This begs the question of why Microsoft doesn’t just transition Windows to being a commercial Linux distribution, especially now that Windows licenses are so much less important to Microsoft’s business than they used to be.
That'd be a lot of work for no gain and substantial loss of control (due to GPL). How are they going to force adverts onto people if it becomes easy to just run a script to remove them?
It’s just as easy to run a script to remove them on Windows but most people don’t do that.
I would say that this vision of Windows would involve Microsoft essentially producing a Linux graphical shell similar to Gnome and KDE with a bunch of convenience tools that are typical to the Windows experience. It would have defaults like the Bing brower and all the typical Windows revenue-generating stuff.
I don’t think the GPL requirement to release code is a problem for the business model. Not all of the tooling has to be released as GPL and even if some of it does, the brand and commercial partnerships of Windows will mean that most people don’t go out and replace Windows with the hypothetical de-commercialized version.
We see this with VSCode where Microsoft is totally fine to release the code with an even more permissive license than the GPL, but they keep the extension marketplace gated. If you want Microsoft’s extensions you have to use VSCode.
What people are asking on this thread, that Microsoft just move everything to a Linux distro, is a gargantuan task. It will not happen in 10 years. It might not happen in 20 years but mark my words. Windows will switch to Linux within our lifetime.
The realistic way I see it happening is more like a product split rather than an explicit migration, or leveraging compatibility layers.
One day Microsoft would say, hey, Windows 15 is Linux-based. It'll run most of your Windows stuff either natively with some nice developer tooling to make a transition or using a compatibility layer (which, as we know, Linux already has!)
But you can keep using Windows 14 for a very, very long time.
You can remove the ads from Android in a similar fashion to how you'd remove ads in Windows (e.g. DNS blocking). However, if you've got root access to Android, then there's other methods available to you. Some phones don't allow you access to root mode, but presumably a Windows version of Linux wouldn't be running on locked hardware (or at least I wouldn't buy something like that).