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Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by reaperducer on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:51PM (#22595280)
My prediction, that my IT department hates to hear, is that Windows is going away.

Microsoft doesn't want to be Microsoft anymore; it wants to be Oracle and IBM and primarily make money off of business consulting and the cloud.

I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out compatibility layer on top of Linux, similar to the way macOS became Unix, but even less different than its underlying OS.

However, it should be noted that I'm not very good at predicting things.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by dnautics on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:27PM (#22595716)
> I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out compatibility layer on top of Linux.

I think this is unlikely. In many ways the NT kernel is superior to the Linux kernel. I just wish it were open source and didn't have the rest of windows around it.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by ForHackernews on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:32PM (#22595789)
Since when has technical superiority ever determined which product wins in the marketplace?

The Linux kernel is ubiquitous and free-as-in-beer, so it might win out. Android has already shown how you can build a proprietary userland on top of it.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by pjmlp on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:34PM (#22595825)
And how fragmentation on Linux profits OEMs, each with their own little distribution, not giving anything back.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by dnautics on Monday March 16, 2020 @04:19PM (#22597169)
> Since when has technical superiority ever determined which product wins in the marketplace?

Good point.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by adamc on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:00PM (#22595374)
Very unlikely, as it would mess with backwards compatibility and cause unhappiness of users and IT departments. Microsoft still makes money selling Office and other products there.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by phoe-krk on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:10PM (#22595512)
Microsoft doesn't need to care about backwards compatibility anymore, now that Wine exists precisely to have compatibility with Windows software (including software that even modern Windows itself no longer wants to run).
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:30PM (#22596590)
> now that Wine exists

Wine is 26 years old.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by phoe-krk on Monday March 16, 2020 @04:23PM (#22597223)
Agreed, could have worded it better. Now that Wine is good enough to run most of Windows software and backed by Valve via its Proton initiative.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by ralphie02 on Monday March 16, 2020 @10:51PM (#22601115)
Hasn't Wine been good enough for at least 10+ years? Furthermore, how does being backed by Valve actually be of any significant value? I've heard of this argument for a couple of years now and I'm still not convinced (not that I follow Wine development that closely).
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @09:07AM (#22604497)
> Hasn't Wine been good enough for at least 10+ years?

Depends on what you mean by "good enough". Wine is an incredible project that has achieved amazing successes, but it still falls short in a lot of ways.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by ralphie02 on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @12:20PM (#22606507)
This is exactly what I'm getting at.

I personally don't use Wine but I've encountered people online in the last 10+ years that use the argument that it's "good enough" for people to fully switch to Linux. Realistically, I don't think Wine actually convinced more than a handful of users to abandon Windows

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:28PM (#22596563)
If Windows goes away, personal computing basically dies with it. Everything will be locked-down walled-garden webshit, or community-built-jank FOSS desktops that really want to be like the locked-down walled-gaden webshit experience but will say it is for the user's own good.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by zip1234 on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:09PM (#22595506)
Microsoft seems to be happily improving their OS and non-cloud products as well. They are a big enough company that they can be competitive in both.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by Rapzid on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:01PM (#22596188)
Microsoft has 7.5X the market cap of Oracle; why on earth would they want to be like Oracle?