>Microsoft openly claimed that "Linux is a cancer" back in 2001
Yes, and? Like any company, it's not a single-mind monolith set in stone willing to die on some random hills, but adapts to where the money is if it wishes to survive, and it's represented by people who are subject to change, specifically Balmer who said that at the time and he's been replaced by Nadella, who fixed a lot of the bad directions Blamer took.
Apple also refused to use USB-C over lightning until the EU forced them, then came around and told everyone how much better the "new" USB C connector is despite refusing to use it in their phones for nearly a decade.
> Apple also refused to use USB-C over lightning until the EU forced them, then came around and told everyone how much better the "new" USB C connector is despite refusing to use it in their phones for nearly a decade.
you seem to have yourself really confused.
refusing to use certain tech is one thing, labelling it as a "cancer" when the tech is being built by millions of people with an idea of promoting openness is a completely different new level.
Times change, people change and companies pivot. Linux has won and Windows is more like cancer today. We should be glad that Microsoft has shown the ability to adapt unlike say RIM (blackberry).
This was 22 years ago... it's honestly so tiring to see people use this as a "got 'em!" argument. Times change, businesses change. This is not a case of ideology.
Because Microsoft's money makers are Azure and Office 365, so they can care less what OS people use, as long as they pick Azure.
The same Microsoft that had a lawsuit with Sun regarding J++, which lead to the creation of .NET, now has its own Java distribution based on OpenJDK, hired several OpenJDK contributors, and is one of the companies doing the work of ARM support.
Also collaborates with Red-Hat in the Java support for Visual Studio, one of the few languages alongside Python, C#, PowerShell and TypeScript that have tier 1 support from Microsoft.
Incidently is why the Windows development experience has gotten worse, with most of the work done by interns and people without background in Windows developer culture.
If only some of the money used for Activision/Blizzard acquisition was used for Windows teams instead.
> Incidently is why the Windows development experience has gotten worse, with most of the work done by interns and people without background in Windows developer culture.
the reason why they have to rely on interns to do such "development" is obvious - skilled developers feel ashamed or at least embarrassing to use/develop for windows.
however, you and I can definitely agree on something here, that is the company known as microsoft is still making money by selling dinosaur "techs", look at its windows, office, visual studio, how much really changed from the 2001 era? yet it is still a major cash cow of the company.
- Some kind of MS branded Linux, that offers improved security/performance/usability etc. it’ll offer full compatibility with existing distros like Debian that devs are already familiar with, but it’ll come pre-setup on windows and it’ll have an amazing integration with GitHub, VSCode and azure, and probably their K8s product too. Much like VSCode they’ll use their influence to get devs used to using it. They’ll probably sponsor a bunch of major OSS projects to use it and start offering features specific to it, bits of it will be “open sourced soon” or similar. The position of power and control will be exerted over it-much the same way Google does with chrome and how that is “open source”.
- a linux compatible api layer over windows, with the angle of “no reason to need Linux anymore”, they’ll angle for large enterprise customers first, offering a Linux-compatible experience, to convert them. Similar experience with above, where the end to end (local to cloud) experience will be the focus. Once again they’ll integrate with existing tooling and major OSS players with the same goal-be so seamless and tightly integrated, and “works with existing tools” that devs will flock to it the way they do with chrome. Orgs and projects will switch to supporting it, probably because the overall experience is superior.
That’s a couple of ideas off the top of my head, we could probably all come with some more scenarios.
When will this tired piece of shit known as FUD die.
With that logic then the damn Linux kernel got "unexpected" ties to Microsoft.
>The trend is that its becoming more and more difficult (due to reimplementation costs and dependency lock-ins) to do Linux in the non-Microsoft way.
No idea what this is suppose to mean in this context, that we get new hardware stanards/tech like UEFI/GPT/secure boot or that people choose to use software like systemd?
That these standards are written with the interests of Microsoft in mind. And that the only Linux-side implementation of them is systemd, where an Microsoft employee is the head maintainer. So if you want any of the new "features" you will need to have a linux/systemd/GPT/UEFI stack.
Smells alot like embrace, extend. Extinguish comes next.
All I see from your comment: With a hammer in hand, everything is a nail.
