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Comment by Ari_Ugwu | Hacker News Reader

This is my guess and the one I'm excited about:

Azure is a cash cow. Windows brings in money but is increasingly difficult to monetize _and_ its increasingly difficult to keep bringing legacy app support forward and stay competitive.

PowerShell, .NET Core, and MS SQL are all happily running on Linux.

By all accounts WSL entered the market with little drama is pretty great to use (IMHO).

The idea of doing a native SSH from WSL into a Linux container on Azure running a bootstraped 'MS' version of *nix with official support for a discounted price compared to a Windows VM is certainly appealing.

I would run MS Linux as a dev environment in a heart beat. MS would do well to _not_ to brand a desktop and just run a very clean gnome or plasma default.

Then a dedicated app store can really push PWAs like Teams,Skype and fully manage the interop layer for other apps that need a little more hand holding (wine, mono, etc).

tl;dr - I'm into this.

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Given the tight cooperation between Canonical and MS for WSL I would somehow expect that MS would use Ubuntu if they were to ever sanction a desktop Linux. This is just my guess, though.

Following that thought:

If Microsoft buys Canonical it will be very interesting. Seeing that IBM bought Red Hat,

This. It's the first thing that came to mind when the redhat deal was announced. Oracle has Sun, IBM has RedHat, it would seem logical for MSFT

Windows is more or less over and MS has been gradually coming to terms with it, helped along by inflection points that made it painstakingly clear that the Windows way was beyond outmoded, like containers and cloud. I don't think MS is even pretending otherwise anymore.

I wouldn't be surprised at all to see MS give up on WSL, acquire CodeWeavers, and reimplement "Windows" as a proprietary desktop environment for a nix-ish OS with a super-souped-up WINE doing much of the legwork. At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).

Selling software, as a general business model, is on the ropes and this is a great indication of that. The victory of open-source here is both blatant and decisive.

Had it not been for every major software company deciding they can subsist on a combination of a) rental fees and b) advertising/demographic data, we'd probably have another RIAA v. The Internet-style showdown to confront over the next decade. In this respect, I suppose we should be grateful for the opportunity to pay 6x more to be in "the cloud".

As an observer, it's a weird situation to see, and still trying to orient my feelings and understand what to make of it.

I would be very surprised to see them take that reimplementation path as their backwards compatibility has been so important for decades (yes I know not everything runs still; but a large amount does). They have provided an evolutionary path and that would be revolution. The benefit to them seems likely to be outweighed by the disruption. And they know points of disruption are where they are more likely to lose customers.

> At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).

I find that hard to believe. Apple only had to build emulators for their ISA changes, just translating instruction set into another. Doesn't sound painful at all. WINE on the other hand has good reasons for pointing out that it's not an emulator.

WINE runs most applications extremely well. With actual backing from a MegaCo, especially the MegaCo that owns all of the IP around Windows, I have no doubt that a year of work would round out the rough edges such that compatibility differences don't exceed what would be expected between major versions of Microsoft Windows.

Get a working version of .net 4.6 working in wine with text that actually renders like it does on Windows and I'll admit wine is a viable alterative.

It is getting an appropriate amount of love though in the last year. I'm really hopeful that it will keep getting better.

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