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Comment by juliangoldsmith | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently.

They won't release products like Office for Linux (though a web interface is possible), and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs. Neither of those actions would have any tangible benefit for the primary users of those produts (Windows users and Windows developers, respectively).

Active Directory is so deeply integrated into the Windows stack that it will never come out. You can authenticate Linux clients against AD, but I doubt they'll be writing a Linux AD server any time soon. I'd imagine most corporate mail servers also support SMTP/IMAP, and Office365 has a web client. As far as ActiveSync goes, that hasn't been a thing since 2007.

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> They won't release products like Office for Linux

Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering.

The whole reason they "love Linux" now is because Linux on the server gained too much market share for them to realistically oppose. They had to find a way to make money in that market that didn't involve somehow boiling an ocean of Linux machines. So they did.

Windows is still overwhelmingly strong in the desktop market, though, so they have no such incentive to accommodate it there. Nobody retreats from a battlefield they've already won.

> Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering.

I would also add in there are other open source options that are compatible and work well with MS Office now. Libre Office and Open Office are two such examples. I can now write my resume in either or and save it in a docx format, send it to a recruiter and then they can open it with MS Word without any issues.

errr... I would still export it as PDF first. I wouldn't trust something as important as a job application to work perfectly. (I'm a Libre Office user on Windows. )

The bigger competitor for Word and the rest of the office suite is not Libre or Open Office but Google Docs. It's cross platform and does away with local file storage, which is a security risk and a data loss risk.

Good call.

I haven't used Google Docs in a long time and had forgotten about them.

The only thing they NEED to improve is version history comparison. I do not understand why it is so hard to "save" a version of a file before you make your own changes, so that others then can easily see what you changed.

Yeah, until you encountered complex script and East Asian script.

As a Linux user I still maintain a Windows VM precisely for MS Office. On Linux, WPS Office is much better at handling these scripts though.

Vanishingly small...the Linux community are usually fan-faring increases in usage on a fractional part of a percentage increase, ~ 2%. And to me, how could they anyway, I can't find "a Linux desktop". There are many, which one would they port to? And as a shareholder, I would not want them to waste the money at this point...

> ~ 2%.

2% of the human population are 154 million people. Sure, not everyone has a computer, so let's say 66 million people, this is the population of France.

> There are many, which one would they port to?

You don't actually need to support a specific desktop environment. Any UI program that you write will work just fine on KDE, GNOME, DWM, etc

>Any UI program that you write will work just fine on KDE, GNOME, DWM, etc

But which versions of which libraries do you target? Every distribution has its own menagerie. There is no well-defined "Linux platform" like there is with Windows (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/).

Core libraries like glibc and Xlib are pretty well defined. You need to ship your own copy of the widget library of choice, but that isn't a big deal. You could even ship an Xlib copy and rely on the fact that there is an X server speaking the same protocol. It's all perhaps a bit messy, but it works.

Just static link? Or do what windows software does, so ship dynamic libraries with your application. I do not see the issue.

> There is no well-defined "Linux platform"

There actually is! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Standard_Base

If your software is FLOSS, that's an integration problem for distro maintainers to solve and it hinges on said libraries being versioned properly. The bigger distros usually have 10,000+ packages and those are downloaded, installed and updated automatically which cannot be said of almost all Windows and OS X software. Really, only Android and iOS offer a similar experience.

If your software is proprietary (or not popular enough to be found in most repos), there's always container technologies like Snap/AppImage/FlatPak/etc.

As a Windows dev I find both of these to be vastly superior to the standard Windows practice of shipping every DLL that's not in system32 alongside your executable, on top of whatever VC++ redistributables and/or .NET framework might not be present on the system.

That is only true on X. With the wayland protocol, the DE also becomes the display server. And because of barndoor sized holes in the standard wayland protocol, apps will either have enormous testing effort or be limited to a DE or two.

And that's why wayland will never replace X

Most programs use existing libraries like SDL, GTK, QT, etc, which handle wayland integration on their part.

> And to me, how could they anyway, I can't find "a Linux desktop". There are many, which one would they port to?

This was the very reason that prevented Google to release Google Chrome for Linux.

Maybe I'm missing your point, but Google Chrome is available on Linux and is available on pretty much any distro I've tried (and has been for many years).

If I remember right from years ago (2008-2010) the initial release of Chrome was just for Windows, and the Linux version was in beta for quite a while as just "Chromium" without much Google "cloud" integration.

Sarcastic or ignorant?

Both. GP knows Chrome for Linux exists but ignores that its need for auto-update doesn't play well with distros package management and it also statically-links or ships 3rd party libs. Clearly supporting diverse (fragmented) linux ecosystem is not easy at all.

> Chrome for Linux exists but ignores that its need for auto-update doesn't play well with distros package management and it also statically-links or ships 3rd party libs.

At least on Debian, it plays perfectly well with the Distro's package management. They use it to auto update google-chrome in preference to their roll their own on effort Windows. The same update system works perfect well on all Debian derived distro's. I'm not familiar with an rpm based distro to say for sure, but I imagine the situation is the same. So "fragmented" means supporting 2 very well tested distribution systems rather than rolling their own - and having the "take out all Macbooks" problems they did on OSX.

>the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering.

The market for Beethoven is also too small to be worth considering. What does the market know?

Would it be too crazy to think Microsoft could one day adopt Linux as their core for their OS though? They could probably implement the Win32 API as an API for a distro much like Wine does (but much better and from scratch) and keep those portions proprietary. This allows their OS to run on more platforms than Windows ever has. Much like how Edge is now Chromium based.

