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This time I want the credit, so Iβm posting my prediction publicly while everyone still thinks itβs ridiculous: I predict that within 15 years Microsoft will discontinue Windows in favor of a Windows themed Linux distribution.
People have been joking about a Windows DE atop the Linux kernel for a while now buddy, too late for you to call dibs
I call dibs! I predicted a free (as in beer) windows OS 20 years ago!
Giving a specific time range and making this prediction in earnest is well worth receiving some credit if it pans out.
Ya, I even wrote into a Linux podcast like 7 years ago making this exact prediction. It's not new.
Has been predicted for almost as long as the year of Linux on desktop.
Windows NT kernel was never an issue, Microsoft would encounter exact same issues theyβre facing now since the pressure to monetise remains.
I'll tell you more, MS already had their own Unix.
Xenix was the most common Unix variant during the mid- to late-1980s.
Microsoft can't do funny things. Microsoft is a bloodsucking sociopath in a clown dress.
It would be in line with their usual EEE, so totally not surprising.
They don't give two shits about brand loyalty as long as line go up.
What standards would Microsoft EEE in this case? POSIX?
they might ship a proprietary lib with their os, encourage developers to use it, then license it out of being distributed
I imagine itβd be more like Android/iOS. Lock down bootloader so you canβt tamper with the OS, enforce notarisation requirement so that apps have to go through them. But Microsoft canβt do that, they donβt have any users vendor-locked to their application store. Valve on the other hand is in a much better position to do this.
@0x0 @codeinabox it wouldn't be EEE in this case. Because a Linux distribution is built up around thousands of packages from hundreds of various open source projects.
For EEE to work, the entire base OS stack would need to be extended with features not becoming useful outside Microsoft's use. Such changes would first of all have a really hard time being accepted in upstream projects. And if they did, these projects would be forked if the last E phase in EEE is triggered. And then Microsoft would be alone with their Frankenstein distribution monster while the majority of the Linux users moves on to something better.
With Linux, there is no single instance of control or power. If a project takes a path people don't like, it get forked. EEE requires Microsoft to cease full control of all the related pieces and components and kill the open source aspects of it.
That's the advantage of open source licences. Once the source is out in the public, you can't retract the source code afterwards, then it just forks.
Ever heard of android?
It's called Microslop. Won't you ever forget it
"A Windows themed Linux distribution" can't really be "Windows themed" without some closed-source blobs and maybe even some backdoors sparkled here and there
Android is a Linux distribution like that and once notarisation requirement is implemented itβll be indistinguishable from iOS. SteamOS will also likely become gradually more like iOS to appease creators of popular multiplayer games.
I canβt imagine Valve making that kind of heel turn on their (mostly) open-source philosophy. Theyβre marketing their whole hardware line as your hardware to do whatever you want with, going closed garden after the fact would throw away a lot of good will.
@mmmm @codeinabox Sure it can.
Microsoft can distribute their Windows Desktop Environment for Linux in a repository they control. And that repo can even contain just the binaries, with their own proprietary licence. These packages can further have dependencies to other open source packages.
If Microsoft ends up with their own Linux distribution or just mirrors an existing distro (like what Alma/Rocky does with RHEL, or Ubuntu with Debian) ... That depends on how much control they want over the Linux distro base OS.
But they certainly have the possibility to add a Windows experience as an alternative to GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, XFCE, etc, etc, building on top of a shared base OS layer. As well as providing WINE like layers to make existing Windows programs run in that environment.
I mean they did switch to their own flavor of their competitor with Edge already so it wouldn't be a first.
I just hope that is they do this they won't gain leverage to control the development of Linux for their own purposes in some way.
I didn't know Edge was made with Chrome. No wonder it sucks
Maybe. If they do it's going to represent a pretty dramatic shift away from backwards compatibility, which has always been the biggest defining characteristic of Windows. Probably not for Enterprise, but maybe for Personal?
They would keep backup compatibility using wine. Well, at least sort of.
Yeah, that's fine for handling some stuff, but there are some very old applications still in use that were coded by a programmer who died twenty years ago who counted on Windows bugs. A lot of companies refuse to spend the money to upgrade or replace those systems, and so Microsoft has maintained compatibility for them ever since. Wine hasn't reached full parity for those bugs, at least so far.
The key word being so far. A company like Microsoft would be able to ramp up wine development substantially, if they decided to. If I'm not mistaken, these very old legacy 16 and 32 bit apps have to be run on emulators running old versions of windows anyways - in these cases the OS running the emulator doesn't matter anyways.
