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by seiferteric 3356 days ago
Wake me when MS offers Linux subsystem for Windows (basically commercial WINE). From what I have read, MS is not actually that interested in improving the Windows kernel anymore unless needed or profitable. Why don't they give up and run windows user space on Linux (or BSD) :)
4 comments

You've "read" wrong. The NT kernel has seen major changes up through and including W10, including focusing on power management and efficiency, improving modularity, and memory use.

It seems like your comment was meant to troll, but in the odd chance you're interested, you can follow a lot of these changes and the decisions behind them where Microsoft documented the process on the old Engineering Windows blog, and well as more recently at the main Windows blog itself.

That's exactly backwards. They're doing a reasonable but very late job of modernizing their user space on top of their quite decent kernel, including giving a Linux environment for those that want it. I for one respect them for that, even though I've been almost exclusively a Linux user since the early 90s. Lately installed Windows 10 and TBH between powershell and improved command line facilities, improvements to the windows GUI itself, and the linux subsystem it's not bad at all these days.
Why would they do that? NT is a very good kernel design.
And, moreover, the ability to run multiple operating system "personalities" on top of it like this was part of that design pretty much from the start.
Linux had that as well until it was castrated a while ago. It was called "exec_domains".