Hacker News Reader

Comment by cannonpr | Hacker News Reader

I grew up through some of the more interesting business practices Microsoft employed, and it's several attempts to harm the Linux ecosystem. I would love to see this move by Microsoft in a positive light, but can't help but be suspicious ? For now the possibilities it opens are great, however I wish I understood Microsoft's strategic view of this and how it might evolve over time for Linux.

View on HN

Strategic View is simple I believe, they want developers back in there fold. MS sells Windows and most devs have no problem with its UI but want to use linux CLI, also some new tools/languages are developed only/first for Linux. Now OSX being compatible has captured this lucrative marketshare.

Having good developers using Windows will be a great boost for ecosystem, a percentage may choose to experiment with UWP, a react-native developer may try a Windows version of app.

Only thing to loose is people may not build cli tools for Windows, but that is already a lost cause. Linux won't pose a threat to GUI, so no chance of non developers getting comfortable and migrating to Linux. So win-win and later some more win.

And WSL could potentially be a much better experience than OS X's "real Unix" with Homebrew and etc.

The paths and base configuration will match your production environment, no worries about version mismatches or missing extensions. Ubuntu packages generally come with a sane and ready-to-run configuration, with service scripts and the like. (I use pkgsrc which seems more polished than Homebrew, but the installing experience is still not as nice as Ubuntu. Maybe someone will make a "Linux subsystem for Mac"...)

If anything this helps Linux because it cements popular Linux distros as the default *nix environments.

I think "Linux subsystem for Mac" is stuff like Vagrant, where you can still work on your dev projects locally/natively but they're shared into a Linux environment that can be set up to mimic your production environments..

This can be done today on Windows too of course, even without this new fancy thing.

Sure, the serious use case is a VM or Docker or etcetera-virtual based solution. However I must have a couple dozen maintenance-mode projects on my system and there's a certain appeal to alt-tabbing from MS Excel or Photoshop to a console window and typing `service start foo` (or the launchd equivalent).

There are still a gazillion people using WAMP (and so on) as a bad impersonation of their production environment, so this fills a role.

This is exactly me. When I can start running Linux(-ish) command line tools in Windows, I'll ditch my Macbook for a Dell in a hot second..

Here's a question though that I seem to not see answered (but maybe I'm not reading enough):

Can I run MariaDB or nginx or other "servers" in this environment? Or does that stuff not work?

I don't see why you wouldn't be able to. Then again, some tools don't seem to work for some inexplicable reason (ex screen).

I haven't tried W10 at all, but it's likely they didn't implement all of the terminal features required by screen, or that they did, but $TERM is set to something not recognized by [the terminal library that presumably underpins] screen.

For any new programmers who want to learn more, search for "ANSI escape codes", VT100, "terminal emulation", termcap, and terminfo. Maybe add curses and pseudoterminal for extra credit.

You can certainly run MariaDB. All you need to do is "apt-get install mariadb-server". The Linux subsystem is the entire Ubuntu 14.04 system. I love my Surface Pro 4 with latest Windows 10 release, only 1 week or so to go before its outside preview program. Look forward to see what Devs come up with. Some of the cooler stuff I've seen is using the Linux shell with Visual Studio Code as the shell on a windows system.

MS is now a services business, they want to sell you their cloud. They can't do that if the linux ecosystem is shut out of Windows as it was before. Simply supporting Linux VMs is not enough, because long-term they still want to maintain some control on the OS market. So they open enough doors that you (or your corporate boss) will be enticed to consider their offerings and move to their cloud. You have some sweet cloud-management tool that runs on Linux? "You can now run it in the same way on Windows! Oh and with Windows in our cloud you also get all these other goodies..." - et voilà, locked back in.

Most "advanced" cloud services are built with the aim of locking you in (AWS, Oracle, Heroku, etc etc): easy to adopt and easy to extend, which means "hard to leave". Microsoft is no exception.

Embrace, extend, extinguish? I mean, in this case, good luck with that.

This attitude seems pretty dated.

This microsoft are no longer the ridiculously dominant force they once were.

Linux is a core part of their cloud business now.

They have a new CEO, and a lot of time has passed.

They are actively trying to change a lot of their culture and approach to things.

Microsoft still seems very divided. On one hand we have cool developer initiatives, but on the other we still have anti-user behavior like forced W10 upgrades, encrypted black-box telemetry that cannot be disabled, Android patent extortion, and lawsuits over FAT support in other operating systems.

I would love to see MS get their crap together, but it still seems like they can't break their addiction to abusive behavior.

The strategic view is not hard to understand. They got their clock cleaned on the server side. They are irrelevant in the IoT. Machine learning, docker, apache spark run best on linux. The direct-x gaming advantage will erode as Vulkan opens up the industry. They failed spectacularly in mobile as the vast majority of connected devices run Android and iOS. ChromeOS is about to run native Android apps which marks the end of charging for windows desktop, which is why they're so desperate for win10 upgrades to monetize user tracking. Some see their embracing of open-source as the new MS but they have no alternative.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com