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?
My adblocker is set and locked on “kill.”
People gripe and complain about how overrun everything is with ads. I don’t. I nearly never see any.
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
NSFW: https://youtu.be/uRGljemfwUE
Windoze just needs more sort icons options.
In other words, the problem isn’t Windows, it’s Microsoft.
The only reason why they can keep abusing their users is because the competition is a disorganized mess with internal and external compatibility issues and missing or bad functionality and UI/UX, or pricing themselves above the common user.
Point in case:
By offering a Windows compatibility layer to make the games work on an otherwise heterogeneous platform that is very difficult to target directly. It means games are still primarily targeted for Windows if they are to work on Steam OS.
..windows… more like 10 diferent installed libs of microsoft c++ redistributable 2xxx.yy and 7 more of .Net x.YY :) oh well and 5more compatibility layers which are used to run a lot of apps (switched on by developers until they upgrade app, you can change this btw). really not much difference, they just do not say it to you :)
And yet somehow this is not a visible problem to users because Windows itself is not split in ten different ways.
ltsc in a nutshell. too bad they only sell that to enterprise licensees. i just want an operating system, all that other stuff should be another product that people pay for if they need it. conflating ai, cloud storage, etc with the os just makes the os more expensive to develop. i should not have to pay for stuff i dont use.
Windows 2000 was top achievement as “platform that just works”. Every successor added new bloatware, problems with stability and compatibility and ridiculous requirements
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.
I for one preferred at least the look and feel of Windows 95/98 (or rather Windows NT4) to the look of XP and later. In particular I find the way Windows 10 did away with colours and frames (e.g. around edit fields) in favour of a “cleaner” UI very annoying. It made it less usable for me instead of more.
Yes, there were quite a few improvements too, but the look and feel of Windows 8 and later definitely wasn’t one of these.
The Windows 8 Beta without Metro UI was still fine, really.
It basically still was looking like Windows 7 (more boxy),
but shipped with built-in USB 3 support, new task manager and software-renderer for Aero Glass (using WARP rasterizer).
Unfortunately, the final release of Windows 8 wasn’t exactly great. 😞
Geez. Cannot believe a fellow ‘Brian’ said that.
It does not ‘just work’. The las time I allowed any windoze box run for over 36 hours, it made a mess of things. I have one Slackware 14 box that has been running for > 3 years. Even WIndoze Server has been problematic without periodic re-boots.
Everytime some youngster employee of a former client insists on converting a factory automation box to windoze, I get another 10-20 billable hours to replace what the cult of mickeysoft has doth ordained as infallible.
Why would I buy the Windows version of Linux when I can get a different version for free? I’m barely okay with buying a Windows version of Windows, and I like Windows. Have always been closest to being “a power user” in the office, but that’s more a commentary on my workmates than a paean to me. Different people are different but BSD-based Mac SOX is more understandable to me, structurally. Things are easier to find, maybe I was just never given the Windows decoder ring. So you’re offering me an opportunity to pay for Linux. This is truly my lucky day.
I’ll echo Bob A., but from another angle. ’95 -Me, even 7 and 8, I OWNED. They were purchased. I was even able to own Win 10 because it was updated from 8. Just plain leasing rather than owning makes the Win 11 experience bad.
Hard disagree. Windows 95 was very usable out of the box. I used it as recently as the early 2010s on old laptops and it was absolutely fine, even going on the internet. Sure there might be odd combinations of hardware that brick it or something, but the same could be said for linux (which I use currently). I mainly liked Win9x because for the most part, it minded its own business. An operating system should really only serve to get things off the disk and into RAM. Anything more is bloat.
it’s usable? ok try the following. try copying a file between two maximized explorer windows. or drag a file from explorer into an application. you know. click, drag over taskbar, hover over the apps icon so it comes out front, and then drag over the file. let me know how it goes.
(for non windows users: windows 11 removed this feature. you have to arrange your windows beforehand so both are visible, or you have to use the keyboard. a feature present for 30 years gone because someone at Microsoft decided so)
The only way I see this happening is in an utterly dystopian fashion. Microsoft has clearly decided that their desired way of generating revenue is to use their users: spying on everything they do while simultaneously selling the data and feeding it to the AI which they’re cramming down users’ throats in order to train said AI even faster. Microsoft is trying to revert the entire consumer computing experience to a client / server model wherein Redmond has all the control.
