Wow, this is a really disappointing thread. There are very few substantive comments here. I came to the comments to dispute this claim from the article:
>It's the first time ever that Microsoft has made Linux part of a product offering.
Microsoft has offered Linux distributions on Azure for a few years now, and has ported a fair bit of their software to Linux, including VSCode, MSSQL, Powershell, etc.
But it looks like I also need to comment on all of the negativity in this thread. This change from Microsoft is a Good Thing. Microsoft has been making some serious strides towards being a better citizen of the technology community in the past few years, and this is something to be celebrated. If you think you can scorn Microsoft out of existence, you're delusional. Microsoft is here to stay. You can choose to respond to these promising changes with optimism, or you can respond to them with spite - which of these responses do you think is going to encourage Microsoft to continue in their course of positive change?
By all means, we should continue to hold their feet to the fire for stupid crap like Windows 10 being spyware. But we can't just be angry at them all the time - we have to celebrate the things they do right, too. Microsoft is clearly making a sustained effort to improve. They've done positive things they can't turn back on, like releasing large amounts of open source software under OSI licenses. Be happy!
"You can choose to respond to these promising changes with optimism, or you can respond to them with spite - which of these responses do you think is going to encourage Microsoft to continue in their course of positive change?"
Neither.
There's very little evidence that Microsoft cares one way or the other about opinions on tech forums. They care about doing what they think will maximize their profits, and no amount of screaming at them from the peanut gallery is going to change that.
What might be effective is choosing or not choosing to do business with Microsoft, or with their competitors. Also, if you're an influential enough person and you come out in public with your opinion about Microsoft, they might take notice. But the average Joe's opinion on HN? Not likely to make any difference.
People talk on here not because they're under any illusion that Microsoft will listen, but because they're talking to each other, and if anything, it's one another's opinions that they are trying to sway -- just like you yourself are doing.
Microsoft employees probably read HN, and rumour has it that the cause to open source more stuff is driven by the engineers. HN readers probably have some influence into the technology decisions made by their employers. Maybe Microsoft as some therotical entity isn't reading HN but Microsofters and people who have opportunities to work with them or their products certainly do.
Somebody bears responsibility for past actions. That Somebody is M$.
You say they are a better company now. We'll see. It is probably just a strategy.
What they did had a huge cost: putting back computing science for decades, and probably closing a one-time chance of having an open source platform accross all market segments.
Linux is a bad desktop platform? Blame M$!
M$ actions have costed humankind trillions, and we have collectively lost millions of years. That is not brushed away with a questionable release of an IoT product.
Who really bears that responsibility? Bill Gates? Steve Ballmer? Guess what - they're both out and the new leadership clearly has a different approach in mind.
Microsoft has no blame for Linux being a bad desktop platform - and for the record, I strongly disagree with the assertion that Linux is a bad desktop platform.
Your hyperbole and childish "M$" name-calling do nothing to support your argument.
It is too easy to say "those persons are no longer responsible". I do not care who was responsible, I do not care how the company was structured or who was calling the shots. The company reaped the rewards, they get to keep the responsibilities.
It is a boring argument, being repeated ad-nausea: "nobody is responsible anymore". And, since companies (and states) are perfectly aware that the market / society will forget in a couple of decades what they are doing now, they keep on doing whatever they like. Guess what, some of us are not willing to forget.
> Your hyperbole and childish "M$" name-calling do nothing to support your argument.
You call it "childish name calling", I call it "guerrilla marketing". It seems to work.
What? The responsibility for Linux being a "bad desktop platform" is entirely that of whoever made it. Between KDE, GNOME and the various alternatives, none of their issues were caused by Microsoft.
Microsoft may have been plenty evil under Gates/Ballmer, but it's hard to argue that they did much actual damage of consequence. If anything, they energized the open source community, and lost developer mindshare as a result.
What market? What kind of progress did Microsoft kill, exactly?
