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Comment by simonblack | Hacker News Reader

I suggested on Mini-Microsoft about 10 years ago that Microsoft do an 'Apple'. Apple took a free OS from BSD and put their own GUI over the top of it. I suggested that MSFT do the same sort of thing, that being to put their Windows GUI on top of the Linux OS instead of using the Linux X11 GUIs.

This had the advantage that the underlying OS base would no longer need maintaining by Microsoft, and all their coding efforts could be allocated to the Windows GUI, thus permitting Windows versions to be released far more often than every 5 years as was the case back then.

Being full of Softies, the crowd on Mini-Microsoft dismissed my suggestion out of hand, it being sacrilege of course to even think of marrying the 'upstart' Linux with the 'sacred' Windows code.

Naturally, today I am smiling to myself that MSFT could have taken my idea and run with it, but were too hidebound to do so and have lost 10 years in the process.

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Apple only needed to support their own hardware. Microsoft would need to make Linux work wherever NT works, and would need to figure out a solution for third-party closed-source NT drivers.

Besides, in a sense, Microsoft did this when they moved the desktop product line to NT. It wsa a similar compatibility break and a similar improvement in stability and switch to a robust, multiuser, preemptively-multitasking kernel as classic Mac OS to XNU; it's just that the kernel Microsoft already had in house was NT, and the one Apple/NeXT had was XNU.

A shortcut (perhaps the wrong word here) would be to migrate the Xbox to Xbox libraries on top of a Linux core. This would minimize the hardware for them to start with.

After a couple years, they could make Windows server run on a Linux core, and then another couple years have Windows run on Linux.

The whole progression could be pretty smooth, covering several years and taking a milestone-driven approach.

With the surface, im sure hey could use that to their advantage and have kore control over hardware.

Perhaps the best impetus to do this would be if they ever really wanted to migrate to ARM and reduce their reliance on the intel platform.

The hardware piece is important, but definitely controllable. Just like you mentioned NT, but this time with a smaller set of vendors to work with.

What would they gain from this?

Harmonization with the rest of the computing world (everything else is effectively a Unix variant) as well as lower dev costs (kernel dev cost would now be shared with everyone else).

Nadella is a smart guy and has moved MSFT in the right direction. If his truly makes sense, then he’ll probably do it.

For the longest time I assumed MS would buy Ubuntu.

I'm not a .NET dev currently running PopOs on my XPS 13. VS Code is my primary editor for all things. If MS released a desktop that looked this good and came batteries included for their tool chains and services I'd hop in a heart beat.

My only guess is that doing so would lower consumer confidence in the corporate space? I know Chrome books are making a push there and the psychological factor of "it's not Windows" does seem to be a competitive advantage for MS (for now).

I'm running Ubuntu 18.04 on an XPS 15 and VS Code is my primary editor and I totally agree.

> For the longest time I assumed MS would buy Ubuntu.

Microsoft was apparently one of the candidates that was in talks to buy Red Hat.

https://www.businessinsider.com/red-hat-deal-talks-with-amaz...

According to the article, they eventually dropped out because of anti-trust concerns.

That would have been the end of me using computers, right then and there. An operating system that updates or upgrades more than about once per decade is moving entirely too fast. 5 years about the fastest possible rate that even approaches being reasonable. The fact that Windows has always bent over backwards to provide backward compatibility would be totally invalidated by shifting toward Linux. I run a bunch of DOS programs in Win 7 still, without needing to go through DOSBox, and that's not counting my collection of 3.1 and 9x programs which I actively use.

So yes, giving up entirely on the good things that Windows does without respect to the GUI and accepting the practices of Linux/Unix devs who have little or no respect for the past would be nothing short of a catastrophic mistake. Your idea would likely have killed computing forever, in my view, especially enterprise or professional-use computing, and within the first two rapid releases that broke necessary functions. It's the so-called 'Softies' who keep the world running and effective for normal people who don't want to have to figure out how to compile a program just to turn on their computer and do the things they need.

And it would have killed home use as well - we don't need network workstations at home with limited control, we need computers that we have full control over, all the time.

> And it would have killed home use as well - we don't need network workstations at home with limited control, we need computers that we have full control over, all the time.

looks at the state of desktop computing

..and yet, here we are.

> ... the practices of Linux/Unix devs who have little or no respect for the past

Maybe some Linux devs, but many Unix devs have been around a long time and are pretty insistent on backwards compatibility too. ;)

shit... There are some Unix software from 80's that runs unmodified on modern Linux. You only need to recompile it.

Linux (the kernel) is an extreme outlier in this case because Linus actually cares deeply about compatibility. You don't even need to recompile statically linked old Linux software to have it work in most cases.

But otherwise UNIX's compatibility story is pretty damned atrocious because part of its culture is relying on everybody to recompile everything.

That sounds weird to me. I used to do Solaris SysAdmin stuff from (roughly) the early 2000s. That also had a strong backwards compatibility attitude, sot you should (and generally could) run old Solaris binaries on much newer releases of the OS.

Which Unix's had this "pretty damned atrocious" backwards compatibility approach?

Perhaps you're right, I sometimes forget that commercial UNIX's exist. The BSDs are mostly what I was thinking of.

Having to "recompile" it means that it's not unmodified, though. Unmodified would mean that it runs like Windows programs where the same binary files work now as did then.

Yeah, that's how I took it too. eg being able to run old binaries on newer versions of an OS.

