That said, maybe it would be feasible if they built a "Linux subsystem for Windows" that could run any legacy Windows app inside Linux, just like Windows can currently run any legacy DOS app (without actually being based on DOS). An official Wine, if you will.

That may be true for small businesses, but I think the single biggest value of Windows to BIG businesses is the ability to screw around with the policies such that, for instance, you can lock a user out of changing their screensaver timeout or their desktop background, as though this had any actual impact on security.

My corporate laptop is infested with tracker programs and scripts which make sure I literally can't do anything with it that I shouldn't, but I have friends who work at places which have even more "corporatized" environments. At least, as a dev, I'm allowed to have local admin through a separate, privileged account.

Thanks to a Microsoft-funded trade press, every CIO of a Fortune-sized company believes you have to implement all of this crap in order to be "secure." (Meanwhile, the mainframe skates by on non-encrypted connections and 6-digit alphanumeric passwords. Straining at gnats and swallowing camels.)

We switched from Lotus to Office365, for a few glorious months, I could access everything from my personal Mac. Then they instituted Mobile Iron. So I created a Windows VM to let MI have it's way with, but then my company further locked down Office365 (and the Azure portal and everything else) so that ONLY their images could get to them. Sigh.

I have scores of company-specific programs on my laptop. They're all either Java or .NET, and could easily be recompiled for Linux or Mac. (I've done it for several of my own programs.) Every commercial app I have is supported on at least Mac. Everything else is web-based anyway. The only thing keeping companies on Windows is the control it gives them over the desktop. I, for one, am very glad that people involved in Linux don't care about this aspect of computing, and that Apple is catering to PEOPLE, not companies.

trust me without dosbox a shit ton of stuff does not work anymore. heck even tons of xp software does not work on win 10 or needs patches (especially games) compat is dropped more and more, especially old cruft that is barely used.

You're welcome :)

I don't think that is correct. Any windows after 9x will need something like dosbox to run dos programs.

Also NTVDM was kind of hit or miss. So if you are using a 32 bit version of any windows you may still get away with running many DOS and win16 applications. But within a particular set of limitations.

1: https://github.com/otya128/winevdm 2: https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64

  The system distro is where all of the magic happens. The sytem distro is a containerized Linux environment where the WSLg XServer, Wayland server and Pulse Audio server are running.
  ...
  The system distro is based on the Microsoft CBL-Mariner Linux. This is a minimal Linux environment, just enough to run the various pieces of WSLg. For details on how to build and deploy a private system distro please see our build instructions. [0]

As far as I know, it's the only Linux distro that requires Windows and VS in order to build it.