Not to mention that back in the late 90s and early 00s when Microsoft was actively FUDing Linux, it was the server market they were afraid of. The LAMP stack was threatening IIS; the whole Mindcraft debacle, for example, was about the supposed superior TCO of Windows NT Server. Linux on the desktop was not a threat to Windows then. Microsoft wasn't talking about how Word and Excel were better than OpenOffice or whatever. They didn't need to. Microsoft's business was IIS, Exchange, SQL Server and so on, and they needed to FUD Linux to avoid losing enterprise market share against an upstart that could run lots of powerful Unix stuff at a fraction of the cost.
hah, seriously? "centuries" as in "hundreds of years"? Do you have _any_ kind of half-way decent argument to back up that -frankly outlandish- assertion? I'm not a big MSFT fan, but you make a lot of statements in this thread, non of which are backed up by anything else except emotional knee-jerk comments. I'd be happy to engage in a reasonable discourse, based on supportable factual statements. Spare me the "M$ is teh (sic) evil" stuff, it doesn't help us as a technology community with being taken seriously.
Alternately, "M$" saved the world from a user-hostile desktop and added trillions of dollars in value to the world, enabling a thriving market of profitable, useful, commercial software with accessibility, backwards compatibility, hardware compatibility, print independence, and relevant business functions that no other company or group has been able to match in decades of trying.
More people were willing to pay for desktop software than use something free.
The "free is better" rhetoric breaks down when people spend billions of dollars per year getting away from the free alternatives.
I do not blame M$ for competing. I blame them for FUDding.
It could perfectly be that M$ had the better product or better TCO, or better support, or better whatever. But advancing their cause by FUDding was not ok.
> Microsoft has been making some serious strides towards being a better citizen of the technology community in the past few years
OK, yes, at least they are not paying SCO to sue linux out of existence [1].
> Microsoft is clearly making a sustained effort to improve.
Only a move that could potentially be disruptive for their revenue in favor of the common good would actually prove to me that they have changed. So, I will believe this when I see a version of office for linux or something similar. Until then, its all part of the embrace, extend, extinguish strategy.
"Open Source" (as if it's a single movement) didn't win in creating desirable, accessible, commercial or beautiful software.
It 'won' in the worst possible way - big companies like Amazon and Facebook took the work, hid it in their datacenters behind their paywalls, and use it to extract money from people.
Nobody has any more freedom with their data and their computing because Facebook uses PHP, than they would have on a proprietary desktop OS.
"you can have an open source OS and browser which connects you to a restrictive interface where your data is under someone else's control" is a lose for all of us.
> I am happy with a small Microsoft and small IBM. Microsoft however is still too big for my liking.
So you judge companies on size, not behavior? Seriously we should celebrate companies when they contribute to opensource software, if only to encourage more contributions.
The 90's ended almost 20 years ago! They are a different company and you're just being an old fogey. As I said: Microsoft is here to stay. You can choose to be a bitter old man about it, or you can choose to be grateful that they're moving in a better direction. But you can't make them go away.
As long as Microsoft is still shaking down other companies for royalties for questionable patents like for exFAT, it's hard to see that they've changed.
They won't be the predominant OS forever. People younger than yourself share none of your enthusiasm for booting into a badly designed clutter-ridden desktop. Microsoft can't improve its aesthetic because no one with talent or vision will ever work for them for any amount of money.
Hah, I don't use Windows, far from it. But Microsoft is more than a single product. Few would argue that their desktop isn't dying, but they are diversifying for exactly that reason.
Lot's of people are mentioning the well-known phase 'Embrace, extend, and extinguish', but what if it ends up being Linux that does the extinguishing? Linux has always been a pain for the average user to run on a laptop or desktop, but these days Windows isn't that much better and I don't think it'll get much better. I'm sure lots of you will think I'm crazy, but I figured it would be an interesting discussion topic.
Whenever EEE has been brought up in the context of Microsoft, it has been used to describe a predatory behaviour. Indeed, the "Extinguish" part is facilitated by the "Extend" portion being a proprietary lock-in.
Using Linux (the kernel) to pull off such proprietary lock-in is going to be difficult because of the kernel's GPLv2 license (although, Tivoization is still an available tactic).
Using the Linux desktop (which is what you seem to be talking about), on the other hand, to pull of such proprietary lock-in is going to compete directly with Windows's desktop market share; which is why I think Microsoft will never push the Linux desktop in an Embrace-Extend attempt.
"Tivoization" is the entire value-add here. IoT devices will run SOME linux. But they want an easy to use, secure Linux. Microsoft's model here is to tack on those bits and charge. It's not some secret ploy, it's in the article.
As for desktop linux: microsoft has four versions of linux userland in its app store for desktop, published by Microsoft. Windows provides drivers and boot - that's its value-add.
