5 ms·
>MAS (hosted on their own platform) MAS is awesome. Anyways MS doesn't care about private piracy. They rather have you pirate Windows than leave the platform a
by haunter 3y ago
>MAS (hosted on their own platform)
MAS is awesome. Anyways MS doesn't care about private piracy. They rather have you pirate Windows than leave the platform and use another OS. This is my conspiracy theory about WSL too (which is an actual nice software but still).
- WarOnPrivacy 3y agoI've used it to quickly auth XP VMs that were needed to run ancient Navision clients. It works as advertised. I had to whitelist the directory in Windows Security because it makes MSAV grumpy and then uploads it's grumpiness home.
- gymbeaux 3y agoIt’s not a conspiracy theory. It’s well-known that Microsoft’s “M$ <3 Linux” campaign is propaganda. It’s classic anti-competitive Microsoft behavior that started with IE in the 90s.
- tracker1 3y agoI think a lot of it is the writing on the wall... long term, it's software as a service model that will be their recurring revenue streams. I'm not sure what they're making in terms of just Windows licensing, but can guess that M365 is probably as much or more per year. In the past 6-7 years most of the applications I've worked on, even those using Visual Studio, C#, etc. Have been tested/deployed on Linux more than Windows.
- sterlind 3y ago(Disclaimer: I work at MS, but not on WSL, opinions are my own.) I don't see how WSL is embrace-extend-extinguish. Embrace, yes. Extend? No. There's basically nothing that only runs on WSL and not real Linux. Only QoL integrations with the Windows shell like X11/Wayland and Explorer integration. The point of WSL is backend dev. If WSL were on an EEE path, you'd expect to see MS adding Windows-only integrations, and encouraging people to run WSL server instances. Instead, MS has never positioned WSL for prod use, and instead cautions against using it for non-dev activities. Even internally, we don't use WSL to host Linux stuff. We use CBL-Mariner instead [1], which is completely FOSS. The whole point of WSL was that Windows lost to Linux for backend. Unlike Ballmer, Satya didn't want to waste resources fighting a losing battle, so he pivoted the company towards Azure and dev tooling and away from Windows Server. And that succeeded, and it's why we're not irrelevant like IBM - we ditched our mainframes, as it were. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBL-Mariner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CBL-Mariner
- jchw 3y ago> There's basically nothing that only runs on WSL and not real Linux. Not going to weigh in on the other aspects of this but I think this is untrue nowadays. Direct3D off-screen rendering and DirectML are supported in WSL2 and while there are several Direct3D implementations that run on Linux, I don't think there has been an attempt at DirectML yet, and neither are ever going to be possible using official drivers and official DirectX like you can on Windows with WSL2.
- sterlind 3y agoHuh. I definitely didn't know about Direct3D and DirectML support. That's bizarre, I can't imagine the use-case.
- zadintuvas1 3y agoDo you remember that DirectX loves Linux announcement?
- redeeman 3y agonot WSL, but dotnetcore, sure, crossplatform, all is great, microsoft loves linux.. run .net applications that produces GUI? nonas, this is of course not available, thats reserved for windows. microsoft is the same old microsoft, and people would do well to remember it
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- eru 3y agoHow is WSL anti-competitive?
- gymbeaux 3y agoMicrosoft created it to incentivize devs to stay on Windows for their dev machines instead of switching to macOS or Linux. It has no other purpose than that. As a result, that many more people are staying on Windows and Linux popularity/growth/development is somewhat more throttled than it otherwise would have been.
- eru 3y agoYou could say the same thing about them eg reducing how often Windows crashes. Making your product better ain't anti-competitive.
- gymbeaux 3y agoYeah, I think to me the line between “competing by making our product better” and “competing in a hostile way” was crossed with WSL, because Microsoft is literally taking other people’s work and slapping it into Windows. I mean at this point I consider Windows 11 with WSL to be “Windows and Linux”, not “Windows”. It doesn’t make Windows better. To me, it’s comparable to Walmart driving small businesses out by undercutting them on price. The product isn’t better, in fact there’s plenty of “Great Value” stuff I wouldn’t feed to my dog, but nevertheless the inferior product wins out in the end. What’s good for Windows is bad for Linux, period.
- pwdisswordfishc 3y agoWrong. It’s classic anti-competitive Microsoft behavior that started with MS-DOS in the 80s.
- josephcsible 3y agoIf Microsoft would rather have people pirate Windows than use another OS, then why did they add product activation at all?
- devnullbrain 3y agoPrice discrimination
- rejectfinite 3y agoCompanies using it need to pay. Home users are whatever.
- tracker1 3y agoI'm pretty sure the reason for the forever upgrades since Win7 is more because it costs them less to have fewer variations of windows in the wild than to stay closer to evergreen.
- bydo 3y agoBecause they'd still prefer you purchase it, or maybe a later version. In Windows 10, if you don't activate, all that happens is that it displays "Unregistered" in the corner and refuses to let you change the desktop wallpaper (and you can even get around that by rearming the "trial").
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- kbenson 3y agoThere's a few other customization items that are locked away as well. I can't recall what they are, and I finally registered by copy after years of running windows 10 and 11 unregistered so I can't even look for it. It might have had to do with graphics settings (flip presentation model?), or HDR. I think there were ways to force those options with registry edits, but that's more trouble than buying a cheap $10 windows key, which is what I finally ended up doing. I also see lots of reports that updates other than critical/security ones may not be downloaded and applied for unregistered installs, but I'm not sure how true that is (or if it's mostly moot because I know you still get the big spring/fall patches, or at least have historically).
- mschuster91 3y agoI think it's the same reason why they don't care about the various KMS emulation servers for Windows 10/11 - some of these are even open source.
- grishka 3y agoAlso don't forget that almost every non-Apple laptop comes with Windows pre-installed. Those OEM deals are also extremely important for Microsoft. The lost profit from people pirating Windows on self-built home PCs must be a drop in the ocean.