Yeah, a general purpose distro would come with a desktop environment and you'd be able to run it on your PC as your main OS. Calling this general purpose is so misleading.

Of course describing reality in titles would have the inconvenience of causing fewer clicks to these articles.

The title on HN could be updated though.

You point to a better timeline. Sometimes—when desperately alone—I imagine.

If only the guy who was destined to close a disk operating system deal with IBM hadn’t been goofing around with his plane that fateful day.

We would all be using lisp machines, running smalltalk on microkernels that put the HURD to shame. Just imagine: instead of backslashes and drive letters, we’d have parens. Endless, syntactically-valid parens.

Or CP/M, probably that. But can it run doom?

I was curious to see what it would be like to run this under WLS. I'm guessing we'll get our chance at some point.

I would imagine MS employees might (or be made to) either directly or through wsl.

You may be right, its possible however that people running on Azure may use it locally for testing.

I don’t know really. Amazon AL2023 can be used outside aws for example, and people might want the same distro on-prem as the cloud.

It’s not the average joe/jane though.