Life certainly has its share of twists.

They will give in and go *nix based again

all will fall to open source

Legend has it that Gates bought MS DOS from a local Seattle company right before IBM visited to see what they had and license it. The rest is history

with a little help from mom

Unlikely. Windows already implemented Linux subsystems.

You get to use both NT and UNIX on the same machine.

Why constrain yourself to only one?

Windows hasn’t been DOS-based since ME.

Likely as a tribute to the fact that the first window was invented by eunuchs.

No one cares about using NT.

Imo, Windows will die and Linux will takeover, same way it went for everything outside the desktop space, the nature of it is simply better for longevity.

There isn't really a future in a proprietary operating system like Windows. Currently, it has a bunch of APIs that perform better like DirectX + market share, and it will be like that for a while as Linux userspace is fragmented and there isn't a very good solution for the people unwilling to adapt.

People have been saying that for years.

I remember all the Linux hype back in the 2000s. And yet, here we are 2 decades later.

I don't want to say it's impossible because who can predict the future but as it stands, Linux will not replace Windows within our lifetime.

It is virtually guaranteed, which is why they say it, doesn't mean they can see where it's at to decide 'when'.

Also, the 2000s? Lol, not really a great time for Linux. You would struggle back then with 95% of the things you plugged in.

>which is why they say it

Who says what?

In your own words, "People".

Sure, good to know you agree with my assessment that your "virtually guaranteed" outcome is nothing but hype.

Sure dude.

[removed]

They currently have CBL-Mariner Linux.

They used to maintain [SONiC](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SONiC_(operating_system)) another Microsoft Linux, but last year gave control over that to the Linux Foundation.

They used an still have limited *NIX compatibility since the days of NT when POSIX compatibility was a requirement to win government contracts and Windows Subsystem for Linux is a modern revived and expanded version of that old feature.

> Windows will die and Linux will takeover, same way it went for everything outside the desktop space,

Except this didn't happen. Windows still runs well over 40% of servers with Rhel taking the lion's share of the rest and various other OSes like AIX, Solaris, etc.... running the rest. Windows continues to run 75% or so of desktops in the enterprise market as well. The ability to centrally manage and secure tons of desktops is something that Linux based desktops just don't really have.

My dude, I would bet every penny in my retirement that Linux on the desktop will never replace Windows in my lifetime.

A good chunk of my Roth IRA is that same bet.

RHEL stands for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

> The ability to centrally manage and secure tons of desktops is something that Linux based desktops just don't really have.

?

https://webtribunal.net/blog/linux-statistics/

I am well aware. Not sure what your point is.

Not really sure what your point is, if you're trying to say Linux isn't dominant in the server space you need a reality check.

> 96.3% of the world’s top one million servers run on Linux.

> 90% of all cloud infrastructure operates on Linux,

Also, why are you talking about things like... Solaris? Solaris is <0.1% ms of top servers. It's a statistical error.

You are looking at web servers, not enterprise. I'm gonna guess you've never worked in enterprise IT. No one in enterprise IT would ever buy that 96.3% of enterprise servers run Linux. It's not even close to that.

Anything doing actual processing.

Not glorified desktop usage.

No one is thinking about someone's office computers and active directory when looking at the server space.

Also it isn't just the "web", like would you call machine learning web?

No one is running AI on Windows.

Seems fair. You are defining "server" in a way that is completely different from how the IT industry defines server. Makes sense.

You're defining server to include something no one in the industry actually includes.

Do you actually think any serious computing is done on Windows? Data centers, server farms, render farms, machine learning?

Enterprise IT? really? even then outside of offices that runs on Windows or Schools, RHEL dominates.

I work in software, fyi.

You work in software. I work in enterprise IT. You have no clue what you're talking about. The server industry is dominated by Windows. Walk into any company on the planet and I 100% guarantee you they have an AD environment. I guarantee you the vast majority of computers you will find in their offices are Windows boxes connected to that AD environment. Their email is going to be run by Exchange most likely. So you've got at least two Windows clusters right there. The applications they run probably also live on a Windows server somewhere and all of this is probably sitting on top of VMWare. You clearly have no idea what you're talking about if you think you can walk into a data center and 96% of the servers there are running Linux. That's delusional.

> You clearly have no idea what you're talking about if you think you can walk into a data center and 96% of the servers there are running Linux. That's delusional.

Yeah, Windows dominates the data center environment.

What are you talking about. There'll always be a need for an all-purpose easy-to-install PC OS that will run on anything. MacOS is for Macs only, and Linux is... Linux -they've got their niches but they'll always be relative minorities.

> Legend has it that Gates bought MS DOS from a local Seattle company

Gary Kildall has entered the chat

Gary Kildall was too busy flying his new plane to take a meeting with IBM, that's why we wound up with some amateur's quick-n-dirty DOS.

Yep, he paid $50K for the rights to QDOS, which became MS-DOS.

Fun fact is QDOS was short for 'Quick & Dirty Operating System' :/

I did read that Gates tried to stiff him by saying that IBM was a single sale and that's all he should be paid for.

Uh. depends upon what you mean by doing work. Since adopting computers have found what took me about 1 hour to write, such as email, letters, and my clinical neuroscience work, can write 3000-4000 words/hour in a good day. 15-20 times more work using word processors instead of typewriter.

That is in a nutshell why we use computers. And with printers, and spell checkers, now finally with large enough vocabs for we professionals to use, quite a bit more.

I can with websites, as do others, advertize and connect cheaply with billions of users. It's in fact easier to send photons and electrons, than paper, and ink. Which is why, come to think of it, the papers AND broadcast media are collapsing.

Tech is way more efficient that ink/paper in 100K's of tonnes/day.

Efficiencies, doing more with less time, money, materials, etc., 2nd Law ThermoD are the way the universe tends to strongly.

Shockin #'s of people do not know 2nd law, and what least energy, drivin efficiencies here on earth & out across all observable space portends.

This is what's goin on

Universality. ThermoD driving most all processes includin fusion (universal star/galaxy shine), and growth/evolution as well.

Dr. Karl Friston is paramount in this work. Sadly, most have never heard of him.

https://aeon.co/essays/consciousness-is-not-a-thing-but-a-process-of-inference

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_energy_principle

If I'm beyond yer ken, then so is Dr. Karl Friston, dept. chair, UCLondon.

The post you are replying to is talking about "servers", not general desktop usage.

General desktop usage is benign as you describe, any moron can type stuff on a computer, that's why the Windows operating system isn't exactly crucial to those means.

Yes, the universe obeys the laws of thermodynamics, but there are plenty of people who in an isolated context seem to defy that, right? They would rather write a letter than use a computer.

I have enough of a span of knowledge to get the gist of that principle, I've never seen it before, thanks for linking that.

Word processing is easy to use. We use the most widely available, too . Sure Linux works, until the next better language comes along. Have seen many upgrades in Linux, haven't you? So, well, then.....

I had a copy of Xenix 286, I gave it back to my company when I left. I wish that I had kept it. The Docs were very good and its C was similar to MS c5.1 with models.