Nothing is stopping them from making Linux server distros either since they do produce SQL Server for Linux as it is. They ported a lot of VS code to Mac (not it isnt just MonoDevelop) and were surprised by how much just worked due to the OO design.

Microsoft is embedding the Linux kernel already. Whats next? A linux friendly file system? Things are going to get interesting overtime.

I have no knowledge of what they are up to truly just a bit of speculation. But given what has happened in the last decade that is "not Microsofts MO" none of this would surprise me.

That is crazy. Because NT is an excellent kernel done by a industry legend (David Cutler). It runs on 80%+ of all desktop, is the grid below a cloud platform, is a game console and has a track record of being flexible enough to run on microcontrollers, phones, etc. And the complete hardware industry supports it.

There is no reason to switch to Linux, considering that they would need to reinvent the whole UI stack of Linux like MacOS did. Keeping a 50 people hired for Kernel development sounds cheaper.

> they would need to reinvent the whole UI stack of Linux like MacOS did.

MacOS X is not based on Linux or GNU and it's UI evolved out of a combination of Next technology and features combined with re-implemented classic Mac OS features. So it wasn't exactly a clean slate.

More relevantly though, they put some effort into maintaining compatibility with programs written for their previous OS by both porting their APIs and providing CPU emulation! And that is on top of bringing the rest of nextstep up to standard for what consumers were expecting out of a desktop OS at the time.

> Keeping a 50 people hired for Kernel development sounds cheaper.

I doubt it, Microsoft can and has rewritten their UI multiple times... if they wanted to, they could write it for Linux atop their own ported windows API with little effort. I think they just lack the incentive to do so, Linux users wont care because they wont use it, Windows users wont care because they don't care about Linux... who will benefit? not Microsoft that's for sure.

From a business perspective MS behavior makes sense, they are embracing Linux because that's the way one half of the market is headed whether they like it or not... meanwhile their desktop business still has a hold on the market mostly out of inertia and legacy, so why would they do something as radical as change the core OS to mess that up?

However as the parent said "one day", maybe, in the future, when windows makes zero sense to run on metal, then perhaps microsoft will create an official and FOSS windows API... if only to relieve themselves from security support hell.

Yeah, you nail the point: there is no incentive. There is no benefit for them into it. Exactly my point.

The rest of their business is where the money is. Office runs one way or the other out of the web, on Android, iOS or macOS.

Agreed. I did a lot of reading about the NT architecture 10+ years ago purely out of interest, and it's pretty amazing. And I'm saying this as a Linux person.

The only reason Linux is so successful is actually the fact that it's open source. For individuals (like me) because that gives you much more flexibility in customizing the system, tinkering with it, and more importantly, debugging problems and understanding inner workings.

But even for big corps (which are mostly running the show when it comes to Kernel dev these days) it's much easier to whack the Linux kernel into shape for whatever you want to achieve, than trying to work with Microsoft to get what you want from NT.

> The only reason Linux is so successful is actually the fact that it's open source. For individuals (like me) because that gives you much more flexibility in customizing the system, tinkering with it, and more importantly, debugging problems and understanding inner workings.

I agree a significant part (necessary part?) of Linux success among hackers and developers is it being FOSS... I don't know much about NT kernel but it would be quite interesting to see the alternate reality in which it was also FOSS and independent of the rest of windows, I wonder if it would have a similar success in the arenas Linux does.

There are some other really interesting FOSS kernels out there today like Minix3 (quite different from the Minix that inspired Linux), they are sure to have deficiencies when directly compared to something like Linux due to the difference in the shear size of community driving them, but they have noteworthy designs, superior in various aspects, and they make me wonder, is there only enough space in the world for so many popular FOSS kernels? i.e how much of Linux is now inertia much like windows desktop? (and I say this as a full time Linux user)

FOSS NT Kernel... It would only be successful when it is really FOSS and not company backed single main contributor FOSS like Chrome or .NET Core. As a kernel contributor I want to shape my kernel, not being overruled by a decision done in a meeting somewhere on a campus I never visited.

You would need extensive partnership agreements like what Google has with Microsoft regards Chrome or Samsung has with Microsoft regards .NET Core. Challenging for smaller vendors.

Linux has a more pure (not owned) FOSS style making it successful.

Wine is actually more compatible with older apps than Win32 implementation in Win10. Better alternative would be to extend Wine.

> They could probably implement the Win32 API as an API for a distro

I'm no sure the powers that be at Microsoft have any great love for Win32.

Back when Windows 8 was released they introduced UPM (Universal Windows Platform) and that looked a lot like an attempt to actually kill off Win32.

They only backed away from this strategy after the backlash they got from Win32 Windows developers.

Move on to today and I think they are now using platforms like .NET Core 3.0 to gently move developers away from Win32.

> They could probably implement the Win32 API as an API for a distro

They did, that's how SQL Server runs on Linux

the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering

Yes, and the market for NeXT software was likewise until Apple decided to put it under a Mac shell. In fact, NT was the same until MS put it under a Windows shell. They could do it again, put Windows on a Linux kernel with a multiyear transition strategy and have the consumer and producer clients with the closest integration with Linux servers.

Microsoft have an established track record of offering, then withdrawing, MS Office for alternate platforms (or refusing to offer it at all).

