I don't know about MS creating their own Windows distro but I wouldn't be surprised if they were going the way of turning Windows into a DE. There are a number of indications that MS wants out of the OS business. The current leadership has basically slashed any real OS development. Windows is still based on an ancient and cobbled filesystem which is years behind the curve and can't seem to be able to develop a new filesystem worth a damn.
Creating and supporting a DE would be so much less resource and money intensive than a whole OS. It would also allow for MS to piggyback on top of Linux for filesystems and everything else Linux already does. It doesn't mean that the DE would need to be open source. It also doesn't mean that components of Windows' consumer and server OSes would need to be open sourced. They could keep parts as closed source and sell them separately as well as the DE all the while working on top of Linux. It probably wouldn't take much to port most of Microsoft's software to Linux assuming that it hasn't been done already.
Microsoft are the greatest contributor to GitHub and Edge is now based on Chromium. Furthermore, their cloud based solutions now run under Linux and Windows contains bash.
I agree 100%, the NT kernel is ageing and combined with the Windows scheduler is struggling with the newer NUMA implementations that are the way of the future. Combine these well known issues with the issues surrounding the now ancient NTFS file system, and Windows is totally overdue for some form of overhaul that's going to be difficult to achieve without a ground up revamp.
It's like death from a thousand cuts...
I can see them going for a locked down DE running the open source Linux kernel/file systems with backwards Win32 compatibility provided by Wine. They have to do something eventually as NT/NTFS can't keep going forever.
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