7 ms·

It keeps smelling a lot like embrace-extend-exterminate to me, and I keep not trusting WSL and advise people to use native Linux instead.

pjmlp 6y ago
Android, ChromeOS.....
mhh__ 6y ago
This is also why I try to use the GPL where possible. The move towards permissive licences puts the open source world in the hands of the companies as opposed to having a legal guarantee Open source is in at the moment but it might not be in the future (especially if we go all in on the cloud)
kyriakos 6y ago
This is more of "embrace" so the other steps are made obsolete. i.e. anyone running windows who ever considered trying linux will no longer be tempted since he would probably be able to do anything he wanted in windows either way.
- leppr 6y ago
  At least for me, a huge part of running a Linux OS is not just having access to some Linux-exclusive features, but not having Windows anti-features. WSL does not give you the non-intrusiveness, better performance, security, and privacy of a native Linux distro installation.
  - kyriakos 6y ago
    Depends on your perspective if you look at it from the perspective enterprise where Microsoft makes a lot of its money its a different story. The enterprise's IT department (which is probably already running Windows with Exchange, Office and the rest of MS stuff) faces the following issue: Developers want Linux tools, but to IT, it makes sense to keep all employees on Windows rather than give developers the option of Linux in order to make their management easier. With WSL the problem is solved, everyone is on Windows and developers get the tools they need.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    Linux is definitely better at privacy by leaps and bounds. But! Performance, no, there are use cases where windows outperforms, and others where Linux does. Security they're almost equal with Linux with a slight advantage if you keep your OS up to date and fire walled.
- rvz 6y ago
  Microsoft has created a GPU accelerated DirectX driver with Nvidia that only works on WSL 2. That is 'extend'. [0] I can't begin to imagine if Microsoft starts creating an entire Linux development suite of apps that 'requires' the presence of WSL and Windows installed. [0] https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda/wsl https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda/wsl
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Like Android and ChromeOS?
colesantiago 6y ago
Well, Windows is looking like the best "linux distro" at this point, despite it not being free, but mostly widely available to most people. EDIT: OK downvoters, so what's the most popular operating system that has Linux on it? pretty sure now it is Windows.
- littlestymaar 6y ago
  > what's the most popular operating system that has Linux on it? pretty sure now it is Windows It depends what you call “Linux” obviously, but android runs on top of a [forked] Linux Kernel.
  - stjohnswarts 6y ago
    It's still Linux kernel though. Linux is far more machines than windows. Embedded computers and phones are computers too. If you're talking desktops and laptops of course windows is in the lead by a huge amount.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Which is meaningless for userspace apps, as Linux kernel isn't part of official Android NDK stable APIs.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Android? And with Android x86 you can run it on PC's too. For people who just browse and check emails, it's a pretty decent alternative.
  - colesantiago 6y ago
    Numbers for people who run Android on PCs?
    - webmobdev 6y ago
      No idea. But Fosshub gives an idea about its popularity: - Android-x86: 8,352,565 Downloads - RemixOS: 4,623,342 Downloads - Phoenix OS: 180,898 Downloads - Openthos: 166,697 Downloads
dgellow 6y ago
How would the steps “extend” and “exterminate” look like in this situation? If Microsoft does anything people don’t like with WSL, people can move back to another Linux distribution, the cost is almost zero to move back to a Debian or Ubuntu.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Not if you let your workflow get intermingled with Linux (WSL) and windows because they worked well together and then suddenly Microsoft gets new management and decides to "take the company in a new direction"
bane 6y ago
The good news is that if Microsoft becomes Micro$oft of old, you can just move off Windows and back to just normal old Linux. At the moment though, this brings Linux and the entire Linux software ecosystem, a pretty good desktop experience, all of the Windows hardware/software ecosystem, and very good integration between the two environments. It's sort of everything that OS X/MacOS used to be with respect to a great GUI + nix CLI. But Apple has given about as much attention to the nix side of the software as I give the sewage lines that run under my house. With a Windows GUI and a CLI that is one of several distros. You get the benefits of the enormous hardware support Windows provides, but all of the opensource software the open source community provides. Who knows what the long-term strategy is, but it's suddenly made Windows useful as a development platform again, right when Apple has started taking their eyes off the ball and has been ignoring the *nix side of their platform for years.
- majewsky 6y ago
  > The good news is that if Microsoft becomes Micro$oft of old, you can just move off Windows and back to just normal old Linux. Not if driver developers say "we don't need to support Linux anymore, everyone uses WSL2 anyway".
  - bane 6y ago
    That is a good point.
    - kalium-xyz 6y ago
      That is EEE.
  - game_the0ry 6y ago
