I don't know much about the NT kernel. Is it really as bad as the shell such that they should throw it away? I kinda don't want to see that happen for the same reason I lamented them switching Edge's rendering engine the same one Chrome uses. I feel like not everybody should build on top of Linux/Unix. It's good that there are other options.

Not at all. NT is a fantastic kernel. In many ways the core system of Windows is much better than Linux. Largely because you just don't have the pointless fights about systemd vs. not, or X vs. Wayland, or foo vs. bar - you have a cohesively designed, unified base platform instead. Lots of very fantastic edge-case scenarios that are so trivial & seamless, and with functional GUIs & tooling so you can discover on your own more easily. Run out of disk space? Pop in another drive and just say "extend" and your existing partition is instantly expanded across both drives - no reconfiguration, no broken fstabs, no "well since you didn't anticipate this originally you now just can't do that", etc... Hell, Window's can handle a GPU driver crashing so quickly & seamlessly that you wouldn't even realize it happened if it didn't give you a little notification saying "hey something might be wrong with your GPU since it just crashed, take a look maybe?" It won't even kick you out of a game when it happens. Similarly you typically don't need to reboot to update drivers. Heck, converting from a "bare metal" install to a hypervisor is a matter of checking a box & rebooting.

But Microsoft then throws a bunch of stupid crap on top of it like Candy Crush ads for a piece of software that costs $200 and kinda ruins it. Or with all the deep hooks for Windows Defender & friends that just cripple process launching & file creation performance.

> Heck, converting from a "bare metal" install to a hypervisor is a matter of checking a box & rebooting.

Can't the same be said with Linux too? Major distros has Linux with KVM kernel module built-in. I never had to do anything rocket science to run KVM, for example.

I mean the existing install is converted to a VM in the hypervisor, too. I'm unaware of a way in Linux to convert your install to being a VM under KVM.

It’s not, the problem is all the legacy compat stuff they are forced to support forever now. NT and Windows without legacy would be an amazing operating system but also nobody would use it.

They already have a great WSL going already. I run Ubuntu 18.04 under Windows 10 all day long.

I use it to model and test code that will take hours to fold into a build for our embedded target. On the last feature I completed, I wrote 2500 lines of pthread / Unix domain socket server code, and it ran on my WSL/Ubuntu target with only lightweight text file based shims to replace drivers on the embedded target. When I slid it over into the embedded build flow, it ran on the first try, no changes.

Compiled as a unit test harness in about 3 seconds on my WSL instance. Our full embedded target takes 30 minutes to build. So the WSL/Ubuntu instance is a huge time saver.

MacOS is based on BSD 4.4 and certified as a UNIX 03.

Linux is a different and somewhat distant version of UNIX.