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My prediction for 2019: Microsoft announces Microsoft Linux, with many Microsoft store apps working via a compatibility layer. Office for Linux coming early 202
by Yuioup 8y ago
My prediction for 2019: Microsoft announces Microsoft Linux, with many Microsoft store apps working via a compatibility layer. Office for Linux coming early 2021.
- xarope 8y agoMS lDOS: the New linux distro for 2019?
- snacktaster 8y agoI actually thought for the longest time that they would eventually acquire red hat. But now I'm thinking it will be canonical
- jrs95 8y agoNow that IBM bought Red Hat I think that would actually be good for Linux.
- jimnotgym 8y agoI can imagine MS wanting control of a Linux server edition for Azure, and Canonical looks like a good target. Not least as canonical seem to have been preparing for a sale. I suppose the real question is how they will treat desktop Linux. I can imagine they would be interested in it as a development environment for their Azure Linux, but less interested in supporting it as a competitor to Windows.
- jefurii 8y agoOne step closer to Debian...
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- chiph 8y agoI wonder if they still hold the rights to the Xenix name? Looks like no - the product was sold to SCO in 1987. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
- jrs95 8y agoWhy would they have any interest in Linux on the desktop? I could see them having their own distro, but I feel like that would have to be geared towards servers.
- phire 8y agoMicrosoft have shown a tendency in the past to unifying their server, workstation, desktop and even phone operating systems. I don't know if they will keep that tendency (plus, it's more likely to lead to them sticking with Windows on servers) However, if they do move towards Linux on servers they will naturally explore Linux for workstations too.
- boogiewoogie 8y agoCan't believe I'm saying this but I think MS could own Apple if they took on Apple in any programming realm outside of objective c/Swift if they embraced Linux desktop.
- jrs95 8y agoUnified frontend development with .NET is their big opportunity for this IMO. Something like Xamarin Forms but a lot more optimized like Flutter and supporting mobile, desktop, and browsers would be incredible. Right now .NET seems pretty unpopular but a really strong front end use case could reverse that.
- sjwright 8y agoIf their prediction is that if Linux starts getting a share of locked-down corporate desktops (think insurance companies, warehouses, big retail, etc) it would make sense to be playing in that field, given that it's a familiar name for people transitioning from tired old Windows XP Embedded or similar. It would be very clever for Microsoft to start offering Office 365 for Linux but only support it on their own distro. And it's understandable; getting that bucket of ugly bolts to work on Linux would be an epic hack job and probably would never be particularly stable on random distros.
- 8y ago
- adrr 8y agoWhy would they do that? Linux desktop has no penetration into the market. It would be a big investment to capture an additional 1% market share. I can see MS porting all their server apps(MSSQL, Exchange, etc) to run on linux since Linux is dominating the server market and it would be a significant opportunity for them.
- btgeekboy 8y agoSQL Server's already been ported and made available.
- dc_gregory 8y agoIt works quite well too. As I understand it, SQLServer itself is effectively running on top of its own "OS" like layer (even on windows), so porting cleanly was made significantly easier.
- statictype 8y agoHow is it performance wise? Is there any advantage to running it on Linux (except maybe the cost of a Windows license which is probably trivial compared to the cost of Sql Server itself)
- cptskippy 8y agoI haven't seen benchmarks but I would guess that there isn't going to be much of a performance difference. It's like comparing the performance of your VM on different hypervisors, unless something is very wrong you won't see much difference. As the OP indicated, MS SQL has it's own facilities for managing memory and disk I/O. It basically asks for all the resources from the OS and then does everything itself internally. I'm exaggerating obviously but it does try to avoid costly calls to the OS whenever and however possible which is why it was so easily ported to Linux.
- din-9 8y agoThe Docker images are smaller for Linux for one. Our team use the Linux version in tests during builds just for that. We are relying that Microsoft manage to keep the two versions close enough that it's meaningful.
- petecox 8y agoA few weeks ago MS suspended development of Office for UWP, so unlikely.
- iMerNibor 8y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18097569 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18097569 discussion for that, in case anyone else was curious
- satysin 8y agoI don’t see Microsoft releasing a desktop Linux but I can see them releasing a Microsoft Azure Linux distro. Linux is already massive on Azure so it makes a lot of sense from a support POV. Whether they go with their own version or just buy a distributor (Ubuntu for example) is an interesting question though.
- exikyut 8y agoEep, MS buying Canonical. With GitHub, I can't even sweepingly dismiss the idea.