I seem to recall that there was an Office version for Sun Microsystem's Solaris, which is 99.99...% of the way to a Linux variant. That was killed.

(This may have been MSIE or an Exchange-compatible email client, I'm researching this still.)

OSX is better supported, though for a long time Microsoft's email client was not Outlook but Entourage, a now-discontinued project. It had a typical-for-Microsoft opaque binary data storage format, though it's proved possible to extract useful information from this using Linux utilities.

Microsoft discontinued MSIE support on Mac in 2005, an issue given that many enterprise Web / intranet tools relied exclusively on nonstandard MSIE web extensions.

Office was never offered for BeOS, which I believe was a deliberate strategy decision, though I'm not finding evidence of this (JLG should be able to comment, if anyone has current contact). The lack was seen as a kiss-of-death for the OS and hardware.

Alternatively, what made RIM's Blackberry as popular among business executives as it was was its integration with MS Exchange email servers.

Strategic control over what ports were and were not supported by Microsoft, regardless of technical difficulty or merits, was a major element of that company's monopoly abuses.

>an [MS] Office version for Sun Microsystem's Solaris //

Are you sure you're not thinking of StarOffice, which became OpenOffice.org which begat LibreOffice. That was Sun's answer to MS Office, supposedly started by realising it was cheaper to buy a company that made an office suite and develop it in-house than it was to pay MS for their suite.

I'm positive it wasn't Staroffice. I know that story ... painfully ... well.

It might not have been MS office, but MSIE or a specific application. I'm finding researching this online disappointingly fruitless, though I've got inquiries in a few spots.

I think MSIE and the Windows Media player appeared for Solaris for a really short while at least. Outlook Express too, it seems.

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

You’re citing things that happened almost 20 years ago if you’re talking about Solaris and BeOS.

Precisely my point. The tiger rarely changes its stripes.

Microsoft isn't a tiger, it's a group of people. There is some continuity, but the people making those decisions are not the same people making those decisions now.

https://www.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_meaning_of_the_phrase_...

Must be why Apple went out of business selling weird computers that ran an unstable proprietary OS using PowerPC CPU’s. And Google never went back to China because of their founders’ personal/family experiences living under communism.

> This may have been MSIE

Indeed it was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

Thanks. That was part of it.

I think I may also have been recalling Wabi, a Windows Application Binary Interface for Solaris, effectively rather like Wine, I believe.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi_(software)

I ran IE (I think it was 3.0) on an HP-UX workstation back around the millennium.

Not directly addressing my points above, but a 1996 Linux Journal piece by Michael K. Johnson describing the compatibility landscape at the time:

https://www.linuxjournal.com/article/1232

>Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. //

If MS Office were available for Linux the market for Linux applications would grow, massively IMO (assuming it worked properly). Which is of course a reason MS wouldn't do that, because why move MS Office users to Linux when you're currently selling $Billions of OS to people who only want to use MS Office.

Increasingly people don't care about productivity suites running locally. Office 365 and Gsuite work just fine with Linux.

Linux is also much more popular for developers. WSL is a very well executed strategy to keep developers on Windows.

> Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering.

And that is because office and other major applications aren't available on linux.

So it's a chicken and egg problem. I wouldn't "go first" if I were Microsoft, no reason to accelerate the obsolescence of windows desktop. Why not let eg. Adobe go first?

I work in an Industrious co-working space in Indianapolis. As I walk around the office and see people's monitors, it appears that about 30% of people are running Ubuntu.

Edit: Query re downvote, too subjective?

At one time, Manjaro Linux came with Microsoft Office pre-installed. The apps were built with python jade application kit with embedded webviews that take you to the online version - https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/manjaro-ms-office-online...

That's impressive, has anyone else done something like this?

Yes, you can now add wrappers with Chrome as well.

That's not impressive in any way. They just launch a window with a web view and go to Microsoft’s Office Online. That was already a thing in 2007/2008. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Site-specific_browser

FYI, Samba version 4+ is an Active Directory Domain Controller that runs on Linux.

Samba 4.11 is scalable to 100,000+ users.

In case you want to give us a try :-).

I have fond memories of running Samba on CentOS at my first tech job at a university. We only had to support enough infrastructure for a couple hundred people in our department, but we wanted to do it with entirely open-source software. There's no way we could have done that if not for Samba. So thank you for working so hard to make that possible!

I have dumped windows completely after spending some time on windows 8 (fyi: system level developer, but... Well i did my share on aix, hpux, solaris, linux, vms too, but I did love windows... Before the age of manifests, putting com interfaces into kernel32.dll,...)

What troubles me THE most on linux is interoperability of applications, there is literally nothing replacing microsoft "office" (not a product Office) stack, it is not a problem for my expertise, but for ordinary John Doe (or lets call him "the manager"), Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, Lync (Skype for business) integrated into Office mesh... They have great product. This is the target that linux must pursue. But it is not there. Still struggling to reinvent hot water (systemd, dbus,...), as it is more fun. But not more usable. Anyway, i am satisfied with my shell...

Hmm the average joe is already using google drive rather than office et al. Works on linux and mac better than the office stack works on windows.

Average student is using Google Docs and Drive but the office workers I hear are driven by corporate culture, and traditional places of work like accounting offices haven’t culturally embraced these kinds of solutions.

Things is like publisher, illustrator, etc. can replace word. Open office is respectable. But all the google docs champions need to wake up.

Google docs is absolutely inferior in its power, formatting options, display performance, ability to write mathematical equations and diagrams directly into the document, etc.

