9 ms·

So now developers can stop writing apps for Windows. Instead, they can write for Linux and distribute on Windows using WSL. Thanks Microsoft!

by bogwog 6y ago

tyingq 6y ago
s/Thanks/Embrace :)
- TimTheTinker 6y ago
  s/Embrace/Extend ... except that if Microsoft did, likely very few would embrace such extensions. A successful EEE play requires a lot of pre-existing trust that has to last through the Extend phase, which is why I don't think they'll ever try that again in the foreseeable future.
  - themacguffinman 6y ago
    Anecdotally, I've seen apparent fanfare and demand for DirectX for WSL that Microsoft recently built so I'm skeptical of this.
BuildTheRobots 6y ago
I'm still convinced the long term plan is to stop people being able to boot a Linux kernel on desktop hardware (think secure boot) and when people complain the response is going to be "but you can run Linux on Windows!"
- ROARosen 6y ago
  After all, there must be something diabolical when Microsoft is just doing something to appease devs who have for years railed against them for being dev hostile.
  - pbhjpbhj 6y ago
    If you've been bitten by a tiger, it seems right to be wary when it invites you for dinner.
  - waheoo 6y ago
    Ah... Yes. Seriously, you kids do not remember things clearly or simply weren't around. Microsoft simply cannot be trusted. Maybe ya'll are fine forgiving and forgetting but personally I take a stance on a company for this kind of behaviour I don't forgive. Same goes for a lot of companies with awful histories of Child Labor and agregious abuses. > Linux is the long term threat against our core business. Never forget that! I won't. https://www.theregister.com/2001/11/12/ms_promotes_linux_from_threat/ https://www.theregister.com/2001/11/12/ms_promotes_linux_fro...
    - ROARosen 6y ago
      Imagine keeping sanctions on South Africa for apartheid decades after they've ended it and that regime is long gone. (Not that I'm comparing the two but since you brought in child labor I'm just going further down that lane.)
      - dane-pgp 6y ago
        The difference is, the constitution of South Africa now makes apartheid legally impossible (I assume, I haven't actually read it), whereas the corporate charter of Microsoft not just allows but potentially requires it to attack Linux.
fmakunbound 6y ago
Yeah this is just like when IBM's OS/2 ran Windows applications. Software developers thought "Great. I'll just code it once for Windows and be on OS/2 for free!"
bachmeier 6y ago
Is that a problem for Microsoft? It's not like folks are going to move away from Windows as a result. The reason they run Windows is because that's what they know and that's what's installed on their machine when they buy it. This for the most part eliminates the reason someone would have to move from Windows to Linux.
- spinningslate 6y ago
  Spot on. This is no knit-your-own-yoghurt altruistic move. It's all part of a well-coordinated effort to re-establish Microsoft as _the_ place that everyone does compute. "Commoditize your complement" as Joel Spolsky put it [0]; "windows on every desktop" for the cloud era. Ballmer went head to head with open source and thought he could crush the threat. That didn't work, and things weren't looking great for MS before he was ousted. Nadella's strategy is far more subtle: not quite Embrace/Extend/Eliminate, more Embrace/Neutralise/Replace. Linux is a threat to server-side windows? Fine. Let them deploy on linux, so long as those linux boxes are in Azure. But that means devs get familiar with linux at the expense of windows, which means (a) they'll want linux on their desktop and (b) things are more readily transferable to AWS/GCP/whatever. So: give them linux _in_ windows. Make appealing tools like vscode available free to create good will and positive sentiment towards Microsoft. Re-build the advocacy that hemorrhaged in the latter days of Ballmer's tenure. And they're nailing it. By comparison to Google/Facebook/Amazon, there's very little negative press for Microsoft. And lots of positivity, even just in this thread. It's hard not to be impressed by how successful they're being. And I say that as someone who still bears the scars from the 90s/00s hegemony. Microsoft was positively reviled by swathes of people in those days. Their attitude and market abuses rightly got them into hot water with the DOJ. So, whilst I respect the turnaround, I'm wary. Microsoft is cruising inexorably back to dominance. History says that wouldn't be a good outcome. [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
  - d1zzy 6y ago
