane stuff, works, there will be plenty of very unhappy Windows customers.

tinyhouse• 6 months ago

Microsoft's future depends on OpenAI.

leejongyon• 6 months ago

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

sho_hn• 6 months ago

It already does: Azure Linux (formerly CBL-Mariner).

wilsonnb32• 6 months ago

They already do that for Azure

AndyKelley• 6 months 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.

scott012• 6 months 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.

okanat6• 6 months ago

That would cause huge big and small tech clashes.

geon• 6 months 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.

aizk• 6 months 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.

sodafountan2• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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.

dang2• 6 months 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

pjmlp16• 6 months 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.

wackget7• 6 months 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

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• 6 months 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.

tombert10• 6 months 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• 6 months 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-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• 6 months 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

[1] I didn't try to replicate it perfectly; things like smaller icons/etc are settings but cba

thunderbong• 6 months ago

It's not the same, though.

The parent comment shows two rows of different types - the upper row consists of the taskbar, and the lower row has the quick launch icons, drive links, and a music bar.

Quite an interesting layout, imho.

wackget7• 6 months ago

~~Sorry, I can't view the image due to annoying Imgur restrictions (and they restrict proxies/VPNs too).~~

Edit: I was able to find a proxy which works and I can see the image.

Your layout is kind of similar but not really - the Windows taskbar can be configured to work in both rows and columns, or a combination of the two.

So you can have a layout like my original screenshot above, or:

* in columns like this: https://i.ibb.co/Y4jJN6jh/image.png

* a mixture of columns and rows like this: https://i.ibb.co/5WsVmLgb/image.png

* at the top or either side of the screen like this: https://i.ibb.co/9mGmjnxs/image.png

* and in any position it can be resized: https://i.ibb.co/HLmh89qF/image.png

Shame they ditched all this in Windows 11 though.

marcosdumay• 6 months ago

As a sibling pointed out, the GP has two different rows. The closest I can get with out of the box Plasma is by creating two bottom panels.

But then, I really doubt the GP is using out of the box Windows.

dralley• 6 months ago

KDE, Cosmic, etc.

boznz• 6 months ago

Windows user and developer for nearly 30 years and migrated my thinkpad from windows 11 to Kubuntu a few days ago with almost zero friction and got my desktop exactly as I had it on windows, did a lazy write up here => https://rodyne.com/?p=3486 - I wont be going back even if Microsoft does release "Lindoze"

jesse__4• 6 months ago

If that's literally the only thing stopping you.. you could always just write it yourself ..

wackget7• 6 months ago

It's not the only thing, although it is a big one. Honestly Windows just feels better to me and works the way I want it to. It might help that I've always used enterprise versions so I've never had to deal with the awful bloatware. The few things I do want to disable are pretty painless to remove through the group policy editor or one of many freeware GUI tweaker programs.

amlib• 6 months ago

Take a look at dash to panel gnome extension:

https://github.com/home-sweet-gnome/dash-to-panel

It's a very configurable extension for gnome that can do all you described except double stacking...

I've uploaded a video demo and a config file that makes it kinda like what you want, again no double stacking:

https://github.com/amlib/dash-to-panel-config/tree/main

You can also configure it to keep open window buttons separate from the launcher icons, but with the lack of double stacking I rather have it "take over" the launcher.

The way I've set it up it will also only show the open windows for the virtual desktop or screen the bar being shown at, which helps alleviate the crowding issue of only having one row.

wackget7• 6 months ago

Looks like an awesome project; thanks for sharing it.

On my next attempt at a Linux desktop I'll most certainly try it.

I'll also create a feature request for resizing/stacking of rows.

micw• 6 months ago

I'm pretty sure, you can do this stacking 2 panels in XFCE4. Maybe except the multi row start button but if you really need that, you could even create a 3rd panel.

ThrowawayTestr• 6 months ago

Have you heard of trayplayer?

dzonga• 6 months 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• 6 months 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

phendrenad2• 6 months 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_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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

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

nxobject• 6 months ago

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

jasoneckert• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

Agreed; the ads and OneDrive and such are not mistakes. They're in Windows because they make money.

Ekaros• 6 months 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• 6 months 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.

pjmlp16• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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.

skissane4• 6 months 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

tombert10• 6 months 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.

skissane4• 6 months 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.

torginus4• 6 months ago

Cygwin is literally what you describe - some companies (usually engineering firms who make high-end CAD software and the like) use to ship their Linux based tooling on Windows, you can use it, and most Linux CLI tools run on top of it.

It works well, if you mind the limitiations, but it has existed for a long time, and I don't think it's been a huge game changer.

skissane4• 6 months ago

Cygwin literally isn't what I describe, because it is an additional layer of code which isn't supported by Microsoft, doesn't come with Windows, and contains a lot of complex inefficient hacks to do things which Microsoft could do much more easily.

bfrog• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

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

voidfunc• 6 months 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• 6 months 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). 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.

pjmlp16• 6 months ago

Pluton is already required on CoPilot+ PC branded devices.

Those ARM laptops that people are wishing there were more to chose from.

pohuing• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

God help us

ritcgab• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

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

wooptoo• 6 months 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• 6 months 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?

pjmlp16• 6 months ago

Distrowatch already has too many options.

shiroiuma2• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

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

bni• 6 months 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• 6 months 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.

pjmlp16• 6 months 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.

beAbU• 6 months 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.

Sammi2• 6 months ago

Like MS ditching Internet Explorer in favor of basing Edge on Chrome?

shiroiuma2• 6 months 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_ing20• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

They can just acquire one of the existing ones.

https://winuxos.org/ or https://zorin.com/os/

estimator7292• 6 months ago

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

daft_pink• 6 months ago

Will it be a spyware and ad themed too?

tempodox• 6 months 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• 6 months ago

And call it "Windows Copilot"

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

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