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Comment by ddtaylor | Hacker News Reader

This will probably never happen. The killer feature of Windows is backwards compatibility. It can run apps that are 30 years old. A less than stellar developer experience isn't as big of a concern for Microsoft.

We have seen them attempt to ease some of the pain with COM and .NET, but under the hood the old APIs always live - many remaining bug compatible to keep existing apps working.

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If Microsoft didn't care about developer experience, they wouldn't be working on WSL. And as someone who interned at msft several times, I can say for certain they cared about developers.

I didn't say they don't care about developers, I said it's not as big of a concern as end users, which I think is fair.

Also as a user of WSL, it's great, but I think it's goal was to keep people on their platform, which I think has worked out pretty well.

Everything Microsoft is doing for developers at the moment (WSL, Terminal, VSCode, etc) is there because they need developers onboard to sell Azure services. That these things might be useful outside of Azure is a happy coincidence.

The Windows Terminal is just awful! Slow! Bad UI, feels like a touch-based UWP app. Has absolutely no concept of Windowing, everything just feels awful because they follow the UWP design guidelines!

And extremely buggy as well!

WSL is for bringing into Windows, the developers that buy macOS laptops instead of supporting GNU/Linux OEMs, as they only care about a POSIX shell.

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