Every time I had to produce a non-trivial report in google docs I grind my teeth and end up rendering these things elsewhere and insert them as png.

Additionally, google docs gives you no ownership over the software or the files I find it's commercial model unsettling.

For diagrams try draw.io

What do you use for math document formatting and presentation? The publishing world I'm aware of is still running on Adobe.

LaTeX

It's not like we are using modern products in most local companies I've worked for in the last decade. Everyone is still on 2008 and older office products. Hell I'm lucky we have AutoCAD LT 2014 at my current job. Its the most up to date piece of software in the whole office other than web browsers.

Google drive absolute shit on Linux.

Idk what it’s like on Windows but all Linux has is the web UI anyway so it’s probably the same.

It feels almost intentionally bad, I’m not sure what’s going on there but I’m pretty sure you couldn’t pay me to use it. IMO at least with SMB you don’t have to use that godawful file manager.

I agree. I've used rclone and another ML based program (forgot its name) with varying success for GDrive on Linux. RClone seems to be the best so far for my use case.

I wish Google provided better integration of GDrive w/Linux...

I'd be very surprised if this were true. My experience is that in actual offices, MS Office is king and it would be very hard to move most workflows away from it without exactly replicating it bug-for-bug.

To be honest i never worked in such a backwards office where people still use ms office

Like it or not that is the majority of offices everywhere.

Bug-for-bug? Nah. Just come up with something even remotely as productivity-enhancing as Excel is and you might have a shot. Fact is, people who think this already exists underestimate that powerhouse of productivity. It is possibly the most used programming environment on earth.

Even Excel isn't as productivity enhancing as Excel is. Microsoft has been trying to get people into .net macros for years but a lot of places are still using VBA.

Here's my hot take, as a Linux distro developer with an Office356 sub: Excel is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who thinks anything in the FOSS world can compare or stand up to what Excel does is completely deluding themselves, and this is a major reason why Excel will never be replaced, or even touched, by FOSS solutions. PowerQuery is absolutely game changing (and no I will not accept "but you can cobble together awk and 5 other tools to run a preprocessing pipeline before opening your spreadsheet", that's not competition, it's a joke.)

I hate saying this considering how much LibreOffice, etc have invested -- but OTOH I imagine they understand their competition better than the average programmer who uses Office suites to track their month-to-month finances and thinks they've got it figured out.

There is the fact that actually challenging Excel as a product and implementing any competitor would technically require a substantial amount of labor and effort, on a very large scale. But that's just one part; the fact is that you can't actually win a battle unless you're willing to analyze where you've already lost. I think most FOSS users don't actually realize how badly they are losing to products like Office or even (the inferior, IMO) G-Suite. This isn't surprising in the grand scheme considering how much software freedom we've lost in the past few decades; it's just one more lost battle, but it still stings.

This isn't a situation that pleases me, but at the end of the day between an O365 family sub and the alternatives, it was very easy to make the choice given the returns I got.

TBF, depending on data size I’ve had much better results with awk and friends than with Excel.

I was really surprised to learn that according to Okta’s Businesses at Work 2019 report[1] Microsoft Office is still significantly more popular than G Suite, at least in the workplace:

> Office 365 increased its lead and continues to dominate the total pool of apps by number of customers, and it’s growing its active unique users by 55% year over year.

I wrote a bit about the report[2]. Another interesting finding is that people actually prefer using Microsoft Office products:

> Our survey found that 67% of knowledge workers prefer Microsoft Word over Google Docs, while only 15% report the opposite. When it comes to email, 49% prefer Microsoft Outlook over Gmail, while 35% report the opposite.

[1]: https://www.okta.com/businesses-at-work/2019/

[2]: https://blog.robenkleene.com/2019/08/31/office-suite-market-...

The Google Docs word processor objectively sucks, it's barely a rich text editor.

To wit, you can't even define custom styles!

And both Word and Google Docs pale in comparison to LaTeX for demanding customization work. But "barely a rich text editor" suffices for the vast universe of documents which barely need rich text.

Except when your target market is captured by network effects and demands a particular file format regardless of how appropriate it is for the material.

The lack of custom styles is really problematic for a very common use case, documentation. I'd rather use Markdown for the purely tech stuff, but I thought I'd use Docs for collaborating with non or less technical people. That just doesn't work, too tedious.

Yes, it does. At the same time it works incredibly well for collaborative editing. But the number of quirks and errors in the product are enough to drive you mad.

I use Linux exclusively and have since 2003. Also, I don't put any of my work in google drive/docs/GSuite for anything. Google simply has enough of my life, I'm not giving them my business data as well.

At every company I've worked at gmail and google drive are blocked at the firewall. I dont know how any big company would allow their data to be stored or copied externally.

Yeah, that's the problem. Linux Desktop evangelists think they can slap a new coat of paint on this cobbled-together kludge of disparately developed software and that'll be "good enough for everyone". They don't seem to understand the way desktop software fits into workflows that aren't their own.

A "cobbled-together kludge of disparately developed software" is how I would describe the average Windows' user's workstation. You only need to boot it to be immediately hit by a barrage of dysfunction. I think you're simply comfortable in your own mess.

I use Linux on 3 of the 5 computers I interact with frequently, and the Windows mess is not comparable to the Linux mess.

I use Linux on 3 of the 4 computers I interact with frequently and my experience is the exact opposite of yours. The linux ecosystem might be a mess but at least it is usable, unlike windows, where it is painful to do even the simplest task.

