I mean, this is actually backwards from a pure engineering POV from what would be actually excellent.
The core Windows NT kernel is quite excellent, and was always in some ways far superior to what Unix offered. E.g. proper asynchronous I/O from day one. Dave Cutler and crew did a bang-up job. Linux is only getting competitive things like io_uring now(ish).
The problem was the shitty API and user space they papered in front of it with. Lack of a proper CLI shell, slow filesystem, the godawful "registry", a low quality, unsafe windowing toolkit (Win32 API), and then, after WinXP, bad UX / environment stuff. And, of course, the fact that everything was proprietary, closed/closed-source, and the $$ licensing story for running a WindowsNT server was always garbage.
As a user operating system none of this mattered so much because the sheer mass of the market meant that driver support and application support was always going to win out on Windows.
But these days, with all my attached devices being USB-Cish things that just implement USB standards I have zero issues in Linux. In fact, audio interface support works better for me in Ubuntu than it does in Windows right now.
But people who were serious about running servers naturally stuck with Unix, despite it being in some ways technically inferior on paper -- because that experience on NT just wasn't as good. Remote administration via GUI. Anemic CLI. MS proprietary everything. Per-user $$ licensing stuff. Tight coupling with IIS & SQL Server, which has their own licensing stuff, etc. etc. etc.
Anyways, I think it would be a shame if MS gave up on the NT kernel.
With WSL1 they did an interesting job of getting Linux user space running overtop of the NT kernel, but they dropped that approach with WSL2 and went with a more VM approach.
> Anyways, I think it would be a shame if MS gave up on the NT kernel.
I can't say this more. The NT kernel is really the best part of Windows. Almost everything that people complain about in Windows 11 is in the userspace. Start menu nerfed? Right-click menu hidden? Settings versus Control Panel? Cortana, Copilot? There's nothing in the kernel or lower-level OS constructs that require any of these.
Funny, I just went back and edited my comment to add in filesystem where I didn't have it before and then saw your reply.
Because, yes, NTFS is just slow as hell. I have never been clear why but as I said elsewhere, various *nix filesystems have always outperformed it. I understand that on paper NTFS was technically superior back when Linux was stuck with ext2 & ext3 as standard, but in practice it just made for a really slow system.
The core Windows NT kernel is quite excellent, and was always in some ways far superior to what Unix offered. E.g. proper asynchronous I/O from day one. Dave Cutler and crew did a bang-up job. Linux is only getting competitive things like io_uring now(ish).
The problem was the shitty API and user space they papered in front of it with. Lack of a proper CLI shell, slow filesystem, the godawful "registry", a low quality, unsafe windowing toolkit (Win32 API), and then, after WinXP, bad UX / environment stuff. And, of course, the fact that everything was proprietary, closed/closed-source, and the $$ licensing story for running a WindowsNT server was always garbage.
As a user operating system none of this mattered so much because the sheer mass of the market meant that driver support and application support was always going to win out on Windows.
But these days, with all my attached devices being USB-Cish things that just implement USB standards I have zero issues in Linux. In fact, audio interface support works better for me in Ubuntu than it does in Windows right now.
But people who were serious about running servers naturally stuck with Unix, despite it being in some ways technically inferior on paper -- because that experience on NT just wasn't as good. Remote administration via GUI. Anemic CLI. MS proprietary everything. Per-user $$ licensing stuff. Tight coupling with IIS & SQL Server, which has their own licensing stuff, etc. etc. etc.
Anyways, I think it would be a shame if MS gave up on the NT kernel.
With WSL1 they did an interesting job of getting Linux user space running overtop of the NT kernel, but they dropped that approach with WSL2 and went with a more VM approach.