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Comment by orf | Hacker News Reader

> In an ideal world, Windows should replace its entire NT underpinnings and either build their own BSD-inspired infrastructure (like Darwin) or create their own Linux distro using off-the-shelf Linux kernel as the main driver (probably can't because of GPL).

Why? Is a 'BSD-inspired infrastructure' or Linux the absolute best, or even significantly better? Is an OS monoculture a good thing?

> Apple had its miracle in the turn of the century, and OS X and iOS are terrific OSes. Best of the breed.

The user-facing portion is, but there are significant problems with some core features (semaphores, forking being very slow, file system notifications, HFS).

Also, for a fair comparison you should run the test suite inside a vboxfs mount.

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This is the first thing I thought when I saw that comment. The Windows NT kernel is one of the best and most stable ever written. Why should Microsoft throw away all that investment?

Seriously, the original NT Kernel was designed to be Posix compliant to run a UNIX environment. It eventually grew away from that but since Vista, Microsoft has been extricating unnecessary Win32 bits to Userland to take it back to it's roots. I think the MinWin project was completed prior to Windows 10 / Server 2016.

Linux was developed as a Unix compatible environment because Unix wasn't an option on commodity hardware. BSD isn't UNIX or Linux.

Why can't NT exist in the same area as a *nix compatible system?

I feel like the entire appeal of WSL is that it lets you have your Linux environment and those Windows apps you just can't give up (Office, Photoshop) running together. You get to have your cake and eat it too. From that perspective, throwing out NT and building Yet Another Linux Distribution would be an absolutely terrible idea.

The other part is significantly better hardware support (including powersaving and wider range of devices) which would also be completely undone by a unixy kernel.

I really kinda fail to see what would be gained by rewriting a piece of kernel that works just fine (well, except that ./ users would finally declare that they were right all along!)

I think the hardware support point is moot because if Windows did switch to Linux (Microsoft wouldn't but we are playing the "what if" game here) then hardware manufacturers would obviously port their drivers to Linux else nobody would buy their hardware. We've already seen this to be the case on Android for example. Plus Linux already has reasonably good support for older hardware.

I should stress again, just in case anyone misinterprets my comment, that I don't for one second think Microsoft will not should switch to Linux

They would port their new hardware drivers, maybe. It's the 20 years of backwards compatibility that keeps Windows strong in many places, especially government, military, corporate.

I did also address that point in my post you're replying to

Unfortunately they aren't running together. They run entirely separated in isolated subsystems with no way to communicate between the two. The GUI makes them seem more integrated than they actually are.

Linux w/ a windows vm makes more sense for that use case though

Not always. If the windows only software needs access to a hardware device (e.g. GPU) then there's still a significant barrier to setting that up. Hardware support is kind if there but some vendors dont allow it with consumer cards and you'll need two of them if you want both desktops at once. Along with that it's not uncommon for even new hardware to get details about doing this wrong. Currently amds threadripper and corresponding motherboards don't work with it due to a bug with power management.

>Why? Is a 'BSD-inspired infrastructure' or Linux the absolute best, or even significantly better? Is an OS monoculture a good thing?

If you used unix based OSes for all your life, it makes sense that every operating system should be unix.

Ehh, I’m not so sure this is true. I think people are open to, erm, analagously powerful forms of computation. I was under the impression that, at least before powershell, the ability to compose programs and form scripts was super limiting, and by now bash is realistically far to entrenched to replace on the unix side, and people don’t really want to target two scripting languages.

However, there are alternative ways of doing this that seem quite powerful, like the lisp machine—it didn’t fail because it couldn’t handle tackling abstract problems, it failed because unix ended up doing it cheaper and faster. There might even be arguments for visual shell scripting.

That said, if you’re doing anything like unix, you might as well go full unix :)

I was under the impression that, at least before powershell, the ability to compose programs and form scripts was super limiting

Do you mean using batch files in cmd.exe? Sure.

But that's not really what cmd.exe "was for." It's what WSH - Windows Scripting Host[0] - was for.

A lot of people (perhaps those who have little Windows experience) don't realize this and think that Windows was entirely un-administratable without using the GUI. While that may indeed have been the case (and may still be) for certain tasks, you could get far with WSH. And using real (well, non-shell script) programming languages: WSH was a host on which programming languages could be added. Such as perl, for example. Or Python.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Script_Host

Enlightening; thank you!

You were comemnting on a blogpost from a person that thinks that linux on desktop is a thing. Well no it is not.

It is a thing. It's a very small thing, but a thing regardless. Some of us have used Linux on the desktop since the 90s.

No it is not. Not even chromebooks are a thing. Android is a thing and if they try enough the might turn it into a desktop alternative.

What do you suppose I'm typing this on?

Dude, how pretentious are you? I'm writing this on a Acer Chromebook, btw, which I absolutely love.

Linux on the desktop is a thing. At my previous job all the consultants (100+) used a custom distro based off Mint/Kali, with a Windows VM.

It's a thing. Might not be your thing, but its a thing nonetheless.

My desktop has been running Linux for 18 years

I own a pair of clogs. Still, I'd hesitate to call it a thing.

It was my desktop from '95 'till 2008. Then - tired of the always recurring wrestle with drivers and multimedia - I bought a MacBook. Never looked back.

1995-2008? That is some serious self flagellation. I have tried to use various Linux desktops from 2000 onward and, while they have improved immensely over the years, I can't see using one as my daily driver even today.

I guess I've been doing all my work and getting all my computing desktop needs from an imaginary box then.

More than one in 30 users is using Linux on the desktop. That does NOT include ChromeOS (which you may or may not classify as running a Linux desktop - I do not).

That's a "thing", much more so than e.g. Windows Phone market share, or the Baha'i religion.

[0] https://linux.slashdot.org/story/17/09/01/1639250/linux-desk...

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