[qbasic_forever]

I'm kinda curious if in some wild future WSL3 ends up being Windows completely ditching the NT kernel for linux kernel and building up wine to be a first class Windows API emulator.

It's just increasingly silly in the Azure and server space to be running Windows--you lose all the benefits of the container ecosystem and have all the baggage of decades of windows cruft (yes I know windows containers exist--no one uses them). Desktop usage has been in decline forever and I have to imagine they could get the 90% of windows API apps left that matter to work great on wine. It would give Microsoft a huge boost to get back in ARM by building on the linux kernel and its great support vs. windows ARM very limited set of qualcomm and a handful of other chips.

[gpanders]

AFAIK Windows is still one of Microsoft’s golden geese. If they transitioned to Linux, they’d lose out on all that sweet, sweet licensing revenue. Which makes this seem unlikely to me.

[qbasic_forever]

Last I heard internally there hasn't even been an official Windows OS team for the last couple years after Myerson left. It's been divvied up and split apart into parts of Azure, etc.

[jussij]

The OP's point is Microsoft is still making billions of dollars selling millions of Windows annual licences to both personnel and corporate users.

If they were to discontinue Windows they would just be throwing away those billions of dollars in annual income.

Since Windows continues to make Microsoft such large amounts of 'easy money' they would be stupid to not keep pushing it out to customers.

[rashil2000]

I would recommend you to read this article by a former Canonical engineer - https://boxofcables.dev/no-microsoft-is-not-rebasing-windows...

[boogies]

Not a new idea, see eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24599397