No one would have guessed a few years back that Apple would be running on risc chips, then Unix, then x86, then... Or Amazon becoming the leading internet infrastructure provider. Or MS dumping their browser for Chrome, or ten other very surprising things they’ve done lately.

Don’t underestimate what new leadership who have no nostalgia towards Windows, but want to save money to pay themselves bonuses might do.

> No one would have guessed a few years back that Apple would be running on risc chips

Just how far back are you talking? Because around 1988 most people were suspecting that apple would migrate to the 88000 at some point in the near future. And by the time it was obvious to apple users and (3rd party) developers that the 88000 was going nowhere fast, AIM had happened.

When I started out in the 90s there were cisc wintel PCs, cisc macs, and risc/unix workstations like Sun. The idea that Apple would be selling a risc/unix workstation would been laughed at. And of course that didn't last long, they blew everyones minds again by switching to Intel a few years later.

The fact that surprising things have happened in the past isn't evidence for a particular surprising thing happening in the future.

Who’s looking for evidence? It’s a call to open your mind.

Interestingly, I have it on good authority from someone who works at MS that they are experimenting exactly with that: Windows as a desktop environment running on top of Linux.

This is a bold claim - is your friend sure they're not "just" sharing some system calls, but still running both kernels?

I said they’re experimenting with Windows simply being a desktop environment on top of Linux. Only the Linux kernel would be involved. NTOSKRNL wouldn’t be present. I suspect if they’re trying to get native Windows apps to run, some call translation layer would have to exist (similar to what WINE provides).

Perhaps it is a bold claim, I haven’t seen it first hand. And it certainly has me hoping it goes much further than experimentation. I’d love to have a Windows environment on top of ext4 or zfs and the Linux kernel.

It would be an interesting proposition - yet the burden of legacy code is too much. Essentially we are talking about a WINE-ey situation here, where your true honest humble int WINAPI WinMain program's messages have to be translated to Linux kernal calls and vice versa. It would be a huge hassle for everyone involved plus the corporate crowd would absolutely detest it (unless every corporate bell and whistle was there and I very much doubt it).

Considering MS has the actual source to the Win API, they could very well complete what WINE does on a linux kernel.

Reminds me of the time there was a comment wondering what the OS on Microsoft watch was- someone responded with a speculation - an erlang vm with js for gui