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Should The Next Windows Be Built On Linux?

Posted by timothy on from the yoga-position-questions dept.

scrm writes "The next version of Windows should be built on top of Linux, according to this article by Robert Cringely of PBS." If Microsoft wanted to, they could be the world's largest vendor of Free software .. couldn't they?

7 of 763 comments (clear)

  1. No. by tshak · · Score: 4, Interesting

    No, but it should be built on a BSDish *nix ala OS X. Heck, MS could even use Darwin - wouldn't that be an interesting turn of events!

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    There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
  2. They'll use FreeBSD or NetBSD if anything by m0nkyman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    GPL licensing is anathema to them, but they seem to enjoy using BSD licensing....

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    ~ a low user id is no indication I have a clue what I'm talking about.
  3. Pardon? by Acidic_Diarrhea · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "Now back to Microsoft putting Windows on top of Linux. Linux is better, faster, stronger than whatever is living underneath XP now, right?"
    This article posed an interesting proposition but in order for the whole premise to fly, this snippet really has to be a "Well, duh" type of question. I really don't know that it is. Without any definitive proof of this, the author is merely picking at straws. How does anyone know where the clunkiness of Windows comes from? I mean, the NT kernel isn't exactly a slouch and I'm not sure that Linux is vastly superior. How are we to know that the windowing system isn't the problem? Perhaps the real Operating System-type services provided by the kernel are faster and more powerful than the ones provided by Linux. We just don't know because a separation of the windowing system from the real OS isn't possible with MS's closed source system. Thus, this argument isn't really credible to make. It's an interesting hypothesis but there's nothing solid to say, "Yes! You're right!" There's really no way to know which underlying OS services are better provided by XP or Linux.
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  4. Re:And compromise compatibility with drivers, etc by EvilNTUser · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "Yeah, Cringely is either incompetent or trolling for readers."

    Yes he is, but he's just one person. What really saddens me is how pervasive this kind of thinking is. People who genuinely believe XP is based on DOS are a real threat to getting intelligent users to migrate.

    When I was younger, I was originally turned off by the Mac platform because of all the ignorant users. It wasn't uncommon to hear them condescendingly say that Windows is based on DOS and Macs do true multitasking etc. And there I was, sitting in front of a box running a *preemptively* multitasking kernel (NT 4.0 at the time), thinking "there's no way I want to associate myself with these retards".

    When I grew up, I realized how stupid I'd been and acknowledged that I didn't really hate Macs, but their users. Today I might even consider buying one because of OSX, but my earlier feelings show just how much a platform can be hurt by bigoted users.

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    My Sig: SEGV
  5. You're wrong. VMS != UNIX by jpmorgan · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't VMS based off of Unix as well?

    You're wrong. VMS and UNIX appeared at about the same time, but are very different beasts. Arguably, VMS was better than UNIX, but UNIX became dominant as a result of BSD.

  6. Re:Everyone is missing the point. by jpmorgan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    No, Cringley is missing the point, and he's talking about something he doesn't understand: namely the Windows/NT mix.

    In some respects he's right, but accidentally (a stopped clock is right twice a day), in that Windows is built on top of another operating system, in this case, NT. But to transition to another base there are three questions that would have to be answered:

    • Is it possible?
    • Would it be better?
    • Would it be economic?

    Is it possible? Not without a lot of modification to Linux. NT is not UNIX and has a number of fundamentally different idioms; while Win32 abstracts a lot of this, it still pokes through in a few places. Even if Microsoft implemented features in the Linux kernel necessary, they'd still be forced to deprecate half the API and force developers to rewrite their applications to take full advantage of the new architecture. And if they rewrote Linux enough to make this unnecessary, it wouldn't be Linux anymore - it'd be an NT rewrite.

    Would it be better? Cringley simply assumes that Linux is faster, more stable, etc... than NT. Windows is notorious for being unstable, although most of that reputation is due to the Win9x line. Win2K/XP have been known to crash on occasion, but unless you're using some seriously broken hardware, or have fucked its internals up a lot, it doesn't crash that often, and even then the vast majority of crashes are due to the Win32 layer, not NT itself. NT has a stronger security model, is realtime and fully reentrant. In short, the problems with Windows 2000/XP are not the fault of NT, but Win32 itself. Exactly how would porting Win32 to Linux solve these problem?

    Would it be economic? The marginal benefit of porting to Linux would be minimal, and at great expense. I can't see how Microsoft would justify it.

    Cringley suggested something that is fundamentally highly technical without understanding the real issues involved, which was stupid. This is particularly ironic when you consider the section of his site saying that people should listen to him since he knows what he's talking about. Once again this simply proves that he's nothing more than a digital snake-oil salesman - under the guise of holding an expert opinion, he tells people what they want to hear in exchange for ratings.

  7. Separation of operating system and windowing by Animats · · Score: 4, Interesting
    There are arguments for a strong separation between the operating system and the windowing system. NT 3.51 really did have a strong separation between the two. In NT 4/2000/XP, the graphics subsystem moved into the kernel, over the objections of Dave Cutler, the primary architect of NT. This wasn't done to improve performance; it was done so that Windows 95 code could be reused in NT 4, giving NT and Win95 closer graphics semantics.

    More and more junk has been going into the kernel ever since. The multimedia codecs have moved into the Win2000/XP kernel, for example. Start coding your viruses now.