Or to be more specific: If Microsoft is directly or directly involved in OSS or standards, then it's all EEE/compromised.
GPT/UEFI are standards, they are not ruled by Microsoft nor do I even think it was sole written with Microsoft in mind, at best what I can find is that UEFI took the same architecture Windows has with EFI, that's about it.
systemd's only concern with well systemd, no one is stopping you from not using it, or I'm oh so curious how non-systemd distros are able to boot WITH UEFI + GPT.
- ESP is the FAT filesystem, developed in 1977 for DOS
- LFS vfat extensions so the ESP can have directory entries with lowercase letters or longer than 11 characters. This also pulls in the UCS-2 encoding. Stuff from Windows 95.
- EFI executables are actually windows PE executables
- ... which are hacked on top of a MS-DOS MZ executables (The "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" thing)
- ... and use the Windows64 calling convention
So formally, UEFI is not ruled by Microsoft. Somehow yet all this Windows/MS-DOS stuff ended up in it.
>GPT partition uuid's with the "mixed endianess" from Windows COM
From the wikipedia[1]:
>The binary encoding of UUIDs varies between systems. Variant 1 UUIDs, nowadays the most common variant, are encoded in a big-endian format.
>Variant 2 UUIDs, historically used in Microsoft's COM/OLE libraries, use a little-endian format, but appear mixed-endian with the first three components of the UUID as little-endian and last two big-endian, due to the missing byte dashes when formatted as a string
In other words, there are 2 variants, 2 is for Microsoft's COM/OLE, so it's not designed by Microsoft.
>ESP is the FAT filesystem, developed in 1977 for DOS
>LFS vfat extensions so the ESP can have directory entries with lowercase letters or longer than 11 characters. This also pulls in the UCS-2 encoding. Stuff from Windows 95.
FAT is not govern by Microsoft, despite them being the original author, and even then FAT32 patents have expired[2].
>EFI executables are actually windows PE executables
You would need to provide proper source for this, the only source I can only talks about boot loaders, which I would imagine is written with the OS in mind[3].
They might wish but the fundamentals of Linux (to borrow a term from finance) might be stronger here. What if Linux had a Windows subsystem instead so one could run windows apps securely and without the adware?
> few developers choose this method due to the overhead of needing to restart (reboot) your device any time you want to switch between the operating systems.
The overhead of booting windows maybe once a year?
> If you choose the bare metal Linux install route, you may also need to deal with potential driver issues or hardware compatibility problems that may arise with Linux on some devices.
With Linux?
Did they even mention that you need to install windows before Linux because windows has (had?) No concept for dual boot?
> The overhead of booting windows maybe once a year?
No way!
If you were to boot into Windows only once a year, I'm sure there will be a couple of updates waiting to be installed, forcing you to boot into Windows at least twice a year ;-)
> Did they even mention that you need to install windows before Linux because windows has (had?) No concept for dual boot?
Last time I tried it would still overwrite whatever Grub set up so yes, after 30 years of Linux Windows is still behaving like it's the only game in town.
Every time you buy a computer it is generally going to be "bleeding edge" to various degrees and it's unlikely to work properly for X months/years.
It is only because people keep their machines for several years that the "average" machine running linux is several years old, yet it seems like a rite of passage for people to blame the user for having the audacity to buy a laptop that isn't 10 years old with X and Y but avoids Z wifi chipset.
Yes totally with linux. I've been using Windows on my 1 year old laptop until recently because it didn't have support for the audio amp. Then when it was supported, you have to download and include a script to run as a service which configures the hardware. That script is buried in a year of comments and discussion spread across 5 different sites.
Then my favourite desktop (cinnamon) didn't recognise HiDPI out of the box. I had to figure out how to scale the desktop properly.
Then the trackpad scrolling acceleration is way too fast. You can't change the scrolling acceleration independently from the cursor acceleration so I had to manually modify that in a config file
Then my touch screen is only recognised as a mouse. So i can click and drag, but I can't scroll documents/websites like I can in windows
Then the fan curve is not correct by default. I had to find some values buried in forum posts and then edit the service config to set the fan to these random values
So yes, linux can be an absolute arse to set up even for a developer, let alone the average user. I've been a linux user for the best part of 20 years, but hardware compatibility has always been a pain point.
