Unlike IE, the NT kernel was never bad and is still (presumably) in a pretty good shape. It's the userland that's gone insane. Someone should just port the Windows 7 shell to the newest kernel and call it a day.

The problem with windows is not the kernel, as it is preety solid, but user space.

Wathever problems windows have today, retro compatibility was always a strong point in favor of windows. Breaking it with such a change in the kernel, would make most of its users even bitter than they are today.

> another way has been looking better and better: windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro

They’d have nothing to gain from doing this, NT kernel isn’t the problem with windows.

That would be kind of awesome, since Microsoft has a pretty serious track record of supporting decades old sofware and technology quirks. Could be pretty cool supporting Windows 11 software products on a 'Linux based Windows 13'. :)

> The pain of ripping this all out properly is likely too high.

That is just completely illogical and betrays a complete lack of understanding of how Windows works. Most problems people have with Windows are in the user mode, and not in the kernel. The pain of reverting straightforward UI/UX/vendor-provided application code that is probably version-controlled and tagged for specific historic Windows releases is 'too high', so, therefore, let's do something that's even higher cost, and...

> windows 13 or 14 will just be a linux distro

Ugh, not this again. It looks like this train of thought will never leave HN commenters who probably have never seriously actually used or programmed on Windows. Literally every week I see 'Windows should keep the same user mode and move to the Linux kernel'.

You guys know what another Linux kernel running a locked-down user mode stack is called? Android.

Imagine they got their smart engineers to improve and refine Wine (and adjacent tools), rather than pushing out slop, it would be truly amazing

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