For the first time ever, Microsoft will distribute its own version of Linux
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
>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!
Are they different companies now? Yes. But not by choice, the market beat them down and made both irrelevant compared to what they were.
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.
And the first assumption of a free market is that no single supplier is large enough to significantly affect the price in the market.
The smaller the firms get, the better the products.
That takes more than just "being big".
If we had one firm control 90% of oil reserves and a free for all for coal that the fossil fuel market was free.
and
I believe in the free market.
come across as difficult to combine statements in my mind.
It needs as much regulation to run as any Soviet Bureaucracy. The reason why it's efficient is because the price computation is distributed.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Linus on Desktop is improving, but the damage is done.
It happened long ago, but tbe ripples will be felt for centuries. They bear a huge responsibility, and it will not be forgotten.
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.
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$" name-calling do nothing to support your argument.
It is a boring argument, being repeated ad-nausea: "nobody is responsible anymore". And, since companies (and states) are perfectly aware that the market / society will forget in a couple of decades what they are doing now, they keep on doing whatever they like. Guess what, some of us are not willing to forget.
> Your hyperbole and childish "M$" name-calling do nothing to support your argument.
You call it "childish name calling", I call it "guerrilla marketing". It seems to work.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes#Mic...
%UserProfile%\{Desktop,Documents,Music,Pictures,Videos,...}?
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?!
I think they want to disentangle the user's installed software from the OS, rather than disentangling the software from the data.
Huh? /home on Linux contains user software now? That's literally the example he gave for this on Linux...
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.
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.
It has an app store, and it has an installable package manager - https://chocolatey.org/
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.
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.
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.
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.
There's a button in the settings to remove it all: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/17085/windows-8-res...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You could go far as a new M$ft representative.. submit your Social Media credentials pending our approval.
The guy claimed he "worked" within Windows for a while but was a Business Development Rep (Sales) at Microsoft for less than two years (2011-2013).
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)
[1]: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/freebsd-now-available...
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.
You know what comes next.
P.S. Maybe it will be different, this time. However, there's some significant history to overcome, if some of us are to come to believe this.
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