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No. Microsoft will buy Canonical for Ubuntu and that sweet, sweet developer mindshare. Ubuntu is the developer distro after all. Ubuntu will become Microsoft Li

No. Microsoft will buy Canonical for Ubuntu and that sweet, sweet developer mindshare. Ubuntu is the developer distro after all. Ubuntu will become Microsoft Linux.

jacooper 4y ago
Is this really realistic ? Why would Microsoft get into the Linux Enterprise market?
- thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
  >> Why would Microsoft get into the Linux Enterprise market? Azure integration
  - jacooper 4y ago
    They can do that without buying canonical surely?
- denkmoon 4y ago
  Developers Developers Developers Same reason they brought MSSQL to Linux.
- encryptluks2 4y ago
  Because the same reason they have already tried with WSL... They are losing too many developers.
  - mickael-kerjean 4y ago
    WSL on my office laptop takes 10s to boot and if you CTRL+C before it gives the prompt it shows a python stacktrace. I can only hope that by the time the people who have only ever used windows retire, windows will become as relevant as what cobol is today which is probably an insult to cobol as it's not known to make blue death screen on ATM and airport screen
    - borissk 4y ago
      As everyone else you're living in a bubble. In your bubble people probably do hate Windows. Given HN origin in the Silicon Valley - where macOS and Linux are very popular - probably the majority of HN users also hate Windows. But that doesn't say anything about the majority of the developers out there. From my experience Python and Ruby guys usually do use Linux and macOS, while .NET and Java devs run almost always Windows on their PCs and laptops.
      - BeefWellington 4y ago
        The overwhelming majority of developers I interact with these days are on MacOS, and it's not even close. Probably a 80-20 MacOS to Windows ratio. I'm not in Silicon Valley, and I work with people from lots of different companies. Every company that offers the option for devs to have a Macbook, that seems to be what the "average" dev is choosing for a while now. This is obviously an anecdotal sample size but I'm looking at a group of about 30 companies over the past year ranging in size from < 15 employees to up to 500, and everything in between. M1 has made a lot of people eager to jump too.
        encryptluks2 4y ago
        Same... a lot of it has to do with just the convenience of Mac shell being more native than the janky WSL implementation that does take time to startup and is noticeable, and not having to worry about a translation layer for volumes.
        borissk 4y ago
        Ask a C#/.NET and he'll tell you 90% of the developers he knows use Windows laptops (the real Visual Studio works only under Windows). There are more than 10M professional .NET developers out there.
- brundolf 4y ago
  Microsoft is no longer about Windows, it's about being wherever you are, especially if you're a developer
  - beebmam 4y ago
    It's been this way for like at least 6 years now. And it's quite comfy. WSL and Windows gives me everything I could want from a dev machine.
    - jack_pp 4y ago
      You should try tiling WMs
      - naikrovek 4y ago
        Windows 11 has one built in. it's not as flexible as i3 or the custom tool I use, but it's a heck of a lot easier to use.
      - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
        Tried them and hated them. The built in tiling capabilities in Windows 11 are enough for me.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- p_l 4y ago
  Microsoft actually bought a Gentoo based distro in container space - Flatcar Linux (which is a direct continuation of CoreOS that was bought and killed by RedHat)
- GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
  Money. Cant have Azure without a lot of Linux
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Because Azure is the new OS, and for better or worse, UNIX was won the server room wars, with Linux being the most used variant nowadays. However with containers running directly on top of hypervisors and serverless, it is only a matter of time until the actuall OS of the server room is irrelevant. Until then, Linux and BSD (which they also support) are business relevant.
  - jacooper 4y ago
    But I mean they dont have to have their own distro?
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
aliqot 4y ago
> Ubuntu is the developer distro after all I'd have assumed Arch and friends.
- heywoodlh 4y ago
  > > Ubuntu is the developer distro after all > I'd have assumed Arch and friends. I'm a huge Arch (and NixOS) user. But one of the things that I think is difficult about Arch in an enterprise is that by design it is difficult to standardize enterprise tooling around. Ubuntu, on the other hand, has a bunch of defaults that can be more reliably be predicted for in an enterprise. I'm a security engineer and I've thought long and hard about why enterprise applications often lack Linux support -- it would be difficult to have something that works across the board (there are so many choices of desktop environments, notification daemons, network subsystems, etc.). If I were to write enterprise applications that targeted Linux I would probably target the default config of the current LTS release of Ubuntu (Gnome as the desktop environment, etc.). I feel like Ubuntu is the desktop developer environment for the enterprise that is forward enough to support desktop Linux.
  - aliqot 4y ago
    I think I'm smelling what you're stepping in. What made me assume arch was the ease at which everything is 'there' without a snap or ppa via the AUR. Thanks for taking a moment to share a different perspective with me. I've been trying to have a similar strategy to you with regards to enterprise long-uptime application deployments. I target RHEL and Debian Sid because they move at a almost glacial pace and have quite a bit of documentation. Do you ever wonder what the trajectory of Microsoft and Canonical looks like with regards to an M&A perspective? It would be a good contender to counter Red Hat's dominance in the enterprise space.
- BeefWellington 4y ago
  My daily driver for dev work is Fedora. It gets a bad rap but I think it's superior to most other distros if you want a "work-focused" distribution with relatively little tinkering required.
IncRnd 4y ago
The next version of Ubuntu after the purchase will contain MS Buntu, a female gnome in the shape of a paperclip who assists with all sorts of programming tasks - logging into hotmail, using copilot, signing up for github enterprise, and so forth.
- oaiey 4y ago
  Dissing because of clippy: fair game :)
anonymoushn 4y ago
I have defaulted to Ubuntu for familiarity reasons, but recently I got to learn - the procedure for upgrading to a newer release of ubuntu it you run sed as root to fix your sources.list, then you do-release-upgrade, but it doesn't work because it has an undocumented dependency on pciutils - at this point i should be used to this pciutils thing since ~all software has undocumented dependencies on autoconf, automake, autotools, libtool, cmake, ninja, rust, python2, python3, calling the binary called python in your path and expecting it to be a particular version that is 2 or 3 but some stuff needs 2 and other stuff needs 3, perl, npm but not the latest npm, clang but not the clang in the repositories, gcc, nvm, ruby, lua but not the latest lua, bazel, make, openssl, libressl, libcrypto, a different version of libc that will break almost all software on your machine when you install it, a bunch of optional obscurely named C header packages that install the headers into folders that the build won't search for header files and that turn out not to be optional if you want the thing to work at all, and a hundred different javascript build automation and test automation tools that exist mainly to call each other - snap will just install broken package updates for you and is incapable of undoing this operation by design - systemd-resolved will randomly just start taking 250+ms to return cached DNS entries so if you call connect() many times per second you need a much bigger threadpool than you may have expected (and this is maybe an architectural change to your software if your previous threadpool size for connect() offloding was 1 or if you were naively calling connect() on your thread where you do actual work) - if you thought you knew how to set the open file limit for a user, systemd has rearranged your furniture and by the way this operation now requires you to reboot your computer so i'm not sure ubuntu has been a great fit, but i'm also not switching to anything else
- sfuller808 4y ago
- chao- 4y ago
  >snap will just install broken package updates for you and is incapable of undoing this operation by design I no longer recommend Ubuntu for this reason to people looking to get into Linux for the first time for developer-adjacent reasons. My recommendation is now Mint or Pop_OS, as they are effectively Ubuntu without Snap. Edit: I am not blindly against snap, or against its idea outright. I understand what it is for, and if it delivered on that without issue, I would welcome it. My avoidance of Ubuntu is due to having to repeatedly (and increasingly) help Linux newbies through problems, where lately all of those problems have wound up being based in snap.

