I hope Windows 11 is a free upgrade from Windows 10, if not buy it new.
ReactOS is improving to the point that I can use it in a Virtual Machine with a web browser and LibreOffice for docs. https://reactos.org/ If Windows is shut down, I'll just use ReactOS.
I would say there is a more likely than Windows becomes open source and (some) Linux distros will switch to use the windows kernel than the scenario you put forward.
The amount of work it would take to switch Windows to use a linux kernel is mindbuggeling. One thing is the actual task of switching the kernel but documentation, tools suppor, drivers, end user training etc etc makes this scenario unrealistic.
It wouldn't even bring any benefits to Windows. It already has a perfectly fine kernel
I think this would be a shame. I’ve always been a Linux guy pretty much since I was old enough to have my own computer, but NT is a fascinating architecture capable of running multiple different system abis (POSIX, Win32) side by side and was designed to allow for doing just that.
I realize that very real performance reasons (especially with git repos) resulted in WSL 2, but I still think it's a shame we had to go down that road. WSL 1 literally provided Linux system ABIs on top of NT, and it was super cool that it was even possible to ship such a thing.
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ReactOS is improving to the point that I can use it in a Virtual Machine with a web browser and LibreOffice for docs. https://reactos.org/ If Windows is shut down, I'll just use ReactOS.
The amount of work it would take to switch Windows to use a linux kernel is mindbuggeling. One thing is the actual task of switching the kernel but documentation, tools suppor, drivers, end user training etc etc makes this scenario unrealistic.
It wouldn't even bring any benefits to Windows. It already has a perfectly fine kernel