There is even an interview of Bill Gates where he talks about UNIX as the future of computing, naturally with Xenix, how things turn around.
Xenix was my introduction to UNIX.
"The Future of Xenix"
https://archive.org/details/Unix_World_Vol02_10.pdf/page/n21...
Also relevant quote that I think about when this subject comes up:
“If Microsoft ever does applications for Linux it means I've won.” ~Linus Torvalds
In this case, an entire freaking distro.
This is not the first distro coming out of Microsoft, see Azure Sphere OS.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/shows/internet-of-things-s...
I would rather say UNIX won the server room, Linux just happens to be the UNIX clone most people hack on nowadays, and can change tomorrow as companies take over and people like Linus eventually pass the torch.
You can already see that on embedded, other FOSS OSes are being adopted, without GPL licensing, like Zephyr, NutXX, FreeRTOS,...
a distro is the opposite of an application
Correct, but who 25 years ago could have imagined they’d have gone so far as to roll their own? I remember the Balmer days.
But the fact that they’re rolling a distro tells me they’re likely also writing software for Linux. I’m sure their Azure Linux contains apps they wrote and maintain, used by the OS.
Then there’s Microsoft apps on Android, with Linux under the covers.
I develop C#/F# applications in Windows that run on Mac OS, iOS, Linux, and Windows. It's by far the best environment for this sort of thing. You can get native performance in a much lighter environment than those crappy electron apps.