My understanding is that the portion of revenue Microsoft makes from Windows these days is nearly negligible (under 10%). Both XBox and Office individually make more money for Microsoft than Windows, which indicates that they don't have a compelling incentive to improve it technically. This would explain their infatuation with value extraction initiatives like ads in Explorer and Recall.
My understanding is that the main thing keeping Windows relevant is the support for legacy software, so they'd be hesitant to jeopardize that with any bold changes to the kernel or system APIs.
That said. Given my imagined cost of maintaining a kernel plus my small, idiolistic, naive world view; I'd love if it Microsoft simply abandoned NT and threw their weight behind the Linux kernel (or if GNU is too restrictive, BSD or alternatively write their own POSIX compliant kernel like MacOS).
Linux would be ideal given its features; containers, support for Android apps without emulation, abundance of supported devices, helpful system capabilities like UNIX sockets (I know they started to made progress there but they abandoned further development), and support for things like ROCm (which only works on Linux right now).
Microsoft could build Windows on top of that POSIX kernel and provide a compatibility layer for NT calls and Win32 APIs. I don't even care if it's open source.
The biggest value for me is development capabilities (my day job is writing a performance sensitive application that needs to run cross-platform and Windows is a constant thorn in my side).
Cygwin, msys2/git-bash are all fantastic but they are no replacement for the kind of development experience you get on Linux & MacOS.
WSL1 was a great start and gave me hope, but is now abandonware.
WSL2 is a joke, if I wanted to run Linux in a VM, I'd run Linux in a VM.
I guess a less extreme option would be for Microsoft to extend NT to be POSIX compliant - If I could target unix syscalls during development and produce binaries that worked on Windows, I supposed I'd be happy with that.
My understanding is that the main thing keeping Windows relevant is the support for legacy software, so they'd be hesitant to jeopardize that with any bold changes to the kernel or system APIs.
That said. Given my imagined cost of maintaining a kernel plus my small, idiolistic, naive world view; I'd love if it Microsoft simply abandoned NT and threw their weight behind the Linux kernel (or if GNU is too restrictive, BSD or alternatively write their own POSIX compliant kernel like MacOS).
Linux would be ideal given its features; containers, support for Android apps without emulation, abundance of supported devices, helpful system capabilities like UNIX sockets (I know they started to made progress there but they abandoned further development), and support for things like ROCm (which only works on Linux right now).
Microsoft could build Windows on top of that POSIX kernel and provide a compatibility layer for NT calls and Win32 APIs. I don't even care if it's open source.
The biggest value for me is development capabilities (my day job is writing a performance sensitive application that needs to run cross-platform and Windows is a constant thorn in my side).
Cygwin, msys2/git-bash are all fantastic but they are no replacement for the kind of development experience you get on Linux & MacOS.
WSL1 was a great start and gave me hope, but is now abandonware.
WSL2 is a joke, if I wanted to run Linux in a VM, I'd run Linux in a VM.
I guess a less extreme option would be for Microsoft to extend NT to be POSIX compliant - If I could target unix syscalls during development and produce binaries that worked on Windows, I supposed I'd be happy with that.