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Comment by generalk | Hacker News Reader

Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression here is that Windows Subsystem for Linux will support DX12, but not broader Linux support for DX12.

So if you want a machine that can play games and run a Linux dev toolchain, that would require a Windows install. If you can incentivize folks who may never have installed Windows to do so, and keep them there as the only place they can both play games and use their preferred dev environment, then you've extinguished that portion of the desktop linux install base.

EDIT: Also I absolutely love the "I don't think Microsoft thinks so either." Microsoft is a for-profit corporation who's eyeing a way to get users who traditionally avoid them to come to their platform and stay there. They aren't some benevolent font of cool tech, they're trying to sell you products.

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I agree, when we look at Microsoft's motivation, considering them driven by profit makes more sense than anything else. Hence why I'm critiquing comments that seem to think Microsoft is driven by some innate desire to destroy Linux and FOSS. They're not, they just want to make money, but back when their making money was based on Windows, and they thought Linux was an existential threat to that, those two goals coincided. Today, I think Microsoft cares much more about building up Azure to beat AWS and become the biggest cloud platform - they don't care if the servers are running Linux or Windows, as long as it's running on Azure - being seen by developers as Linux-hostile runs counter to that goal. So again, I'm not saying they wouldn't go for an Extinguish if they could, but I think they know that they can't and they have a strategy where they don't need to.

We're not talking about Microsoft's cloud / server strategy though. Linux as a server OS is different from Linux as a development platform. The two have nothing in common except the word "Linux."

Microsoft is taking steps to embrace desktop Linux, we've seen that with WSL. Instead of ditching Windows for a different/better dev platform, just keep using Windows.

They are extending their own desktop Linux by adding the capability to use DX12 in Linux, so long as it's run on Windows. Note that they are not adding this capability to a straight Ubuntu install, let alone any other distribution.

To claim "Microsoft knows they can't Extinguish desktop Linux" is naive at best, and shill-like at worst. They don't need to completely eliminate desktop Linux for EEE to apply here. the "Extinguish" part comes naturally from fewer and fewer devs choosing an alternative to Windows.

> We're not talking about Microsoft's cloud / server strategy though

Yes we are. I was talking about the motivation behind their action. And I think it's quite obvious that 'get businesses to use Azure over AWS' or 'get web developers to use Windows instead of Macs' is a much, much more likely motivation than 'Extinguish desktop Linux'. Why would they care about that? Desktop Linux is absolutely no threat to them, and there's no money to be made winning that fight more than they already have. Know what, I'll grant you that in their attempt to steal web devs over from MacOS, and getting a better user story for a web dev deploying Linux servers from Windows, they will probably also hurt desktop Linux - if nothing else, simply by creating another viable alternative for devs that isn't MacOS. But I can pretty much guarantee you that extinguishing desktop Linux is not their motivation - it simply makes no sense.

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