True! If they committed back to the Linux kernel and the Wine project, this would be a huge boon. And it might happen someday, I guess; they've contributed to other FOSS projects. They've also built the WSL which is just one transposition away from a LSW, so who knows.
A little crazy, but not a lot crazy. ARM adoption may provide the spark necessary to ignite this fire.
If they dont use wine, they'll sell you a subscription to a cloud machine running legacy Windows to run your legacy apps in. They already have this product Windows cloud pc is a thing
Not what I want to happen though.
I want them to release Windows as free and open source software. Windows is on a purely technical level not a bad OS. If it were FOSS, we would get dozens of excellent distributions of it.
Windows IS a horrible OS at the technical level. It seems okay-ish from a non-technical perspective. Everything just below the surface is absolute junk. There's a reason it's the most exploited piece of software in history.
I remember reading a post from an intern there about why they switched to using a browser for the start bar and windows settings UI: the code was just layers upon layers of friction requiring conversion from C++ to some intermediate format into another one and back. Making a simple change would take days if not weeks.
Ad now that they want to rewrite millions of lines of C++ into Rust using AI to rewrite all of winblows in Rust, it's going to get much worse.
I'd be very, very nervous about using AI for a project that big.
One of the biggest issues with AI, when it "works", is that it's incredibly hard to catch its errors. We have layers of cognitive biases around content that appears "written well" is most likely authoritative.
That means LLMs sound very authoritative, since correct structure is something LLMs are very good at. LLMs can write text that uses advanced vocabulary and complex sentence structure correctly. Similarly, it can write well laid out code with detailed comments and include an explanation for how and why the code works.
It all looks really convincing. It takes significant attention and effort to critically analyze LLM output to notice the errors it makes, and it's very easy to forget that the LLM is categorically incapable of understanding your prompt or its outputβLLMs don't understand anything! They're just advanced word (token) prediction machines.
So, on a project the scale of refactoring the entire Windows codebase, with pressures to do the work quickly, the results are very predictable. They are going to introduce a lot of errors. And end up with incompatible spaghetti code that's incredibly inefficient.
(Somewhat technical example: Anyone who's studied algorithms/computer science knows how easy it is to write functional code that scale terribly because of missing a small logical step that makes one factor of code operate in linear time instead of logarithmic time. Multiply that by a few other factors in the same function and your code balloons from n or log(n) time to nΒ² or even nΒ³ time.)
We're witnessing the beginning of the end of Microsoft as an OS company.
We're witnessing the beginning of the end of Microsoft as an OS company.
Keep going. The faster the better. Imagine if billions went into Linux and opensource every year. It could be way better. The only thing I'm afraid of is companies starting to decide the future of linux. Everything would die in committee or they'd try and enshittify it to the max by adding proprietary kernel modules, filesystems and whatever else in order to get an upper hand.
There are some good ideas in there (the main one IMO is structured objects as the main form of IPC, instead of text), but the execution is really bad after XP and maybe 7. They stuck to a lot of legacy garbage in the name of "compatibility", but in the end it's an inconsistent mess of dozens of frameworks, and yet many old programs run worse than they do in WINE on Linux. Now with the advent of vibecoding the core components, it's pretty much over unless they literally start over from an old checkout.
MS already has their own Linux distribution...
And their own Unix before that. And arguably their own Linux compatible kernel until they dropped that ball.
I think if they were planning this at all, we'd see linux support for maui. currently their linux use has been very focused on only for devs and servers
How are Nvidia GPUs holding up on Linux at this point? Since the author specifically praised AMD and Linux.
Counter to the experiences I usually read about here, I put an Nvidia GPU into my Linux box over the weekend and it just worked immediately.
Now I have no idea if I've been reading the troubles of a vocal minority, or if I should go buy a lotto ticket this weekend. Haha.
Same boat here, just works, both on my laptop and deksktop.
In fact most of our company runs linux on laptops with nvidia gpu..
The biggest problem i can think of is a distro that doesn't ship the drivers in their package manager. and then it's just following the description on the nvidia website how to install them for your distro.
There's three types of NVIDIA failures on Linux:
A- The niche thing that doesn't work for the group of people who use it.
B- The specific card model that doesn't work.
C- The distro that for some reason is a nightmare to install the drivers.
Each motive individually is not a lot of people, but all together it is way much more than AMD. Hence the difference.
Also, if you have a type A failure card, there's a probability that maybe it will be fixed eventually. But for type B, you're out of luck. There's a non-zero chance that your card will never work.
Type C is entirely up to user error and distro effort. But it won't help with type A and B. If NVIDIA of fails you, whether you can install the drivers on your distro or not, is irrelevant.
Watch them be the ones to make Loss32