8 ms·

I highly doubt these Linux games will amount to much for Microsoft, but it's fun to watch. Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems

by diebir 11y ago

I highly doubt these Linux games will amount to much for Microsoft, but it's fun to watch. Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer's mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono/open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well). MS is lagging behind the Java ecosystem by 20 years. It's fun to watch them scramble and try this and that, but I suspect that the train has left the station long ago. I think Oracle Linux has been a joke. I don't know anyone in their right mind using that. RH or CentOS, yes. Oracle Linux? Most IT professionals will pay extra to have nothing to do with Oracle. Heck, I am considering risking moving to OpenJDK, just so I have nothing of Oracle in sight.

MichaelGG 11y ago
With MS supporting CLR on Linux, I don't see what the problem is. They now have a limited IDE and runtime support for cross-platform. FWIW I've used Mono in production on Linux in telecom, and it's handled many billions of messages over the years. With F# nonetheless. Apart from a few rare issues here and there it's been a great experience.
- Scarbutt 11y ago
  IMO the point still stands, in general it will be years before the CLR and .NET native is considered a serious alternative to Java/JVM on linux, although microsoft is doing a great effort, so who knows how long real adoption will take, I guess it can get closer to Golang, adoption wise, than to Java, the introduction of Swift is not going to make it easier for them either.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  >limited IDE and runtime support Key word: limited I don't believe MS will ever fully support Linux 100%. They will always make their software tooling more compatible with their OS even though they have the ability to create software for Linux that is on par with the Windows counterparts. Microsoft purposely leaves their "cross-platform" software gimped out so that anyone who does decide to take up .NET on Linux will eventually want to switch to Windows because Microsofts support for Linux is half assed. Hopefully most people can see through the obvious MS shilling that's been going on lately. Some people seem to believe the "new bash" coming to windows is somehow a game changer and that this means they no longer need Linux. Please. Setting up any serious development process in this Frankenstein OS is going to be a nightmare and it's going to break every tool chain conceivable.
  - tychuz 11y ago
    JetBrains will be releasing C# IDE - https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/ https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/ Right now it's not much with C# in cross platform development (ASP.NET is in total flux, it's not even renamed to Core 1.0, Rider IDE still not released), but soon™.
- bmurphy1976 11y ago
  FWIW we spent years on mono as well, constantly chasing performance issues, incompatibilities, stupid bugs, race conditions and uncountable segfaults. All with code that worked perfectly fine on Windows (but we had to run on Linux due to cost and integration necessities). We are about 70% of the way through a complete Go rewrite and I couldn't be happier with the outcome. For once, things just work as expected, on Windows, Linux and OSX. I'm glad Microsoft is finally doing something to make .NET something other than a shit show on Linux, but we needed that 3 years ago, not 3 years from now. Alas, too little too late for us anyway. I hope it works out better for others, but the ship has already sailed.
Spooky23 11y ago
Oracle doesn't care what you think at all, good or bad. If you hate them, they undermine you by making you sound like a bumpkin. If you love them, they undermine you by using you as a spy. They influence your CEO/CIO/board/governor/mayor/general/owner/investor. A few years back, they convinced some dope in the State of California to buy a named user license for every resident of the state.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- robterrell 11y ago
  More info please. I'm a resident of CA. I have a named Oracle seat paid for by the state? How do I get my login credentials???
- tominous 11y ago
  That makes no sense. With about 40 million residents, the government of California would need to have approximately 1.6 million CPU cores dedicated to Oracle before named-user worked out cheaper than per-core licensing. Either that or there's a special deal unrelated to Oracle's normal licensing price list, in which case who cares what the licensing metric is?
x5n1 11y ago
I begrudgingly watch these games, and I hate all the ooohhhs and aahhhs at stupid Microsoft integrations with Linux. But this too shall pass. If Microsoft was to put out a free version of Windows say Windows Developer Edition, I would happily dual boot to it. That's my #1 gripe with Windows their shit licensing schemes and activations. Other than that, this does not make me happy. All this embrace extend extinguish is not going to play with me. But I know a lot of younger developers, just starting out, will be taken away by it rather than properly switching to Linux or other *nix as they should. But what can you do about that.
- m_fayer 11y ago
  That's a beautiful lawn you got there.
  - deepnet 11y ago
    It is a common's green, everyone can freely picnic there.
- zxcvcxz 11y ago
  Frankenstein OS (Linux + Windows) is going to break every dev tool chain you can think of. I don't see how anyone in their right mind would think Frankenstein OS is a good dev platform. I guess if you don't mind having an unstable system and enjoy searching google for "how to get xyz to work in bash windows linux" and finding absolutely no answers on stackoverflow then Frankenstein OS is good for you. If you want to find and squash completely new types of bugs that you aren't use to dealing with, then use Frankenstein OS. For those of us who just want a system that works and is reliable then we should stay away from Frankenstein OS.
  - mappu 11y ago
    >Frankenstein OS (Linux + Windows) is going to break every dev tool chain you can think of. I don't see how anyone in their right mind would think Frankenstein OS is a good dev platform. It's a binary-identical linux userspace, and it (appears as if it) has the same linux kernel. There will be some rare edge cases (see: mounting a case-sensitive POSIX filesystem on top of the case-preserving NTFS) but aside from that i envisage lxcore.sys being extremely compatible. Certainly a better dev platform than my current cygwin/windows/samba/debian-in-hyper-v setup for mixed OS development. Why do you think things will break?
