Then again, this is the company that answered complaints about Windows being bad for development by embedding an OS that is good for development and calling that an innovation rather than an acknowledgement that Windows is bad.
Then again, this is the company that answered complaints about Windows being bad for development by embedding an OS that is good for development and calling that an innovation rather than an acknowledgement that Windows is bad.
Well, they actually did it twice in recent history: WSL 1 was relatively innovative, integrating Linux application compatibility into the Windows operating system itself. But that turned out to still be bad for development because it meant Linux software was now subjected to the performance problems of the Windows IO stack. So they responded with WSL 2, an ordinary Linux VM. And separately they also introduced the "Dev Drive" feature to let you create a filesystem that bypassed the worst parts of the Windows IO stack.
Both FreeBSD and Illumos were running Linux applications (at various levels of compatibility) many years prior to wsl v1. Joyent even went as far as re-implementing the Docker api to allow running OCI images natively in LX zones. Hence, it wasn't even that novel of an idea.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-tech&m=161435521906992&w=2
https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/6ce3f21
https://github.com/NetBSD/src/commit/1a68594
He also came to the same conclusion compat layers were a dead end (OpenBSD removed all compat_*(8) support, including Linux).
But there are plenty of examples of compatibility layers like this throughout computing history. WINE, cygwin, Linux compat, etc.
Microsoft even went down this road already in the 80s with Xenix before abandoning the idea of Unix.
The only novel part of WSL was the marketing folks
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
Then with the release of XP it was replaced with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
The interesting thing about WSLv1 is the pico process concept, not the syscall compatibility.
Admittedly back then I was working for a place that mainly developed in Perl, so I didn’t port a whole lot of ELFs across. So maybe I’m misremembering
It was nice because getting anything approved by the windows sysadmin group was like changing the tire on a moving truck.
It was more than a godsend, because when a windows server was plugging into "the wrong vlan" we could just give them the tcpdump command to capture a CDP/LLDP packet and tell us which switch and port the box was physically connected to.
For example with tcpdump:
https://github.com/search?q=repo%3Athe-tcpdump-group%2Ftcpdu...
So it’s not quite the same thing as what we were discussing further up the thread. Though it’s still an interesting anecdote in its own right.
Thanks for correction
I would say that this vision of Windows would involve Microsoft essentially producing a Linux graphical shell similar to Gnome and KDE with a bunch of convenience tools that are typical to the Windows experience. It would have defaults like the Bing brower and all the typical Windows revenue-generating stuff.
I don’t think the GPL requirement to release code is a problem for the business model. Not all of the tooling has to be released as GPL and even if some of it does, the brand and commercial partnerships of Windows will mean that most people don’t go out and replace Windows with the hypothetical de-commercialized version.
We see this with VSCode where Microsoft is totally fine to release the code with an even more permissive license than the GPL, but they keep the extension marketplace gated. If you want Microsoft’s extensions you have to use VSCode.
One day Microsoft would say, hey, Windows 15 is Linux-based. It'll run most of your Windows stuff either natively with some nice developer tooling to make a transition or using a compatibility layer (which, as we know, Linux already has!)
But you can keep using Windows 14 for a very, very long time.
If something is being pushed on me, it's obviously bad for me, and good for the pusher.
That being said, I do agree that windows is user hostile and i won't run it myself.
Maybe if those were only security updates. Windows pushes new features, new crap, and re-enables and re-installs (!) stuff you've removed via this path as well.
The moment these 'solutions' would get mainstream traction they will be shut down.
Linux is catching up (mostly in gaming) but nothing comes close to the amount of engineer-hours poured into building Windows desktop apps.
In fact, I was trying to convince developers at work (fortune 500 company) to move from Windows to Linux for a long time, only 1 person moved.
For a bit of cruel fun, have a Finance person use Libreoffice scalc instead of Excel. Doing that is probably the worse thing you can do to a Finance person, I think after a few days of that, they will end up in ICU.
FWIW, we were allowed to use RHEL, Fedora or Ubuntu on our workstations instead of Windows.
you cannot take a compiled gui app for linux from 20 years ago and run it on a modern system and have it work. on windows it will work just fine.
not to bring out that old trope, but windows is an OS (and desktop environment) - linux is a kernel. you know what they meant, and your rebuttal isn’t one.
also, GP clearly said ABI and you jumped to API - one is much harder than the other.
Microsoft has their niche, which is offices. This used to be the main application of computers, but now it is just a very large niche.
The overwhelming majority of computer interactions are Android clients talking to Linux servers.
Just because lots of people use their phones primarily doesn’t mean that desktop computers aren’t responsible for producing literally trillions of dollars of shit every month. All those mobile apps? Developed and built and tested on desktops. The mobile phones themselves? Designed and built and QA’d using desktops. The payroll for the 200,000 people in the supply chain to get them to you? Desktops.
The power grid. Airline reservation systems. CNC mills. MRI machines. Mortgage underwriting. Computer factories. Pick-n-place machines. These aren’t run off phones.
You get the idea. Real business runs on real computers, still, no matter how many billions spend how many hours playing Candy Crush.
It’s bordering on unusable. There is no amount of money you could pay me to daily-drive the current release of consumer windows.
ms is def at the point of major enshitification