Say what you will about Windows (OS), but the NT kernel really is an engineering marvel that still puts Linux to shame in many ways. The quickest way to describe it for a programmer, is NT was more like an object-oriented language, with a strong security model from day one, whereas Linux is very…not. A lot of the “good” features in Linux feel bolted-on (SELinux, Capabilities, Namespaces) because…well they were. I love to imagine an alternate history where NT won. IMO, Microsoft *should* have made an “Open NT” in the early 2000s; not fully GPL-style open, but one where a large org could say…swap out a memory allocator for their own. (they sorta did this with limited source access, but it was too restrictive) You could imagine say…an early Amazon forking OpenNT to create an “AmazonNT” for EC2, where they have a modified scheduler, network stack, whatever. But, the security+compatibility contract keeps a stable baseline on the Microsoft side. Controversial take, but if we enter this era where users are giving AI agents increasingly higher levels of access control; the Linux kernel is legitimately a poor fit. Think about it; answer the question “What exactly is this AI agent allowed to do?” On Standard Linux, it’s disgustingly messy with lots of overlap. Do you use UIDs? GIDs? ACLs? CGROUPs? Policies? SELinux? Filesystem modes? There’s not a singular coherent graph of capabilities you can point to. Too many ways you can escape an initially narrow scope. NT, by comparison, can go the route of explicitly typed resources, and then you could have these really strong centralized audit trails when an agent goes haywire…etc. I know I’m rambling, but the point is…if you were greenfielding an OS kernel from scratch, in 2026, with the intent of being forward-looking, it would *not* look like Linux. Frankly, it’d probably look a lot closer to NT, or even a BSD fork…