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Ubuntu on Windows

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Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#591

Post by kbenson »

michaelmrose wrote: post #515
leo_mck wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I absolutely love the fact that windows download and install critical updates automatically for me. I would feel like a slave if I had to do it manually.

You kind of are a slave aren't you? After all you can only auto update microsoft and store apps. Other apps will either handle updates themselves probably with an annoying UAC prompt and possibly at inconvenient times when you actually want to use the apps. Some have processes that constantly sit in the background sucking up your resources to pop up annoying prompts to update application foo during which you must wat…

> Unbelievably staying on an older still supported platform until you are ready to update is a feature you have to pay money for!

You are making it sound like they are forcing, or even automatically upgrading Windows 7 to Windows 8, or Windows 8 to Windows 10. They aren't. You have to specifically choose the 8->10 update, even if you are getting updates automatically installed.

> I'm talking about the future equivalent of staying with windows 7 and upgrading to windows 10 because 8 sucks.

Which you can do. I'm not sure what exactly your complaint is here. What am I missing?

(Note: I found Windows 8 to be superior to Windows 7 in every way except the start menu. I find Windows 10 superior to Windows 8 in every way except for Privacy :/ )

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#592

Post by Mafana0 »

ssalazar wrote: post #527
Mafana0 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you name a single company that doesn't follow where the market is and try to monopolises it later? Plus, Windows is still the leader in the desktop and laptop market until today. They are facing some tough competition but "not leader in given market" is not true.

Uh, any company that sells niche or upmarket offerings of commodity products, for one. I.e. Apple, Tesla, a bunch of watch manufacturers. > Plus, Windows is still the leader in the desktop and laptop market until today. They are facing some tough competition but "not leader in given market" is not true. Their position in the server world is not nearly so secure, which is quite possibly what this move is meant to addr…

> Uh, any company that sells niche or upmarket offerings of commodity products, for one. I.e. Apple

Without thinking much I can come up with a list of instances where Apple did exactly follow where they think the market is. Example include making phones with bigger screens [0], using a stylus with tablets [1], smart watches, small screen tablets [2], the the list goes on and on.

[0]: http://www.engadget.com/2010/07/16/jobs-no-ones-going-to-buy...

[1]: http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/08/jobs-if-you-see-a-stylus-...

[2]: http://fortune.com/2012/04/17/what-steve-jobs-said-about-an-...

> Their position in the server world is not nearly so secure, which is quite possibly what this move is meant to address.

Microsoft never had the lead in server operating systems. So they're not doing this just because they are no longer the leader. This is a proof that Microsoft is just changing how they handle competition and FOSS under Nadella.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#593

Post by seanp2k2 »

Someone wrote: post #470
Delmania wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Yea, I think they are going after developers who use OS X because it is UNIXy It's a bit more than UNIXy, (the proper term is Unix-like), it literally is UNIX. It meets the UNIX 03 specifications . Also, the motivations for these move predate the rise in popularity of Apple. For years, one of the biggest complaints about Windows was the lack of a good command line interface. There was the legacy CMD.EXE, which provi…

"the reality is these tools work just fine. There's never been a reason to evolve them." On the contrary; there have been many valid reasons to evolve them, but backward compatibility was deemed more important. Example #1: it is possible to write a sh/csh/bash/?sh script that handles file names with spaces, slashes, quotes, question marks, etc, but one would hope that would be made a bit easier, almost half a century…

Yeah, it would e.g. Be awesome to standardize all the arguments and flags and even the format of those between all the tools (also: how to define "all the tools"), but it'll never happen due to backwards compatibility / the way people know how to do stuff. As much as these tools are each individually weird and nuanced and stupid and broken, they come together to glue a scary amount of stuff together.

It'll get better through rewrites, new tools, different infrastructures etc long before it gets better through iteration on the same tools. That's OK though :)

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#594

Post by simoncion »

yuubi wrote: post #582
simoncion wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It means I need to install Visual Studio. I mean, sure, but (unless things have changed dramatically in the many years since I was a Windows dev) you don't have to do anything more than install VS. The compilers and nmake can be used without opening the GUI. IIRC, you can feed a VS project file (or -I'm pretty sure- a solution file) to nmake and get the same result you'd get from loading the GUI and pressing build.

Confirming you can feed a .sln file to msbuild (I did it the other day), no idea about whether nmake accepts them. Source: https://www.wireshark.org/docs/wsdg_html_chunked/ChSetupWin3... .

Ah, shit. I couldn't remember if the damn thing was called msbuild or nmake. [0] I guess one should replace all instances of nmake in my comment with msbuild.

