Microsoft doesn’t think Windows is important anymore
theverge.com
theverge.com
In fact it's turning the current situation with the Ubuntu subsystem around. Make Ubuntu the main system, and Windows a VM like service. Maybe that's the whole idea behind this. It would show vision.
Just as long as it's not the God-awful online version or its competitors.
LibreOffice isn't terrible but it's way better than even online office versions.
Even now, I recently upgraded to an X570 based system on Linux. I had to bump the Linux kernel to 5.2 and download binaries to get the wifi working... I then got my rx5700xt video card, had waited for review cycles for non-reference cards. I bumped the kernel, again, and downloaded the blobs... swapped the card. 1080p on a 4k display (42" so too big to deal with)... two hours later futzing with it, no gui load at all, and shut it off.
Will probably give Manjaro (with update) and/or arch a try before reverting to Windows. Why, I'm pretty confident it will all work. Note: this doesn't even scratch the surface on the state of aRGB support from the hardware vendors.
As much as I prefer Linux, there are still headaches with current hardware. Not to mention, I doubt MS would switch to Linux for XBox's underlying OS (though something closer to Android or ChromeOS could be an option, with MS gui).
AFAIK, the minimal kernel for RX5700 drivers is 5.3 (I've been running on a 5.3 rc for a few week but now the 5.3 is stable so you don't need to run on an unstable rc anymore). With 5.3 it worked at first try. (But I still agree that needing to update your kernel is a bit annoying, especially when you run on a distro that doesn't support 5.x kernels, and now you need to update your distro then update your kernel…)
Been a Debian/Ubuntu user for years (recently giving desktop another try), so will be a bit different for me. But so much of my workflows are containerized, I'm hoping it's less of an issue.
Much as I may prefer a compute environment where OS choice was meaningful we are a tiny minority and will have to adapt to a world with less choice because it makes no sense to put effort into something that does not matter.
The premise seems simple though: if Microsoft is prioritizing cloud then obviously desktop isn't as important anymore.
Or massively invest in Wine so that all that legacy code can run seamlessly on Linux.
Time after time they get all hot and bothered about their new platform, whip up a lot of FUD, and then it flops, and we're all still sitting here working off of Win32 apps.
In the end, it isn't a bad strategy. For better or worse, their office software, communications and collaboration tools (office365+mail) tends to be better than competitors and price competitive as well. Their authentication platform ties into what is/has been used in office environments and expands externally. Their cloud platforms are a natural target for their developer tooling, which has made a lot of progress in expanding to support various non-ms platforms.
In the end, I don't think MS is going anywhere, and the strategy seems a bit more friendly than say Oracle or IBM in similar spaces respectively. I don't think this will mean Windows over Linux any time soon, but I wouldn't be surprised to see things closer to that in a decade or so. Of course Linux itself is becoming less Free (as in freedom) lately, which is another concern.
I'm 100% sure that if you asked the Microsoft CEO if Windows is important, he will confirm that it is in fact important to Microsoft. The headline "Microsoft doesn’t think Windows is important anymore" is extrapolated from a quote of Nadella's where he is discussing the new Neo and Duo devices. Read in the original context you can see that at no point does he say that Windows is not important to Microsoft, he is just giving some justification for not wanting to revive the Windows Mobile OS.
> “The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us,” was the message from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella yesterday.
But I can't tell if he actually said those exact words, or if that was the message that The Verge writers interpreted him as saying. If he didn't say those exact words, it's a bit dishonest for The Verge to lead with that sentence, in quotes, as if he's quoted as saying that.
>Later on I ask Nadella the same question, and he zooms out even further. “The operating system is no longer the most important layer for us,” he says. “What is most important for us is the app model and the experience. How people are going to write apps for Duo and Neo will have a lot more to do with each other than just writing a Windows app or an Android app, because it’s going to be about the Microsoft graph.”
https://www.wired.com/story/microsoft-surface-duo-neo-phone/