    > Not if driver developers say "we don't need to support Linux anymore, everyone uses WSL2 anyway". Disagree. The success of linux has been driven by open source enthusiasm, not corporate backing, so I doubt its demise will come from a corporation. And the momentum of OEMs offering linux out of the box (Dell, Lenovo, System76, Pinebook) seems to be growing, not shrinking. Linux is winning. Have some more optimism, my friends.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago
The big danger of WSL is in drivers. For many hardware vendors, driver development is a cost center. It they could just get away with writing a single Windows Driver and then rely on a Microsoft supplied WSL universal driver which just does pass through to the Windows driver, it would cut down on their development cost. With GPU pass through, Microsoft already has this type of model, where the graphics driver on the Linux side of WSL is just a thin shim that calls to the Windows GPU driver. In the future, I could see NVidia, making all their consumer GPU drivers like this, and reserving native Linux drivers for their professional GPUs, which would help them segment the market better.
- throwaway8941 6y ago
  As much as I like to crap on nvidia, they have supported a relatively high quality Linux driver when it barely registered as a desktop platform. Hell, they even have a FreeBSD driver.
bachmeier 6y ago
That view would have been reasonable 15 years ago. MS didn't embrace Linux because they want to be nice, but because they realized a desktop OS monopoly is completely useless in the mobile era. A big chunk of software developers prefer Mac or Linux. Work in the cloud is done on Linux. People use Windows at home/work because it's what they've been using for 25 years.
raesene9 6y ago
From a Microsoft perspective, this feels like damned if you do and damned if you don't. If they didn't embrance linux style tooling, they get told that they're anti-open source and that Macs will always be a better development environment when you're targeting Linux servers. If they do embrance Linux style tooling, they get told it's EEE all over again. I've been following the development of WSL, Terminal and VS Code. It doesn't strike me that this is some corporate EEE style policy, more it's a directive to make Windows as developer friendly as possible. There's quite possibly an ulterior motive here, but it's more "make deploying onto Azure the happy path" than anything else. WSL+VS Code+Terminal+Docker for Windows+Github == more business running their workloads on Azure == more money for Microsoft.
- Impossible 6y ago
  This is one of the more sane comments on this thread. There is a lot of paranoia about MS wanting to somehow "corrupt" Linux because some web developers are having IE6 flashbacks. Sure if it was still 1999 I'd be scared of that, but now Microsoft's biggest growth business is Azure, so this move is largely about supporting Azure usage, not about creating a weird Linux Windows hybrid to lock developers out of proper Linux distros. The rest all comes from MS being developer friendly, which has always been a part of their culture on the tools side
  - Gibbon1 6y ago
    Not to mention the uptake of proper linux desk top distro's is a rounding error in the big scheme of things. They need to worry more about Apple and Google. And Apple has done more to EEE Linux than Microsoft is going to do.
  - themacguffinman 6y ago
    That's a poor portrayal of EEE. Of course this move is largely about supporting Azure usage, it just supports Azure usage by locking developers out of proper Linux distros. When you use the proprietary DirectX extension in WSL, you're not developing for Linux anymore, you're developing for WSL, a proprietary package. And now that you're reliant on DirectX/WSL/Windows, what cloud provider are you going to pick? You see, the Azure Advantage (TM) is that only Microsoft knows how to run DirectX on Linux effectively, because only Microsoft can inspect and modify the code. The Azure Advantage (TM) is that only Microsoft has the proprietary rights for Windows, so Microsoft can charge their competitors anything they want while offering it on Azure at a (relatively) affordable price.
withinboredom 6y ago
To me, it feels like someone got stuck working at Microsoft that likes Linux better so they decided to write some code to make it happen as a side project. Then somebody noticed... it doesn’t feel planned to me. But now that person feels happy to be working on Linux at Microsoft.
est31 6y ago
Desktop Linux market share has been growing in past years among developers, just check the stack overflow surveys. This is MS fighting over that market share by providing an alternative. They don't do it to help Linux but to protect their own base line. For employees this means less ability to justify running Linux on developer boxes and having to run Windows like the rest of the company.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Nope they do this to cater for the "Linux developers" that buy Apple laptops instead of helping Linux OEMs.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
And the vast majority of people still do. Linux isn't going anywhere. Microsoft will get injected with the open source virus as well, it's almost inevitable.
threatofrain 6y ago
Embrace-extend-exterminate is an objective strategic risk which exists regardless of Microsoft's current executive culture. With Microsoft now controlling an important part of dev tooling, i.e. stuff like VSC, TS, Github, Azure, the risk is very real.
mmis1000 6y ago
It looks they are moving to subscription model now. The don't care whether they give software to you for free or not/which system are you using because they do earn more from subscriptions (azure, office 365, xbox game pass, whatever)

pjmlp 6y ago

Android, ChromeOS.....