> The overhead of booting windows maybe once a year?
Why even bother? I have a dedicated cheap desktop running Windows (because I needed it for specific hardware), but, normally, I just fire up a VM when I need Windows for something.
I haven’t needed it in a very long time.
And it runs a lot better on top of Linux than on bare metal. Not quite sure why, but its perceivable.
It's cool seeing Microsoft explain Linux use, yet the 'embrace and extend' tactics seem present. FTA: "If you are good with a slightly more complicated install process and don't need access to Windows tools (like Outlook, Teams, Word, PowerPoint, etc), you can run Linux on bare metal." It hints that cross-compatibility isn’t possible, and omits that most don't use alternatives like Google Docs and LibreOffice anyway. Overlooking Wine and VMs feels intentional. Classic Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.
Outside normal desktop Linux, Chrome OS is trusted more that Windows for good reasons. Instead of odd Linux takes, Microsoft should better their products and reputation. Contextual AI features won't fix their trust issue. Being trustworthy might! I'm not sure they can do that though this side of the singularity.
Well… they have Active Directory, Exchange, SharePoint, Teams, Power BI, Excel, and quite a few others so deeply ingrained into most companies, Microsoft will be healthy for at least a couple decades from now.
And once your company’s data is on Azure, chances are it’ll stay there forever.
The problem is that this is just a short guide. Either it stays short and vague, or becomes a 500 page book about how libreoffice will replace most of the functionality of office but misses a lot of common features, and may introduce random compatibility issues with your word docs, that you may have unsupported hardware, may have to google for random scripts to make common hardware work, discuss the pros and cons of each desktop, explain the additional software you'll have to install to interface with devices/services, etc.
Or they just give you an overview on the different install methods
I want to, ideally, run Arch and have a gpu pass-through Windows installation in a VM, for games only.
There, it can do all the spying and malware it wants, I'll have snapshots, I might even use a M$ account to sync my save games to their cloud.
But last time I tried, it didn't work very well. That was a few years ago already.
I'm not sure what the current state is and if I'd need more than 1 GPU.
I could imagine running Linux with the CPU's GPU only and having the Nvidia GPU (because let's be real, who uses AMD for gaming, nv uses less energy to achieve a nicer looking result) dedicated for the Windows VM.
That would be ideal for me as well. I tried getting something similar to work and eventually gave up. I just game through Steam and let the preconfigured proton stuff handle everything.
This is the setup that I have, although my host is Debian. I guess it works best with two separate GPUs, but a CPU's GPU and a normal one should work just fine. Take a look at Looking Glass [0], setup is a bit confusing, but once done it works flawlessly for me.
My solution is to have two machines, one for Windows, one for work, each optimised for its intended use: for work I’m fine with integrated graphics, but I need more memory and faster CPU, but for play, the core count can be much lower, as long as the GPU is nice.
"did you know, you can actually run linux on bare metal??? zomg but it's super scary and will void your warranty and probably your dog will die and the fbi will think you're a hacker, probably because your wife will tell them, because srsly who does that otherwise?"
SEO is the name of the game, and Microsoft is hoping to capitalize on some of the traffic and direct it towards WSL. Obviously their interests are selfish (as is the nature of business), but that explains some of the language.
Still a huge leap from the point where MS bootloaders would not load Linux on purpose or otherwise acknowledge its existence. You didn't expect a Microsoft KB article saying 'windoze suxx, here's how to remove it' did you?
I think we must be reading very different pages because that's not how it comes across at all. I think this reads very fairly, and if anything maybe understates the downsides for the average user that would come with ditching windows
73 comments
[ 6.4 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadfor those who don't know, Microsoft openly claimed that "Linux is a cancer" back in 2001.
https://www.theregister.com/2001/06/02/ballmer_linux_is_a_ca...
Yes, and? Like any company, it's not a single-mind monolith set in stone willing to die on some random hills, but adapts to where the money is if it wishes to survive, and it's represented by people who are subject to change, specifically Balmer who said that at the time and he's been replaced by Nadella, who fixed a lot of the bad directions Blamer took.