dantiberian 11y ago
I think this is one of the destructive legacies of Internet Explorer. Many web developers (including myself) got fed up with IE, and that rage transferred onto Microsoft.
- ZeroGravitas 11y ago
  They intentionally tried to destroy the web, because it didn't suit their monopoly. That rage was well and truly earned by Microsoft.
  - justinlardinois 11y ago
    > They intentionally tried to destroy the web What are you referring to?
    - oblio 11y ago
      The web as envisioned early on by Netscape was supposed to have apps much sooner than it did. Once Microsoft swept aside Netscape by killing their business it basically froze development on IE. They made one mistake: XMLHttpRequest (probably the last big feature added to IE before the freeze) and we got lucky with Firefox.
      - ams6110 11y ago
        Netscape's vision was java applets though, right? The only thing I can remember that was worse in a browser than Flash. Perhaps we owe Microsoft some thanks.
        eganist 11y ago
        ActiveX. Don't ever let yourself forget ActiveX.
        carey 11y ago
        XMLHTTP was originally an ActiveX technology, though, from the Outlook team; it wasn't originally developed as part of IE. I guess it wasn't until Mozilla and Apple added a native version that it really took off.
Eridrus 11y ago
> Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer's mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono/open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well). The JVM has certainly had a lot of time to mature, and certainly has a fairly entrenched position, but when you look at all the developers who were willing to hop on board the Go train with no supporting infrastructure, it's pretty clear that support from powerful entities can go a long way.
- tambourine_man 11y ago
  Or appreciating good ideas, being excited with them and bored with the old ways.
- levemi 11y ago
  > but when you look at all the developers who were willing to hop on board the Go train with no supporting infrastructure I think that speaks more towards engineers that like shiny new things that do something in particular in a new way which then help drum up excitement and an ecosystem around it. C# is a very good language, but there's nothing new or shiny about it now. The tools and ecosystem around it are well established and managed by Microsoft and often involve spending some money. The excitement for new things like Go, Rust or Julia etc are really not a signal for new support for C#. I think if anything Microsoft should continue their new support for llvm[0]. Windows is a fine operating system, I'd like to use it to do development and the closer I can get to developing things that then run on linux the easier my life will get and the more likely it will be that devs use Windows. [0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/12/04/clang-with-microsoft-codegen-in-vs-2015-update-1/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/12/04/clang-wit...
  - Corrado 11y ago
    You know, people say that Windows is a fine operating system, but I find it constantly annoying and terribly inefficient. Maybe it because I know there are other, better things, or maybe it's because I use it "incorrectly". As a desktop OS the GUI constantly annoys me with tiny little cuts; you can't manipulate file names properly as it disallows names starting with a period (among other things), the UI is terribly inconsistent, the console(s) don't interact with the mouse well, etc. I know they are small things, but they really add up to some serious frustration with the OS as a whole. As a server OS it's not much better. I can't find a way to force a NTP sync; things that should be simple (creating a service with logon rights) takes 10's of lines of PowerShell; you can't use SSL with the core image because it requires IE, which is not included in the core image. Its full of little surprises which make it difficult to understand (.../windows32 == 64bit, .../SysWOW64 == 32bit). It takes 10 minutes to fully boot a Windows instance in AWS, which is mostly the result of how large it is, and the fact that it has to recompile its DCOM DLLs (or some such thing). I know that no OS is perfect, but Windows has had years and years to mature and a company with billions of $$$ and thousands of developers behind it. I expect more.
devonkim 11y ago
There's a handful of Fortune 100s I've seen that are on Oracle Linux. They've mostly gotten deals through their existing relationships with Oracle and/or Sun. These places have typically been heavy on both Solaris / SunOS as well as on Oracle. Trying to develop a new relationship with RedHat to that level would not have been possible politically, so Oracle Linux it is.
sremani 11y ago
There is absolutely no basis for arguing .net being behind Java, JVM or the ecosystem by 20 years. I am sure you are conflating the library advantage that Java has enjoyed. .Net is clearly going to give Java ecosystem fits in less than 5 years.
- newjersey 11y ago
  Oracle is clearly doing all it can to close the gap with all the FUD but it might not be enough to help .NET because for what it is worth in my opinion, Microsoft appears inconsistent. Are they betting the farm on Azure yet? Do they still see Windows as a profit center? Can they afford to give away developer tools for free as in free beer with no strings attached? Can they give away everything I'd need to run an Azure stack without paying them a single cent? I don't know but if they can't, I don't see how we can get Java teams and projects to switch over. Microsoft has a lot of cash but they don't have unlimited cash and it sort of matters in the long term. I hope the answers to the questions are yes. I wish Microsoft became to Windows what Red Hat is to Linux but as they say if wishes were fishes...
  - sremani 11y ago
    The first wave would involve enough tools for already .net projects to invade into Linux land. If this wave is not big, then Microsoft will have to try harder to convince Java devs to make the switch. But I am sure, there are many like my employer who make fintech products that with some work expand on to the Linux Server side very motivated to be part of the first wave. More Java developers, I would be observing how many .Net shops expand their products and services to Linux.
hoodoof 11y ago
>> MS is lagging behind the Java ecosystem by 20 years This statement lacks credibility.