In the context of the GPL, "Tivoization" refers specifically to the practice of blocking modifications to the running software without breaking the copyleft requirements of GPLv2 (and similar) licenses. Sure, Microsoft could that here, but hasn't so far. And while I'm not inclined to believe they'll do the right thing, I don't see or suspect them doing the wrong thing yet.
> Microsoft's model here is to tack on those bits and charge. It's not some secret ploy, it's in the article.
I did not allege any secret ploy. And from what I read, there's no mention of any charges (yet).
> published by Microsoft
Which distros exactly? As I recalled (and just verified), Ubuntu, OpenSuSE, and Debian are published by Canonical, SuSE, and Debian, respectively.
> Windows provides drivers and boot
Not adequately enough, one could argue. No graphics, no raw devices, last I checked.
It would be the Android-style Tivoization, where you get the OS on the device you buy, and if you are lucky the vendor publishes their kernel on an obscure part of the website, but without certain binary drivers. You may find you can't actually do anything useful with the sources because of those missing drivers and because the bootloader is locked to only accept new software signed by the vendor.
You can run an x client just fine, with any Windows x server running on the host, just as you would with x forwarding. It's not perfect but it does work.
Something like ... freedom lock-in? I'm not sure I see how EEE can be without some form of lock-in. A trap is necessarily required for the "Extinguish" step to work.
Linux has a fantastic kernel but when it comes to the stuff running in user space it's really hit and miss. For a lot of domain specific applications there are no equivalents on Linux: Image and video editing, music sequencing, spreadsheets, games, etc. Until the developers behind these applications create a decent Linux port Windows (and macOS) are here to stay.
Not to mention Windows deciding seemingly randomly that it needs to take complete control of the machine for 5 hours to install updates. Not exactly user friendly.
Windows seems far worse to me, and has always seemed worse. Somebody just asked me to help fix their Windows laptop, which is running ridiculously slowly. My inclination is to wipe it and install a fresh version of Windows. That'd be pretty easy in Linux (I use a separate /home partition and routinely reinstall the OS) but Windows is such a mess, how do you untangle the user's own data and installed software?
> Generally speaking with modern Windows, it's the user's installed software that's the problem rather than the OS.
It's the same problem on Linux... sudo {apt-get install,pacman -S,whatever} $blah and now have fun setting up and restoring everything in /etc/, ~/, /var, ~/.config/, etc. to just like it was before.
> That'd be pretty easy in Linux (I use a separate /home partition and routinely reinstall the OS) but Windows is such a mess, how do you untangle the user's own data and installed software?
Is %UserProfile% an environment variable? Will there be multiple settings of it? Hopefully if the user's data is all in one subdirectory tree and I could cope.
I'm not sure if it will work for software though, it tends to require random setup like registry changes and would also require reinstallation. Which may be difficult if it was pay-to-install software of if the original vendor is defunct.
Is $HOME an environmental variable? It's certainly exposed as one. Same here.
> Will there be multiple settings of it?
Will there be multiple settings of $HOME? You can certainly set it to a different value for some program, but does that mean you have multiple settings of it? Same here.
> Hopefully if the user's data is all in one subdirectory tree and I could cope.
"Hopefully" the same is true when you do the same on Linux and cope there?
> I'm not sure if it will work for software though, it tends to require random setup like registry changes and would also require reinstallation. Which may be difficult if it was pay-to-install software of if the original vendor is defunct.
...what? You explicitly asked about saving "user's own data" and not "installed software". The entire point of your comment was that you wanted to wipe the software while keeping the user data. So I gave you a solution for keeping the user data that let you wipe the software. Now you complain it doesn't work for migrating installed software?!
> ...what? You explicitly asked about saving "user's own data" and not "installed software". The entire point of your comment was that you wanted to wipe the software and keep the user data. So I gave you a solution for keeping the user data and letting you wipe the software. Now you complain it doesn't work for migrating installed software?!
I think they want to disentangle the user's installed software from the OS, rather than disentangling the software from the data.
There's a missing step after reinstalling the OS of running one of more apt-get commands to reinstall the software. Windows doesn't have apt-get of course. I do tend to have software installed in my home directory (stuff I wrote or at least compiled myself) and generally it would still work after replacing the OS. Missing shared libraries could break it, but it's not the sort of software where that's an issue.
