That's an interesting idea. Some thoughts come to mind:
- The relatively low revenue of Windows for Microsoft means that they have the potential opportunity of increasing Windows profitability by dropping the engineering costs associated with NT (though on the flipside, they'd acquire the engineering cost of developing Linux).
- Open sourcing NT would likely see a majority of it ported into Linux compatibility layers which would enable competitors (not that this is bad for us as consumers, it's just not good for business)
- Adopting the Linux kernel and writing a closed source NT compatibility layer, init system, and closed source desktop environment means that the "desktop" and Microsoft aspects of the OS could be retained as private IP - which is the part that they could charge for. I know I'd certainly pay for a Linux distribution that has a well made DE.
> UNIX is... pretty backwards,
I honestly agree. Many of the APIs show their age and, in the age of high level languages, it's frustrating to read C docs to understand function signatures/semantics. It's certainly not ergonomic - though that's not to say there isn't room to innovate here.
Ultimately, I value sameness. Aside from ergonomics, NT doesn't offer _more_ than POSIX and language bindings take care of the ergonomics issues with unix, so in many ways I'd argue that NT offers less.
> Visual Studio (not Code) is a massively superior development and debugging too [...] Tell me when you can get flame graphs in one click
Just because the tooling isn't as nice to use now doesn't mean that Microsoft couldn't make it better (and charge for that) if they adopted Linux. This isn't something entirely contingent on the kernel.
I don't see why everything has to be Linux (which I will continue to maintain has neither the better kernel- nor user-mode).
Windows and NT have their own strengths as detailed in the very article that this thread links to. When open-sourced they could develop entirely independently, and it is good to have reasonable competition. Porting NT and the Windows shell to the Linux kernel for porting's sake could easily take years, which is wasted time and effort on satisfying someone's not-invented-here syndrome. It will mean throwing away 30+ years of hardware and software backward compatibility just to satisfy an imperfect and impractical ideal.
For perspective: something like WINE still can't run many Office programs. The vast majority of its development in recent years has been focused on getting video games to work by porting Direct3D to Vulkan (which is comparatively straightforward because most GPUs have only a single device API that both graphics APIs expose, and also given the fact that both D3D and Vulkan shader code compile to SPIR-V). Office programs are the bread and butter of Windows users. The OpenOffice equivalents are barely shadows of MS Office. To be sure, they're admirable efforts, but that only gets the developers pats on the back.
- The relatively low revenue of Windows for Microsoft means that they have the potential opportunity of increasing Windows profitability by dropping the engineering costs associated with NT (though on the flipside, they'd acquire the engineering cost of developing Linux).
- Open sourcing NT would likely see a majority of it ported into Linux compatibility layers which would enable competitors (not that this is bad for us as consumers, it's just not good for business)
- Adopting the Linux kernel and writing a closed source NT compatibility layer, init system, and closed source desktop environment means that the "desktop" and Microsoft aspects of the OS could be retained as private IP - which is the part that they could charge for. I know I'd certainly pay for a Linux distribution that has a well made DE.
> UNIX is... pretty backwards,
I honestly agree. Many of the APIs show their age and, in the age of high level languages, it's frustrating to read C docs to understand function signatures/semantics. It's certainly not ergonomic - though that's not to say there isn't room to innovate here.
Ultimately, I value sameness. Aside from ergonomics, NT doesn't offer _more_ than POSIX and language bindings take care of the ergonomics issues with unix, so in many ways I'd argue that NT offers less.
> Visual Studio (not Code) is a massively superior development and debugging too [...] Tell me when you can get flame graphs in one click
Just because the tooling isn't as nice to use now doesn't mean that Microsoft couldn't make it better (and charge for that) if they adopted Linux. This isn't something entirely contingent on the kernel.