by diebir 11y ago

MichaelGG 11y ago

With MS supporting CLR on Linux, I don't see what the problem is. They now have a limited IDE and runtime support for cross-platform. FWIW I've used Mono in production on Linux in telecom, and it's handled many billions of messages over the years. With F# nonetheless. Apart from a few rare issues here and there it's been a great experience.

Scarbutt 11y ago
IMO the point still stands, in general it will be years before the CLR and .NET native is considered a serious alternative to Java/JVM on linux, although microsoft is doing a great effort, so who knows how long real adoption will take, I guess it can get closer to Golang, adoption wise, than to Java, the introduction of Swift is not going to make it easier for them either.
zxcvcxz 11y ago
>limited IDE and runtime support Key word: limited I don't believe MS will ever fully support Linux 100%. They will always make their software tooling more compatible with their OS even though they have the ability to create software for Linux that is on par with the Windows counterparts. Microsoft purposely leaves their "cross-platform" software gimped out so that anyone who does decide to take up .NET on Linux will eventually want to switch to Windows because Microsofts support for Linux is half assed. Hopefully most people can see through the obvious MS shilling that's been going on lately. Some people seem to believe the "new bash" coming to windows is somehow a game changer and that this means they no longer need Linux. Please. Setting up any serious development process in this Frankenstein OS is going to be a nightmare and it's going to break every tool chain conceivable.
- tychuz 11y ago
  JetBrains will be releasing C# IDE - https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/ https://www.jetbrains.com/rider/ Right now it's not much with C# in cross platform development (ASP.NET is in total flux, it's not even renamed to Core 1.0, Rider IDE still not released), but soon™.
bmurphy1976 11y ago
FWIW we spent years on mono as well, constantly chasing performance issues, incompatibilities, stupid bugs, race conditions and uncountable segfaults. All with code that worked perfectly fine on Windows (but we had to run on Linux due to cost and integration necessities). We are about 70% of the way through a complete Go rewrite and I couldn't be happier with the outcome. For once, things just work as expected, on Windows, Linux and OSX. I'm glad Microsoft is finally doing something to make .NET something other than a shit show on Linux, but we needed that 3 years ago, not 3 years from now. Alas, too little too late for us anyway. I hope it works out better for others, but the ship has already sailed.

