This gem was posted to Slashdot on Friday, but I’m still catching up after a weekend away. It’s an article by Gary Wolf for Wired Magazine, on what the future might hold if the unthinkable happened, and Linus Torvalds was hired by Microsoft.

It’s 2008, and Windows is now a Desktop Environment running on top of a stable open source base, rather than (as currently) an OS in its own right. Read The Microsoft Memo.

Back to reality, I don’t think it would ever happen, but perhaps a hybrid solution could be a way forward. Windows is a lot more stable than it used to be, by the way. I use Windows XP on my home workstation, because it works better than anything else for me. It’s not perfect, but it doesn’t crash anywhere near as much as 95/98 used to, and there’s software available for pretty much everything I need to be able to do with my computer.

But I use Debian GNU/Linux on my home server, becase I don’t need to download music or play games on that machine, and stability is more important than application support for that machine, given that it’s only generally used as a file/web server.

Windows has maybe 99% application support, but is only about 90% reliable, in my experience. Linux is more like 99% reliable, but has maybe only 90% of the application support it needs. What if the two really could be combined?