[0] I do know that they are both parts of the VS build tooling. ;)

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#595

Post by kbenson »

grovulent wrote: post #589
riotdash wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's be honest here. Does this change make some developers actually even consider to change their OS X/Linux Desktops to Windows? Yeah it is really cool thing that we can finally use windows cmd like the terminal on unix systems however: - What about lack of all the Linux/OS X GUI software? - What about lack of all the UNIX OS features? - What about all those billions and billions of Windows malware, viruses, adware…

I think this move by MS is wonderful and I support it completely - but there is one concern that you've left out that makes me more worried than anything. I'm someone who doggedly persisted trying to dev on my windows box because the stability, speed, app support, GUI niceness of windows is just far superior to Ubuntu (I won't speak to OS X since I've only done minimal dev on it). I won't go into a lengthy defense of…

> So I tried vagrant VM with virtualbox - and shared folders... so I could keep my windows GUIs without needing to sshing everything to the VM. Somehow - even though the shared folders thing means the VM is ultimately using the windows filesystem

Maybe the other way would be easier, use the VM for all dev file storage as well, and export a SMB share that you can connect to from windows. Same sharing capability (as long as the VM is running), but you don't have to worry about different underlying file system semantics.

> So - I ditched vagrant and shared folders and use a totally contained VM with the ubuntu GUI... it's slow and horrid and it makes me cry... but at least I can alt-tab and waste time in a browser in the windows GUI if I want to.

Personally, I would just SSH for access to the VM though, as I find PuTTY superior to having a desktop as a window on a desktop (I would prefer to RDP to a local Windows VM as well). But I use Vim as my IDE, so it's extremely easy for me to do so.

That said, Visual Studio announced support for targeting Linux today (I assume either through SSH to a local VM or remote box and/or the local Linux support they announced here, so that might be an acceptable route in the future.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#596

Post by drvdevd »

shmerl wrote: post #74

So it's like Wine in reverse. Is it FOSS?

And here you've hit upon what would actually be interesting: the open sourcing of Windows itself, open sourcing of Hyper-V, etc. This is a 'nice to have' addition to Windows for sure. But it really does nothing to make Windows more relevant as an open source platform which is actually a major technical strength of most UNIX-alikes. And no I'm not saying Microsoft has to go GPL.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#597

Post by ctstover »

I've seen plenty of windows centric IT departments that would try to ban this from being installed. This act of admission will just be to iconoclastic for all those really enterprisey entrenched forces. You know the type.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#598

Post by Saltor »

derek_kanjus wrote: post #438
takeda wrote: post #233

Surprised I don't see anyone else mentioning this. This looks to me like typical Microsoft strategy that they utilized a lot 25 years ago. 1. when not leader in given market, make your product fully compatible with competitor 2. start gaining momentum (e.g. why should I use Linux, when on Windows I can run both Linux and Windows applications) 3. once becoming leader break up compatibility 4. rinse and repeat Happened…

What bothers me about people bringing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is how they never mention how all the big software companies do this. For example, how many nice JavaScript features are in Google Chrome that aren't anywhere close to real standards? But when anyone but Microsoft does it they're just pushing the industry forward, not out to stab you in the back. Let's not call it Embrace, Extend, Extinguish until we s…

I'm hopeful that this will lead towards greater unification and innovation, but I can see why people are more likely to bring up "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" when Microsoft does something compared to when other companies do. The difference is that Microsoft is the one who internally coined the term and used it to describe their strategies. It was a conscious and explicitly stated strategy rather than an unspoken side benefit.

You could certainly say that none of that matters and what we should care about is the actual actions that each company makes, but I can definitely see how people would read more intent into things like this when Microsoft does it compared to other companies.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#599

Post by mynameisvlad »

ssalazar wrote: post #527
Mafana0 wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you name a single company that doesn't follow where the market is and try to monopolises it later? Plus, Windows is still the leader in the desktop and laptop market until today. They are facing some tough competition but "not leader in given market" is not true.

Uh, any company that sells niche or upmarket offerings of commodity products, for one. I.e. Apple, Tesla, a bunch of watch manufacturers. > Plus, Windows is still the leader in the desktop and laptop market until today. They are facing some tough competition but "not leader in given market" is not true. Their position in the server world is not nearly so secure, which is quite possibly what this move is meant to addr…

Jumping on what Mafana said, Tesla is known for being one of the most closed off car systems on the planet. There were several HN posts over the last month or two talking about this, but they will require a full inspection to re-activate a car once it's been sold or written off, and it's almost impossible to get parts from them outside of service centers.

You chose literally two of the worst examples out there to try and prove your point.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#600

Post by yoklov »

derek_kanjus wrote: post #438
takeda wrote: post #233

Surprised I don't see anyone else mentioning this. This looks to me like typical Microsoft strategy that they utilized a lot 25 years ago. 1. when not leader in given market, make your product fully compatible with competitor 2. start gaining momentum (e.g. why should I use Linux, when on Windows I can run both Linux and Windows applications) 3. once becoming leader break up compatibility 4. rinse and repeat Happened…

What bothers me about people bringing Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is how they never mention how all the big software companies do this. For example, how many nice JavaScript features are in Google Chrome that aren't anywhere close to real standards? But when anyone but Microsoft does it they're just pushing the industry forward, not out to stab you in the back. Let's not call it Embrace, Extend, Extinguish until we s…

What JS features are chrome exclusive other than maybe a few ES6 features nobody else has implemented yet?
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