Spooky23 11y ago

Oracle doesn't care what you think at all, good or bad. If you hate them, they undermine you by making you sound like a bumpkin. If you love them, they undermine you by using you as a spy. They influence your CEO/CIO/board/governor/mayor/general/owner/investor. A few years back, they convinced some dope in the State of California to buy a named user license for every resident of the state.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
robterrell 11y ago
More info please. I'm a resident of CA. I have a named Oracle seat paid for by the state? How do I get my login credentials???
tominous 11y ago
That makes no sense. With about 40 million residents, the government of California would need to have approximately 1.6 million CPU cores dedicated to Oracle before named-user worked out cheaper than per-core licensing. Either that or there's a special deal unrelated to Oracle's normal licensing price list, in which case who cares what the licensing metric is?

x5n1 11y ago

I begrudgingly watch these games, and I hate all the ooohhhs and aahhhs at stupid Microsoft integrations with Linux. But this too shall pass. If Microsoft was to put out a free version of Windows say Windows Developer Edition, I would happily dual boot to it. That's my #1 gripe with Windows their shit licensing schemes and activations. Other than that, this does not make me happy. All this embrace extend extinguish is not going to play with me. But I know a lot of younger developers, just starting out, will be taken away by it rather than properly switching to Linux or other *nix as they should. But what can you do about that.

m_fayer 11y ago
That's a beautiful lawn you got there.
- deepnet 11y ago
  It is a common's green, everyone can freely picnic there.
zxcvcxz 11y ago
Frankenstein OS (Linux + Windows) is going to break every dev tool chain you can think of. I don't see how anyone in their right mind would think Frankenstein OS is a good dev platform. I guess if you don't mind having an unstable system and enjoy searching google for "how to get xyz to work in bash windows linux" and finding absolutely no answers on stackoverflow then Frankenstein OS is good for you. If you want to find and squash completely new types of bugs that you aren't use to dealing with, then use Frankenstein OS. For those of us who just want a system that works and is reliable then we should stay away from Frankenstein OS.
- mappu 11y ago
  >Frankenstein OS (Linux + Windows) is going to break every dev tool chain you can think of. I don't see how anyone in their right mind would think Frankenstein OS is a good dev platform. It's a binary-identical linux userspace, and it (appears as if it) has the same linux kernel. There will be some rare edge cases (see: mounting a case-sensitive POSIX filesystem on top of the case-preserving NTFS) but aside from that i envisage lxcore.sys being extremely compatible. Certainly a better dev platform than my current cygwin/windows/samba/debian-in-hyper-v setup for mixed OS development. Why do you think things will break?

dantiberian 11y ago

I think this is one of the destructive legacies of Internet Explorer. Many web developers (including myself) got fed up with IE, and that rage transferred onto Microsoft.

ZeroGravitas 11y ago
They intentionally tried to destroy the web, because it didn't suit their monopoly. That rage was well and truly earned by Microsoft.
- justinlardinois 11y ago
  > They intentionally tried to destroy the web What are you referring to?
  - oblio 11y ago
    The web as envisioned early on by Netscape was supposed to have apps much sooner than it did. Once Microsoft swept aside Netscape by killing their business it basically froze development on IE. They made one mistake: XMLHttpRequest (probably the last big feature added to IE before the freeze) and we got lucky with Firefox.
    - ams6110 11y ago
      Netscape's vision was java applets though, right? The only thing I can remember that was worse in a browser than Flash. Perhaps we owe Microsoft some thanks.
      - eganist 11y ago
        ActiveX. Don't ever let yourself forget ActiveX.
        carey 11y ago
        XMLHTTP was originally an ActiveX technology, though, from the Outlook team; it wasn't originally developed as part of IE. I guess it wasn't until Mozilla and Apple added a native version that it really took off.