So yes, they could leverage some Frankensteined version of Linux to achieve the same ends while simultaneously erasing a couple of decades’ worth of technical debt. But calling the resulting beast “Linux” would have even less validity than calling Android “Linux”.
Yes, that’s what I was thinking. Since they would have to add a layer to continue collecting data, this would become very much like Android. And OBTW: having a Linux variant becoming the dominant consumer desktop OS would shift all of the black hats over to targeting the Linux kernel.
I go all the way back to original DOS and IBM 360. So, lemme see, 37 or 38 years on NIX and roughly the same on MSFT. I run both at home (Debian, Fedora, Win10, Win11, *not Arch).
I do loath many things about MSFT but I think true *NIX devotees forget how much tweaking a *NIX system requires compared to Win.
Fedora pushes out a “minor” update and boom, my WiFi card stops working. Now I either have to rollback or find that one deprecated library that has been keeping my exact Intel WiFi chip happy and find a replacement. Hours go by. I don’t mind. It’s part of the game.
But that doesn’t really fly for most people. “Windows applied a patch and my PC stopped working” is a very big deal for most people. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen (hi, Crowdstrike) but it’s way less frequent. And yeah, I know about immutable and LTS distros but sometimes even something presumably minor, like an update to the power management daemon, means suddenly my battery is discharging at 300% and I will spend the next 5 hours on forums figuring out why. I get it. Volunteer community mostly and building for a bazillion configurations. It’s the dog walking on hindlegs. You don’t ask why it doesn’t do that all the time, you ask how it does that at all.
And yes, *NIX is amazing for highly stable carefully curated hardware and software builds — servers that run for years without incident.
However, for the “everyday” user where people install and uninstall stuff constantly it’s got some real challenges that MSFT, even with adware dreck like W11 has less of.
Thanks for mentioning DOS, it’s another alternative.
At least for running a small selection of specialized applications needed at work place.
Such as Predict or Dillo, for example.
I like the fact that there are a dozen of MS-DOS compatible OSes, also.
Diversity is almost as high as with Linux distros, maybe.
FreeDOS is most up-to-date version, maybe.
https://computer.fandom.com/wiki/MS-DOS_compatible_operating_systems
The list is incomplete, though. There are more DOS-like OSes that come to mind..
Paragon DOS, PTS DOS, PC-MOS/386 (now GPL’ed), Wendin DOS, X-DOS, DIP DOS, L3 (has DOS sandbox), DCP (former East Germany), etc.
Sure. But I think Titus was talking about DOS/360 (for the IBM System/360), not MS-DOS.
Ah, I see, thanks for the info! 😃
When I replied, I wasn’t sure, I guess, because Windows was also mentioned.
My bad, though. Should have read it more carefully!
Run windows on an old machine that and compare that to how linux performs on it……
Let’s make sure the “old machine” has plenty of RAM, though.
Linux eats it by the GhibliBytes.
I don’t find that the case at all. Although I’ve been using linux since ’99, when it was all about the page partition (or pagefile) It amazes me what 4GB has been able to do for, like a decade now? Tried a Puppy Linux derivative yet? It has to do with tweaking, but once you know how…
Remember this goodie from the 90’s: Oh if we could have seen the future.
I just did a web search and picked this version out of the 50 different “original” versions I found.
Comparing Microsoft Windows With Cars
At a recent computer expo (COMDEX), Bill Gates reportedly compared the computer industry with the auto industry and stated, “If GM had kept up with the technology like the computer industry has, we would all be driving $25.00 cars that got 1,000 miles to the gallon”.
In response to Bill’s comments, General Motors issued a press release stating: If GM had developed technology like Microsoft, we would all be driving cars with the following characteristics:
For no reason whatsoever, your car would crash twice a day.
Every time they repainted the lines in the road, you would have to buy a new car.
Occasionally your car would die on the freeway for no reason. You would have to pull over to the side of the road, close all of the windows, shut off the car, restart it, and reopen the windows before you could continue. For some reason you would simply accept this.
