this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2025
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I remember a podcast I used to listen to a long time ago that argued that MS should just make a fork of the Linux kernel and just make the gui work like Windows. Better security and stability, and huge increase in user base with all the normal Linux users seeing it as viable alternative. I thought it was a brilliant idea. Well except Microsoft would likely have figured a way to kill Linux from the inside.
Except for the part where decades' worth of software no longer runs on Windows.
Hide WINE in the box
Boxed WINE? Disgusting
Seriously, Microsoft's absurd level of commitment to backwards compatibility is the entire reason Windows has such staying power. I had to fuck around with things to get a Linux port of a ten year old game running without issues, and it was even the Steam version, but Windows will install and run most twenty year old games right off of the original CD without the user having to do anything at all.
That compatability has been dropping recently, especially for games. Most of my CD games need extra libraries to run now, if they work at all.
I hear this a lot but in production I still see xp/win 7 era PC's all the time due to comparability issues (half the time still online too :/ )
Maybe its just absurd support for big spenders like the US military?
Seems like the small companies are mostly getting burned by gambling on MS
Right, because Linux definitely can't run Windows software. Don't check.
Try to run old soft on windows though😓
That is the literal opposite of what the world needs.
Windows isn't a bad OS from a purely technical perspective. If Windows were released as FOSS, I would switch to Windows without hesitation.
Are you sure it's not bad from a technical perspective? I saw a story from a former programmer talking about how changes would be made the to the interface in the new settings app that's trying to replace control panel and the shit was like a horror story.
Mostly because Microsoft tries to maintain backwards compatibility to ridiculous extents, and their customers grew accustomed to it so they kinda rely on it, no ?
I mean, they do until they don't. They eventually retired 16 bit subsystem, and they are gungho on TPM now. They have always had EOL dates for old OS's too. I'm not entirely sure why they do what they do, I suspect they are too large and unwieldy to operate as an entity with a unified vision.
Surely it's less work to maintain security patches for a few prior versions of windows than it is to indefinitely maintain backwards compatibility
Sure, and for home users the backwards compatibility feature only really comes up for people into retro-gaming, but a significant portion of their customer base is government agencies that haven't updated their software since the '90s. The old hardware is dying, so they need new stuff, and that means something with a new OS to run it, but it also needs to be able to run an ancient program that can only be replaced if some some seventy-something who calls every console a Nintendo can be made to understand why software older than their grandkids isn't the best thing to have, and they might need to introduce and pass a bill to get it done, not to mention budgeting to commission a company to code the replacement.
You could keep the kernel tho while changing the gui
The windows kernel isn't all that great, particularly in the realm of memory security or scheduling.
You know, to each their own. Question is really whether windows maintaining a closed source kernel even makes sense from a maintenance burden perspective when it really doesn't give them much money in return. (Most of their money in 2025 comes from cloud services, not operating systems)
Rumors (Yes, just rumors, I know) have it that MS is working on a shim to be able to just use the Linux kernel under the hood. That's what spawned WSL. It is a side effect of the work to get the shim between the Win64 userland and Linux kernel. The shim will probably be a temporary thing, until all the ABIs are done.
maybe, but there are also things it arguably does better than Linux, e.g. user access control
(If you can still find this story, I'd be very interested in it, please do link to it here.)
https://lemmy.world/post/24613381
Thank you arse assassin
Holy crap, that's the exact post I was talking about! Nice!
The full Microsoft XP source code was leaked and is available for anyone on GitHub; not the same, I know, but it's atleast NT based. I've just always wondered why a community never formed to fork it
Because it's not legal and no one's going to develop software for XP. Someone could make and sell security patches for it, but the type of person who still runs XP either doesn't care enough to buy security patches or it's running some hardware that isn't connected to the internet.
There are exactly two games released in the past few years that have XP support, but that was more a flex on the part of the developer then catering to the market. HROT and Zortch are those games if you're curious.
https://reactos.org/
yeah I know, far from production-ready though
That is the fun part 😏
I had forgotten about this!! I’ll have to start up a VM this morning to check it out.
https://youtu.be/u0nuEXxzsdI
For those who don’t have the spare time 🤭