Eridrus 11y ago

> Their fundamental problem is (which they realize pretty well i seems) that they have lost developer's mind share. .NET may be a fine ecosystem and C# may be a great language but in all practical senses it is Windows-only. All these Mono/open source CLR games are not even the slightest blip on the radar for a practical day-to-day backend operations running cross platform (which is mostly Linux, but Windows as well). The JVM has certainly had a lot of time to mature, and certainly has a fairly entrenched position, but when you look at all the developers who were willing to hop on board the Go train with no supporting infrastructure, it's pretty clear that support from powerful entities can go a long way.

tambourine_man 11y ago
Or appreciating good ideas, being excited with them and bored with the old ways.
levemi 11y ago
> but when you look at all the developers who were willing to hop on board the Go train with no supporting infrastructure I think that speaks more towards engineers that like shiny new things that do something in particular in a new way which then help drum up excitement and an ecosystem around it. C# is a very good language, but there's nothing new or shiny about it now. The tools and ecosystem around it are well established and managed by Microsoft and often involve spending some money. The excitement for new things like Go, Rust or Julia etc are really not a signal for new support for C#. I think if anything Microsoft should continue their new support for llvm[0]. Windows is a fine operating system, I'd like to use it to do development and the closer I can get to developing things that then run on linux the easier my life will get and the more likely it will be that devs use Windows. [0] https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/12/04/clang-with-microsoft-codegen-in-vs-2015-update-1/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/12/04/clang-wit...
- Corrado 11y ago
  You know, people say that Windows is a fine operating system, but I find it constantly annoying and terribly inefficient. Maybe it because I know there are other, better things, or maybe it's because I use it "incorrectly". As a desktop OS the GUI constantly annoys me with tiny little cuts; you can't manipulate file names properly as it disallows names starting with a period (among other things), the UI is terribly inconsistent, the console(s) don't interact with the mouse well, etc. I know they are small things, but they really add up to some serious frustration with the OS as a whole. As a server OS it's not much better. I can't find a way to force a NTP sync; things that should be simple (creating a service with logon rights) takes 10's of lines of PowerShell; you can't use SSL with the core image because it requires IE, which is not included in the core image. Its full of little surprises which make it difficult to understand (.../windows32 == 64bit, .../SysWOW64 == 32bit). It takes 10 minutes to fully boot a Windows instance in AWS, which is mostly the result of how large it is, and the fact that it has to recompile its DCOM DLLs (or some such thing). I know that no OS is perfect, but Windows has had years and years to mature and a company with billions of $$$ and thousands of developers behind it. I expect more.

devonkim 11y ago

There's a handful of Fortune 100s I've seen that are on Oracle Linux. They've mostly gotten deals through their existing relationships with Oracle and/or Sun. These places have typically been heavy on both Solaris / SunOS as well as on Oracle. Trying to develop a new relationship with RedHat to that level would not have been possible politically, so Oracle Linux it is.

sremani 11y ago

There is absolutely no basis for arguing .net being behind Java, JVM or the ecosystem by 20 years. I am sure you are conflating the library advantage that Java has enjoyed. .Net is clearly going to give Java ecosystem fits in less than 5 years.

newjersey 11y ago
Oracle is clearly doing all it can to close the gap with all the FUD but it might not be enough to help .NET because for what it is worth in my opinion, Microsoft appears inconsistent. Are they betting the farm on Azure yet? Do they still see Windows as a profit center? Can they afford to give away developer tools for free as in free beer with no strings attached? Can they give away everything I'd need to run an Azure stack without paying them a single cent? I don't know but if they can't, I don't see how we can get Java teams and projects to switch over. Microsoft has a lot of cash but they don't have unlimited cash and it sort of matters in the long term. I hope the answers to the questions are yes. I wish Microsoft became to Windows what Red Hat is to Linux but as they say if wishes were fishes...
- sremani 11y ago
  The first wave would involve enough tools for already .net projects to invade into Linux land. If this wave is not big, then Microsoft will have to try harder to convince Java devs to make the switch. But I am sure, there are many like my employer who make fintech products that with some work expand on to the Linux Server side very motivated to be part of the first wave. More Java developers, I would be observing how many .Net shops expand their products and services to Linux.

hoodoof 11y ago

>> MS is lagging behind the Java ecosystem by 20 years This statement lacks credibility.