It’s called Linspire, what you’ve described happened 20 years ago. It was not the cataclysmic event you described it as. TBH I’m not that concerned about a company who charges $400+ for an OS that still shows advertisements and loses support after 5 years when I could go out and get an OS with no ads or bloat for free that will never lose support.
Looking up Linspire, that was not Microsoft, but a separate company. That means they didn’t have the windows kernel source code, nor the windows userbase. If M$ made a distro within which nigh any windows software worked (Photoshop, Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, …, games), it were presented as a frictionless upgrade (“Upgrade to Windows LT!”), and suddenly 1-2 billion people were on it, what would happen to linux?
I’m not sure things would be that rosy.
Linspire is what Windows named the company who made Lindows after acquiring them as a way of settling ongoing litigations against them. It was a Linux Distro that was built on the concept of running everything that Windows could. Windows was always a parent company to Linspire.
2 Billion People won’t use a Microsoft distribution of Linux unless they can control their greed long enough to make it worth using, which is unlikely.
EDIT: I’m getting all my nouns mixed up lol
Microsoft sought a retrial and after this was postponed in February 2004,[9] offered to settle the case. As part of the licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated $20 million, and Lindows, Inc. transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed its name to Linspire, Inc.
The company was thus never owned by M$. So there never was M$ proprietary code in Linspire.
2 Billion People won’t use a Microsoft distribution of Linux unless they can control their greed long enough to make it worth using, which is unlikely.
It’s the power of default. If it comes by default on hardware, people will unknowingly use it. And if the upgrade path is smooth and unnoticeable, people will upgrade too.
I’m not sure whether Windows is their cash cow anymore. I’d assume Office 365 (or whatever it’s called now) along with Azure make up the majority of their income. Window is probably just the gateway to their garden. But, change is hard and most likely M$ won’t pull an Edge --> Chromium with their OS any time soon - and I sure hope they don’t.