Occasionally, executing a maneuver such as a left turn would cause your car to shut down and refuse to restart, in which case you would have to reinstall the engine.
Macintosh would make a car that was powered by the sun, was reliable, five times as fast and twice as easy to drive – but would run on only five percent of the roads.
The oil, water temperature, and alternator warning lights would all be replaced by a single “This Car Has Performed An Illegal Operation” warning light.
The airbag system would ask “Are you sure?” before deploying.
Occasionally, for no reason whatsoever, your car would lock you out and refuse to let you in until you simultaneously lifted the door handle, turned the key and grabbed hold of the radio antenna.
Every time a new car was introduced car buyers would have to learn how to drive all over again because none of the controls would operate in the same manner as the old car.
You’d have to press the “Start” button to turn the engine off.
I don’t like cars too much and prefer the airline comparison.. :)
https://2bitsabyte.com/airlines
I’ve had to press the “Start” button to turn off my last 3 cars.
As a corporate user of Win 11 I find it works a lot better than 10 or 7, for the B2B activities. It’s a lot better than the alternatives, at least for a large organisation. All the high end CAD tools run on it fairly well.To be fair I’m pretty sure that our IT department strips a lot of the annoying stuff mentioned in these columns out of our installations. I would think the main reason why windows is losing the OS market has more to do with the migration of most people to tablets and phones for internet browsing. As the family tech support I’ve noticed that since most of my family have stopped using laptops etc, the number of support calls has dropped significantly. :-). Although I do run a win laptop at home, most of the time I use one of my Linux laptops. The raspberry pi desktop for PCs works quite well for me and provides an easy migration for pi development.
I too have to use Win 10/11 at work. Wish they’d just go Linux … but isn’t going to happen. Windows free here at home for years. Laptops, desktops, workstations, servers, SBCs … All Linux based and nothing left on the table as an ‘I wish…’.
I think M$ going to Linux as the underlying OS is a good thing, even for them. No longer would they have to ‘maintain’ the inhouse code base. Let Linux developers do the ‘heavy’ lifting, leaving M$ to just ‘support it’ and add their own DE features. Simple and good for the stock holders as well. They already use Linux in the back room … next up the Desktop market.
I agree that dependency on Windows and US companies/services in general should be reduced, that’s reasoable.
Switching one monopoly for another isn’t exactly the solution, though.
That’s a character traith I don’t like about Linux users, personally, by the way.
To me, they act sect like, as if Linux was the only one and true messiah.
In practice, there are also BSD (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD etc), macOS (Darwin/BSD based), BEOS (Haiku),
ReactOS (free Windows implementation, unfinished), QNX, MinuetOS/KolibriOS (fits on a floppy), RISC OS, various Unices (Solaris, HP/UX), OS/2 (eComStation, ArcaOS) etc.
Sure, some are absolute niche OSes, but they do have gotten support for SDL library or X11 and are in principle able to host full-size applications.
They can be alternatives to Windows in certain work environments, without having the security issues of Windows.
Even with all network ports open or if beeing directly exposed to the information super highway, they aren’t vulnerable same way as Windows.
I’m a Linux user but if I had to manage IT at a company, I’d run windows. Active Directory just works. it’s a no braiber.
I hear a lot of Unix nerds saying that Unix doesn’t need that because you can write your own scripts. to which I respond: GO AWAY. if you’re in IT, you’re paid IT salary. not software developer salary. if I have to write programs I expect to be paid accordingly. and the board will say, with good reason, “why are we paying someone to write scripts every time we need to change something if on windows you click Apply template and all of the company is updated”?
also, Unix nerds, have you really, really tried to use Kerberos? because that thing doesn’t work. it doesn’t work from BSD to Linux (there are different flavors of Kerberos, betcha didn’t know that eh?), and it doesn’t solve a lot of the issues AD solves
the sole idea of “writing scripts” to do common tasks… smh
“oh but you can use Ansible”. really? yet another tool that is just a framework to do things and it’s not really what AD is?
thanks. for work, I’ll stick to AD
Linux fans treat Linux as “the true messiah”, because people aren’t accepting ANY alternative desktops, unless Microsoft foists it on them, and considering Linux has multiple ones to choose from… Using linux since ’99, I’ve come to accept that people are absolute total morons when it comes to PCs. It might seem arrogant, but just try converting people to ANY of the alternatives you mention. You can have pages of logical, cogent notes, FREE as in beer!, and I’ve heard all the whining of needing Windows for games. If you want to hear linux promoters being irritating, STOP BEING F’N MORONS!
