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Comment by simula67 | Hacker News Reader

It is great to see Microsoft taking many steps to court hackers these days. What would convince me they have turned the corner ?

1. Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux

2. Dont use patents to stifle free software [1][2]

3. Port Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office to Linux and offer immunity for projects like Wine for reimplementing Windows API. Do not change APIs unreasonably to sabotage these projects. Let Windows compete on its own merit ( speed, performance, stabilty, backwards compatibility, hackability etc ).

[1]http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2007/05/microsoft-235-pat...

[2]http://www.zdnet.com/article/310-microsoft-patents-used-in-a...

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About 1 I kind of understand, you're installing/upgrading so something might be broken and it overrides this (not sure how it works with UEFI though), there should be an option "don't override the MBR" (or the modern equivalent)

But yeah, I am skeptical about this "New Microsoft"

1. Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux

I hadn't used Windows for about 12 years when it came on a new PC that I bought. I installed Steam and played games on it for about 2 months. Then when I upgraded from 8.0 to 8.1 it offered to repair one of my Linux partitions. Thats nice I thought.

It was really inconvenient when it overwrote my root linux partition and I had to waste an hour repartitioning and replacing Windows with something a little less aggressive.

Maybe in another 12 years things will have improved and I will be able to try it again...

> Port Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office to Linux

Linux is not a platform.

At best, Microsoft can port IE and Office to Ubuntu or Red Hat. But "Linux in General" is a horrible misnomer that needs to be eradicated.

Just because a piece of software works in one configuration of Linux does NOT mean it will work on other configurations. "Linux" is a horrible platform. You have to build on top of actual platforms (ie: Red Hat, CentOS, Debian, Ubuntu).

Beyond that, IE is DirectX rendered now IIRC. Porting IE implies porting DirectX, which will probably never happen. (DirectX relies on specific hardware drivers...).

> 1. Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux

It does, as long as you use UEFI boot, since this was specifically designed to allow clean booting from multiple OSes without creating conflicts.

If you're using legacy MBR/BIOS boot, supporting multibooting involves so many unreliable hacks, you can't realistically expect it to be supported by anyone.

Except every linux distro on earth...ever. Its sufficient just to NOT overwrite the mbr with your own bootloader if you see one is already there. Pretending this is hard is pretty disingenuous.

And how do you separate a "good" Linux/BSD Bootloader from random bits? What about private/custom grub-builds?

A single false positive here means a valid windows 8 install will fail to boot because a Bootloader was not written.

Do you think Microsoft is willing to take that risk?

Just leave MBR behind. UEFI does what you want. UEFI is nice.

Except for that whole "secure boot" business, where I have to half-install a fedora or Ubuntu install in order to get a proper signed key, so that I can wipe the drive and install gentoo or arch.

Secure boot is optional in the UEFI spec. You don't need to enable it if you don't want it.

And a compliant UEFI firmware should let you provide your own trust keys. Which by default makes it more reputable and secure than the internet CA-model everyone else is willing to put their trust in.

So tell me what your problem is. I'm genuinely curious.

Seems windows 10 is making secure boot mandatory. This means my problem is Microsoft is still playing the "embrace/extend/extinguish" game as usual, and the Halloween Documents are still totally relevant.

Please show me a compliant UEFI firmware that allows for custom keys. I'm genuinely curious.

Your claim was new to me so I did some very basic checking and found this:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/03/window...

What it says is not that it must be mandatory, but that being able to disable secure-boot is not a requirement. It's clearly sneaky, but it's not the same.

Note also that nowhere does it say that you can no longer install your own keys.

Some parts are what I'd call "sneaky", but this Windows 10 spec is not hijacking the X86 architecture to run Windows only, like you hint at either.

As for adding your own keys, I only have Intel mobos with UEFI and I've seen menus for adding them. This article from the intel forums seems to give you some leads if you want to go looking:

https://communities.intel.com/community/itpeernetwork/vproex...

Thanks for the link. That's the first time I've seen an implementation. And I've looked at a bunch of devices from different vendors.

Unfortunately, this means that i can have my own key if I avoid tablets and laptops, and only build my own hardware. I'll still have to use Canonical or RedHat's (possibly NSA/GCHQ-compromised) keys in order to have portable computing.

So how do you know the current bootloader will actually boot your new Windows installation? You don't. Now you have people confused why they can't install windows. This is a very bad "solution".