If a Linux system has proprietary software installed, you'd probably also have to copy /usr/local and/or /opt. Hopefully it would be statically linked or supplying any share libraries it needed but I suppose there's no guarantee.
> Somebody [who] just asked me to help fix their Windows laptop
to saving
> software installed in my home directory (stuff I wrote or at least compiled myself)
This person asking you for help with a slow Windows computer (this person is yourself?) also compiles and installs his own software in his /home? So you keep his /home in an effort to keep his software... because somehow he doesn't know how to reinstall Windows? But anyway...
----------------------------------------
> There's a missing step after reinstalling the OS of running one of more apt-get commands to reinstall the software. Windows doesn't have apt-get of course.
Chocolatey, or just run the .MSI/.EXE...
> I do tend to have software installed in my home directory (stuff I wrote or at least compiled myself) and generally it would still work after replacing the OS.
I do tend to have software installed in my D:\ drive (stuff I wrote or at least compiled myself) and generally it would still work after replacing the OS.
> Missing shared libraries could break it, but it's not the sort of software where that's an issue.
Missing shared libraries pretty much never break those on Windows... there's literally only 2 shared libraries that a large fraction of programs need (Visual C/C++ runtimes) and those are installed by practically any program you try to install so you won't even notice.
I normally only use Linux, and when I've used Windows it has only been as a user, not an administrator. I'd prefer that people didn't ask me to help with Windows problems, since I'm obviously not an expert, but bizarrely many Windows users seem to know even less.
How is that bizarre? One of the main selling points of Windows is that you don't have to be a mechanic to drive the car.
It still baffles me that people see that as a negative. "Any fool can use a GUI". Yes, that's .. that's why GUIs are popular. They make things easier to use without having to know the details behind them.
I'd just expect that somebody who owns a computer and is nominally responsible for administering it will tend to learn stuff about it over time. In practice, they seem to learn very little.
Well, in Linux the home directory is read from /etc/passwd at login and $HOME is set from that, and $HOME is presumably and environment variable like any other. It's up to each bit of software whether it cares about such things. That's how I understand it. On Windows I get confused with "administrator" vs "all users" vs "current user" vs "some other user" that an organisation is using for some reason. It seems like stuff can end up in different places.
Sorry if I gave the impression that I don't care about the software the user installed themselves. Well, actually I don't, but the user themselves may care.
> Well, in Linux the home directory is read from /etc/passwd at login and $HOME is set from that, and $HOME is presumably and environment variable like any other. It's up to each bit of software whether it cares about such things.
On Windows the user profile location is read from the registry (if you care: HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList) which is on the disk (if you care: %SystemRoot%\Windows\System32\config\SYSTEM) and %UserProfile% is set for that, and %UserProfile% is presumably an environment like any other. It's up to each bit of software whether it cares about such things.
> On Windows I get confused with "administrator" vs "all users" vs "current user" vs "some other user" that an organisation is using for some reason. It seems like stuff can end up in different places.
On Linux I get confused with /root vs /usr/share vs /var vs ... vs ~/ vs ~some-other-user/ that an organization is using for some reason. It seems like stuff can end up in different places.
I can't say I see what's so amazing about the Linux and so awful about the Windows near-equivalents here.
I'm still missing the step of how I preserve any proprietary software the user installed (equivalent to preserving or copying /opt and /usr/local in Linux).
Otherwise it may be similar in principle, just somewhat user-unfriendly in the Windows version. /etc/passwd is a bit easier than HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList.
> I'm still missing the step of how I preserve any proprietary software the user installed (equivalent to preserving or copying /opt and /usr/local in Linux).
You don't. You also don't on Linux either. Copying /opt or /usr/local will restore neither the user shortcuts nor the config files in /etc, for one (er, two). Nor any system-related configurations like services that need to run at startup. Or a ton of other miscellaneous things that I can't list here off the top of my head but which will inevitably always come up.
And it's a practical deceitful comparison when such a small fraction of the software you (er, the person-whose-computer-you-were-trying-to-fix, remember?)'d have installed falls in this category. The vast majority of Linux software is open- and installed via a package manager for which you can't even do what you just suggested. Yeah, maybe you'll somehow keep 3 proprietary programs just by copy-paste or something. Now have fun setting up the 50 other non-"proprietary" packages you had installed all over again just like you would on Windows.