mhh__ 6y ago

This is also why I try to use the GPL where possible. The move towards permissive licences puts the open source world in the hands of the companies as opposed to having a legal guarantee Open source is in at the moment but it might not be in the future (especially if we go all in on the cloud)

kyriakos 6y ago

This is more of "embrace" so the other steps are made obsolete. i.e. anyone running windows who ever considered trying linux will no longer be tempted since he would probably be able to do anything he wanted in windows either way.

leppr 6y ago
At least for me, a huge part of running a Linux OS is not just having access to some Linux-exclusive features, but not having Windows anti-features. WSL does not give you the non-intrusiveness, better performance, security, and privacy of a native Linux distro installation.
- kyriakos 6y ago
  Depends on your perspective if you look at it from the perspective enterprise where Microsoft makes a lot of its money its a different story. The enterprise's IT department (which is probably already running Windows with Exchange, Office and the rest of MS stuff) faces the following issue: Developers want Linux tools, but to IT, it makes sense to keep all employees on Windows rather than give developers the option of Linux in order to make their management easier. With WSL the problem is solved, everyone is on Windows and developers get the tools they need.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Linux is definitely better at privacy by leaps and bounds. But! Performance, no, there are use cases where windows outperforms, and others where Linux does. Security they're almost equal with Linux with a slight advantage if you keep your OS up to date and fire walled.
rvz 6y ago
Microsoft has created a GPU accelerated DirectX driver with Nvidia that only works on WSL 2. That is 'extend'. [0] I can't begin to imagine if Microsoft starts creating an entire Linux development suite of apps that 'requires' the presence of WSL and Windows installed. [0] https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda/wsl https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda/wsl
- pjmlp 6y ago
  Like Android and ChromeOS?

colesantiago 6y ago

Well, Windows is looking like the best "linux distro" at this point, despite it not being free, but mostly widely available to most people. EDIT: OK downvoters, so what's the most popular operating system that has Linux on it? pretty sure now it is Windows.

littlestymaar 6y ago
> what's the most popular operating system that has Linux on it? pretty sure now it is Windows It depends what you call “Linux” obviously, but android runs on top of a [forked] Linux Kernel.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  It's still Linux kernel though. Linux is far more machines than windows. Embedded computers and phones are computers too. If you're talking desktops and laptops of course windows is in the lead by a huge amount.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Which is meaningless for userspace apps, as Linux kernel isn't part of official Android NDK stable APIs.
webmobdev 6y ago
Android? And with Android x86 you can run it on PC's too. For people who just browse and check emails, it's a pretty decent alternative.
- colesantiago 6y ago
  Numbers for people who run Android on PCs?
  - webmobdev 6y ago
    No idea. But Fosshub gives an idea about its popularity: - Android-x86: 8,352,565 Downloads - RemixOS: 4,623,342 Downloads - Phoenix OS: 180,898 Downloads - Openthos: 166,697 Downloads

dgellow 6y ago

How would the steps “extend” and “exterminate” look like in this situation? If Microsoft does anything people don’t like with WSL, people can move back to another Linux distribution, the cost is almost zero to move back to a Debian or Ubuntu.

stjohnswarts 6y ago
Not if you let your workflow get intermingled with Linux (WSL) and windows because they worked well together and then suddenly Microsoft gets new management and decides to "take the company in a new direction"

bane 6y ago

The good news is that if Microsoft becomes Micro$oft of old, you can just move off Windows and back to just normal old Linux. At the moment though, this brings Linux and the entire Linux software ecosystem, a pretty good desktop experience, all of the Windows hardware/software ecosystem, and very good integration between the two environments. It's sort of everything that OS X/MacOS used to be with respect to a great GUI + nix CLI. But Apple has given about as much attention to the nix side of the software as I give the sewage lines that run under my house. With a Windows GUI and a CLI that is one of several distros. You get the benefits of the enormous hardware support Windows provides, but all of the opensource software the open source community provides. Who knows what the long-term strategy is, but it's suddenly made Windows useful as a development platform again, right when Apple has started taking their eyes off the ball and has been ignoring the *nix side of their platform for years.

majewsky 6y ago
> The good news is that if Microsoft becomes Micro$oft of old, you can just move off Windows and back to just normal old Linux. Not if driver developers say "we don't need to support Linux anymore, everyone uses WSL2 anyway".
- bane 6y ago
  That is a good point.
  - kalium-xyz 6y ago
    That is EEE.
- game_the0ry 6y ago
  > Not if driver developers say "we don't need to support Linux anymore, everyone uses WSL2 anyway". Disagree. The success of linux has been driven by open source enthusiasm, not corporate backing, so I doubt its demise will come from a corporation. And the momentum of OEMs offering linux out of the box (Dell, Lenovo, System76, Pinebook) seems to be growing, not shrinking. Linux is winning. Have some more optimism, my friends.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 6y ago

