If this is going to be a desktop offering from Microsoft, I think it will be for remote cloud and potentially WSL2 use only. The future of desktop Linux is a VM under Windows.
Is there really any demand for this though? What Linux gui apps exist that windows users want/need? Enough that Microsoft sees an addressable market large enough to get roi?
The inverse seems to have way more practical use cases that could actually drive revenue - games and legacy business applications (as mentioned in the esr prose).
Never used it since. I did have the Linux version of dBeaver installed that way but there is little/no difference just running the native Windows install for that.
The only use I can really think of is doing cross-platform GUI development, but even then MS will say "hey look, native Linux windowing support in WSL" and also "Not yours, no linux version of MAUI for .NET"
Kind of a mixed message.
Windows deployment isn’t bloated, it just has a ton of actual functionality that real users want and that doesn’t come for free. The UX for the admin is also super nice, with tons of online articles and communities with people who are willing to help you do what you’re trying to do, as opposed to tell you why what you want is bad.
A base Windows installation takes up a lot of space mainly because of Microsoft's compatibility commitments and the implementation strategy it uses to maintain them, and to some extent the way libraries are typically distributed. Neither OS features, nor hardware compatibility, nor the selection of included applications has much to do with that. Microsoft delivers some real value through their compatibility commitment, but it's a different thing than functionality.
> The UX for the admin is also super nice, with tons of online articles and communities with people who are willing to help you do what you’re trying to do
This is frankly a stunning claim. From local configuration being the hodgepodge of many generations of GUIs to the incompleteness to the painful slowness of completing a task through visual imitation to the fundamental hostility automation to the slowness and incompleteness of PowerShell to the absolutely anarchic nature of software management on the platform, administering Windows machines is a cumbersome, manual mess.
> communities with people who are willing to help you do what you’re trying to do, as opposed to tell you why what you want is bad.
This is an illusion afforded to those who come to both operating systems with Windows-centric expectations. In this very forum, you can find Windows users who respond to posters who complain about defects that come up with Microsoft's official Windows port of OpenSSH by telling them they never should have tried to use rsync to transfer files between Windows machines.
With any operating system, there will always be people who respond to questions involving solutions that are at odds with the paradigm, strengths, or cuatoms of the operating system with advice to re-think the problem. (And sometimes, they'll be right!)
> You mean the tons of online articles and communities trying to get you to purchase spyware?
Linux has a substantial amount of communities and support, and with systemd things are getting pretty routine there isn't a lot of ways to mess things up like people in Windows communities telling you to reset various windows components by deleting important system files.
If Microsoft has their way, you mean.
If regulatory agencies were to let them get away with it - which is a very big “if”.
I have always found it funny that Microsoft provides a free service to the Linux community which makes them significantly safer, and for their trouble they get no end of shade from that community.