It’s fair to say that there are many people in our community who just love to dunk on Microsoft Windows. It’s an easy win, after all, the dominant player in the PC operating system market has a long history of dunking on free software, and let’s face it, today’s Windows doesn’t offer a good experience. But what might the future hold? [Mason] has an unexpected prediction: that Microsoft will eventually move towards offering a Windows-themed Linux distro instead of a descendant of today’s Windows.
The very idea is sure to cause mirth, but on a little sober reflection, it’s not such a crazy one. Windows 11 is slow and unfriendly, and increasingly it’s losing the position once enjoyed by its ancestors. The desktop (or laptop) PC is no longer the default computing experience, and what to do about that must be a big headache for the Redmond company. Even gaming, once a stronghold for Windows, is being lost to competitors such as Valve’s Steam OS, so it wouldn’t be outlandish for them to wonder whether the old embrace-and-extend strategy could be tried on the Linux desktop.
We do not possess a working crystal ball here at Hackaday, so we’ll hold off hailing a Microsoft desktop Linux. But we have to admit it’s not an impossible future, having seen Apple reinvent their OS in the past using BSD, and even Microsoft bring out a cloud Linux distro. If you can’t wait, you’ll have to make do with a Windows skin, WINE, and the .NET runtime on your current Linux box.
” let’s face it, today’s Windows doesn’t offer a good experience”
Really?
Go fire up a copy of 95 or Vista or shudder ME.
Defense of the company or it’s policies aside, by an large my experience with windows is everything just WORKS, and it chugs along just fine. Not sure what kind of “experience” you’re looking for from an operating system, but I’m looking for a foundational platform from which I run my chosen applications, and from that lens I’ve had a perfectly fine experience.
What people are objecting to are the ads baked in, the Microsoft account being mandatory, the telemetry, the AI “features”, the cloud “features”, the whittling away of any user control, the hardware requirements in service of the “features”, and that’s just a partial list off the top of my head. Strip all that away, and yeah, it might be a decent “foundational platform”.
Yeah. Probably they’ll just strip away the crap in next version again.
+1
Windows 2000 used to be considered a well designed release, for example.
It was small, stable, had a clean UI, had no product activation, no spyware or ads.
Many Linux users respected Windows 2000, which I think means a lot.
I still use Win2K occasionally in a VM on my Linux laptop. It was the last version of Windows that I actually liked; later on I used XP at work, but even then I felt that Microsoft was starting to make spurious less-than-helpful changes to the way they did things. I did a fair amount of Registry hacking because of that, and it was the last version of Windows I ever used on a daily basis.
Sounds like the internet in general. You all have your adblockers set to stun, right?
it’s amazing to think that Windows still randomly reshuffles my desktop icons — what is so completely unfixable about that bug? if the desktop metaphor means anything at all, it means leaving things where the user left them so that they can use their spacial memory to find them again
That disparity aside… “it just works” is a statement about your tolerance… not quality. Company ethics rants aside, Windows is technically inept compared against its competitors.
Windows seems fine if your workload is a browser, Excel and a couple “normie” desktop apps. That’s not a “foundational platform” though. It’s an appliance. The moment you step outside that paradigm, the cracks are no longer subtle.
The UI is incoherent by design. Windows doesn’t really have an interface… it’s a museum of abandoned ones. Control panel vs Settings vs MMC vs vendor-specific dialogs, three different context menu systems, half the OS is win32 and the other half is UWP… neither of which fully owns anything. Search behaves differently depending on which subsystem you hit. System config is scattered across a dozen incompatible paradigms, none of which works with the other.
Routine everyday tasks turn into archaeological digs. Need to change something non-trivial? You’re bouncing between deprecated panels, registry edits, “reboot and pray”, and dialogs that haven’t been visually updated since Vista. That’s not “just works”… it’s throwing darts in the dark and hoping something lands.
It gets even nastier when you get into real work. Scheduler incompetence, for one… where SMT and NUMA are first class failures. Windows routinely packs heavy threads onto sibling SMT cores while leaving physical cores idle, thrashes L1/L2 instead of spreading load, and oscillates threads between cores destroying cache locality. Linux solved this a decade ago, while Windows faceplants once you cross the “desktop CPU” threshold. NUMA awareness? Windows memory allocation regularly lands on remote nodes, latency spikes are routine and bandwidth collapses under real non-synthetic load. Windows actively fights hardware topology because “Microsoft knows better”.
My Windows QEMU/KVM with just a single CCX routinely beats Windows on bare metal… on the same hardware. That means Linux + KVM + virtualized hardware topology beats Windows with native access to the silicon. That should be embarrassing.
Windows’ update system is operationally reckless. Forced reboots, silent driver replacements, regressions shipped globally, feature updates masquerading as “security updates”, no transactional rollback that you can actually trust, and no meaningful staging model. It’s not maintenance… it’s roulette.
Even I/O + storage + filesystem stack is backward. NTFS is fragile under crash conditions, diagnostics are vague/opaque, it’s slow to repair and hostile to snapshotting and is poorly integrated with modern CoW or checksumming models. Windows storage is “don’t touch it and pray it keeps working”.
The tooling is duct tape. Anything serious on Windows involves third party driver stacks, vendor-specific kernel modules, unsigned hacks, mystery background services, registry edits and reboot cycles.
And lets not forget the engineering masterpiece that is Windows SxS… an operating system so incapable of maintaining binary compatibility that its solution was “hey, I’ve got it! let’s ship every version of every DLL forever and hope nobody notices!” Stunning. Revolutionary. Truly the pinnacle of “it just works”.
“It works for me” is not a technical argument. A toaster “just works” too. Windows is just fine if your definition of “just works” is “yeah, it opens Chrome without catching fire.” As a serious “foundational platform” it’s a scheduler/NUMA-incoherent, confused mess of a liability that actively wastes modern hardware… to the point that running it virtualized on Linux performs better than running it on bare metal. If “just works” means “it boots, launches Chrome and hasn’t bluescreened TODAY”, then congratulations… the bar has been successfully buried six feet underground.