Microsoft hasn't changed after all...
I used to like what they were doing with WSL, but now on the contrary it starts to worry me, because it can become an avenue of evil behavior against users/devs/open-source/...
I used to like what they were doing with WSL, but now on the contrary it starts to worry me, because it can become an avenue of evil behavior against users/devs/open-source/...
But then it looked how Apple and Google did the same thing, successfully, and sailed away in terms of market share and now it wants to replicate the success.
The thing is, I don't think it is going to succeed. The likely thing that is already happening is that power users are leaving Windows and once power users leave the platform will die.
I mean for the fact you have less and less to say with regards to your installation. I have been Windows user for many years but around 4-5 years ago I got fed up with the fact Microsoft decides on a daily basis to change completely the stuff I own and not let me have anything to say about it. I don't want to have any Live accounts to log in to my machine, I don't want significant updates installed without me having anything to say about it. I want to spend time doing actual work and not babysitting the OS because I just got interrupted by another Microsoft idea.
Currently the only Windows I personally use is a VM I use to do my remote work because I am forced to use Windows. Just this weekend I got the very significant Edge update that completely blew my setup and caused me to spend an entire day to fix. As I am paid by the hour this is pretty significant: unhappy client, lots of work stacked.
You would think a backup would help? After all this is VM that I basically don't touch. The only site I open is the one I use for remote connection. The only tool I ever run is Edge. Unfortunately, it was not possible for me to revive the backup and not have it immediately do its thing.
I am disgusted.
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197#issue-458254244
But to your point, WSL 2 does have some really big issues pending tho, such as https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4166 and https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699. The TL;DR is that WSL 2 will happily use 80% of your system's memory by default and it never frees disk up in the VM that it runs in. The VM's disk will continue to grow and grow unless you as an end user run some PowerShell incantations to shrink the vhdx. In other words, deleting files from within WSL 2 won't clear the disk space used by the VM.
Within like 2 hours of using WSL 2 for the first time I found my system grinding to a halt because it used 11GB of memory and chewed through 60GB of my SSD since when I copied my source code into WSL 2's file system (to avoid the poor performance documented in your issue) I forgot I had a ton of wave files included in one of the directories since I kept those in a private directory in my podcast site's source code.
The last thing I’d want, working with Linux tools, is to have another thing I have to eliminate as a source of trouble when anything breaks.
I would consider myself a power user, but the only reason I stick with Windows still is because I can't find a good reliable video editor on Linux -- and also some games.
Kdenlive makes doing super common things a lot more difficult and time consuming than what's available on Windows video editors and DaVinci Resolve has potential but it's the most crash prone piece of software I've run into on any platform, and also has severe audio quality issues when exporting mp4s (on my hardware at least -- I couldn't use it to create videos due to that).
But I would think at this point, power users are only a drop in the bucket compared to the gaming crowd in terms of audience size. Right now on Linux, gaming comes down to hoping 3rd party tools allow you to run most games you want, or you dual boot (really annoying) or you run KVM with a GPU pass-through to run Windows in a VM with native performance (approaching 1 level above power user level just to set this up and 2 video cards).
I don't see a power-user exodus from Windows, really.
The power users outside of the MS ecosystem already left Windows a while ago you mean. A lot of mainstream tech tools & languages only have a medium support on Windows which is not really prioritized that much compared to the Mac & Linux versions. WSL is a big move to try to win those power users back.
My point being: I've been a very stubborn desktop Linux user for a long time and have migrated to Windows. The traffic, I suspect, is going the opposite way to what you seem to expect, at least for now.
Seems like you can download Windows nowadays, and you need to buy the license key separately. I am wrong? (I ask naively, because I am not a Microsoft user)
Yes, they were distributing a modified ISO and it probably should/could have been taken down on straight copyright grounds. But the article is about the fact that rather than concentrating on this clear violation, the DMCA complaint specifically calls out the modifications as infringing because "the link provides a work around technical restrictions of the software". This distinction is directly addressed in the paragraph that starts "At first view, some may conclude that Ninjutsu OS amounts to a heavily modified yet pirated version of Windows 10."