I'm having a hard time thinking of a simple task that is easier on Linux.

Here's an example in the other direction: install a piece of software to a different disk than the OS resides on. This is trivial in most Windows software, but requires recompilation from source for most Linux software.

> I'm having a hard time thinking of a simple task that is easier on Linux.

Installing any program, compiling a c file, opening non-zip archives, writing an iso to a usb, counting the lines that contain a certain word in a file, removing the preinstalled spyware, etc.

> install a piece of software to a different disk than the OS resides on

Windows is certainly much better than this than most distros (although it is not perfect, many programs such as the sims 2 expansion packs for example had issues with being installed in another disk). That being said, I am pretty sure that Nix does not have this issue.

tbf, those workflow probably can be replaced by a much better alternative. The only downside is people who wouldn’t learn a newer system of interaction with their computer. It’s like 737 Max8 except that mistakes and problems won’t cause lives to be lost.

Please, do suggest it. I, personally dont see a product group in oss that would function in that manner. Yes, you can set up LibreOffice with postfix, dovecot, nextcloud (with sh__load of plugins),... But the integration of it, even after some serious scripting is nowhere near from the microsoft solutions. You only have a bunch of lonely programs knowing how to do their job... more or less... well but completely unaware of each other. And quite frankly, I know it is "trendy" to run everything in browser, but to me (just a personal opinion, don't take it personally - I am old, I have seen mainframes, ibm,... and I know you will all be sorry for locking in into cloud vendors, saas solutions,...but at that point I wont care any more), browser is a joke. A huge step back in IT compared to what desktop apps already have.

> well but completely unaware of each other

The dysfunction on the main GUI level is even more obvious: using command line is still not necessary for a Windows user. Linux would be utterly unusable without the command line and the command line programs. I believe that even those who write GUI and GUI apps themselves aren't using them.

I actually agree with you. But I think the need for office software is grossly exaggerated. There’s no reason how one couldn’t articulate reason as well in a markdown file. Excel is the only thing remotely useful but even that can be replaced with pandas. The whole workflow itself - the fancy stuff, is unnecessary complex.

> Exchange, Outlook, Sharepoint, Lync (Skype for business) integrated into Office mesh... They have great product.

After a multi-year hiatus of using Windows (because my customers were running mostly on Linux, Mac OS or did BYOD), on my current industrial/research project I'm back to using Office (Skype for Biz, Outlook for team comm and partially Sharepoint, Excel and even PowerPoint (!) for spec docs) on Windows VMs and I have to say I can't fathom how these people can get anything done at all. Lync/Skype4b is bordering on ususable for me (normal Skype works just fine), and it not being available for Linux is a show-stopper. The only tolerable tool that doesn't get in the way all the time is Excel, and even that has laughably primitive versioning in SP compared to tools of the git era. With this office software lineup I think web-based tools will totally dominate the next decade.

Classic office suites on Linux is a sufficiently well solved problem with Open Office/Libre Office IMO, and I don't expect it to get any better, ever. The reason is simply that classic office software where people print out, sign, scan, paper-mail, and fax letters has run its course.

The stumbling block at this point (and quite frankly, for most of time) for Linux / Unix office suites hasn't been features. It's been OEM bundling/tying, enterprise bundling/tying, and a "good enough" widespread and effectively universal userbase / skillset.

In establishing standards, diversity is a weakness, unfortunately.

I believe Skype for Business has been discontinued, but I may be wrong.

Edit: I actually bothered to check and the EOL is 2021. New customers are directed to Teams. I used Teams at work, and it’s crap quality UX, but it does the job. For chat at least. (PowerPoint crashed on me multiple times this week from within Teams.)

> putting com interfaces into kernel32.dll

I think I read this claim from you here before. What's up with that?

These days, kernel32 (split off into kernelbase and others in the Vista and Win7 days) mostly has small wrappers to ntdll.

A COM interface is really just a C++ VTable. So the "overhead" of that is basically minimum 3 function pointers and some indirect calls. What is the problem with having a COM object passed to a kernel32 function? Would you have the same objection if it were a (barely any different) function pointer plus an extra pointer for context?

The complaint about manifests maybe made me think this was about WinSXS or something. Which I would agree is engineered kind of poorly, but I doubt it's the worst thing in Windows.

[Disclaimer. I worked as an IC SDE at MS from 2008-2011.]

> Sharepoint

Sharepoint is an abomination, always was and always will be. It's not something that you'd use voluntarely.

Amen.

I once tried running MS Office 2007 on Linux with Wine and it worked great, no quirks I could notice. That happened during the days when Office 2010 was new and mos of the people still were using 2007. Some time later I've read 2010 already works fine, tried it and it did. Newer versions probably work ok too as for today. You can use MS Office on Linux and it's hardly a problem (hint: the real problem is Adobe). Why? Because Linux is more safe (that's why I migrated people who use MS Office to it), faster, more cool/convenient/customizable (e.g. I feel like the latest KDE provides "like Mac but even better" experience), more reliable (updates are frequent and never ruin your system) and free (which is a thing in countries with less developed economies).

I think the only way in which "Microsoft loves Linux" can be scrutinised is: does a successful Linux ecosystem help or harm Microsoft.

That it forms part of their business model is not enough, if Microsoft would prefer dominance of its proprietary technologies.

