It is some time in the future.
Torvalds has left us too soon. A sudden illness or accident has claimed him, and left the Linux Foundation leaderless. While things seem to go well at first, frictions build over new ideas and direction for the kernel. There is a failed take-over by Lennart Poettering and the community is too busy pointing fingers to type out any code. Hardware standards develop and soon it is getting challenging to find the correct patches to make your new graphics card work and even then it is not without its hitches.
As the future looks grim, Microsoft comes to the rescue. They don’t want the ecosystem to go to waste, and so offer nice positions and offices to the lead kernel developers in Redmond. They get to move out of their development setups in the laundry room, into nicely ventilated corner offices, with young pretty women coming in to pour their coffee. They move their families out of their rentals into some nice Washington properties. Life is good.
The community is not immediately onboard and the original kernel attempts to live on. There are fragmented efforts from Canonical and Red Hat to keep their systems running, but ultimately they can’t match the raw power of the Microsoft office spearheaded by the original kernel developers. Time passes, and silently in a changelog, Ubuntu migrates to the Microsoft Linux kernel, boosting performance.
While you can still use the old style linux kernel in Microsoft Azure, you can only install dated snapshots that are there for legacy reasons. By default you get your server distributions with the Microsoft Linux Kernel, other hosting providers follow suit. The Windows subsystem for Linux get extended with improved support for display managers, and users can seamlessly run their original Linux setups inside Windows. As users move on, the Arch wiki get fewer and fewer contributions, eventually getting locked as bots and spammers try to take over.
Driver support has never been so easy on Linux, and games start to regularly boast better performance and easier installation than on Windows. More and more games on Steam display the Linux badge. All the original doubters are being ridiculed with “told you so” as they’re forced to move over if they want to upgrade their hardware, with some fringe communities holding on to decades old tech only for ideological reasons.
You were saying this about SystemD and you were saying this about Wayland. Things move on and Microsoft is frankly the best thing that has ever happened to Linux. You can be a backwards troglodyte all you want but I have never experienced any problems and finally I can install proper Nvidia drivers.
** - A random redditor **
Microsoft Linux servers take the dominant lead in servers as Microsoft finally embraces the cake they always wished they had. Unix tools and utilities already work out of the box on both Linux and Windows systems, linux administration starts to move downwards in server admin CVs as the importance diminishes.
Most computer manufacturers now bundle their computers with Microsoft Linux as an option to Windows. Installing Linux with UEFI has never been so easy. However, you have to download the kernel from Microsofts web page and then bundle it together with your distribution of choice, but tooling makes this easy and it is just how things are done now.
Fringe groups are complaining about this new tooling. They have patched the Microsoft Linux kernel from source and compiled it, but the tooling does not accept their kernel. The reasoning is that the tooling will only accept genuine kernels for security reasons, and they have to be signed with keys that are under Microsofts control. Due to the Linux Kernel being licensed under GPL-2 instead of GPL-3, this is fully allowed. Not able to navigate new boot standards yourself, you sheepishly accept these terms.
UEFI has aged and starts to be replaced by a new standard, SUBO. SUBO solves a lot of vulnerabilites present in UEFI, but makes installing new operating systems difficult. Using an installer tool inside Windows allows users to install new operating systems on SUBO computers, but it requires an active Windows partition to be present. Since your new SUBO computer came with Windows pre-installed anyway, you accept this. Hackers try to circumvent the new standard to be able to keep installing their aging Linux systems without Microsoft meddling, but progress is slow and sometimes vendor dependent, usually relying on some exploit.
Your work is interrupted by an automated update and restart that you couldn’t disable. Once you return to your login screen, you see that your window manager of choice is no longer an option. A frantic Bing search shows that replacing the standard window manager is no longer possible for security reasons. You attempt to downgrade but your efforts are for nought. You resign to manually resizing and moving windows around for now.
The final nail in the coffin for you is that you receive a pop-up informing you that within 30 days, Microsoft Linux will require you to pay a monthly subscription fee. Enraged, you and your fellow enthusiasts decide to finally take matters into your own hands and fork out the Microsoft Linux kernel to free it from everything that has been going on. Not only do you discover that the code base is riddled with Microsoft patents, to your horror you find that all the code has been rewritten in C#. In panic you try to contact the original kernel developers demanding an explanation, but they have all retired. Canonical and Red Hat has closed down for a long time. Richard Stallman has since long passed away.
Linux is dead. Long live Windows.