> Port Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office to Linux

Office maybe, but is there any demand for IE on Linux?

Web development, but you can try to use a few virtual machines to run IE 11 & 9

Wouldn't you still need to use VMs even if IE were available for Linux? Aren't sites supposed to be tested for browsers and platforms? E.g., a site may show an undesired behaviour under Chrome for Windows but not under Chrome for Linux (or vice-versa).

N.B. not a web dev, so please put me straight if I'm wrong.

You can actually just go grab the wms from MS of modern.ie the only limitations is that they can't run for more than one hour.

If the new IE any good, I'd be willing to try it on my Linux box.

Both times I booted in to Windows over the last ~18 months were to apply for Visas on sites that wouldn't work properly with either Firefox, Chrome or Opera in Linux. With most sites I'd just move on, but for a visa application with no viable alternative...

Sure, that's a problem that ought to be addressed by those sites, but it's still a possible use case.

If you assume the goal of the IE team is to just have as many users as possible then porting IE would be a huge step forward. If you use anything in addition to Windows then you're going probably going to limit your browser choices to ones that are cross platform which right now basically means Chrome or Firefox.

I'd say the Windows API is rather stable, to be honest. Mostly because MS is big on backwards compatibility. Is this really a problem for WINE?

> Do not change APIs unreasonably to sabotage these projects

Forget about Windows. That's a malicious thing they've always done with Office, even after promising to adhere to a "standard". It's so ridiculous even their own different Office versions aren't properly compatible with that "standard".

That's because it supports a ton of features which the standard doesn't mention. I'd imagine the standard has more to do with being able to make documents Office can handle with a subset of its features than enabling feature parity.

Off-topic, but have you figured out a solution to your first point.

I went deep into the rabbit hole and learned a whole lot on how booting my computers works at the time but I gave up and have to spam F8 when I turn on my computer now so I don't boot into Windows.

I had to reinstall GRUB uefi. Afterwards, I followed the advice from here : http://askubuntu.com/a/371589

Edit : Care to explain why this is getting downvoted ?

Thank you so much for the link. Running bcdedit on Windows did the trick. Who knew it was possible to let Windows fix the issue it caused.

I can now finally press my power button and walk away knowing it'll boot into Ubuntu in peace.

It sounds like you have two different hard drives. You should change your boot drive in BIOS.

I don't think they're courting the hackers. I think they've realized they're on a slow and steady path towards irrelevancy.

They have the office market. Yay. I bet that's growing at, what, 2% a year? Maybe? They have home pc's as well. Great.

But where it matters? Mobile, cloud, start-ups - all the new, cool, exciting, future stuff - they're basically absent.

And the new CEO knows that.

So they open-sourced .NET, the compilers, everything. First-class support for OS X and Linux. Is that because they like it? No, I doubt it. It's to stay alive and relevant in the next 10-15 years.

For me, #1 would be to allow Metro apps for Windows to be developed outside the App Store.

4. Don't ram a half-baked document format through ISO.

> Windows playing well with other OS on my laptop. I updated my Windows 8 to Windows 8.1 and I could no longer boot into Linux

You don't seriously think that was anything but a consequence of your specific setup, right? Dual booting with Windows 8.1 and Linux is most certainly possible.

> You don't seriously think that was anything but a consequence of your specific setup, right? Dual booting with Windows 8.1 and Linux is most certainly possible.

Yet is is. It is a consequence of the fact that windows overwrites things like the master boot record that live outside of it's partition on a hard drive without asking the user first.

Yes dual booting is possible. But as always installing windows second makes everything else unbootable (until fixed).

>without asking the user first

You must be kidding.

Why would she be?

Care to actually write a small bit about your opinion so that we can have a discussion?

Well last time I checked operating systems don't install themselves, a user has to download the setup or insert a disk and there are quite a few user agreement prompts before anything installs.

Yes, but the thing is that, when you do this with many other OSes, they install in a manner such that the other OSes on the machine still work. There's no warning that this isn't the case with Windows.

>Yes dual booting is possible. But as always installing windows second makes everything else unbootable (until fixed).

Yeah, I'm 100% sure you fucked up. Windows' bootloader offers me either Windows 8.1 or starting GRUB, from which I can start Linux.

Of course, the first option on Grub is Windows and the first option in Windows is Gub so I can get a nice bootloop.

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