    This is a very smart strategic move on behalf of Microsoft that I would have never guessed (not because it doesn't make sense but simply out of corporate pride, considering they are the authors of the "Linux Facts" memorandum...). I think it's smart because this will capture all those Linux people who aren't super comfortable administrating their own distro and even for those that are it's now giving them another option if they ever need to run things both in Windows and Linux at the same time or just run into some Linux issues and don't want to spend the time on them they can switch to Windows 10 WSL. At this point the only thing that I still think it doesn't make much sense is Microsoft running/developing their own kernel. It's entirely possible for them to start running Linux and run all the WIN32 support, drivers, DirectX, etc as a separate sandbox (similar to the type of sandbox WSL runs). The performance overhead from doing that should be negligible on modern hardware. EDIT: note that I only mean switching to Linux kernel for their desktop OS, there are plenty of usecases of Microsoft kernels where every bit of performance matters but I suspect those will continue to use their own kernel as part of Windows Server releases.
InitialLastName 6y ago
Judging by the performance/UI catastrophe of Outlook, Teams, Windows Terminal and the rest of Office, Microsoft has already stopped writing apps for Windows. Look at them, eating their own dog food.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  I believe Microsoft is expected to replace Outlook with a web app-based version in the next major release. Google Chrome is the new Microsoft development platform, it seems.
  - jraph 6y ago
    This would allow them to run Outlook natively in EdgeOS, their fork of ChromeOS, in which the default search engine, Bingle, is a proxy to Google Search with nice backgrounds. (all of this comment completely fictional).
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
    I sure hope they improve the searching, conversation merging (realistically non-merging) and RSS support, but something tells me they won't.
- sandyarmstrong 6y ago
  Hold up, what's your beef with Windows Terminal? I've really been enjoying it!
  - weakfish 6y ago
    Same, it's a joy to use.
  - swest 6y ago
    Agreed! It's the only terminal I can find that both respects my color settings and runs tmux well.
  - InitialLastName 6y ago
Ombudsman 6y ago
Pretty sure WSL is a developer tool, so "normal" would still need native apps, unless they go through the hoops of activating WSL so that they can listen to Spotify.
yazaddaruvala 6y ago
Before the year 2025, when Windows has switched from the NT kernel to the Linux kernel, we will all ask "What exactly is Windows?" (in the spirit of Theseus' ship) and "Is this outcome really Linux on the desktop/laptop?" (in the sprit of No True Scotsman) To avoid too much theory lol, my perspective is that MSFT views Windows as the trademarks and the 30+ years of backwards compatibility layers (e.g. Direct3D, WinAPIs, etc), and everything else is already expendable (kernel, drivers, etc). Meanwhile, the (slow?) migration to ARM and Web(Electron + derivatives included) will deprecate the compatibility layers too. FWIW, I think people will still only develop "for Windows" not develop apps "for all Linux distributions", the same way people develop "for iOS/macOS" not "for all *BSD distributions". MSFT reduces developers and costs because kernel costs become "a relatively large corporate donation" (tiny compared with the reduced developer salaries) and drivers are created by hardware companies instead. Meanwhile, MSFT increases revenue through Azure, consumer services like gaming, consumer electronics (e.g. VR, Surface, etc), enterprise sales "for the support/compatibility", and increased adoption/street-cred given its now "Linux on the desktop, laptop, AR/VR and tablet". Its simply a no-brainer for MSFT. This is not a new idea: found one of my responses from 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11390719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11390719. There is a parent comment describing Windows as "just another Linux distribution", albeit it'll 1. be the most deployed Linux distribution by a lot and 2. continue to have a closed-source UI toolkit (e.g. Cocoa on macOS).
- bscphil 6y ago
  > Before the year 2025, when Windows has switched from the NT kernel to the Linux kernel > continue to have a closed-source UI toolkit (e.g. Cocoa on macOS). The comparison isn't apt. macOS can use BSD licensed programs because it's allowed to create derivative works that are closed source. Anything constituting a derivative work based on the Linux kernel has to be open source because of the GPL's virality. So unless you think Microsoft will be willing to keep all their custom software restricted to userland (requiring basically everything else to be GPL) it seems extremely unlikely that this will happen. Microsoft is going to want to continue developing an operating system, not merely a Linux distribution. Obviously I'd love to see it happen, but I find it extraordinarily unlikely for these and other reasons (backwards compatibility? Continuity with previous sysadmin tools?)...

