I'm not going to read this article. My apologies when I'm completely off with my post, but I've had lengthy discussions with people who are unable to even imagine what I recognize as screaming into their faces. I'm talking about what Microsoft is doing and the future of computing in general. No, this is not a conspiracy theory. It's just 20 years of observing technological progression and drawing conclusions.

So, with all due respect, please allow me to expand:

I usually start such conversations with "The Desktop Wars are over and no one's the winner. The only actual participant decided to withdraw and instead change the rules of the engagement."

In keypoints, in no particular order, to make this shorter: Trusted Computing, Virtualization, SaaS, WSL, web applications, WASM, Docker, CPU based in-flight/runtime memory encryption, walled gardens, consoles-are-just-PCs-anyway. All of these go together, one way or another, leading to a particular outcome.

When virtualization became a default feature of CPUs, eventually sandboxing became a thing. Docker. You can download "sandboxes" and run those instead of downloading and running "just" programs. It's pretty fast, safe, completely self-contained. You don't dirt up your OS by installing software and potential malware has to be significantly more sophisticated to break out of the sandbox.

Now look at WSL. At some point in the likely-not-so-distant-future Microsoft will proudly announce "full integration", at which point the idea of a Windows, or a Linux, simply becomes irrelevant. The Linux kernel will be running virtualized next to a virtualized Windows kernel, controlled by a hypervisor.

Combined with on-the-fly encryption of memory, which eventually will hit the consumer market, software can then be "trusted" on both sides of the equation. While virtualization makes sure that the user can "trust" the software, on-the-fly memory encryption ensures that the software (developer) can "trust" the user (not to hack/reverse engineer it).

The situation we will then be in allows for software/content to be rented on demand without creators needing to fear that their software, or content, will be copied and shared with others. We will be downloading the programs/data we wish to run to local, "trusted" machines (without the ability to copy it), and/or running heavy workloads "in the cloud" streamed to the local machine.

If you think we already have this, then you're not wrong, but it's still in the baby steps. It's not something that has yet reached the mainstream yet, but we're getting there. UWP programs offered in the Microsoft Store are sandboxed by default, but the environment is not yet fully trustable.

Back in the early 2000s there were stories about TPM and how we will end up with paying money for copy/pasting content, which got ridicouled, but have become a technological possibility in the present. Considering that the prevention of "stealing" content will always be a high priority, the scenario does not seem so unlikely to happen. Imagine that! A simple and straight-forward way of solving any and all copyright/licensing issues simply by paying immediately.

So, to answer the question:

"Could Microsoft be en route to dumping Windows in favor of Linux?"

No. They're dumping the whole concept of an OS entirely.

...

PS: Remember not to just downvote me without sharing your thoughts. This isn't reddit. : - )