No. Microsoft will buy Canonical for Ubuntu and that sweet, sweet developer mindshare. Ubuntu is the developer distro after all. Ubuntu will become Microsoft Linux.

jacooper 4y ago

Is this really realistic ? Why would Microsoft get into the Linux Enterprise market?

thesuperbigfrog 4y ago
>> Why would Microsoft get into the Linux Enterprise market? Azure integration
- jacooper 4y ago
  They can do that without buying canonical surely?
denkmoon 4y ago
Developers Developers Developers Same reason they brought MSSQL to Linux.
encryptluks2 4y ago
Because the same reason they have already tried with WSL... They are losing too many developers.
- mickael-kerjean 4y ago
  WSL on my office laptop takes 10s to boot and if you CTRL+C before it gives the prompt it shows a python stacktrace. I can only hope that by the time the people who have only ever used windows retire, windows will become as relevant as what cobol is today which is probably an insult to cobol as it's not known to make blue death screen on ATM and airport screen
  - borissk 4y ago
    As everyone else you're living in a bubble. In your bubble people probably do hate Windows. Given HN origin in the Silicon Valley - where macOS and Linux are very popular - probably the majority of HN users also hate Windows. But that doesn't say anything about the majority of the developers out there. From my experience Python and Ruby guys usually do use Linux and macOS, while .NET and Java devs run almost always Windows on their PCs and laptops.
    - BeefWellington 4y ago
      The overwhelming majority of developers I interact with these days are on MacOS, and it's not even close. Probably a 80-20 MacOS to Windows ratio. I'm not in Silicon Valley, and I work with people from lots of different companies. Every company that offers the option for devs to have a Macbook, that seems to be what the "average" dev is choosing for a while now. This is obviously an anecdotal sample size but I'm looking at a group of about 30 companies over the past year ranging in size from < 15 employees to up to 500, and everything in between. M1 has made a lot of people eager to jump too.
      - encryptluks2 4y ago
        Same... a lot of it has to do with just the convenience of Mac shell being more native than the janky WSL implementation that does take time to startup and is noticeable, and not having to worry about a translation layer for volumes.
      - borissk 4y ago
        Ask a C#/.NET and he'll tell you 90% of the developers he knows use Windows laptops (the real Visual Studio works only under Windows). There are more than 10M professional .NET developers out there.
brundolf 4y ago
Microsoft is no longer about Windows, it's about being wherever you are, especially if you're a developer
- beebmam 4y ago
  It's been this way for like at least 6 years now. And it's quite comfy. WSL and Windows gives me everything I could want from a dev machine.
  - jack_pp 4y ago
    You should try tiling WMs
    - naikrovek 4y ago
      Windows 11 has one built in. it's not as flexible as i3 or the custom tool I use, but it's a heck of a lot easier to use.
    - ChuckNorris89 4y ago
      Tried them and hated them. The built in tiling capabilities in Windows 11 are enough for me.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
p_l 4y ago
Microsoft actually bought a Gentoo based distro in container space - Flatcar Linux (which is a direct continuation of CoreOS that was bought and killed by RedHat)
GoOnThenDoTell 4y ago
Money. Cant have Azure without a lot of Linux
pjmlp 4y ago
Because Azure is the new OS, and for better or worse, UNIX was won the server room wars, with Linux being the most used variant nowadays. However with containers running directly on top of hypervisors and serverless, it is only a matter of time until the actuall OS of the server room is irrelevant. Until then, Linux and BSD (which they also support) are business relevant.
- jacooper 4y ago
  But I mean they dont have to have their own distro?