I guess I'll "refresh" the OS and tell the user they need to save the installers, next time. Who knows if that will even fix the "laptop running stupidly slow" problem, though.
Linux has better legacy windows support than Windows for windows apps already. As you say, it's not user friendly, but when your boss tells you 'get this working or else', wine will get you there eventually. Now if this was packaged in a better way that the average user could use it would be a huge boost to Linux.
I think this is an interesting market shift for MSFT.
I worked there in the late 90's and was there for the introduction of Windows2000. Hillariously most of their big acquisitions ran FreeBSD and/or Solaris and I don't ever recall anyone considering Linux much of a threat since it never really worked for the workloads we were seeing.
Even today I rarely see anyone using Linux as a desktop (MSFTs primary market) so 20 something years later its still not really a threat.
MSFT is smart enough to offer what people want, maybe this will get more people to try it, not a bad thing.
Article is very light on detail, but from the MS announcement, this seems to be essentially a distro for IoT and the like; I was about to ask what it's based on, but having read that, I'll be guessing it's minimal and built from the ground up.
I'm also very curious about what the microcontroller design announced involves - obviously powerful enough to run Linux, and customisable, so I'd be guessing ARM based (small chance of MIPS or RISC, but probably not)
Microsoft could use similar techniques to the way they ported SQL Server to let all Windows software run on Linux. I don't think they will, but it's always something that could happen.
They have said multiple times that they are open to open sourcing Windows. It could happen...stranger things have.
This is really just them giving their customers what they want. They are a business after all.
I think the bigger news here is the custom MCU design. What is it? Is it Arm-derived, and if not - why? Anyone pay attention lately to MSFT’s activity on LKML?
Honestly, amp-businessinsider-com.cdn.ampproject.org is the kind of url you try to teach grandma not to click on so she doesn't enter her bank details on halifax-online-co-uk-personal-logon-login.jsp.secure.tk when they send her an email
Along similar lines: seems like it might be worth blocking all amp links by default, unless there's an automatic way to get the root URL when one is provided.
Microsoft must still abide by all the applicable FOSS licenses; not only that, Ubuntu and the systemd crew already tried the EEE tactic and it largely blew up in their faces.
It's more than just licenses, though. With this program, Microsoft is going to be providing a service in addition to simply putting out their build of the Linux kernel: the userspace, libraries in it, and associated cloud services. They can put as little or as much they want in these service layers, and these service layers are free from copyleft license restrictions (little embedded Linux software is AGPL, and their cloud services are almost certainly not going to be AGPL).
Now, I'm not saying they're going to do this, but, if they wanted to, everything above the kernel is very easy to "extend" in a capturing effort.
Indeed, Ubuntu and systemd have successfully extended layers above the kernel to great success. It's a good thing that both are open source (and that systemd is LGPL), but that was not a very neccessary requirement to the extensions they have built.
Debian has allowed users to go back to sysvinitrc (for both security and stability reasons), and Redhat has been trying to EEE the systemd project entirely to fix their issues with it.
As in, if Microsoft keeps taking resources out of the Windows division in favor of Azure, we might end up in a place where the Linux desktop wins not through becoming better, but by Windows becoming worse.
There's no more VP of Windows. It's pretty clear MSFT is making a hard cloud push. Seriously - they gave out Windows for free for three years and NOW you think it's not a priority?
>It's the first time ever that Microsoft has made Linux part of a product offering.
Microsoft has offered Linux distributions on Azure for a few years now, and has ported a fair bit of their software to Linux, including VSCode, MSSQL, Powershell, etc.
But it looks like I also need to comment on all of the negativity in this thread. This change from Microsoft is a Good Thing. Microsoft has been making some serious strides towards being a better citizen of the technology community in the past few years, and this is something to be celebrated. If you think you can scorn Microsoft out of existence, you're delusional. Microsoft is here to stay. You can choose to respond to these promising changes with optimism, or you can respond to them with spite - which of these responses do you think is going to encourage Microsoft to continue in their course of positive change?
By all means, we should continue to hold their feet to the fire for stupid crap like Windows 10 being spyware. But we can't just be angry at them all the time - we have to celebrate the things they do right, too. Microsoft is clearly making a sustained effort to improve. They've done positive things they can't turn back on, like releasing large amounts of open source software under OSI licenses. Be happy!