Apple also refused to use USB-C over lightning until the EU forced them, then came around and told everyone how much better the "new" USB C connector is despite refusing to use it in their phones for nearly a decade.
you seem to have yourself really confused.
refusing to use certain tech is one thing, labelling it as a "cancer" when the tech is being built by millions of people with an idea of promoting openness is a completely different new level.
The only conclusion was that Balmer was wrong and Microsoft was right.
The same Microsoft that had a lawsuit with Sun regarding J++, which lead to the creation of .NET, now has its own Java distribution based on OpenJDK, hired several OpenJDK contributors, and is one of the companies doing the work of ARM support.
Also collaborates with Red-Hat in the Java support for Visual Studio, one of the few languages alongside Python, C#, PowerShell and TypeScript that have tier 1 support from Microsoft.
Incidently is why the Windows development experience has gotten worse, with most of the work done by interns and people without background in Windows developer culture.
If only some of the money used for Activision/Blizzard acquisition was used for Windows teams instead.
the reason why they have to rely on interns to do such "development" is obvious - skilled developers feel ashamed or at least embarrassing to use/develop for windows.
however, you and I can definitely agree on something here, that is the company known as microsoft is still making money by selling dinosaur "techs", look at its windows, office, visual studio, how much really changed from the 2001 era? yet it is still a major cash cow of the company.
In that case, what would the extinguish stage be?
- Some kind of MS branded Linux, that offers improved security/performance/usability etc. it’ll offer full compatibility with existing distros like Debian that devs are already familiar with, but it’ll come pre-setup on windows and it’ll have an amazing integration with GitHub, VSCode and azure, and probably their K8s product too. Much like VSCode they’ll use their influence to get devs used to using it. They’ll probably sponsor a bunch of major OSS projects to use it and start offering features specific to it, bits of it will be “open sourced soon” or similar. The position of power and control will be exerted over it-much the same way Google does with chrome and how that is “open source”.
- a linux compatible api layer over windows, with the angle of “no reason to need Linux anymore”, they’ll angle for large enterprise customers first, offering a Linux-compatible experience, to convert them. Similar experience with above, where the end to end (local to cloud) experience will be the focus. Once again they’ll integrate with existing tooling and major OSS players with the same goal-be so seamless and tightly integrated, and “works with existing tools” that devs will flock to it the way they do with chrome. Orgs and projects will switch to supporting it, probably because the overall experience is superior.
That’s a couple of ideas off the top of my head, we could probably all come with some more scenarios.
The trend is that its becoming more and more difficult (due to reimplementation costs and dependency lock-ins) to do Linux in the non-Microsoft way.
XDG, UKI and UAPI Standards are also written by people who are getting their paycheck from Microsoft.
When will this tired piece of shit known as FUD die.
With that logic then the damn Linux kernel got "unexpected" ties to Microsoft.
>The trend is that its becoming more and more difficult (due to reimplementation costs and dependency lock-ins) to do Linux in the non-Microsoft way.
No idea what this is suppose to mean in this context, that we get new hardware stanards/tech like UEFI/GPT/secure boot or that people choose to use software like systemd?
Smells alot like embrace, extend. Extinguish comes next.
Secondly, Lennart Poettering became a Microsoft employee only recently, after all the systemd drama took place.
And Poettering didn't stop working on systemd, so you can estimate that Microsoft is not having a negative attitude towards his previous work.
systemd adoption across Linux distributions and the features everyone complains about, predates his hiring process by several years.
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E36784_01/html/E36801/svcrun-123....
https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E23824_01/html/821-2731/ggnke.htm...
Or to be more specific: If Microsoft is directly or directly involved in OSS or standards, then it's all EEE/compromised.
GPT/UEFI are standards, they are not ruled by Microsoft nor do I even think it was sole written with Microsoft in mind, at best what I can find is that UEFI took the same architecture Windows has with EFI, that's about it.
systemd's only concern with well systemd, no one is stopping you from not using it, or I'm oh so curious how non-systemd distros are able to boot WITH UEFI + GPT.
- GPT partition uuid's with the "mixed endianess" from Windows COM: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220928-00/?p=10...
- ESP is the FAT filesystem, developed in 1977 for DOS
- LFS vfat extensions so the ESP can have directory entries with lowercase letters or longer than 11 characters. This also pulls in the UCS-2 encoding. Stuff from Windows 95.