Conceivably, the future of Microsoft's business model may be where development and maintenance of Windows / the NT kernel is deemed burdensome and not critical to their business, and Windows becomes a premium Linux distribution with legacy subsystems.

Using Linux at work, I'm indirectly a Microsoft customer, using Office 365 and Azure (an expanding portion of their business), yet the investment in Windows desktop is lost on me, and unnecessary to retain my business.

This is correct.

On the client-side, MS is not worried much about Linux desktop and hence will not invest in office for Linux.

On the server-side, Linux is a platform of choice for new projects (I would say Kubernetes and containers but those are based on Linux) and hence windows server moved to a more legacy state.

In this case, if Microsoft wants to be relevant for future projects, it must embrace Linux.

However, since there is no money in Linux as an OS, Microsoft is in the process of becoming a hardware company due to azure. And as such, it would like to commoditize its supplement which is the OS.

> Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently.

Microsoft has a history that makes skepticism warranted. Look up "Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish"

Off the top of my head:

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

It's mentioned in the beginning of the article...

Plus, I don't see how this contradicts the OP. Maybe EEE was the best way to make money then, but supporting Linux developers is the best way to make money now

> they won't move away from Windows-only APIs

Office already runs on MacOS and iOS

Runs ... but not well. It may be different now but I knew an engineer on the Office for Mac team some years back and it did not sound like a pretty port. I have both a Mac and a Windows machine at work and Excel on the latter is lightning fast compared to the former.

Haven't had issues with Word on the Mac. Seems very fast on my MBP. However I prefer using Pages, Keynote etc. if I can help it. I don't use Numbers, as I usually prefer Google Sheets for that.

I wouldn't say they'd never do an Office on Linux... If you look at how they've been leveraging web tech and Electron for VS Code and MS Teams, I'd be very surprised if we didn't see an Electron based version of Office in a couple years. Electron has an amazing cross platform appeal for developers and MS has taken advantage of that. Not to mention managing to write applications under Electron that don't suck (though memory usage is high). And despite high memory usage, Office has never been that nimble in terms of ram use anyway.

As for AD, Azure's hosted services for this may well see more inroads into Linux, and I know a LOT of people/companies that would be beyond happy to use MS account management with a cleaner Linux integration.

I won't be using these things at home any time soon, but in a corporate space, MS would be a welcome and cost saving change compared to what is out there on Linux currently.

I’m 90% teams doesn’t work on Linux and have been using the web app for a long time now. I sorely miss the slack desktop app and would to be corrected if this is possible now.

Yeah, teams was pretty badly broken even a few months ago... There's an "unofficial" client in Flathub, that's what I've been using and it mostly works now... the only broken feature I'm aware of that I haven't re-tried is the desktop sharing... but the A/V chat and webcam now work.

Well, if the buzz I've heard recently (and the article below) are correct. A native Linux "Microsoft Teams" client is coming (pretty sure I heard mid-December)

https://www.windowscentral.com/its-official-microsoft-teams-...

EDIT: Yup, the link referenced by the article (https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/su...) says:

"We’re pleased to confirm the Teams client for Linux will be available in preview by the end of this calendar year, enabling people who use Linux client at work or in educational institutions to collaborate with others on Teams. Users will be able to install native Linux packages in .deb and .rpm formats."

It used to work fine in the browser if you spoofed your user agent to Edge. They shut that down somehow. The standalone client still works with a little wrapper (see teams-for-linux).

The market share for Linux on the desktop is tiny - I can't ever see Office for Linux.

Not sure about your memory claim either - I don't recall high memory usage in Office ever being an issue.

I can't see an Electron based Excel appearing. Excel is pretty much the best spreadsheet application that exists in terms of performance. Using Electron would likely kill that to the point that no one would use it. The browser based versions of Office applications fall short when you start pushing them hard already - they're fine for light editing, but I wouldn't use them for anything substantial.

I can very much imagine a Goole Stadia but for real apps rather than games, where you are interacting with a video stream rather than the app itself.

That already exists. Citrix was doing this a decade ago - VMware too. I think Office was even one of the apps Citrix used to demo its thin client plan when Chromebooks first launched. Honestly, containerize it (for easy spinups), and if you have the bandwidth, a lot of apps would probably be really great run fully remote.

Microsoft released Windows Virtual Desktop earlier this year that is basically a cloud version of Windows 10 (or 7) or Office, that’s designed to be used like Stadia.

Disclosure: I work at Microsoft but not on any of these projects

Do you know if they run in a browser on Linux?

If you're asking if WVD desktops can be delivered to a Linux browser, yes - there's a HTML5 client that renders desktops. In addition, a Linux toolkit was announced for thin clients in the recent Ignite conference.

https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/81670?...

>Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently.

It should really be "<X corporation> loves <Y> because it makes them money" because let's be honest, the only reason these companies make any decisions, moral or not, is to make money They supported <any movement> and showcased these supports with events, banners, and advertisement only because that's what they _need_ to do to make _profit_.

They could easily discard all of these values the moment a government or a market said they can't do it. Just look at all the companies bowing down to China.

> They won't release products like Office for Linux

This one I don't really understand why not. Presumably Office for Linux would still bring in revenue. Just not the additional indirect revenue of a Windows license.

> (though a web interface is possible),

I am not totally familiar with the "Office365" brand and what it includes, but I get the impression some browser based stuff already works on Linux. In work accounts at former employers I have used a web-based Outlook on Linux and FreeBSD that had some "Office365" branding.

