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Comment by test001only | Hacker News Reader

It looks like Google is loosing hacker confidence while Microsoft is gaining them. Am not able to keep count of the number of times I have been burnt because of Google's decision to drop support for their products, change functionality after buying then and inane UI changes. Contrast that to experience with Microsoft, I can't recall that many instances.

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I consider myself to be roughly in the category of "hacker" in the context of that sentence. I don't have confidence in The Google controlling everything any more than I do with MS.

I used to be an MS developer many years ago. I will say one positive thing -- MS makes a lot of very useful development tools.

However, I'm amazed that people think it's not MS anymore. They have not gained my confidence in any way in terms of this supposed altruism or whatever.

Linux in some ways has been one of very few possible Windows competitors on the desktop. The fact they they essentially decided to just swallow Linux into Windows does not make me think they are more friendly to Linux.

They will set it up so that it will _seem_ like your are developing for Linux, but due to some extensions or technicality it will only work on _Linux inside of Windows_.

So from my perspective it is amazing that people think this is a good thing for Linux.

I doubt this will happen. For one thing, the dominant targets for Linux are servers and embedded systems - both of which are cases where resource overhead is pretty important. Running a Windows to run Linux inside of incurs a pretty substantial overhead, so I really can't see any case where developers would be willing (or even necessarily able) to spare the resources to install Windows on their formerly-Linux-only targets just to maintain the convenience of getting to develop for "Linux" on their Windows PCs.

And desktop apps developed for WSL will simply never be Linux-compatible out of the box at this rate, given that WSL does not contain any graphical or UI functions; MSFT has been pretty clear about this right from the start, and so I really can't see a scenario where people mistakenly believe just developing user-facing applications for WSL will make them "just work" on Linux, given that all the UI code is on the Windows side.

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