Specifically, I hope they release their own branded Linux distro, built on Ubuntu/Debian, with an optional KVM-hosted NT kernel for Windows syscall support. Maybe call it Windows NC (for Next Century).
I'll probably leave MacOS behind at that point on my work machine, especially if they create a display-PS compositing window manager that's anywhere as good as MacOS's.
It does remind me of the old Microsoft Linux joke (http://www.mslinux.org/) of the early 2000's, which has aged more poorly then a younger me would have thought.
[0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-au/blog/microsoft-showcases-t...
"I don't remember agreeing to that."
-- Janet Reno(I found this immensely amusing 20 years ago, and mirrored/restored this a decade ago, finding images from multiple wayback snapshots... )
MS Linux to have Start Button
Microsoft is working hard to incorporate the well known "Start" button from the Windows Platform into X Windows' Gnome interface. "We just can't figure out how the hell to get that darn foot out of there! The damn thing is like stuck." The team will have this feature ready by product launch.
SQL Server (already converted) MS Office suite (including Project and Visio) and Sharepoint Exchange (for Outlook's best features) ActiveDirectory (scalable auth + DNS + client management is still hard to beat, but MDMs are catching up)
Beyond that, all they really have is an open source platform (.Net), and a few open source projects (VS Code, PowerShell), and Visual Studio. Oh, and GitHub, I suppose.
Microsoft will not release their version of Linux for sale. They're going to try to make it a high-availability Azure-only service. They're still chasing Apple's and Google's services-only architecture and Amazon's cloud-dominance strategy. Windows will become their legacy server and user client product.
Second, MS would need to port some sort of compatibility layer, which would probably be 10000 person-years to achieve anything like the backward compatibility they currently support.
Third … well, that would be it. The vast majority of non-techies would be ecstatic to find they can upgrade for free for ever, their software would just keep running, and hardware would work basically from day one (because the companies developing cutting edge hardware Windows would pivot their driver development) until the end of time (because FOSS drivers, while slower to appear for most hardware, are supported essentially forever).
It depends on what desktop environment / window manager you use.
I don't notice too many weird issues when I run i3 and bsp on my Linux laptop. I think the nice thing about a tiled window manager is if you go down this route, you often hand select a bunch of small components that do 1 thing very well. Even going as far as evaluating and picking a specific compositor (or maybe not even using one at all).
You are right tho about Windows. Its UI is very stable and buttery smooth for actions like moving and resizing windows. It has a level of polish that out of the box DEs on Linux usually don't have.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/linuxfxdevil/
https://b00merang.weebly.com/windows-10.html
Leveraging the FOSS work and cutting down on maintenance costs, and focus that only for LSW, to guarantee the functioning of that abstraction layer, and leave the harder parts (hardware support, security etc) onto public to pick up - at the cost of a few coupons, t-shirts, coffee-mugs etc thrown at them via "hackathons". (And even perpetuate the "passion for software" hence "public github contributions". May be give a slightly higher tier github subscription for free, they've bought that org anyway. And people are anyway suckers for Internet points)
ReactOS has been a thing for 20 years now and it just isn't that popular.
I see more and more people - and not just hardcore devs - using Linux.
For me, Linux has been a better desktop experience since around 2005 sometime: faster, easier to configure to my exact liking, easier to install, less hassle to maintain. (Except the time when KDE 4 was new and Ubuntu changed to Unity.)
For a long time I even though it was just a matter of time before everyone would realize but now I have realized that people are just different. Some people actually like Mac and Windows. Some people are driven mad by inconsistencies in my favorite DE (KDE) that I cannot even spot after someone tried to point them out. I however can't stand CMD-tab on Mac but Mac users - like me with the alignment issues on KDE - cannot see how it can be a problem.
Summary: it is not like any of them are way ahead in general. I see more and more people using Linux and expect numbers to rise a few percentage points more.
Had it not been for FOSS UNIX clones, they were probably right.
I just don't like Windows anymore. So much of the modern development tools are Linux only, and depends on shell scripts. Running the WSL is not ideal either, even though it helps a lot.
Only thing keeping me from switching directly to Linux is the bad memories with the various Linux Desktops I tried in the early 2000s. Clipboard didn't work, font smoothing was very inconsistent, the fight with the (GPU especially) drivers, simple windowing animations was jerky, browser was always slower (e.g. scrolling on web sites, and videos).
Font smoothing is occasionally inconsistent between modern and ancient apps, but the same happens on Win. As for the clipboard, I've only seen clipboard issues on my ancient Arch install, which I'm surprised even boots up at this point.
As a multi-decade linux user, the thought of a Microsoft distro still makes my stomach churn. The grand-daddy of software copyright enforcement branding the paragon of f/oss... it is just wrong.
But I bet it wouldn't last. MS's institutional inertia would soon see the thing fork away from linux, becoming something else. Something like android. Something more horrible.
Microsoft had a lot of support for SUSE-specific products around that time, like SLES Support in System Center (https://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/...)