So now developers can stop writing apps for Windows. Instead, they can write for Linux and distribute on Windows using WSL. Thanks Microsoft!

by bogwog 6y ago

So now developers can stop writing apps for Windows. Instead, they can write for Linux and distribute on Windows using WSL. Thanks Microsoft!

tyingq 6y ago

s/Thanks/Embrace :)

TimTheTinker 6y ago
s/Embrace/Extend ... except that if Microsoft did, likely very few would embrace such extensions. A successful EEE play requires a lot of pre-existing trust that has to last through the Extend phase, which is why I don't think they'll ever try that again in the foreseeable future.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  Anecdotally, I've seen apparent fanfare and demand for DirectX for WSL that Microsoft recently built so I'm skeptical of this.

BuildTheRobots 6y ago

I'm still convinced the long term plan is to stop people being able to boot a Linux kernel on desktop hardware (think secure boot) and when people complain the response is going to be "but you can run Linux on Windows!"

ROARosen 6y ago
After all, there must be something diabolical when Microsoft is just doing something to appease devs who have for years railed against them for being dev hostile.
- pbhjpbhj 6y ago
  If you've been bitten by a tiger, it seems right to be wary when it invites you for dinner.
- waheoo 6y ago
  Ah... Yes. Seriously, you kids do not remember things clearly or simply weren't around. Microsoft simply cannot be trusted. Maybe ya'll are fine forgiving and forgetting but personally I take a stance on a company for this kind of behaviour I don't forgive. Same goes for a lot of companies with awful histories of Child Labor and agregious abuses. > Linux is the long term threat against our core business. Never forget that! I won't. https://www.theregister.com/2001/11/12/ms_promotes_linux_from_threat/ https://www.theregister.com/2001/11/12/ms_promotes_linux_fro...
  - ROARosen 6y ago
    Imagine keeping sanctions on South Africa for apartheid decades after they've ended it and that regime is long gone. (Not that I'm comparing the two but since you brought in child labor I'm just going further down that lane.)
    - dane-pgp 6y ago
      The difference is, the constitution of South Africa now makes apartheid legally impossible (I assume, I haven't actually read it), whereas the corporate charter of Microsoft not just allows but potentially requires it to attack Linux.

fmakunbound 6y ago

Yeah this is just like when IBM's OS/2 ran Windows applications. Software developers thought "Great. I'll just code it once for Windows and be on OS/2 for free!"

bachmeier 6y ago

Is that a problem for Microsoft? It's not like folks are going to move away from Windows as a result. The reason they run Windows is because that's what they know and that's what's installed on their machine when they buy it. This for the most part eliminates the reason someone would have to move from Windows to Linux.

spinningslate 6y ago
Spot on. This is no knit-your-own-yoghurt altruistic move. It's all part of a well-coordinated effort to re-establish Microsoft as _the_ place that everyone does compute. "Commoditize your complement" as Joel Spolsky put it [0]; "windows on every desktop" for the cloud era. Ballmer went head to head with open source and thought he could crush the threat. That didn't work, and things weren't looking great for MS before he was ousted. Nadella's strategy is far more subtle: not quite Embrace/Extend/Eliminate, more Embrace/Neutralise/Replace. Linux is a threat to server-side windows? Fine. Let them deploy on linux, so long as those linux boxes are in Azure. But that means devs get familiar with linux at the expense of windows, which means (a) they'll want linux on their desktop and (b) things are more readily transferable to AWS/GCP/whatever. So: give them linux _in_ windows. Make appealing tools like vscode available free to create good will and positive sentiment towards Microsoft. Re-build the advocacy that hemorrhaged in the latter days of Ballmer's tenure. And they're nailing it. By comparison to Google/Facebook/Amazon, there's very little negative press for Microsoft. And lots of positivity, even just in this thread. It's hard not to be impressed by how successful they're being. And I say that as someone who still bears the scars from the 90s/00s hegemony. Microsoft was positively reviled by swathes of people in those days. Their attitude and market abuses rightly got them into hot water with the DOJ. So, whilst I respect the turnaround, I'm wary. Microsoft is cruising inexorably back to dominance. History says that wouldn't be a good outcome. [0]: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/06/12/strategy-letter-v/
- d1zzy 6y ago
  This is a very smart strategic move on behalf of Microsoft that I would have never guessed (not because it doesn't make sense but simply out of corporate pride, considering they are the authors of the "Linux Facts" memorandum...). I think it's smart because this will capture all those Linux people who aren't super comfortable administrating their own distro and even for those that are it's now giving them another option if they ever need to run things both in Windows and Linux at the same time or just run into some Linux issues and don't want to spend the time on them they can switch to Windows 10 WSL. At this point the only thing that I still think it doesn't make much sense is Microsoft running/developing their own kernel. It's entirely possible for them to start running Linux and run all the WIN32 support, drivers, DirectX, etc as a separate sandbox (similar to the type of sandbox WSL runs). The performance overhead from doing that should be negligible on modern hardware. EDIT: note that I only mean switching to Linux kernel for their desktop OS, there are plenty of usecases of Microsoft kernels where every bit of performance matters but I suspect those will continue to use their own kernel as part of Windows Server releases.

