I also prefer a GNU userland, but Dave Cutler and his team did a pretty serious job with the NT kernel.

A post from a blog I like a lot about how Linux and NT aren’t so different: https://manybutfinite.com/post/how-the-kernel-manages-your-m....

Windows’ driver ecosystem is important to Windows’ market success - switching out the kernel (and so, the driver interfaces) would throw that all away.

In my eyes that would be a demotion of technology. They should instead do a Xerox Parc and invent newer/different kinds of hardware operating environments (and try to ship them too).

Even if they would, they couldn't do with Linux what Apple did with BSD because the licensing situation is different: BSD allowed them to develop a proprietary OS, GPL doesn't.

I've said this before, but takes like this have it completely backwards. The NT kernel is really good, that part should stay. Win32 is the source of most of the shittiness that people have come to associate with Windows, it should be replaced with a Linux userspace... which is exactly what WSL does (or at least what WSL1 did, now things are a little different)

I don't know if you're already aware of this, but macOS is not based on GNU/Linux. It is based on NeXTSTEP which was in turn based on a combination of Mach and BSD.

Also known as doing a Novell - if you want an example that didn't turn out so well for the company.