> and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs

This one I don't know why they would ever do. Win32 apps are still driving revenue and customer satisfaction for them. More, I think, than they admit to themselves. Witness they tried to kill Win32 apps in the Windows 8 cycle, and failed. Then kept trying to resurrect the idea of killing Win32, and had to walk it back every time. Surface RT wouldn't do third party Win32 apps. Neither would Windows Store initially. Then they floated a Windows 10 amd64 SKU that couldn't run third party Win32 apps. Nobody wanted this stuff. That legacy is pretty much the only thing that keeps people on Windows.

Don't forget the expense of porting it in the first place, and then maintaining it after.

> maintaining it after

This is the real elephant in the room. Despite all their other flaws Microsoft has an excellent record of maintaining their software well after release. Particularly when it comes to their core products like Office or Windows. WIN32 programs or XLS files from 30 years ago still work on the latest versions.

If Microsoft didn't have this commitment, then porting Office to Linux as an experiment might be worth it. Even if there's a 10% chance it takes root, that's good revenue. But even if only a small base of users bought Office Linux it, Microsoft's reputation would require them keep maintaining it for decades.

To echo what you were saying, binary distribution on Linux is indeed tough.

A while ago I needed to experiment with an old file format, and I found a Linux binary of a proprietary tool from the 90s. It linked to libc version 5 (from before the Linux world adopted glibc). It would have been complicated to get it running.

I found a Windows binary of the same tool. Put it on a Win10 VM I had for other purposes. No issues.

Stable binary ABI of userland is something the Linux world doesn't do well. Win32 and COM are really good at this.

If that tool linked libc statically, it would have worked. Linux does provide a very stable binary ABI in form of syscalls, so long as you bundle all your dependencies. The problem is that nobody does it that way in practice, at least not with the commonly used tools.

Well, 2 things:

* There are, right now, online browser-based versions of most of their office applications available, which work fine on Linux.

* if [1] is anything to go by, we might see client-side Javascript/Electron based clients, which would make the porting to other platforms a lot cheaper/easier to maintain. Even if a "native" (read: electron-wrapped) Linux client wouldn't be in the works, the browser-based versions will probably be just the exact same version.

[1] https://twitter.com/TheLarkInn/status/1006746626617008128

Why not?

Maybe the OS market was profitable for decades, but isn't anymore?

Maybe their goal is to move everything to Linux in the next decade so they don't have to develop their own stuff, getting all that free OSS dev power and can control them by supplying cloud based user-land software, because "Linux never breaks user space"... who knows.

Office online is already a thing and available for free https://products.office.com/en-us/free-office-online-for-the...

AD will be gone in the 2030 timeframe.

Kerberos can’t survive in untrusted networks, and products like Azure AD and Okta are far more profitable, especially since the license that pays for AD (ie windows, even for Linux clients), is required anyway!

> Kerberos can’t survive in untrusted networks...

Wasn't Kerberos designed to work in untrusted networks?

It was, but Active Directory wasn't. If you put your DCs on the Internet you're asking to get hacked.

Another point worth mentioning is that as we move towards zero trust by default, AD getting replaced by Azure AD is a logical step towards that goal.

Kerberos is designed for untrusted networks.. and Azure AD is just AD hosted somewhere else. Same problems.

> Azure AD is just AD hosted somewhere else

Azure AD DS (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/active-directory-...) is a specific offering from Azure which gives you a hosted AD instance, but otherwise AAD is completely different.

AD is mostly used internally on corporate networks. Why would untrusted networks be relevant?

As corporate datacenters migrate to the cloud, the distinction between internal and external will fade.

Additionally, with cloud email/office becoming the standard, there’s powerful levers to incentive cloud adoption and shifting of compliance standards.

> As corporate datacenters migrate to the cloud

I don't think this trend is as large as SV web devs think it is, nor do I think the trend will continue indefinitely in that direction. My current corporate masters hate the cloud because they want to be in control of their own data and services. They don't want to twiddle their thumbs when somethings wrong while waiting for BigCorp to get around to fixing it. They really, really don't like paying rent on business essential tooling.

And they've pretty much been proven right in all their concerns so far.

Consider both ways: even if you run 100% of your backend on-prems, a significant portion of your routes may go outside to reach roaming employees, remotes, maybe customers for some apps, etc. You likely have some Infrastructure-as-a-Service, dynamic subnetting and addressing for containers, VPNs, firewalls to cross, etc. AD and MS Server DCs in general are just not suited to this environment, where IPs may change on-the-fly, hosts die quickly, etc.

You typically need a more robust, web-compliant solution using e.g. tokens + MFA and web-compliant centralization of authority and certs on e.g. Consul or Red Hat Identity Management.

That being said, IMHO, it's a much saner and safer approach to bite that bullet and setup a rock-solid ID/Auth system on-prems (or at least vendor-agnostic and load-balanced over at least 2 major providers). It's really the kind of low-level infra that you can setup properly once and use for a decade, + cost of extra features you may want to add later.

> AD and MS Server DCs in general are just not suited to this environment

Don't know what you're talking about, they work just fine. All of our branch offices and salesmen are remote workers.

I think that really big and really small companies will go the way you describe.

Most places want to control capex and limit capacity wastage. Nobody wants to invest in datacenter facilities. Even the government, which has access to super cheap capital, is embracing cloud.

The shift is real. In my area, a major infrastructure OEM like HPE has like 2 CEs that cover the region. There was probably 14-16 20 years ago.