InitialLastName 6y ago

Judging by the performance/UI catastrophe of Outlook, Teams, Windows Terminal and the rest of Office, Microsoft has already stopped writing apps for Windows. Look at them, eating their own dog food.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
I believe Microsoft is expected to replace Outlook with a web app-based version in the next major release. Google Chrome is the new Microsoft development platform, it seems.
- jraph 6y ago
  This would allow them to run Outlook natively in EdgeOS, their fork of ChromeOS, in which the default search engine, Bingle, is a proxy to Google Search with nice backgrounds. (all of this comment completely fictional).
- InitialLastName 6y ago
  I sure hope they improve the searching, conversation merging (realistically non-merging) and RSS support, but something tells me they won't.
sandyarmstrong 6y ago
Hold up, what's your beef with Windows Terminal? I've really been enjoying it!
- weakfish 6y ago
  Same, it's a joy to use.
- swest 6y ago
  Agreed! It's the only terminal I can find that both respects my color settings and runs tmux well.
- InitialLastName 6y ago

Ombudsman 6y ago

Pretty sure WSL is a developer tool, so "normal" would still need native apps, unless they go through the hoops of activating WSL so that they can listen to Spotify.

yazaddaruvala 6y ago

Before the year 2025, when Windows has switched from the NT kernel to the Linux kernel, we will all ask "What exactly is Windows?" (in the spirit of Theseus' ship) and "Is this outcome really Linux on the desktop/laptop?" (in the sprit of No True Scotsman) To avoid too much theory lol, my perspective is that MSFT views Windows as the trademarks and the 30+ years of backwards compatibility layers (e.g. Direct3D, WinAPIs, etc), and everything else is already expendable (kernel, drivers, etc). Meanwhile, the (slow?) migration to ARM and Web(Electron + derivatives included) will deprecate the compatibility layers too. FWIW, I think people will still only develop "for Windows" not develop apps "for all Linux distributions", the same way people develop "for iOS/macOS" not "for all *BSD distributions". MSFT reduces developers and costs because kernel costs become "a relatively large corporate donation" (tiny compared with the reduced developer salaries) and drivers are created by hardware companies instead. Meanwhile, MSFT increases revenue through Azure, consumer services like gaming, consumer electronics (e.g. VR, Surface, etc), enterprise sales "for the support/compatibility", and increased adoption/street-cred given its now "Linux on the desktop, laptop, AR/VR and tablet". Its simply a no-brainer for MSFT. This is not a new idea: found one of my responses from 2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11390719 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11390719. There is a parent comment describing Windows as "just another Linux distribution", albeit it'll 1. be the most deployed Linux distribution by a lot and 2. continue to have a closed-source UI toolkit (e.g. Cocoa on macOS).

bscphil 6y ago
> Before the year 2025, when Windows has switched from the NT kernel to the Linux kernel > continue to have a closed-source UI toolkit (e.g. Cocoa on macOS). The comparison isn't apt. macOS can use BSD licensed programs because it's allowed to create derivative works that are closed source. Anything constituting a derivative work based on the Linux kernel has to be open source because of the GPL's virality. So unless you think Microsoft will be willing to keep all their custom software restricted to userland (requiring basically everything else to be GPL) it seems extremely unlikely that this will happen. Microsoft is going to want to continue developing an operating system, not merely a Linux distribution. Obviously I'd love to see it happen, but I find it extraordinarily unlikely for these and other reasons (backwards compatibility? Continuity with previous sysadmin tools?)...