Microsoft's Linux Kernel
This is really Microsoft catching up to the Mac in terms of integration with the open-source ecosystem which importantly drives the web.<p>In the mid 2000&#x27;s the Mac really took off due to being a good-enough Linux replacement on the command line, while taking care of all the hardware integration and providing a sleek desktop experience. This really helped the Mac take off among hackers. This system wasn&#x27;t as open-source as Linux, but it was good enough: Most of us don&#x27;t want to mess about with the desktop stack. If the stack we care about is open-source and runs across many systems, then we still have the freedom. I find it fairly easy to work on both Mac OS X, Linux and WSL2 -- but not pre-WSL Windows.<p>The inclusion of a Linux kernel really seems to cause a lot of confusion. No, Microsoft is not about to remove the NT kernel. No, they&#x27;re not about to supplant Linux. WSL1 did what the guys from Illumos and FreeBSD have also done: since the Linux syscall interface is quite stable, the NT kernel can simply implement these syscalls and handle them appropriately. The was that the NT kernel was still sufficiently different that the filesystem performance was quite poor and complex applications like Docker required more kernel features than was provided by just the syscall API.<p>Including a Linux kernel is really the nuclear option: rather than trying to fit Linux applications in Windows, they&#x27;re running in their own world and providing integrations into this world. This means you can now run Docker on WSL2 for instance, but it&#x27;s also complicated: Kernels really like to think that they own the world, for instance they keep memory around to use for later. WSL2 dynamically grows the amount of RAM allocated to the VM, which is quite clever, but I don&#x27;t know how&#x2F;if they&#x27;re going to handle freeing memory again -- here the NT kernel really needs to communicate with the Linux kernel.<p>Anyways, the upshot is that no, Microsoft is not going to take over the world, but perhaps it will be easier to use a Windows laptop which supports all the stupid Enterprise software I need but still have a Linux shell for actual work.