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Ubuntu on Windows

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Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#691

Post by sreenadh »

jupiter2 wrote: post #384
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…

Thank you for mentioning this! Really bothered by all the positive comments, especially coming from savvy HN users. Gave this a long look and my main beef is that I couldn't possibly do anything on a Windows Machine in its' current state. Linux isn't just about running apps - there's a philosophy behind the system. Users first! As long as Microsoft continues to disrespect the rights of users in regard to privacy, dat…

@jupiter2 Well put. I really liked, "It's like giving a man who is dying of thirst sea water.". The fact of the matter is that MS has not yet realized or is unwilling to correct its core issue, and instead it is going many nothings like be it an atom forked text editor or running Ubuntu in windows.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#692

Post by wfunction »

homero wrote: post #686
jupiter2 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for mentioning this! Really bothered by all the positive comments, especially coming from savvy HN users. Gave this a long look and my main beef is that I couldn't possibly do anything on a Windows Machine in its' current state. Linux isn't just about running apps - there's a philosophy behind the system. Users first! As long as Microsoft continues to disrespect the rights of users in regard to privacy, dat…

I nuked win10 after it decided to uninstall a program all by itself

What program was this...?

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#693

Post by badminton1 »

jupiter2 wrote: post #384
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…

Thank you for mentioning this! Really bothered by all the positive comments, especially coming from savvy HN users. Gave this a long look and my main beef is that I couldn't possibly do anything on a Windows Machine in its' current state. Linux isn't just about running apps - there's a philosophy behind the system. Users first! As long as Microsoft continues to disrespect the rights of users in regard to privacy, dat…

One aspect is the technology, another aspect are the values driving that technology, another aspect is the legal aspect.

You are mixing them all and that's how the debate gets stuck into some neckbeard-limbo that nobody cares about.

Society made a lot of progress when religion and state got decoupled from each other. There are some things that should be handled separately.

What I have to say about this is:

Technology-wise, GNU/Linux software is separate from that of Windows at the binary level as well as dependencies. For them to extend such software means that they would need to build on that. That would extend the GNU/Linux ecosystem.

Legally-wise, open source software is protected by open source licensing that requires derived software to also be licensed as open source. It is challenging to achieve the "extend" part of the "embrace/extend/extinguish" loop if open source licenses are in place.

In terms of values, they're a for-profit corporation trying to reach out to developers. Same as every other company. They have open sourced .NET, they've released some of their actually important software on Linux (SQL Server), they have embraced the Linux platform on their cloud environments... everything possible to appeal to developers. It doesn't appeal to me, though.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#694

Post by groundCode »

city41 wrote: post #588
jupiter2 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for mentioning this! Really bothered by all the positive comments, especially coming from savvy HN users. Gave this a long look and my main beef is that I couldn't possibly do anything on a Windows Machine in its' current state. Linux isn't just about running apps - there's a philosophy behind the system. Users first! As long as Microsoft continues to disrespect the rights of users in regard to privacy, dat…

I think a key point that is being missed here is most of the people excited about this probably run OSX, not Linux. OSX has long been the "'Linux' for people who don't really want to run Linux" (not really meant as an insult, I'm typing this from OSX right now). Apple is just as proprietary, commercial and anti-competitive as Microsoft here. FWIW, this excites me because it potentially means I can go from two machine…

Pretty much this - it's going to make my life as a developer easier. Having Linux right there when I'm working on an Microsoft platform will remove a clunk in my user experience of having a VM open all the time for when I want to drop into Linux.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#695

Post by baq »

ageofwant wrote: post #539
mcpherrinm wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fortunately X11 is "network transparent" and there's X11 servers for windows. It shouldn't actually be that hard to make this work (though the perf will probably be pretty bad in a naive implementation). At very worst you could SSH to localhost and X11-forward to the same host -- but you can optimize that.

