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.
Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
41–50 of 267 posts
Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
#42Microsoft will likely distribute its own Linux distro someday; however, there is no chance they will ever discontinue the NT.
They already do that for Azure
Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
#43As 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. Doi…
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.
Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
#44The "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…
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 no…
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.
Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
#45I 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.
Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
#46Nope. 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.
Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
#47As 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. Doi…
> 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.
Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
#48As 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. Doi…
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 Microsof…
> 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.
Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
#49As 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. Doi…
> 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.
Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro
#50As 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. Doi…
>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...