Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella penned an AI-heavy blog post to close out 2025, leading to widespread mockery and a brand new moniker for the big M.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella penned an AI-heavy blog post to close out 2025, leading to widespread mockery and a brand new moniker for the big M.
it would be pretty interesting if Microsoft made the next version of Windows a Linux distro with a Windows emulation layer
With Edge running on top to render all user interface elements.
Edge running Chromium inside, loading windows web app from Microsoft website every startup
I just threw up a bit at the thought.
I think it’d be a full screen ai client app running on linux, probably on cage. why bother with the nt and win32 and whatever middlewares. linux is externally maintained. saved dev money can be used for power/ram bills instead.
Well, if they let AI write all the software I bet it will be. I’m sure it’s been trained on the Linux source code.
Or throw their support behind certain distros with said emulation layers, maybe even a desktop environment like Plasma with a “Microsoft theme”.
Honestly I think it is a great idea either way.
Regardless of their commercial goals, if they put their weight into supporting the Linux ecosystem we’d undoubtedly benefit as a whole. For instance from common upstream bug fixes and increased user adoption of Linux by their remaining loyalist customers.
Yes, until they do like Google with android
That would never happen. The entire reason why Windows is not as power efficient as MacOS or some Linux distros is the backwards compatibility that it brings. People laugh at the fact that you can still find icons and .dlls from Windows 95 (or, probably, even 3), but that’s exactly one of the reasons why this OS is so massively popular, especially for enterprise users.
I’m sorry but this is just not true. The legacy support within Linux is insane and it’s one of the hallmarks of the operating system.
What are you talking about? Linux has virtually no backwards compatibility at all. Maybe one or two years max. The kernel is fine. The weak point is glibc.
You literally need to recompile applications constantly to stay compatible with glibc. Otherwise they just don’t work.
The good news is that distros are constantly providing freshly compiled versions of open source applications.
The bad news is that actual binary backwards compatibility is non existent. Try running a binary compiled in 2005 on modern Linux. You’ll just get a ton of glibc errors.
Windows lets you run applications compiled in 1995 on modern desktops.
Linux is great and it’s what I use. But we can’t claim backwards compatibility as a strength. Maybe a binary compiled today with musl might run in 2036 but musl targeting is quite rare.
Linux has excellent legacy support for Linux.
Now run a 1998 obscure Windows vendor custom app. The vendor went out of business 30 years ago.
Not to mention that it would kill the entirety of existing IT automation, the entirety of centralised system management, and lots more.
Actually, Linux has better support for legacy Windows apps (through wine) than for legacy Linux apps.
Your best bet to run it probably is on Linux with Wine. Or if it is MS themselves , they already have their own Win32 to Linux translation layers, for example DB2 for Linux runs that way.
Or you can just not introduce extra instability layers and use native Windows. I can’t even fathom the cost of implementation and maintenance of something like that in a company like HCL (200 000 employees, last I checked).
Haha, are you aware of how many layers of Windows are just backward compatibility hacks? Architecturally Windows has changed a lot since Win98.
The fact that your 30year old business software is still running is just the fact that Windows has built in patches for some common programming patterns used at the time and someone having insight enough can enable/disable them (mostly).
Btw, the same for games. Windows detects specific games and re-enables former direct x bugs.
There are numerous layers of abstraction between your Win32 application and the Kernel, there’s no reason they won’t work on another kernel.
Oh. And of course it’s badly debuggable and frequently goes wrong.
I stopped maintaining Windows systems and focused on developing software - it’s so effing annoying that things always break out of the blue with a new windows patch versions because MS has bad quality control on their overcomplicated house of cards that is named Windows.
… which is exactly my point. What’s yours?
Not so frequently to cause major disruptions.
Much too frequently, if you need to manage systems for a company.
THAT is my point.
I have spent too many nights unrolling and blocking Windows updates just to keep the fucking MS Exchange server happy. Or the damned 8 year old CRM software which writes to places that Windows now blocks access to.
Yeah it was paid time, but I’m much more happy if the systems I care about just run without hiccups.
So ultimately I just jailed all the Windows stuff in VMs which I can snapshot and reliably backup, which I can roll back (mostly, as long as it does not involve Active Directory) etc. Windows is inherently unstable, that’s my point.
The ultimate solution was to get out of that job. Yeah, I stilm do use Windows as a daily driver, but single use only, no centralized management and thats kind of OK.