Very soon Microsoft will acquire Canonical for at least $40 billion. The reasons:
* Ubuntu powers the overwhelming majority of Azure workloads (both customer and internal)
* Nearly all Linux applications and tooling target Ubuntu first (or at the very least)
* Github, VSCode. The missing piece is the actual runtime operating system. Ubuntu.
* Canonical employs nearly all the remaining core enterprise open-source developers after IBM acquired Red Hat
Start the countdown to Microsoft Ubuntu.
If it gets us closer to being able to run native Office and Directx apps on Linux I'm all for it. Snap enforcement already scared me away from Ubuntu for the most part anyway.
Were I Microsoft, a custom Linux would be exclusively for server side benefits. Better/more integrated Azure tooling, native VS Code Remote Development containers, improved telemetry, native account/security provisioning, etc. No reason to tempt fate with better cross platform desktop efforts.