- EFI executables are actually windows PE executables
- ... which are hacked on top of a MS-DOS MZ executables (The "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" thing)
- ... and use the Windows64 calling convention
So formally, UEFI is not ruled by Microsoft. Somehow yet all this Windows/MS-DOS stuff ended up in it.
From the wikipedia[1]:
>The binary encoding of UUIDs varies between systems. Variant 1 UUIDs, nowadays the most common variant, are encoded in a big-endian format.
>Variant 2 UUIDs, historically used in Microsoft's COM/OLE libraries, use a little-endian format, but appear mixed-endian with the first three components of the UUID as little-endian and last two big-endian, due to the missing byte dashes when formatted as a string
In other words, there are 2 variants, 2 is for Microsoft's COM/OLE, so it's not designed by Microsoft.
>ESP is the FAT filesystem, developed in 1977 for DOS
>LFS vfat extensions so the ESP can have directory entries with lowercase letters or longer than 11 characters. This also pulls in the UCS-2 encoding. Stuff from Windows 95.
FAT is not govern by Microsoft, despite them being the original author, and even then FAT32 patents have expired[2].
>EFI executables are actually windows PE executables
You would need to provide proper source for this, the only source I can only talks about boot loaders, which I would imagine is written with the OS in mind[3].
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table#Patents
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UEFI#Applications
And here the history and current usage of the PE format: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Executable
It was made for Windows 3.1.
And again that source doesn't give me any evidence of your claim.
It could be called WINE, because it wouldn’t be an emulator.
> few developers choose this method due to the overhead of needing to restart (reboot) your device any time you want to switch between the operating systems.
The overhead of booting windows maybe once a year?
> If you choose the bare metal Linux install route, you may also need to deal with potential driver issues or hardware compatibility problems that may arise with Linux on some devices.
With Linux?
Did they even mention that you need to install windows before Linux because windows has (had?) No concept for dual boot?
No way!
If you were to boot into Windows only once a year, I'm sure there will be a couple of updates waiting to be installed, forcing you to boot into Windows at least twice a year ;-)
Last time I tried it would still overwrite whatever Grub set up so yes, after 30 years of Linux Windows is still behaving like it's the only game in town.
Yes, with Linux: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37864883
In 99% of all cases driver are installed and updated in the background.
Every time you buy a computer it is generally going to be "bleeding edge" to various degrees and it's unlikely to work properly for X months/years.
It is only because people keep their machines for several years that the "average" machine running linux is several years old, yet it seems like a rite of passage for people to blame the user for having the audacity to buy a laptop that isn't 10 years old with X and Y but avoids Z wifi chipset.
Then my favourite desktop (cinnamon) didn't recognise HiDPI out of the box. I had to figure out how to scale the desktop properly.
Then the trackpad scrolling acceleration is way too fast. You can't change the scrolling acceleration independently from the cursor acceleration so I had to manually modify that in a config file
Then my touch screen is only recognised as a mouse. So i can click and drag, but I can't scroll documents/websites like I can in windows
Then the fan curve is not correct by default. I had to find some values buried in forum posts and then edit the service config to set the fan to these random values
So yes, linux can be an absolute arse to set up even for a developer, let alone the average user. I've been a linux user for the best part of 20 years, but hardware compatibility has always been a pain point.
Why even bother? I have a dedicated cheap desktop running Windows (because I needed it for specific hardware), but, normally, I just fire up a VM when I need Windows for something.
I haven’t needed it in a very long time.
And it runs a lot better on top of Linux than on bare metal. Not quite sure why, but its perceivable.
And once your company’s data is on Azure, chances are it’ll stay there forever.
Or they just give you an overview on the different install methods
But last time I tried, it didn't work very well. That was a few years ago already. I'm not sure what the current state is and if I'd need more than 1 GPU. I could imagine running Linux with the CPU's GPU only and having the Nvidia GPU (because let's be real, who uses AMD for gaming, nv uses less energy to achieve a nicer looking result) dedicated for the Windows VM.
[0] https://looking-glass.io/
"did you know, you can actually run linux on bare metal??? zomg but it's super scary and will void your warranty and probably your dog will die and the fbi will think you're a hacker, probably because your wife will tell them, because srsly who does that otherwise?"