The big danger of WSL is in drivers. For many hardware vendors, driver development is a cost center. It they could just get away with writing a single Windows Driver and then rely on a Microsoft supplied WSL universal driver which just does pass through to the Windows driver, it would cut down on their development cost. With GPU pass through, Microsoft already has this type of model, where the graphics driver on the Linux side of WSL is just a thin shim that calls to the Windows GPU driver. In the future, I could see NVidia, making all their consumer GPU drivers like this, and reserving native Linux drivers for their professional GPUs, which would help them segment the market better.

throwaway8941 6y ago
As much as I like to crap on nvidia, they have supported a relatively high quality Linux driver when it barely registered as a desktop platform. Hell, they even have a FreeBSD driver.

bachmeier 6y ago

That view would have been reasonable 15 years ago. MS didn't embrace Linux because they want to be nice, but because they realized a desktop OS monopoly is completely useless in the mobile era. A big chunk of software developers prefer Mac or Linux. Work in the cloud is done on Linux. People use Windows at home/work because it's what they've been using for 25 years.

raesene9 6y ago

From a Microsoft perspective, this feels like damned if you do and damned if you don't. If they didn't embrance linux style tooling, they get told that they're anti-open source and that Macs will always be a better development environment when you're targeting Linux servers. If they do embrance Linux style tooling, they get told it's EEE all over again. I've been following the development of WSL, Terminal and VS Code. It doesn't strike me that this is some corporate EEE style policy, more it's a directive to make Windows as developer friendly as possible. There's quite possibly an ulterior motive here, but it's more "make deploying onto Azure the happy path" than anything else. WSL+VS Code+Terminal+Docker for Windows+Github == more business running their workloads on Azure == more money for Microsoft.

Impossible 6y ago
This is one of the more sane comments on this thread. There is a lot of paranoia about MS wanting to somehow "corrupt" Linux because some web developers are having IE6 flashbacks. Sure if it was still 1999 I'd be scared of that, but now Microsoft's biggest growth business is Azure, so this move is largely about supporting Azure usage, not about creating a weird Linux Windows hybrid to lock developers out of proper Linux distros. The rest all comes from MS being developer friendly, which has always been a part of their culture on the tools side
- Gibbon1 6y ago
  Not to mention the uptake of proper linux desk top distro's is a rounding error in the big scheme of things. They need to worry more about Apple and Google. And Apple has done more to EEE Linux than Microsoft is going to do.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  That's a poor portrayal of EEE. Of course this move is largely about supporting Azure usage, it just supports Azure usage by locking developers out of proper Linux distros. When you use the proprietary DirectX extension in WSL, you're not developing for Linux anymore, you're developing for WSL, a proprietary package. And now that you're reliant on DirectX/WSL/Windows, what cloud provider are you going to pick? You see, the Azure Advantage (TM) is that only Microsoft knows how to run DirectX on Linux effectively, because only Microsoft can inspect and modify the code. The Azure Advantage (TM) is that only Microsoft has the proprietary rights for Windows, so Microsoft can charge their competitors anything they want while offering it on Azure at a (relatively) affordable price.

withinboredom 6y ago

To me, it feels like someone got stuck working at Microsoft that likes Linux better so they decided to write some code to make it happen as a side project. Then somebody noticed... it doesn’t feel planned to me. But now that person feels happy to be working on Linux at Microsoft.

est31 6y ago

Desktop Linux market share has been growing in past years among developers, just check the stack overflow surveys. This is MS fighting over that market share by providing an alternative. They don't do it to help Linux but to protect their own base line. For employees this means less ability to justify running Linux on developer boxes and having to run Windows like the rest of the company.

pjmlp 6y ago
Nope they do this to cater for the "Linux developers" that buy Apple laptops instead of helping Linux OEMs.

stjohnswarts 6y ago

And the vast majority of people still do. Linux isn't going anywhere. Microsoft will get injected with the open source virus as well, it's almost inevitable.

threatofrain 6y ago

Embrace-extend-exterminate is an objective strategic risk which exists regardless of Microsoft's current executive culture. With Microsoft now controlling an important part of dev tooling, i.e. stuff like VSC, TS, Github, Azure, the risk is very real.

mmis1000 6y ago

It looks they are moving to subscription model now. The don't care whether they give software to you for free or not/which system are you using because they do earn more from subscriptions (azure, office 365, xbox game pass, whatever)