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Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Windows Store

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Re: Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Windows Store

#71

Post by eddiedunn »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #4

While I can see this is an excellent strategy for the Windows platform, and will probably make developers on Windows more productive, I for one will never give up natively installed linux distributions for development. It may be childish, but I resent Windows for every anti-privacy, anti-competitive move they make, despite how much it is within their rights and fitting with their corporate goals. Trying to put linux…

I agree with you, but there is a flip side. More people might start asking themselves what the point of Windows is, since everything they need is available on Linux.

"Why bother paying the Windows tax? Everything I need runs on Linux natively."

Re: Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Windows Store

#72

Post by AsyncAwait »

notalaser wrote: post #63
hardwaresofton wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you expand on some ways that linux desktops are getting worse/less portable? I run Arch and I definitely run into a few things from time to time where I need to go on a google hunt to figure out what's wrong (if it's not already obvious), but the distro is pretty user friendly (despite the 'hard core' reputation it has which honestly drew me to it). Ubuntu just about works right out of the box 99% of the time t…

> Could you expand on some ways that linux desktops are getting worse/less portable? Less portable: both major projects (Gnome and KDE) are increasingly depending on Linux-specific technologies (mainly through systemd dependencies, e.g. timedated, localed, hostnamed and logind, which are explicitly Linux-specific). They can be replaced by shims, fortunately, but these are difficult to write, because the components th…

> both major projects (Gnome and KDE) are increasingly depending on Linux-specific technologies

Yeah, turns out POSIX is no longer enough. I am all for operating systems using the best technology stack they've got. Nor Windows, macOS or BSDs get hate for doing the same, so why should Linux not be able to fully embrace its own solutions to make itself more competitive?

People always complain about this and that not being on par with Windows or macOS - well, in order to get there, you'll have to take full advantage of whatever APIs you can, even forgoing POSIX in some instances.

You can get the best experience using the most up-to-date APIs available on your platform or the most compatible, lowest common denominator experience, but you can't get both.

> Basically, except for Bluetooth and proprietary graphics driver, there's nothing that "almost works"

True that, it tends to "just work", on reasonably standard hardware, like the latest Dell XPS 15, practically everything 'just works', even on a 2015 retina MacBook Pro, my experience has been near flawless.

Re: Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Windows Store

#73

Post by taude »

hardwaresofton wrote: post #29
Shorel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't resent Windows, in fact I am doing updates now in the Windows OS. But just for performance and workload capacity, I can't give up Ubuntu, when installed in the very same hardware. There's something in Windows that just removes control from the user, and I say this in a very technical way.

Absolutely agreed -- I saw a different HN thread about running Windows 10 on ARM and: - thought to myself "why on earth would anyone want that" - looked at the comments, noted people who were working with legacy software that turned out to be dependent on windows, decided to keep my disparaging commentary to myself - felt sympathy with smidgen of condescension (I'm of the opinion that someone should just rewrite thos…

When you're a large company, with literally 100s of 500K+ LOC apps around, you don't get to just rewrite them. That's the reality of a lot of enterprise shops and completely changes the perspective when looking at a codebase with various vintage technologies.

Re: Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Windows Store

#74

Post by sevensor »

JoBrad wrote: post #49
cerved wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Awesome! Can't wait to install linux on WINE

Wine does work in WSL, so you can install WSL on your Windows box, then use WINE to run a Windows app on the Linux instance on your Windows box.

Are people doing this to play Win9x-era games? I find Wine does a better job being compatible with old Win32 applications than Windows does.

Re: Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Windows Store

#75

Post by lorenzhs »

mih wrote: post #67
lorenzhs wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All the issues you named are KDE issues. I don't want to start a war here but Gnome 3 has really matured since its botched initial release and plays nice with KDE applications (but maybe that's due to Qt being great). I'm not trying to convince you to switch (KDE does have points in its favour, too!), but Gnome 3 is a sound recommendation for new users and causes very few issues.

Gnome does indeed look better out of the box, but I am not in favour of installing extensions for customization. This is something that KDE shines at, with loads of options to tweak appearance and behaviour. XFCE and other tiling managers, I've tried briefly but I always find myself reverting back to Plasma desktop. Without a unifying force behind Linux desktop (Freedesktop helped to some degree), I have come to acce…

Yup, the extensions are annoying, but luckily many are packaged, at least in Debian. I have one to get sane Alt-Tab behaviour, a media player indicator, a weather extension (in the middle of the top bar, next to the clock), one to get a suspend button, and another one to arrange my workspaces in a grid. Of those, only the last one isn't part of the gnome-shell-extension* packages. It's annoying to have to use a "tweak tool" to manage this stuff.

