3 ms·

The Year of the linux desktop has come

by kalium-xyz 6y ago

smitty1e 6y ago
The sheer hilarity of Microsoft doing this work cannot be over-chuckled.
badRNG 6y ago
This is not a port of DirectX for Linux. This extends the functionality of WSL at the expense of desktop Linux.
squarefoot 6y ago
Actually, the year of Linux on the desktop will never come also thanks to this. Developers will find more comfortable writing Linux software on Windows (some already do); desktop users will have both worlds at hand without being forced to dual boot; Linux gamers won't have any reasons to keep using native Linux. Etc. I foresee in a not so distant future Microsoft integrating Windows UI elements and events hooks right into WSL, so that Linux developers too will be able to take advantage of the well standardized Windows UI; no more GTK or Qt frankenapps on Windows: just pure Linux code written on well known Windows RADs that access all windows internals while opening standard Windows dialogs and widgets. That would likely take away a huge part of Linux users.
- kalium-xyz 6y ago
  I disagree, i do not think that anyone would want to start running windows just to run the same software they already run while losing a chunk of control and support. However for the real argument, ask yourself: am I switching to using windows because of this?
  - dividedbyzero 6y ago
    I think it's the other way round: Do I still need to dual-boot or switch to Linux if this works? Or can I stick with Windows and have the best of both worlds?
    - kalium-xyz 6y ago
      I do not agree with it being "The best of both worlds". You do not control windows, it controls you. You must adapt to it being in your life and the choices made by its designers, this is both not secure and insanity for a software engineer to allow as an ongoing situation. Even dual booting windows will mean its updater will overwrite the partitioning table of your drive and hide any other OS you have installed, and as I understand this people only do it out of need and not out of want.
      - dividedbyzero 6y ago
        I'm using Apple products for my computing needs, and I din't particularly like Windows, but Apple tends to be even more opinionated and restrictive – and I really like that a lot. It's a big feature of the ecosystem that I get a lot of pretty good defaults that work quite well, even if they aren't what I'd build from scratch if I had to. That way I don't have to expend energy crafting everything myself and can spend that energy on whatever it is I wat to do with my computer. I don't care about the exact type of steel used for my hammer, just give me a reasonably good one and let me build that thing. In that way, MacOS currently is the best of both worlds for me – hassle-free if somewhat constrained, but I still have a UNIX underneath, iTerm, all sorts of utilities, and so on.
- bb88 6y ago
  > the year of Linux on the desktop will never come also thanks to this. I think you're giving MS too much credit here. Apple has one UI, and Windows has one UI (2 if you count windows in tablet mode). Linux has, what? 30? Quoth the Torvalds: "I still wish we were better at having a standardize desktop that goes across all the distributions… It’s not a kernel issue. It’s more of a personal annoyance how the fragmentation of the different vendors have, I think, held the desktop back a bit." Only recently did Ubuntu stop trying to push Unity and accepted Gnome, thereby reducing fragmentation by 1. https://itsfoss.com/desktop-linux-torvalds/ https://itsfoss.com/desktop-linux-torvalds/
  - _ph_ 6y ago
    I think that both Ubuntu and Red Hat family being based on Gnome is a good thing for Linux on the desktop, as there is a clear target for Linux GUI applications. I like the fact, that you still have the freedom to run any kind of desktop environment of Linux, but a stable default can only help Linux.
    - kalium-xyz 6y ago
      Its better if the competing ecosystem offers multiple stable defaults IMHO. Have you looked at KDE5? its amazing.
- Koshkin 6y ago
  Looks like a very realistic scenario. From this prospective Linux is slated to become just another part of the MinGW world, thus having nothing to do with Linux as a potential end in itself. I would not be surprised if one day WSL is advertised as "the best environment for Windows programming."

The Year of the linux desktop has come

smitty1e 6y ago

The sheer hilarity of Microsoft doing this work cannot be over-chuckled.

badRNG 6y ago

This is not a port of DirectX for Linux. This extends the functionality of WSL at the expense of desktop Linux.

squarefoot 6y ago

Actually, the year of Linux on the desktop will never come also thanks to this. Developers will find more comfortable writing Linux software on Windows (some already do); desktop users will have both worlds at hand without being forced to dual boot; Linux gamers won't have any reasons to keep using native Linux. Etc. I foresee in a not so distant future Microsoft integrating Windows UI elements and events hooks right into WSL, so that Linux developers too will be able to take advantage of the well standardized Windows UI; no more GTK or Qt frankenapps on Windows: just pure Linux code written on well known Windows RADs that access all windows internals while opening standard Windows dialogs and widgets. That would likely take away a huge part of Linux users.

kalium-xyz 6y ago
I disagree, i do not think that anyone would want to start running windows just to run the same software they already run while losing a chunk of control and support. However for the real argument, ask yourself: am I switching to using windows because of this?
- dividedbyzero 6y ago
  I think it's the other way round: Do I still need to dual-boot or switch to Linux if this works? Or can I stick with Windows and have the best of both worlds?
  - kalium-xyz 6y ago
    I do not agree with it being "The best of both worlds". You do not control windows, it controls you. You must adapt to it being in your life and the choices made by its designers, this is both not secure and insanity for a software engineer to allow as an ongoing situation. Even dual booting windows will mean its updater will overwrite the partitioning table of your drive and hide any other OS you have installed, and as I understand this people only do it out of need and not out of want.
    - dividedbyzero 6y ago
      I'm using Apple products for my computing needs, and I din't particularly like Windows, but Apple tends to be even more opinionated and restrictive – and I really like that a lot. It's a big feature of the ecosystem that I get a lot of pretty good defaults that work quite well, even if they aren't what I'd build from scratch if I had to. That way I don't have to expend energy crafting everything myself and can spend that energy on whatever it is I wat to do with my computer. I don't care about the exact type of steel used for my hammer, just give me a reasonably good one and let me build that thing. In that way, MacOS currently is the best of both worlds for me – hassle-free if somewhat constrained, but I still have a UNIX underneath, iTerm, all sorts of utilities, and so on.
bb88 6y ago
> the year of Linux on the desktop will never come also thanks to this. I think you're giving MS too much credit here. Apple has one UI, and Windows has one UI (2 if you count windows in tablet mode). Linux has, what? 30? Quoth the Torvalds: "I still wish we were better at having a standardize desktop that goes across all the distributions… It’s not a kernel issue. It’s more of a personal annoyance how the fragmentation of the different vendors have, I think, held the desktop back a bit." Only recently did Ubuntu stop trying to push Unity and accepted Gnome, thereby reducing fragmentation by 1. https://itsfoss.com/desktop-linux-torvalds/ https://itsfoss.com/desktop-linux-torvalds/
- _ph_ 6y ago
  I think that both Ubuntu and Red Hat family being based on Gnome is a good thing for Linux on the desktop, as there is a clear target for Linux GUI applications. I like the fact, that you still have the freedom to run any kind of desktop environment of Linux, but a stable default can only help Linux.
  - kalium-xyz 6y ago
    Its better if the competing ecosystem offers multiple stable defaults IMHO. Have you looked at KDE5? its amazing.
Koshkin 6y ago
Looks like a very realistic scenario. From this prospective Linux is slated to become just another part of the MinGW world, thus having nothing to do with Linux as a potential end in itself. I would not be surprised if one day WSL is advertised as "the best environment for Windows programming."