Because the distinction of internal and external networks is eroding. Read about zero trust networking.

That's not a trend we're interested in following. You bring your own device? Fine, it's on the guest network that is treated like the internet as far as our services are concerned. This isn't rocket science.

If your services are internet accessible and secure, what is the distinction between your trusted internal network and the internet?

The answer is usually that legacy apps, SMB, Voip, and printing require trust derived from the network.

AFAK SAMBA 4 can serve as an AD controller and you probably can run it on Azure. Or even on a Windows server if you want (I used SAMBA client on Windows once).

Kind of. A full AD DC isn't supported by redhat (it's disabled) as the MIT kerberos "port" is incomplete and seems dead.

> You can authenticate Linux clients against AD, but I doubt they'll be writing a Linux AD server any time soon.

They did it for SQL Server, and they built a full API compatibility shim to do it:

https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/17/how-microsoft-brought-sql-...

Doesn't Apple Mail still use ActiveSync to connect to Office 365?

The online Office 365 works great on Linux in the browser. And they're bringing their Chromium-based Edge to Linux to make sure users have a perfect experience.

> I doubt they'll be writing a Linux AD server any time soon

They don't need to. Samba exists; nothing stopping Microsoft from sending in patches.

>Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently.

I rather thought the point of the article was that Microsoft didn't actually love linux but pretended that it did to stave off irrelevance in markets where linux is kicking their ass (i.e. server).

As he said, if they really loved linux and this isn't just another "embrace, extend, extinguish" ploy sugarcoated in PR niceties they'd be porting office and directx and outlook to linux.

Which they're not.

You're using "love" in different ways. I also love cookies, but I'm not in a committed, lifelong romance with them. (Well, maybe I am. Bad example.)

None if the examples given are particularly sensible.

Turn Word into a webapp? This has been happening for years, but no web editor can offer even 50% of the functionality offered by Word. Office365 is competitive with GSuite.

Drop Win32? That's basically asking Microsoft to commit suicide and destroy all companies who rely on windows to run their software. They were trying to get people to move to UWP, and look how hard that has been.

Port DirectX? Maybe, don't know. Given that Unity and Unreal both support OpenGL, Metal, Vulkan, and they are available on Windows, would this make any difference?

DirectX 12 is actually more easy to swallow for the average Joe programmer than Vulcan so maybe it does make sense.

If you define "sensible" as "might impact existing MS monopolies" then no, NONE of it is particularly sensible.

Microsoft doesn't love Linux if it interferes with its monopolies. It never did and it never will. That's the whole point.

It didn't turn over any new leaf like it claimed. It just adapted its existing strategy as a means to stave off impending irrelevance in the server market.

Not turning over a new leaf WAS the "sensible" thing to do.

My view of Microsoft, and I'd be interested to hear if it's bullshit from people who have worked there, is there isn't such an entity.

The dev tools and .NET team actually like Linux, the Windows team hate those guys, the Office team hate everyone, the Skype team hate their lives, the Nokia team, well...

Expecting a single determined vision from Microsoft isn't rational. It's multiple business units who don't really coordinate and just happen to share a logo.

Again I've only formed this view from hints and allusions but it seems to explain a lot.

Yes, especially when they can extort patent fees with their patent protection racket from anyone that builds a Linux or Android device.

Microsoft continues to make billions of dollars a year in royalties by accusing device makers of patent infringement.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-joins-open-...

You can’t really auth Linux clients against AD, because you will kill the AD servers.

AD and ADAM are shockingly low performance compared to Sun/Netscape LDAP. They depend on extensive client side caching to work at all.

If you want to tie Unix clients to AD, the first step is to mirror your AD content in a more competent LDAP cluster

Absolutely not true at all. Various Linux distributions support MSAD integration out of the box.

A web interface is already a reality.[1] Work great with Chrome or Chromium. Not a full featured office, but in general very nice. [1]https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/office/ndjpnladcal...

A Chromium-only extension is not a "web interface".

Sure it is, in the sense that it’s very likely not using any Chrome-specific APIs (Chrome right now has the least exposed extension API surface to regular, non-ChromiumOS extensions) but rather at most being equivalent to an Electron app, where some of the HTML and JS lives and runs on the client rather than on a server. But that HTML and JS still is HTML and JS built for a web-rendering-engine to parse and run, so it should be fully possible to turn this extension into a regular web-app with not very much work. Probably any sufficiently-motivated programmer could do it in a couple of hours, throwing the result in an S3 bucket for anyone to access. (Not sure how well it’d run on other browsers, but we still call regular web-apps where the developers happened to only test it in one specific browser “web interfaces.”)

It's not just the web versions of Office that work on Linux. On Chromebooks, the Android runtime ensures that the Android MS Office apps run full-screen and take advantage of the large screen and keyboard[1,2].

[1] https://imgur.com/a/rp0VFR4 [2] https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-android-apps-chrome...

> Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money.

No, no, no. That's not the reason. Have you actually read the article?

The reason is that Microsoft is doing a sophisticated stratagem against Linux. It wants to infiltrate the Linux ecosystem, and then when they can keep taps on every piece of essential software, they will pull the plug.

The same with patent pledge, they want to bait as much companies to use Linux thinking that Microsoft will not patent troll them, and then they will reveal their true intentions, and sue them all.

That trick even got a name now. People in the industry called Microsoft's infiltration strategy "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"

Linux crowd will soon realise what trick they are trying to do, and I hope they will do that before it is too late.

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