- bpye 8y agoAt least they can kill Launchpad then right? I can't be the only person that hates it.
- gmueckl 8y agoMS buying Canonical would be an epic irony given how Mark Shuttleworth promoted Ubuntu at the beginning and how he wrote Bug #1 ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 ).
- sebazzz 8y agoThat bug only affects 2450 people. That's ironic. Still, I don't think Microsoft would have a Linux distribution itself, for consumers, the cloud and related services is the current focus for Microsoft.
- SwellJoe 8y agoThat doesn't make any business sense for Microsoft. They might do a server fork of RHEL for their cloud offerings (as Amazon has done, very poorly, for AWS), but desktop? That'd be nuts. It would just lend an air of respectability to an OS that still has no traction on the desktop.
- Immortalin 8y agoI will bet that MSFT is going to embrace and extinguish Red Hat's position in the corporate Linux market.
- cies 8y agoMS vs IBM once again :)
- wwice 8y agoMaybe MS Android? That will make more sense.
- oropolo 8y agoMS version of Fuchsia is far more likely.
- Alex3917 8y agoHaving used OS X for the last 15 years, a good Microsoft Linux is probably the only thing that could conceivably get me to switch to either Microsoft or Linux. I don't think it will happen, but it's a good idea.
- MR4D 8y agoNo need. Ms office is being ported to the browser. Once that’s done and it runs on chromium or Firefox, then all they have to do is test /fix it on the Linux versions of those browsers. I played with it this summer and some of it actually works!
- techntoke 8y agoThis sounds absolutely awful. Electron is much slower and running Excel queries in JavaScript sounds like a terrible experience.
- fooker 8y agoElectron is, Wasm isn't. You won't be running it in javascript, it will be compiled just like desktop Excel.
- FridgeSeal 8y agoWasm is a improvement on JS for sure, but proper native compiled still thoroughly beats it.
- M_Bakhtiari 8y agoWhy wouldn't WASM implementations do native compilation? It's the norm for most modern language implementations nowadays, anything else would be silly.
- FridgeSeal 8y agoMany languages that compile to native are rolling out WASM support, or have it in their roadmaps, but there are many more architectures and formats that you have to handle in native land. I guess theoretically, if we agreed to support the main desktop and mobile/tablet OS’s and chip architectures, and then got everyone to use a standard compiler and IL format (LLVM maybe?) then you might get some of the way, but that would be a lot of work (cool if it happened though...)
- est 8y ago2018: IBM bought Redhat 2019: Microsoft bought Ubuntu
- Zhenya 8y agoEmbrace Extend Extinguish
- pknopf 8y agoReally though, how would you extinguish Ubuntu? GPL? It doesn't seem possible.
- carlmr 8y agoInstead of taking away, which you can't do with GPL you can always push things that cause problems. You could make Ubuntu terrible enough that people stop using it.
- rakoo 8y agoOr just stop developing it. A massive effort would be needed to mount another organization to continue development back again.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoAnd? There are plenty of other great distros out there. People can switch pretty painlessly. And I say that as a Ubuntu user.
- carlmr 8y agoI was just giving an example how you could destroy something if you were so inclined.
- simias 8y agoI don't see why MS would want to do that but it's perfectly possible to "extinguish" GPL projects, especially something as massive as an OS. You buy Ubuntu, put a lot of money into it, slowly force more and more of your MS software on people, make more and more third party software depend on it and eventually the effort needed to fork away and maintain "clean" version is simply too huge to be worth it. But of course in this case there are many other Linux distributions out there already so it shouldn't be a huge cause for concern.
- fergie 8y agoIts definitely coming, and its strange that so many people dont see it.
- Lio 8y agoThat seems unlikely to me but if I was playing fantasy CEO, I could imagine it going more like Windows grows better Linux compatibility to the point where they can push for Windows to be the primary development platform for Linux server software. Next stage after that would be to launch Azure Windows VMs that are competitive with a "real" Linux OS for running Linux binaries but with access to Microsoft GUI management tools. Once you depend on the GUI tools you depend on Microsoft as OS provider.
- oropolo 8y agoHow would that be different from Azure App Service for Linux, a Platform-as-a-Service offering that runs apps that require Linux instead of Windows?
- 72deluxe 8y agoA lot of the comments in this section appear completely uneducated about the Windows architecture eg COM/RPC and seem to think that it's just some high-level recompile to get it to run on another platform. It is unrealistic. Eg their compatability layer for their own apps Metro > Win32 is quite thin.