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Comment by msravi | Hacker News Reader

Here's hoping that "Windows 12" will be just a Window manager + Desktop running on Linux, with all existing bugs meticulously replicated to maintain backwards compatibility with Windows 95/7/8/10/11.

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Stop dreaming. Won't happen. Windows is a purely additive effort. WSL is what happened, and when it couldn't do some things they built WSL2.

As another commenter pointed out regarding the integration of this new "sudo" and UAC prompts, it will probably be done in a new, separate, different tool, because this new, freshly released "sudo" will now have to remain bug-for-bug compatible for the next four decades.

> WSL is what happened, and when it couldn't do some things they built WSL2.

I always wondered why it wasn't called WslEx.

To be fair that would still make windows instantly so much better if you could actually run a less weird desktop environment AND run all the vendor locked software.

And you then get sudo for free! With all the command parameters you know and love. Win-win.

If that ever happens, it'll bring Microsoft dependencies to the Linux ecosystem. In not sure that's a good thing anymore with the endless enshittification going on in Windows. Just imagine the poor distro maintainers constantly battling to disable spyware, ads, nag screens, and unwanted configuration changes caused by Microsoft packages. I feel sorry for them just by thinking about it.

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