Well, my experience with BSD hasn’t been that good. I’ve tried it in a VM a few times over the years, but it just never quite as easy to use as Linux is (for my purpose anyway). MacOS is just another closed system on Apple for Apple. Tried RISC OS too. No go. Liked OS/2 during it’s hay day, but our company stayed with M$ . Kicked around QNX for awhile at work a long time ago. Coherent was another Unix like… Used VRTX, Wind River OSes in the RTU/IED domain as well. So no stranger to other OSs and kernels. That said, Linux just seems more practical across all platforms from SBCs to high-end workstations on different CPU platforms. And no one can ‘lock it up’ behind a paywall, either or force one particular DE down your throat. Pick one that fits your workflow. Very flexible. Seems like a win win. Oh and if not satisfied with any, build a linux system from scratch if that floats your boat (I did that only once, never again ) . Note, I’ve used DOS, CP/M, and most of all the Windows platforms through my career, but when I loaded Linux I knew this was the direction for me. It finally stabilized enough that I started using full time. Win 7 was the last M$ OS I bought, before going Windows free. Never looked back.
That’s the advantage Windows really has: A lot of business software out there is really only available for Windows. All your good mechanical CAD packages, some of your ERP and accounting software (although we’re starting to see that moving to cloud based software), a lot of oddball specialized technical software. And there’s presumably a lot of tools available for enterprise level IT there as well. So a lot of people are going to see Windows at the office, which also means if they want a computer at home using a Windows box will minimize what they have to relearn.
Trying to overcome that advantage with another OS would require convincing all sorts of software companies, from big dogs like Solidworks or Intuit down to companies that make a software package for an obscure lab test, to offer Linux friendly options. At larger companies you may encounter a bunch of institutional inertia; at the shallower end of the pool you may have a situation where the original programmer retired and now you have one person trying to sustain the package in between their regular assignments.
That’s true, that’s why Windows VMs can help to continue to run certain inportant applications.
Such as AutoCAD or other professional software.
In addition, there’s LOSS32 distribution of Linux.
The compatibility layers WINE (*nix, KolibriOS) and ODIN (OS/2 Warp and beyond) can execute Windows applications.
Then there’s ReactOS which can be used as s subsitute for software relying on device drivers written for NT4/NT5.x.
While ReactOS is still unfinished, it can be use as a base for forks or custom builds.
Companies or business could compile their own ReactOS builds that can continue to run unsupported, specialized hardware/software.
I’m thinking of labs or factories with special equipment..
The crazy thing is, microsoft invented android almost a decade before it existed. In 2001 they were sending guys to college campuses to tell CS majors about how dot net would become The One runtime, would let apps run the same code on mobile and desktop, true cross-platform, ARM and x86, blah blah blah. And i looked at the technical decisions they were talking about and i said “yeah right”, i knew it would never happen. But Android made all of those same decisions and won the mobile space at least. I’m still in awe that microsoft had a huge lead on everyone else and still hasn’t even neared the finish line. Meanwhile, Android has become so mature that all of its recent innovation is antifeatures.
Surely Java was The One runtime, from the 90s? Microsoft only ever copied. They never innovated.
lol. I’ll take the developer experience of the “bad copy” that .NET is over Java any day.
imo copying is the core of innovation. I have nothing against C# as a copy of Java (and after Oracle’s litigousness, it almost looks like a good choice). Android famously copied Java completely, and to dramatic success. Microsoft failed to succeed, despite their copying.
W95 was fine (ironically about 95% of the time) ie when it didn’t crash, and you kinda learned how to avoid that by managing the workload and programs running.
XP and W7 were the pinnacles. It’s been downhill (very fast) since then.
Even office peaked around 2003.
Ever since then it’s been more and more $hit to the point the stuff isn’t useable.