Man, I loved Windows NT back in the day. It was light enough that I could run it on fairly low end late-90s hardware, and it was substantially more stable than Windows 95.
Instead I dual booted between both of them.
And before they got golden goose with MS-DOS/IBM deal, they were into the UNIX business with Xenix.
A few reasons why Linux would probably never taken off, had Microsoft stayed closer to their UNIX related projects.
To make a Windows NT box UNIX-ish, there was MKS Toolkit. It predates Cygwin, msys, and djgpp.
Same story with MySQL.
Arguably they did have a serious POSIX subsystem w/ the Interix (nee OpenNT) acquisition but they didn't do anything with it. I remember building GNU software under Interix and having a blast with it.
I still wish there was a distribution of NT that booted text -mode and had an Interix-based userland. That would be tons of fun.
See the usual complains about macOS not being Linux, from people that probably should be supporting Linux OEMs instead of buying Apple laptops.