Or you could just use ubuntu... It amazes me that people will rag on linux because its "hard" and then build these elaborate Rube-Goldberg machines to avoid the most obvious solution.

no i couldn't, corporate it won't let me. this will be so much better than anything else currently available.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#696

Post by willtim »

jychang wrote: post #254
blinkingled wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They actually do syscall translation on the fly from Linux to Windows. I suppose they had to add some calls to Windows for things in Linux that did not exist on Windows (various console ioctls for e.g.) but it is still a one to one translation.

This isn't really easy to implement for some syscalls in NT, like fork(2) for example.

It's not possible to implement fork efficiently on Win32/64 which cygwin uses, but are you sure this is the case when using the NT native APIs?

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#697

Post by narrator »

1024core wrote: post #675
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…

It's called "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish". They also tried to do this with Java, but people were alert.

They tried to do it with Java but Sun wrote a really good contract and filed and won a multi-million dollar lawsuit against them for trying to fragment the platform.[1]

[1] http://www.cnet.com/news/sun-microsoft-settle-java-suit/

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#698

Post by tempestn »

thegenius2000 wrote: post #454
jupiter2 wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for mentioning this! Really bothered by all the positive comments, especially coming from savvy HN users. Gave this a long look and my main beef is that I couldn't possibly do anything on a Windows Machine in its' current state. Linux isn't just about running apps - there's a philosophy behind the system. Users first! As long as Microsoft continues to disrespect the rights of users in regard to privacy, dat…

This is so true I'm loathe to add to it. I dual boot my laptop b/w Windows and Linux because the WiFi network at my school has issues with Linux...so I'm forced to use Windows, also for games, but it's such a pain. Today it updated forcefully while I was trying to study; I tried to postpone the update but the option was grayed out. The Windows philosophy through and through is to treat users as ignorant and incompete…

It's odd for me to read this, because the main reason I use Windows for my desktop over OSX is that it offers increased control. Obviously nothing is as customizable as Linux, but Apply software seems much more about taking decisions away from the user than Microsoft. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. It's, "It just works," vs, "You can make it work the way you want." I see Windows as sitting between OSX and Linux on that spectrum.

That said, for most development work I prefer Linux, and run a Linux home server as well as various VMs, so this announcement sounds great to me.

And as a final aside: basically all of the information gathering that people complain about with Windows can very easily be turned off. In fact, for the most part the installation wizard actually leads you through how to turn it off. For me that makes it a non-issue, although I understand that some feel differently.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#699

Post by ed_blackburn »

SXX wrote: post #477
partiallypro wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft is not the same company it was 25 years ago, much less 3 years ago. Microsoft cares about Azure now, and Azure requires GNU/Linux. It just makes sense for Microsoft to do this, and I for one am pretty excited about it.

Once Microsoft stop charge users of Linux-based products for their patents or at least stop doing that shady way under NDA I'll believe it's not the same company. So far they get better in communication with open source community, but their business practices are all the same and Windows 10 only prove it.

I'm curious how many people actually factor this into any due diligence for selecting technology for a project? How much weight do you give it? If I were to advise against using Azure, Windows, .NET because of patents charges for some Linux products I'm not sure my colleagues or clients would take me seriously. Yes, there are lots of reasons why you may not select MS tech, but patents seems a personal, political reason , which would be difficult to justify if you're trying to project it onto other people / organisations.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#700

Post by willtim »

deckar01 wrote: post #602
tostitos1979 wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been "stuck" with a 2010 Macbook since Apple isn't refreshing it's laptop hardware soon enough. Plus I'm sick of soldered in RAM and other BS. For devs that do heavy Linux work (but have stuck with a Mac OS for GUI/app reasons), is it time to move (back) to Windows? If so, what would be a good laptop to get at the moment?

Go to a brick and mortar electronics store, pick out a laptop that meets your desired specs, and do something realistic with it for a while. There are lots of little things I took for granted about Apple MacBooks that no Windows laptops could match. Touch pad, high dpi display, and cooling were never quite done right, but they are crucial for every day operations.

I would suggest not trying to source quality hardware from an electronics store. For software development, Thinkpads more then compete with MacBooks, the keyboard is considerably better too.
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