My tech friends always joke that pretty soon we’re going to see “the year of the Linux Windows”, where windows will just be an OS on top of the Linux kernel.
I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.
I think we’re only half joking though, I could see it happening.
There's no need because the Year Of Linux On The Desktop™ already happened and it's called WSL2. Meanwhile, the opposite has also already actually happened: SteamOS + Proton is a distro whose main purpose is to be a launcher for Windows apps on a Linux kernel.
Jokes aside, this chest-thumping is incredibly ironic for those of us who lived through the 1990s-2000s. First it was, "FOSS will eliminate all proprietary software and M$ (sic) will be crushed and Bill Gates will go to the poorhouse. Hooray!" Later, it became "Well, we haven't killed proprietary software but at least Linux / LAMP and Firefox are succeeding at taking down Windows and Internet Explorer. Hooray!" Now it's "Maybe Microsoft will consider switching its kernel to Windows. Probably. Someday. Hooray?" What's the backpedaling of the 2030s going to be?
Windows also comprehensively lost the "exclusivity" moat. Most of popular apps are now cross-platform, because they need to run on Android/iOS/macOS. So desktop Linux is often an easy addition: Slack, Discord, all the messengers, Zoom, various IDEs, etc.
So Linux indeed won to a large extent. Just not in the way people expected it.
And everyone that tries to force GNU/Linux via NDK, discovers that not everything Linux is supported.
However, while those web apps might run on Linux (or not, if it uses DRM like all those streaming providers), they increasingly only run in Chrome.
If anything, they invested into the opposite: possibility to run Linux binaries on top of Windows kernel.