Re: Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Windows Store

#76

Post by rubber_duck »

fb03 wrote: post #8

Genuine question: Why not just virtualbox/vmware it up with an ISO ? That's how I've been doing for years and it works just fine.

This is one (windows) kernel instance running apps built for linux. VMWare just starts a new OS instance on the same PC - but it has a separate memory/FS/scheduler/drivers/etc. a lot of overhead, duplication and sync work.

Say there's a tool that doesn't have a Windows version, like Facebook Flow didn't have - you can just install the necessary packages and run the linux app on your project folder - plenty of dev tools are built on top of *nix and Windows is a second class citizen in OSS - this solves that problem nicely. Or you can use linux GCC/clang to build the linux binaries on Windows and not muck around with cross compiling.

Re: Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Windows Store

#78

Post by notalaser »

AsyncAwait wrote: post #72
notalaser wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Could you expand on some ways that linux desktops are getting worse/less portable? Less portable: both major projects (Gnome and KDE) are increasingly depending on Linux-specific technologies (mainly through systemd dependencies, e.g. timedated, localed, hostnamed and logind, which are explicitly Linux-specific). They can be replaced by shims, fortunately, but these are difficult to write, because the components th…

> both major projects (Gnome and KDE) are increasingly depending on Linux-specific technologies Yeah, turns out POSIX is no longer enough. I am all for operating systems using the best technology stack they've got. Nor Windows, macOS or BSDs get hate for doing the same, so why should Linux not be able to fully embrace its own solutions to make itself more competitive? People always complain about this and that not be…

> You can get the best experience using the most up-to-date APIs available on your platform or the most compatible, lowest common denominator experience, but you can't get both.

Thank God the guys who write the kernel never thought about this :-)

Besides, this isn't what I was criticizing. What I wrote (it often helps to read the whole argument before offering a counterpoint) is:

> Both major projects (Gnome and KDE) are increasingly depending on Linux-specific technologies (mainly through systemd dependencies, e.g. timedated, localed, hostnamed and logind, which are explicitly Linux-specific). They can be replaced by shims, fortunately, but these are difficult to write, because the components that they replace move quickly, often not very transparently, and without much documentation.

Windows, MacOS and (at least Open)BSD don't get all this hate because they tend to introduce components when they're reasonably stable and almost always with full, proper documentation. They rarely dump beta-quality code for the community to test and document, like Red Hat did with pretty much every desktop technology they developed after 2005 or so.

Re: Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Windows Store

#79

Post by AsyncAwait »

notalaser wrote: post #78
AsyncAwait wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> both major projects (Gnome and KDE) are increasingly depending on Linux-specific technologies Yeah, turns out POSIX is no longer enough. I am all for operating systems using the best technology stack they've got. Nor Windows, macOS or BSDs get hate for doing the same, so why should Linux not be able to fully embrace its own solutions to make itself more competitive? People always complain about this and that not be…

> You can get the best experience using the most up-to-date APIs available on your platform or the most compatible, lowest common denominator experience, but you can't get both. Thank God the guys who write the kernel never thought about this :-) Besides, this isn't what I was criticizing. What I wrote (it often helps to read the whole argument before offering a counterpoint) is: > Both major projects (Gnome and KDE)…

> Thank God the guys who write the kernel never thought about this :-)

Sorry, I tried, but can't see what you're arguing here, since the discussion was about user space, not the kernel.

> They rarely dump beta-quality code for the community to test and document

Huh, Microsoft has a loong history of updates breaking things, (even permanently) and they recently fired practically all their testers to let the users test their updates.

Mac OS 10.7 was a broken mess and the latest Sierra broke cURL.

Besides, that is the trade off of developing in the open, you get to see not only the good stuff, but all the quirks on the way there too, you must personally decide if it's a trade-of worth making.

Re: Ubuntu, SUSE Linux, and Fedora Are All Coming to the Windows Store

#80

Post by shortlyfinally »

sorenjan wrote: post #42
glenneroo wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing they talked with VMWare before doing this? I wonder what implications/benefits this has for VMWare, since their (limited) Player has been free for a while now. Then again, according to Wikipedia, maybe they were already planning for this? > VMware Workstation versions 12.0.0, 12.0.1, and 12.1.0 were released at intervals of about two months in 2015.[61] In January 2016 the entire development team behind…

There are other reasons to want to use a VM, like guest isolation and multiple environments. I like to run unknown software in a VM first.

VMWare is great for setting up a test networking environment too. Workstation's virtual interface setup is nice and allowed me to test a host of operating systems, a custom router to test firewall rules, 802.1x security and a RADIUS server. All in a simple virtual environment.
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