First of all, because it's not their crown jewel anymore, Azure is. And to the degree that Windows is their crown jewel, it's as much the Windows userland as the NT kernel.zaval wrote: They offload spendings using it, as every corporate linux "lovers" do, but why would they replace a far superior, fully fledged, ready to keep its dominance, with such the heritage and ecosystem OS, remains the question. Why will they want to replace their crown jewel with a plastic substitute?
The fact is, NT is about the only non-Unix kernel left among major operating systems. And the reason that it's the only one left is because most of the vendors that had their own kernels (and didn't die somewhere in the interim) decided at some point along the road that it *was* their best option to pick a Unix kernel, write a compatibility layer for their existing APIs on top of that kernel, and release the next version of their OS with Unix under the hood. What kernel's did Apple and Novell use in the 90s? What kernels do they use now? (Novell even offered their userland with a choice of kernel for a version or two before abandoning the Netware kernel entirely).The code base, they have been nurturing for decades, the code base they fully own and don't need to pull off from somewhere outside and "patch" that mess to fit their visions. Windows is not IE/Edge. Even that was a real bad decision, hurting more a very deplorable browser situation. Without real competition, browsers will get so "improved" soon, that will be eating up gigabytes of memory for an empty page. Not hundreds of megabytes as is now. But Windows is not the case. Like at even 0.001% of chance. Maybe it's just wet fantasies of linux fans, so hardly trying to show, they don't care about anything Windows, yet generating assumptions like this? Anyway, if that happens, then this will be the dumbest decision ever made in this industry, and given MS is always #1 in everything, who knows. Heil ReactOS then!
And the fact is, the Win32 API was *written* to work on top of multiple kernels, which probably explains in part why Wine has done as well as it has. Win32 runs/ran both on top of NT and on top of the monstrosity that was DOS/EMM386/Win16. Microsoft has ported Win32 to other kernels before, and on a much shakier foundation than Linux.
On top of this, Microsoft already has a compatibility layer written for them. I by no means take it for granted that they *will* rekernel to Linux, but if they do decide to, a sign to watch out for is Microsoft suddenly contributing a ton of code to Wine. Wine isn't perfect, but it's good, and could only get better with actual input from Microsoft.
And its not just that I really want it to happen because I'm a Linux fanboi. Sure, there will be some sense of vindication, but the big evils of the modern tech industry are not what they were in the 90s and 2000s when we were all dreaming about the year of the Linux desktop. They lie in lower levels than the kernel (firmware), and higher levels (middleware in practically every consumer system from every vendor that would have been considered spyware of the type spewed out by only the seediest fly-by-night vendors 20 years ago), and, more importantly, away from client systems: big online services (from whatever vendor) are where the real nastiness is, and the shady stuff going on at the firmware and middleware levels in client systems is largely meant to funnel customers towards some vendor or other's cloud services (or datamine for those services whether the customer uses them or not). I'm ever more certain that YOLD is coming, or even that it snuck up on us and arrived a while ago (Chromebooks and Android phones are a dime a dozen), but I'm less and less certain that it will make the future any less dystopian (Chromebooks and Android phones are a dime a dozen).
