Earlier quoted context omitted.
They already have #1 in the form of WSL.
Yes but it runs inside CMD which is the WORST Windows terminal host.
Yes.. but that is more than most Windows users know. It sounds like you are a Linux user at heart.
Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
31–40 of 67 posts
Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
#32PC gaming just shook a little. I have decades old games that still work because Microsoft still supports Windows. uTorrent entirely exists because of Microsoft's commitment to break-your-back-backwards-compatability in Windows. DirectX is 25+ years of of PC gaming's history. That could disappear like a console generation. That's a little disconcerting.
The future of PC gaming is Linux gaming. And you can run Windows games in Wine on Linux, including games from Windows 3.11 times.
Why do you think the future of PC gaming is Linux gaming?
Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
#33They should take it off the burner altogether for Azure services and just use Linux. I’m not saying they should not host eg exchange, sql server, share point, and all their other stuff for customers. But much of their lower level infra is built on Windows, and Windows is both not ideal for large scale services and lacks the awesome FOSS ecosystem around it. And that’s before you consider how painful and slow it is to develop for.
Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
#34Makes sense to me. They are ahead of AWS around K8S support. That kind of thing, if they do it in multiple areas, will erode Amazon's current lead. Azure is also noteably less expensive than AWS. They are already eating into Bezos' market share. Also the whole office 365 plan gets F500 companies already tied into Azure. It's sort of like the drug dealer's "first one's free" tactic. They will, for example, spend money…
AWS is in a really weird place right now. They're powerful and have a bright future, obviously. But it feels like its already become a legacy platform in the cloud world.
Look at what they've released in the past two years... their AI stuff is second rate compared to Google, and seems like its just there to check boxes. Their serverless stuff beyond Lambda is overpriced, like Aurora Serverless and Fargate. They're dragging their feet on EKS; it was announced 5 months ago, we still don't have a release date, and the latest webcast (last week) they showed made it seem either really bad or really unfinished, like you have to involve CloudFormation to provision instances, manually manage VPC subnets, etc.
Its a world where they have a core set of "legacy" building blocks that are really good and well-tested (EC2, RDS, S3, SNS, SQS, a few others) but if you go beyond those you enter uncharted territory that mostly exists to seem hip and check boxes.
GCP, on the other hand, has legitimately powerful products at higher abstraction levels like GKE, Firebase, DialogFlow, and their AI stuff. I know less about Azure, but they seem to be doing well checking boxes and pushing toward more higher abstraction levels with things like AKS, service fabric, etc. Where's the actionable innovation at AWS?
Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the contrary, I think perhaps the best thing for the preservation of the history of windows gaming is for windows to stop changing. A frozen or deprecated win32 API will give WINE (which is already quite good) breathing room to catch up and fill in the gaps, without having to continuously cope with the shifting sand of the latest experiments with windows. We'll be able to run old windows games forever, rather than…
I understand where you are coming from. You are correct that an constantly changing desktop experience is sub-optimal. I fear we will lose the Microsoft as the silent steward of backwards compatibility, DirectX support, getting manufacturers to make great hardware drivers, the list goes on. It's this part of Microsoft that Windows will lose, because it isn't customer facing. I think the fallout is exactly the opposit…
Actually... It's more common than not for an old game to not work correctly (or at all) in recent versions of Windows without hacks and compatibility wrappers. Try to run a DirectX 6 game on Windows 10. Today, WINE is closer to be that "one continuous system" than Windows is.
Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
#36To be honest it is not a bad thing. The new features in Windows have been rather user hostile and regressions in term of usability and capabilities. I’d be happy with them maintaining the security and adding features as required by advances in hardware, but not treating the OS as a playground for radical creativity and monetisation.
Strongly agree. I quickly went from installing software on whatever OS I happened to be using with Windows 7, to actively avoiding booting into Windows with Windows 10. Now, if a binary is available for Linux, I'm using that.
Unfortunately, some areas like embedded development are stuck in the past with support for modern platforms. For example, it is somewhat ironic that I cannot use most tooling for baremetal ARM devices on an ARM platform (tablet, chromebook, raspberry pi) because Eclipse 4+ is a common dependency and is not built for ARM. And before you say it - go try to build Eclipse from source yourself in a reasonable amount of time. Nightmares.
With open toolchains available to serve most of my needs from coding to compilation to EDA to graphic design, it's becoming less of an issue. And on x86/64 platforms, more and more places are starting to provide multiplatform support. But it is so flippin' annoying to have to deal with all the cruft and crap of Win10 when all I want is a clean environment for creating things. Just make the OS easy to use and get it out of the way! It's a product, not a service!
Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
#37PC gaming just shook a little. I have decades old games that still work because Microsoft still supports Windows. uTorrent entirely exists because of Microsoft's commitment to break-your-back-backwards-compatability in Windows. DirectX is 25+ years of of PC gaming's history. That could disappear like a console generation. That's a little disconcerting.
My hope is that it will put more effort into projects like ReactOS, which will get us a binary-compatible version of Windows that is free and open-source.
Microsoft in the last few years had a see-the-light moment with Open Source. If the stars align and I'm good this year, Microsoft might release some core Windows and DirectX code to the community.
Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
They already have #1 in the form of WSL.
Yes but it runs inside CMD which is the WORST Windows terminal host.
Correct me if I am wrong, but it doesn't have to be inside cmd. A lot of people use cmder/conemu, and it works great with WSL. You can even put your own shell on top of WSL (zsh, fish, etc.), if you are inclined to do so.
Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
#39Makes sense to me. They are ahead of AWS around K8S support. That kind of thing, if they do it in multiple areas, will erode Amazon's current lead. Azure is also noteably less expensive than AWS. They are already eating into Bezos' market share. Also the whole office 365 plan gets F500 companies already tied into Azure. It's sort of like the drug dealer's "first one's free" tactic. They will, for example, spend money…
AWS is in a really weird place right now. They're powerful and have a bright future, obviously. But it feels like its already become a legacy platform in the cloud world. Look at what they've released in the past two years... their AI stuff is second rate compared to Google, and seems like its just there to check boxes. Their serverless stuff beyond Lambda is overpriced, like Aurora Serverless and Fargate. They're dr…
Agreed. Looking forward to when Azure, GCP, and AWS have more equal marketshare. That will fix some current cloud shortcomings. Like stupid high egress rates. Or Amazon's lack of a real Spanner competitor.
Though, I get some of the egress upcharge in GCP. Their global network is worth some premium. Just not the current predatory pricing.
Re: Microsoft is putting Windows on the back burner
#40for me to dev solely on windows, it needs: 1) coreutils + some other nix commands 2) iTerm2 equivalent(ConEmu/Cmder do not compare)
Hey there, I'm actually on the windows console dev team. Any specific features you're looking for from iTerm2? There's already hundred of items on the backlog, but I'm always curious what things in particular people are looking for.
Can't answer iTerm2, but I use Cmder daily. I don't think the Windows Console can (as I want for day-to-day usage)
1) show the Git branch in the prompt 2) display nice colours 3) open multiple tabs
Looking forward to being proved wrong :) Cmder works well for me but I'd rather have something core to Windows to use instead.