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Comment by QuadmasterXLII | Hacker News Reader

The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high. Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie, another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro

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Unlike IE, the NT kernel was never bad and is still (presumably) in a pretty good shape. It's the userland that's gone insane. Someone should just port the Windows 7 shell to the newest kernel and call it a day.

>Ever since they got the delicious taste of white-labelling chromium instead of fixing ie

What exactly was wrong with Edge Legacy(not IE) based on their own engine that they need to fix, and why was Chromium a sweet taste?

AFAIk Edge Legacy was kicking ass in all benchmarks. Their only achilles heel was Google messing up Youtube and G-apps to break they way they got displayed on Edge LEgacy forcing users to switch to Chrome.

> What exactly was wrong with Edge(not IE)

The constant fear of having Copilot shoved down your throat whenever you close and update Edge. And Microsoft homepage.

> why was Chromium a sweet taste?

Do zero of the heavy work maintaining a browser engine. Do maximum (little) work of adding AI slop.

>The constant fear of having Copilot shoved down your throat whenever you close and update Edge.

Copilot only cam after they switched Edge Legacy to Edge Chromium.

I was playing with the RTM release of Windows 10 which came with the "new Edge" browser (post-IE, pre-Chromium). It's a cool piece of software, very slick and minimal browser UI and not a hint of Copilot anywhere (since that would come ~8 years later).

I imagine it was not as compatible and it was less work to simply rebrand Chromium as Edge.

Edge Legacy was always playing catch-up trying to be sufficiently compatible with Chrome.

And personally, I preferred the native IE UI over the Chrome-lookalike Edge UI.

I’d still have liked for Microsoft to keep maintaining their own engine, but I can understand why they didn’t.

What was wrong is that they had to foot the bill. Now Google does the hard and expensive part for them.

I meant what was wrong from the user's perspective who complained. Not from MS's perspective.

> another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro

They’d have nothing to gain from doing this, NT kernel isn’t the problem with windows.

The difference is that Microsoft didn't receive any direct revenue off of IE and Google had a lot of levers to use (they weren't under antitrust scrutiny at the time) to continue to eat away at IE's market share. It was smart for MS to give up on maintaining their own browser and downright brilliant for them to use their competitor's own browser against them.

On the other hand, Windows Home and Windows Pro are only part of the bigger picture. Microsoft gets billions in revenue from Windows Enterprise seats and billions more from Windows Server, probably more enterprise revenue than Red Hat and Canonical combined does for their Linux offerings. They have zero reason to give up on Windows while the money keeps rolling in.

The problem with windows is not the kernel, as it is preety solid, but user space.

Wathever problems windows have today, retro compatibility was always a strong point in favor of windows. Breaking it with such a change in the kernel, would make most of its users even bitter than they are today.

Windows NT is indeed a pretty solid technical foundation. But I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to destroy that in a push to use AI for ongoing development. Perhaps the kernel team will have enough political sway to avoid that outcome. We'll see.

NTATSTATUS NTBuyTokens(HANDLE hCopilot, DWORD_PTR dwNumTokens, DQWORD dwCreditCardNum);

That would be kind of awesome, since Microsoft has a pretty serious track record of supporting decades old sofware and technology quirks. Could be pretty cool supporting Windows 11 software products on a 'Linux based Windows 13'. :)

If they actually did this they would vendor lock you into a custom DM after one or two iterations and then anyone not using that DM would be locked out of any real software. It's a Trojan horse.

It would not make Windows a good project, but it would mean that hardware vendors would have to implement good Linux drivers. It could therefore help all other distributions, too!

> The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high.

That is just completely illogical and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Windows works. Most problems people have with Windows are in the user mode, and not in the kernel. The pain of reverting straightforward UI/UX/vendor-provided application code that is probably version-controlled and tagged for specific historic Windows releases is 'too high', so, therefore, let's do something that's even higher cost, and...

> windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro

Ugh, not this again. It looks like this train of thought will never leave HN commenters who probably have never seriously actually used or programmed on Windows. Literally every week I see 'Windows should keep the same user mode and move to the Linux kernel'.

You guys know what another Linux kernel running a locked-down user mode stack is called? Android.

My comment was meant to be an old fogey criticism of giving up on having in-house browser talent and instead just white-labelling chromium, but clearly that's not how it was taken. Another lesson for me in writing clearly (no sarcasm on the internet!), but the last thousand haven't stuck so I'm not terribly optimistic about this one

/s is pretty good

Yeah it’d be crazy to give over control of a core product line to a competitor.

Imagine they got their smart engineers to improve and refine Wine (and adjacent tools), rather than pushing out slop, it would be truly amazing

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