|
 |
👋 Hi, this is Gergely with a subscriber-only issue of the Pragmatic Engineer Newsletter. In every issue, I cover challenges at Big Tech and startups through the lens of engineering managers and senior engineers. If you’ve been forwarded this email, you can subscribe here.
How will AI change operating systems? Part 2: Windows
Deepdive into the Windows team’s efforts to make the OS “AI agent-friendly” and win back developers by going all-in on Linux on Windows, local models, GPUs, & more
|
| |||||||||||||||
AI is changing how us software engineers build software, and developers’ tool preferences are rapidly evolving with it – like how AI coding harnesses have gotten very popular. Likewise, future versions of the world’s leading operating systems look certain to feature more support for agentic tools.
To find out how things are changing, we talked with the folks at tech giant Microsoft who shared in detail their plan for Windows, and how AI will play a part. It comes after the company’s previous AI efforts led to it being dubbed “Microslop” by some users online.
The Windows team’s vision is opinionated and includes building new agentic primitives, alongside reversing some decisions that have annoyed engineers. Microsoft wants developers who have shunned the system to return. The big question is: will it succeed?
For more, check out a previous article on how the leading Linux distribution, Ubuntu, is changing, thanks to AI, with a focus on hardware support for GPUs, NPUs and DPUs, a bet on local-first LLMs, and a focus on AI developer tools.
Today, we cover:
How many devs use Windows anyway? It’s hard to get exact numbers, but macOS appears far more popular at startups than Windows, while Linux may also be on track to overtake Microsoft’s OS in developer popularity.
Agent identity & discovery. Windows ships with native support for agent identification, plus a centralized registry of locally available MCP servers to be included with the OS.
Isolate agentic tools. Microsoft is building an OS-agnostic isolation mechanism that should make it easy for developers to build agents that run tools safely.
Running models locally: Windows is betting big on local models. WindowsML is a new hardware abstraction layer for building and running local AI models across GPU, NPU, and CPU. The OS aims to ship Small Language Models (SLMs) without requiring an NPU in the future. We’ve also seen an impressive demo of a local model running on a Surface laptop using NVIDIA chips.
Building agents on Windows: one goal of the OS is to allow building of agents with opinionated frameworks and libraries that devs can just assume are available.
More dev-friendly: Windows was plagued by questionable product decisions that resulted in a cluttered Start menu and search, to the chagrin of many developers who lost interest in the OS. Microsoft wants them back and is addressing criticisms – finally!
Linux on Windows (WSL): Windows ships with an embedded Linux called Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). It’s proving quite popular with devs. Windows embracing Linux might just be the strategy to get devs to switch from both native Linux and macOS, as counter-intuitive as this strategy sounds.
Windows & hardware: since its early days, Windows has gone out of its way to support a wide variety of hardware. The OS was x86-based from the beginning, but Windows on ARM is starting to finally look like a good alternative. A look into why ARM support took so long, and the upcoming NVIDIA collaboration.
We’ve talked with people on the Windows team to learn about the thinking behind Microsoft’s strategy for the operating system: Pavan Davuluri (EVP, Windows and Devices), Scott Hanselman (VP, Member of Technical Staff, Microsoft CoreAI and GitHub), and Logan Iyer, (CVP, Windows Platform and Developer). Many thanks for your time!
The bottom of this article could be cut off in some email clients. Read the full article uninterrupted, online.
1. How many devs use Windows anyway?
While Windows remains the most popular desktop operating system for mainstream computer users at around 63% market share as per Statcounter – the strong sense is that its popularity is down among developers.
Windows used to be popular with devs…
A year ago, the 2025 Stack Overflow survey polled professional users’ choices of OS. It found that a minority of devs overall use Windows – although it remained the single most popular OS. Despite its top ranking in the survey, the number of devs using Windows was actually way down on Microsoft’s XP-era peak. Meanwhile, MacOS and various Linux distributions also showed considerable market share:
 |