My experience across Solaris and Linux has led me to believe it's also been a strong nix thing too, not just a Windows approach. I used to use FreeBSD a lot too, but that was years ago and I don't have clear memories of it's compatibility approach. :/

Which nix's are you thinking of, which don't offer strong backwards compatibility for compiled binaries?

And then you have iOS, OSX, ChromeOS, & Android that both upgrade annually. I'm sure you'll be happy with Windows 10 though considering it's the last official Window release. Really it's not though; it's just rolling releases in the background.

I'm afraid you have to realize you're in the tail end of the tech adoption cycle[1], either in the late majority or bordering on laggard.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_adopter

I am quite proudly a lag-behind when it comes to tech within the last decade. The rest of you can go on ahead and suffer all the horrible bugs that would have been found in QA testing, if the testers had been given adequate time and resources. I'll happily arrive after you're done and use the finished product.

Also, I've never updated Android OS on a device - every phone and/or tablet I have, has the version of Android it shipped with; whatever that might be. The same goes for iOS, mostly. My old iPad, I knew better than to update the OS. The newer one, I've made the big mistake of upgrading to iOS 12. I'm sorely tempted at the moment to make a list of programs on the device and reset it to get it back to decency.

My feeling is, people are allowing the tech companies to release buggy software, they're still buying it, they're still paying for hardware using it and supporting bug-ridden versions. We need to shift the mainstream - and the business world - back to demanding software that works and keeps on working reliably for the life of the business.

Are you not getting Android or iOS security updates, then?

What's a security update? I don't expect them to be responsible for my security - that's my burden as the user to make sure that I'm using software and files I personally trust.

That seems a pretty illogical position, it relies on developers being perfect at security. It doesn't matter how much you trust someone you must realise that people are fallible; that, in context, means that hardware and software will have [security] bugs/feature oversights.

If/When you discover a bug, and the developer has a fix out as a security update -- eg heartbleed -- then would you really not update because you trusted that developer before. Surely that they've issued a patch that they suggest to apply means, if you trust them, that you should apply the patch?

There are no current OSes which upgrade once per decade or 5 years, sadly. Sure Win 7 and 8.1 are there, but on their way out. Everything else is updated much more frequently. I suppose MacOS is the only remotely reasonable alternative once Win 7 and 8.1 are past EOL.

There are plenty of Linux distros that are supported for upwards of 10 years. Debian and CentOS come to mind but Ubuntu 18.04 was also recently announced to have support until 2028.

> I run a bunch of DOS programs in Win 7 still, without needing to go through DOSBox

Afaik pure DOS mode wasn't in Win2000 and XP, and it uses virtualization or something like it.

While Linux is faster and more scalable, Using BSD like Apple has many advantrges - especially when there are thousands of closed-source windows drivers which will never be released as open source. The other big hurdle is the sad state of Linux graphical facilities in the kernel. For Apple, this was never a problem due to limited hardware choices.

Well if I were them I'd implement my own stable driver ABI so companies wouldn't be forced to open source them (like it really makes a difference anyway with all the firmware blobs) and you wouldn't have to recompile every single driver for every single kernel revision. I'd also move more stuff into user space like they did in Windows, which is why a video or sound driver crash usually just wigs out the screen for a second instead of crashing the whole system.

Given that, maybe it would also be possible to implement a compatibility layer so some amount of current Windows drivers could be used anyway. I don't know if that's feasible, but if it is they're in a position to pull it off.

There is a project called NDISWrapper which attempts to do that. It used to be used quite a bit for WiFi drivers before Linux had decent WiFi drivers for most chipsets.

Not likely to happen - not very long ago, MS likened GPL to a virus. Since then, they have changed a lot, but fundamentally, they need to protect vendors interests, IP, profitability - not appease some open source proponents.

Never too late for them to make a go for it, even today.

But, to avoid alienating their huge existing developer community, they would first do well to get behind Mono [0] and maybe even, make it official (edit: Mono is "Sponsored by Microsoft", so already quite official indeed). In fact, as of 2014, there have been very promising signs in that direction. [1]

[0] https://www.mono-project.com/

[1] https://opensource.com/business/14/11/microsoft-dot-net-empo...

Mono isn't sponsored by Microsoft; they bought it. They also publish an insane number of things completely open source, developing them in the open. .NET Core being a huge one, but ASP.NET, VSCode, ChakraCore, TypeScript, and so many others. There are 2181 repositories in the MS Github account.

Microsoft acquired Xamarin, the corporate sponsors of Mono, in 2016.

Among all the other reasons why not, I think GPL would pose a hurdle. (And I wonder if that influenced Apple's choice of BSD vs GNU―though I guess GNU didn't have a popular OS back in '95.)

> ... put their Windows GUI on top of the Linux OS instead of using the Linux X11 GUIs.

So, put the Win10 GUI on a Linux desktop?

As the saying goes "Now you have two problems". :)

I would like that quite a bit. As X11 is probably the worst part of Linux. That said, you'd lose a lot of apps and games in the process.

They already did that once. It's called Windows NT, largely derived from DEC VMS. Here's an article about it: https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vm...

Not derived at all. The design principles and operation are similar due to a few of the same people working on both. Would you say Linux is derived from Unix? I guess many would but, personally, I am working on a new trading system, would it be derived from my previous work? I would say this one is brand new, but shares common concepts due to the requirement of being a trading system. I would definitely say it is not derived at all. The way I do things similarly because they work well in practice is not derivation to me.

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