Of course they would never, ever do that, but I can hope however hopeless that is.
Windows NT is a remarkably modular kernel architecture, with design decisions far ahead of its time. Things like (acronym overload here) COM, (A)LPC, UMDF, Windows subsystems (for Linux and Android), and an absolutely immense media and utilities ecosystem: Direct3D, DirectWrite, WASAPI, etc.
Why not hope Microsoft open-sources the entire Windows stack including the NT kernel, NTFS drivers, and the Windows API, rather than hope it 'uses Linux'?
> Windows "experience"(sic) into a UI/Desktop Environment for Linux
And for the record, this more-or-less already exists: it's called KDE Plasma Desktop 5.
There's a LOT of weird stuff lurking in there, and a lot of features they've added in recent years just doesn't work properly at all (anything uwp related...). Even the basics of how you start another process have turned into a labyrinthine mess. Then you have things they never fixed like the totally unhelpful NT file locking semantics that regularly break apps that work fine on UNIX.
NTFS is supposedly a nightmare of tech debt that uses SEH for control flow, yet their attempt to move Windows to a new ReFS stalled and failed. Note: Apple managed this with APFS and Linux distros have routinely introduced new file systems.
COM isn't a part of the kernel but is the same situation - incredibly complicated and has not been evolved well. Lots of failed rebrands, attempts to rejuvinate it that actually made things worse.
If you want stable driver APIs that allow you to distribute hardware support with the hardware, keeping that investment proprietary, then obviously no it's crap, and that's a pretty important use case.
If your hardware has good driver support in-tree though, then Linux is hard to beat these days. It just gets so much more investment than the NT or Darwin kernels.
There are a few places where Darwin is ahead especially w.r.t. code signing and sandboxing. I can't think of anything that NT in particular excels at though.
IIRC the new gen graphics frameworks have their origins in work by AMD.
As for Oberon, there is enough material out there.
Suffice to say how Powershell integrates with .NET, DLLs and COM, enabling OS and applications scripting, pursue of safer approaches to OS system programming instead of yet another UNIX clone written in C.
Package that UI and those libraries into the windows experience desktop for Linux and call it a day.
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If they open sourced windows that'd be good, too! Hackers could then remove all the garbage like telemtry, ads, etc., and it'd be dope as well. They could hack the UI to be even more tiling friendly. It'd be amazing.
> KDE Plasma Desktop 5
Personally, I use KDE because it allows me to replicate one particular Mac feature that's important to me: leaving Control alone for terminal (editor) control characters.
It'd be based on a userland and kernel that is open source.
And the UI would be hackable (if it were opened up).
Those 3 reasons are huge imo