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Comment by _fwu1 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft is not a company that ever contributed my life as a Linux user and open source contributor for years. In fact, it always made life harder for me.

Here is a recent example; because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new Thinkpads are designed for just Windows. If you're a Linux user, good luck in your new adventure. People say "isn't it like IOS or Android?"; it's not. We had this freedom of using Linux, and Microsoft has been taking it back.

Microsoft doesn't appreciate freedom, this is why they used to fight open source and make open source communities look like bunch of marginalized geeks. It's sad to see they now own Github.

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> because Microsoft made a deal with Lenovo, now new Thinkpads are designed for just Windows

As a Linux on ThinkPad user, I'd be very interested to learn more about this.

I'm not really the person to speak to this, but I haven't seen it mentioned, yet. Maybe someone more versed in the topic has something to say.

The Wikipedia article reads fairly neutral, e.g. 'Microsoft clarified...' Well, what I remember from that time, from the tech press (right or wrong/exagerated) was much more along the lines of 'Microsoft hacked a compromise in response to the increasing pressure of backlash' -- and this back and forth happening multiple times.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_In...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/02/linus...

Using Optimus is a horrible experience in Linux. I just turned off the discrete graphics because it was power hungry.

fingerprint reader doesn't have drivers available, even blobs

So, are you saying that both Lenovo (that say in manual for x280 that in select countries it ships with Ubuntu) and Ubuntu (That here https://certification.ubuntu.com/hardware/201801-26057/ claim "certified pre-install for Ubuntu.") are lying?

If you are using Linux you are using Linux kernel that is managed by git. Microsoft contributes to git.

> Linux kernel that is managed by git. Microsoft contributes to git

This is a little misleading. MS does not contribute to git for Linux development. Instead, they only provide windows specific patches (AFAICT, would like to be proven wrong).

Their GVfs [0] is windows only, and they maintain a fork of Git with "microsoft specific patches" [1].

[0] - https://github.com/Microsoft/GVFS

[1] - https://github.com/Microsoft/git

(edit: formatting)

Microsoft had a "look at what we did for git last year" post in january, most of that seems OS-independent performance work: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/devops/2018/01/11/microsoft...

Yes some of that work also improves Git on other systems.

All of those patches however were a pure necessity for them to implement GVfs.

Well, I guess we just have to wait until that deal expires then, before we replace our laptops :)

A Thinkpad lasts for a very long time.

>>We had this freedom of using Linux, and Microsoft has been taking it back.

The only thing taking your freedom back is the economics of selling Linux Desktops/Laptops. And the only thing stopping that is the Linux ecosystem fragmentation.

I'm sorry but no hardware vendor will lose sleep over some thousand developers wanting to run fragmented versions of Linux on their hardware.

>>Microsoft doesn't appreciate freedom

The purpose of companies is to maximize their profits.

>> this is why they used to fight open source and make open source communities look like bunch of marginalized geeks.

And they've by and large failed. The other part about open source's economics is beyond the scope of Microsoft's actions.

You know that Microsoft are the largest corporate contributor to open source projects on Github right?

I care about how much they respect freedom instead of how many lines of public code they shared. Technology can be bought or bruteforced, freedom can not.

Minor nit to pick, freedom can absolutely be both bought and brute-forced. We call them (less-relevant example in modern times) "buying yourself out of slavery" and (slightly more relevant) "war".

What are you basing this off? This article?[0] If so, then it only supports my shared belief with roadbeats that Microsoft out of most of those companies has had little impact on my life as an open source user.

[0]: https://medium.freecodecamp.org/the-top-contributors-to-gith...

Little positive impact. Microsoft has shit on open source for years and had a negative impact on your life as an open source user. I know that you know this, just saying it for the sake of saying it.

They are the biggest software company, so when they decided they want to embrace and extend open source, it's not surprising the quantity of released code is higher than of smaller companies. The argument here is different: we don't really believe MS changed much from the time they called Linux and GPL "cancer" and used all possible means, some of them quite grey, to completely annihilate all significant competition.

Imagine there are two cities in a country, city A and city B. The president lives in city A and is very popular there, but not so much in city B.

Person from city B: I hate the president. He never did anything good for our people.

Person from city A: On the contrary, this is the best president we had in forever. In fact he built 5 hospitals and 10 schools in our city alone! How can you possibly hate him?

Like, maybe Microsoft has contributed to some open source projects, but are these open source projects something everyone benefits from? I'm not even sure what their open source projects are.

Also, isn't it a big conflict of interest then? When the largest user of a platform also owns this platform, it kind of puts other projects at a huge disadvantage.

I don't think the issue is where MS has contributed in terms of open source. For me, it doesn't matter: It's great that they do it, but their history of aquiring companies and driving their products into walls (like Skype and so many others) hasn't changed. So, when I see "MS acquires open source hosting platform", I'm thinking about that, not how many lines of code they've opensourced.

Of course, if MS wanted to dampen that reaction, they could distribute the whole code for GitHub as a platform under an open source license - I just can't imagine them doing that.

> I'm not even sure what their open source projects are.

.NET ?

Microsoft is probably one of the largest contributors to Linux itself.

Not at all, they're not even in the list of the contributors, as you can see on the 4.16 kernel statistics : https://lwn.net/Articles/750054/

The list doesn't vary too much with the versions, so either they're working under the radar as "Unknown", or they barely contribute to the kernel.

Microsoft contributes a bunch of money to The Linux Foundation now but they really don't contribute very much code. Their main concern seems to be keeping Hyper-V working well so that Linux VMs are performant on Windows server. They don't register as a top code contributor in the last Linux Kernel Development Report: https://storage.pardot.com/6342/188781/Publication_LinuxKern...

Closed hardware. Microsoft is just following Apple's lead here.

Linux runs on my ThinkPad just fine.

But if you have Optimus working at all, you dumped a couple of weekends into it, right? The dual-graphics auto-switching thing (which I had on my old W530 and now again on my P50) is jank city even with properly tuned "bumblebee" software installed, and proprietary stuff is to blame for that.

It runs on mine ok as well, but the fingerprint scanner doesn't work

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