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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
With Microsoft embracing Linux ever more tightly, might it do the heretofore unthinkable and dump the NT kernel in favor of the Linux kernel? No, I’m not ready for the funny farm. As it prepares Windows 11, Microsoft has been laying the groundwork for such a radical release.
I’ve long toyed with the idea that Microsoft could release a desktop Linux. Now I’ve started taking that idea more seriously — with a twist. Microsoft could replace Windows’ innards, the NT kernel, with a Linux kernel.
It would still look like Windows. For most users, it would still work like Windows. But the engine running it all would be Linux.
Why would Microsoft do this? Well, have you been paying attention to Windows lately? It has been one foul-up after another. Just in the last few months there was the registry backup fail and numerous and regular machine-hobbling Windows updates. In fact, updates have grown so sloppy you have to seriously wonder whether it’s safer to stay open to attacks or “upgrade” your system with a dodgy patch.
Remember when letting your Windows system get automatic patches every month was nothing to worry about? I do. Good times.
Why is this happening? The root cause of all these problems is that, for Microsoft, Windows desktop software is now a back-burner product. It wants your company to move you to Windows Virtual Desktop and replace your existing PC-based software, like Office 2019, with software-as-a-service (SaaS) programs like Office 365. It’s obvious, right? Nobody in Redmond cares anymore, so quality assurance for Windows the desktop is being flushed down the toilet.
Many of the problems afflicting Windows do not reside in the operating system’s upper levels. Instead, their roots are deep down in the NT kernel. What, then, if we could replace that rotten kernel with a fresh, healthy kernel? Maybe one that is being kept up to date by a worldwide group of passionate developers. Yes, my bias is showing, but that’s Linux, and it’s a solution that makes a lot of sense.
(Score: 2) by hwertz on Thursday September 19 2019, @06:41AM
"Many of the problems afflicting Windows do not reside in the operating system’s upper levels. Instead, their roots are deep down in the NT kernel."
Well, the NT kernel does not help. But, the real problem with Windows as it stands is the way the different subsystems, layers, compatibility layers, addons, and additional layers, are not cleanly seperated from each other. Google "Linux versus Windows system call graph", this is admittedly about 10 years old but shows this vividly; Apache on Linux making one HTTP request, a lot more goes on than one might suspect, but Apache makes some high-level calls, these calls make lower level calls, and those may make another layer of calls that actually get stuff off the disk and toss it onto the ethernet. IIS+Windows, the graph really looks like a big ball of spaghetti, with ciruclar dependencies, points where a high level call goes straight to very low level, points where low level calls jump back up to calling a high level call, and so on.
There are two paths Microsoft "could" use for a Linux-based Windows 11 though.
One, "managed code" -- this is admittedly cleanly seperated from the mess of Windows underneath it. But, Microsoft already has tried to push a move to manged code apps, and it's gone over like a lead balloon.
Two, wine. For those not aware, (probably due to Valve working on it for their Linux-based Steam boxes), wine is now quite good at running Windows games (probably running more than Win7 or 10, due to being compatible with older games Win7 and 10 aren't while also being able to run modern games) along with other Windows applications. Since the GNU/Linux stuff is nicely modular, they could reasonably use Linux kernel, wine, and the xorg/mesa3d graphics stack (or xorg + nvidia driver for nvidia cards...) while ditching the rest of a typical linux distro in favor of their own graphical shell and apps, if they wished to.