eg although I usually forget to use it and just go with manpages.

I have several decades of using manpages, so you can understand the manpage reflex. If you don’t have that manpage muscle memory, I’d say give eg a shot.

I wonder about that. I’m probably not thinking of some very important things. Edge, Office, Active Directory, Co-Pilot, a Windows DE, userland programs(could even be GNU+Windows, don’t want to forget notepad and minesweeper), Powershell, DirectX and SDKs. I think they could do it in a year or two. I just figure, if they could improve Windows in the cloud, they would have done it. And they’ve already got a massive head start with Azure Linux.

Too much money. I worked on the Windows kernel from minkernel to onekernel. There were massive rewrites with the switch of the CE kernel out for minkernel when Windows Phone was in development. minkernel used to chew through eMMC memory in a few weeks on the first Windows Phone internal dev devices. Microsoft could, rewrite onekernel (I’m assuming they are still on onekernel), if they wanted. I think Windows is a dead man walking.

Microsoft keeps building up Azure Linux. Also they push Windows 365, the cloud based Windows OS for businesses (if I understand correctly). If I’m reading the tea leaves, Windows runs like shit in the cloud and is very expensive. Because of this, companies are switching to Linux containerization for their servers. Even on Azure, Linux is on 60% of the servers. Even I work exclusively on services containerized with Linux, never Windows. If Windows was so good, you’d think it would be the opposite.

Also, Microsoft makes all their money from Cloud, i.e. Linux. Which again is why Azure Linux is getting more and more development. So, imagine if you will, Windows 365 instances suddenly become Azure with a Windows userland ( Windows/Linux, not GNU/Linux). Most users wouldn’t even know. If you had problems, running your software, Microsoft could allow you to drop back to Full Windows. For every Azure Linux instance running as Windows 365, that would be a significant cost savings to Microsoft, especially when everybody does everything in Chrome. If that’s how it all unfolds, why would Microsoft want to put any major engineering dollars towards a kernel rewrite? They do have the money. I just don’t see Microsoft every fixing the kernel root kit situation. It’s 100% in their wheel house though.