My prediction for 2019: Microsoft announces Microsoft Linux, with many Microsoft store apps working via a compatibility layer. Office for Linux coming early 2021.
I can see MS porting all their server apps(MSSQL, Exchange, etc) to run on linux since Linux is dominating the server market and it would be a significant opportunity for them.
Is there any advantage to running it on Linux (except maybe the cost of a Windows license which is probably trivial compared to the cost of Sql Server itself)
As the OP indicated, MS SQL has it's own facilities for managing memory and disk I/O. It basically asks for all the resources from the OS and then does everything itself internally. I'm exaggerating obviously but it does try to avoid costly calls to the OS whenever and however possible which is why it was so easily ported to Linux.
As for MS Windows, WTF? Not only the forced ads making it seem like in some kind of casino built for 4 year olds (assume it's some kind of play to suck the kiddies in?), it's an abortion of mismatched UI, half of it trying to look like a cheaply built web app, then on next screen dumping you back into some NT style select panel. It's just awful. To say nothing of invasive updates and general Windows unpleasantness. I can say without reservation I have no use for the OS at all, Linux is just so much more pleasant to use at this point.
Or "control [shortcut]" eg control fonts
Or can still use MMC, or blablabla.msc, eg. devmgmt.msc
and hardly have to interact with the snow-blindness Settings app.
Azure can be a ~$30 billion sales business eventually, probably spitting off $6b or $7b in operating income. It's a dramatically better business than messing with smartphones again (other than building apps for Android & iOS). They should just keep focused on their booming cloud business.
1) An easy way to join a Windows domain. Being able to use AD user auth and Windows file sharing with AD groups that is as easy as it is on Windows server would remove a major scare factor for Windows admins trying Linux. I hope this could be implemented by contributing to SAMBA and being a wrapper for SAMBA rather than a reimplementation. I have had frustrating times with Linux unmounting Windows shares and having to reboot to get them to remount.
2) Training. MS have a well trodden path for learning to be an MS admin. Bringing it to Linux would surely help more people test-the-waters.
Red Hat's sssd already makes this trivial. You can join a Windows domain from the Fedora "first run wizard" or via a simple "realm join xyz.tld" command. It works pretty well mostly. You get AD integrated logins and SSH/sudo access and can use AD groups for access control just like normal groups. Kerberos SSO to Linux boxes works fine etc.
Linux has most of this in an ad-hoc fashion, but the key benefit comes from the centralization.
Azure is a cash cow. Windows brings in money but is increasingly difficult to monetize _and_ its increasingly difficult to keep bringing legacy app support forward and stay competitive.
PowerShell, .NET Core, and MS SQL are all happily running on Linux.
By all accounts WSL entered the market with little drama is pretty great to use (IMHO).
The idea of doing a native SSH from WSL into a Linux container on Azure running a bootstraped 'MS' version of *nix with official support for a discounted price compared to a Windows VM is certainly appealing.
I would run MS Linux as a dev environment in a heart beat. MS would do well to _not_ to brand a desktop and just run a very clean gnome or plasma default.
Then a dedicated app store can really push PWAs like Teams,Skype and fully manage the interop layer for other apps that need a little more hand holding (wine, mono, etc).
tl;dr - I'm into this.
If Microsoft buys Canonical it will be very interesting. Seeing that IBM bought Red Hat,
I wouldn't be surprised at all to see MS give up on WSL, acquire CodeWeavers, and reimplement "Windows" as a proprietary desktop environment for a nix-ish OS with a super-souped-up WINE doing much of the legwork. At this point such a contraption would be less painful than some of Apple's recent transitions (e.g. from PPC to x86).
Selling software, as a general business model, is on the ropes and this is a great indication of that. The victory of open-source here is both blatant and decisive.
Had it not been for every major software company deciding they can subsist on a combination of a) rental fees and b) advertising/demographic data, we'd probably have another RIAA v. The Internet-style showdown to confront over the next decade. In this respect, I suppose we should be grateful for the opportunity to pay 6x more to be in "the cloud".
As an observer, it's a weird situation to see, and still trying to orient my feelings and understand what to make of it.
I find that hard to believe. Apple only had to build emulators for their ISA changes, just translating instruction set into another. Doesn't sound painful at all. WINE on the other hand has good reasons for pointing out that it's not an emulator.
It is getting an appropriate amount of love though in the last year. I'm really hopeful that it will keep getting better.
it means they could eventually just adopt Linux as the platform for Microsoft applications. That would do away with a lot of historical reliability issues, and would mean that they would have less to support internally. They're making more and more money on things like Azure and Office365 etc, and none of that really depends on Windows.
I just did some googling, and it looks like Azure actually runs on Windows. It started out as a fork and then eventually merged back with server 2016.
The source for this is unfortunately a video, but here it is.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/resources/videos/mark-russ...
https://www.quora.com/What-technology-is-Azure-running-on-Is...
I played with it this summer and some of it actually works!
I guess theoretically, if we agreed to support the main desktop and mobile/tablet OS’s and chip architectures, and then got everyone to use a standard compiler and IL format (LLVM maybe?) then you might get some of the way, but that would be a lot of work (cool if it happened though...)
The problem right now with warm WASM is lack of features (e.g. you can't do threading), though those are getting sorted.
A WASM version of the local apps would be interesting though.
Linux is already massive on Azure so it makes a lot of sense from a support POV. Whether they go with their own version or just buy a distributor (Ubuntu for example) is an interesting question though.
Still, I don't think Microsoft would have a Linux distribution itself, for consumers, the cloud and related services is the current focus for Microsoft.
I don't know if they will keep that tendency (plus, it's more likely to lead to them sticking with Windows on servers)
However, if they do move towards Linux on servers they will naturally explore Linux for workstations too.
It would be very clever for Microsoft to start offering Office 365 for Linux but only support it on their own distro. And it's understandable; getting that bucket of ugly bolts to work on Linux would be an epic hack job and probably would never be particularly stable on random distros.
Short answer: Chrome OS (also Android).
Chrome OS is a Linux distribution being aggressively promoted by a large, well-funded competitor. It can already run Android apps (in release versions) and Linux applications (in beta). Ironically Visual Studio Code runs really well on Chrome OS, as do the Android versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint -- full screen like a proper laptop application[1]
Microsoft's applications already run on Linux; it's really up to Microsoft to decide whose Linux distributions they get to run on.
2019: Microsoft bought Ubuntu
It doesn't seem possible.
You buy Ubuntu, put a lot of money into it, slowly force more and more of your MS software on people, make more and more third party software depend on it and eventually the effort needed to fork away and maintain "clean" version is simply too huge to be worth it.
But of course in this case there are many other Linux distributions out there already so it shouldn't be a huge cause for concern.
Next stage after that would be to launch Azure Windows VMs that are competitive with a "real" Linux OS for running Linux binaries but with access to Microsoft GUI management tools.
Once you depend on the GUI tools you depend on Microsoft as OS provider.
Eg their compatability layer for their own apps Metro > Win32 is quite thin.