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

aliqot 4y ago

> Ubuntu is the developer distro after all I'd have assumed Arch and friends.

heywoodlh 4y ago
> > Ubuntu is the developer distro after all > I'd have assumed Arch and friends. I'm a huge Arch (and NixOS) user. But one of the things that I think is difficult about Arch in an enterprise is that by design it is difficult to standardize enterprise tooling around. Ubuntu, on the other hand, has a bunch of defaults that can be more reliably be predicted for in an enterprise. I'm a security engineer and I've thought long and hard about why enterprise applications often lack Linux support -- it would be difficult to have something that works across the board (there are so many choices of desktop environments, notification daemons, network subsystems, etc.). If I were to write enterprise applications that targeted Linux I would probably target the default config of the current LTS release of Ubuntu (Gnome as the desktop environment, etc.). I feel like Ubuntu is the desktop developer environment for the enterprise that is forward enough to support desktop Linux.
- aliqot 4y ago
  I think I'm smelling what you're stepping in. What made me assume arch was the ease at which everything is 'there' without a snap or ppa via the AUR. Thanks for taking a moment to share a different perspective with me. I've been trying to have a similar strategy to you with regards to enterprise long-uptime application deployments. I target RHEL and Debian Sid because they move at a almost glacial pace and have quite a bit of documentation. Do you ever wonder what the trajectory of Microsoft and Canonical looks like with regards to an M&A perspective? It would be a good contender to counter Red Hat's dominance in the enterprise space.
BeefWellington 4y ago
My daily driver for dev work is Fedora. It gets a bad rap but I think it's superior to most other distros if you want a "work-focused" distribution with relatively little tinkering required.

IncRnd 4y ago

The next version of Ubuntu after the purchase will contain MS Buntu, a female gnome in the shape of a paperclip who assists with all sorts of programming tasks - logging into hotmail, using copilot, signing up for github enterprise, and so forth.

oaiey 4y ago
Dissing because of clippy: fair game :)

anonymoushn 4y ago

I have defaulted to Ubuntu for familiarity reasons, but recently I got to learn - the procedure for upgrading to a newer release of ubuntu it you run sed as root to fix your sources.list, then you do-release-upgrade, but it doesn't work because it has an undocumented dependency on pciutils - at this point i should be used to this pciutils thing since ~all software has undocumented dependencies on autoconf, automake, autotools, libtool, cmake, ninja, rust, python2, python3, calling the binary called python in your path and expecting it to be a particular version that is 2 or 3 but some stuff needs 2 and other stuff needs 3, perl, npm but not the latest npm, clang but not the clang in the repositories, gcc, nvm, ruby, lua but not the latest lua, bazel, make, openssl, libressl, libcrypto, a different version of libc that will break almost all software on your machine when you install it, a bunch of optional obscurely named C header packages that install the headers into folders that the build won't search for header files and that turn out not to be optional if you want the thing to work at all, and a hundred different javascript build automation and test automation tools that exist mainly to call each other - snap will just install broken package updates for you and is incapable of undoing this operation by design - systemd-resolved will randomly just start taking 250+ms to return cached DNS entries so if you call connect() many times per second you need a much bigger threadpool than you may have expected (and this is maybe an architectural change to your software if your previous threadpool size for connect() offloding was 1 or if you were naively calling connect() on your thread where you do actual work) - if you thought you knew how to set the open file limit for a user, systemd has rearranged your furniture and by the way this operation now requires you to reboot your computer so i'm not sure ubuntu has been a great fit, but i'm also not switching to anything else

sfuller808 4y ago
chao- 4y ago
>snap will just install broken package updates for you and is incapable of undoing this operation by design I no longer recommend Ubuntu for this reason to people looking to get into Linux for the first time for developer-adjacent reasons. My recommendation is now Mint or Pop_OS, as they are effectively Ubuntu without Snap. Edit: I am not blindly against snap, or against its idea outright. I understand what it is for, and if it delivered on that without issue, I would welcome it. My avoidance of Ubuntu is due to having to repeatedly (and increasingly) help Linux newbies through problems, where lately all of those problems have wound up being based in snap.