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Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

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Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#31

Post by [deleted] »

some_account wrote: post #29
stinos wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time they don't let you create from WSL standard Windows application that you can redistribute, I guess this is part of their strategy. I fail to see how that has anything to do with embrace/extend/whatever. Maybe I'm missing something but they simply let you run largely unmodified linux. Which obviously is not windows. And which can already cross-compile for windows seemingly making your point extra moot…

By letting users run Linux, they are moving people away from the Linux distributions and into the windows ecosystem. This the embrace step, so they later can watch Linux distribution usage decline to nothing. That leaves Windows as the professional choice for Linux. Anything that moves users from Linux distributions to Windows is very bad for free software, since it's already a small market.

[deleted]

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#32

Post by barrkel »

some_account wrote: post #29
stinos wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the same time they don't let you create from WSL standard Windows application that you can redistribute, I guess this is part of their strategy. I fail to see how that has anything to do with embrace/extend/whatever. Maybe I'm missing something but they simply let you run largely unmodified linux. Which obviously is not windows. And which can already cross-compile for windows seemingly making your point extra moot…

By letting users run Linux, they are moving people away from the Linux distributions and into the windows ecosystem. This the embrace step, so they later can watch Linux distribution usage decline to nothing. That leaves Windows as the professional choice for Linux. Anything that moves users from Linux distributions to Windows is very bad for free software, since it's already a small market.

I really deeply disagree.

You could use the same argument against Msys2 and Cygwin, yet they were key to me choosing the Unix command line as my common interface across all OSes when I was a teenager, with plenty of games that I wasn't going to give up any time soon to live in Linux.

I think it's ridiculously naive to think that businesses are going to build on top of a closed source licensed system like WSL when with minimal effort they could choose Linux. The business risks of the former are huge and they're handing a big lever to MS to screw them in the future - why would they do that? If anything, WSL makes it easier to transition to Linux, because you can develop and test without committing to a big change or using clunky virtualization.

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#33

Post by tybit »

frankohn wrote: post #8

I advice people to not use WSL. It seems to me that this is the first step of their well-known embrace, extend, extinguish microsoft's strategy. They are now embracing the gnu/linux way of working like the packaging tools, the command line with the shells, the easy of having a compiler and developer tools, etc etc. At the same time they don't let you create from WSL standard Windows application that you can redistrib…

Why would they want to embrace, extend and extinguish Linux when nowadays the competition is no longer Linux but AWS, Google etc?

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#34

Post by red75prime »

frankohn wrote: post #8

I advice people to not use WSL. It seems to me that this is the first step of their well-known embrace, extend, extinguish microsoft's strategy. They are now embracing the gnu/linux way of working like the packaging tools, the command line with the shells, the easy of having a compiler and developer tools, etc etc. At the same time they don't let you create from WSL standard Windows application that you can redistrib…

> At the same time they don't let you create from WSL standard Windows application that you can redistribute.

WSL runs Linux applications natively by implementing Linux compatible syscalls in a kernel subsystem. What standard windows application and redistribution have to do with it?

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#35

Post by barrkel »

newnewpdro wrote: post #25
willtim wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they extending Linux? It also sounds like you are asking them to, since you want to build Windows apps from WSL! A large part of the attraction of WSL for many, is that native windows ports are not needed. Windows will never extinguish Linux, while it remains closed and proprietary, so I wouldn't worry about that.

They're in the embracing phase. Linux, the kernel, is actively in the process of losing a majority of its non-server market share and thus related development resources. It will become a very real possibility for Linux to be relatively unusable directly on modern consumer hardware if nothing is done to prevent it. WSL, if successful, will deter potential desktop Linux users from leaving Windows if they consider WSL a…

WSL makes it easier to migrate to Linux, and the business drivers are entirely in that direction for licensing and tech vibrancy reasons.

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#36

Post by jchw »

frankohn wrote: post #8

I advice people to not use WSL. It seems to me that this is the first step of their well-known embrace, extend, extinguish microsoft's strategy. They are now embracing the gnu/linux way of working like the packaging tools, the command line with the shells, the easy of having a compiler and developer tools, etc etc. At the same time they don't let you create from WSL standard Windows application that you can redistrib…

WSL is not for developing Windows applications, it's a full Linux ABI-compatible subsystem. The intent is to run Linux-based operating systems and tools unmodified. It's mostly just to make life easier for people developing on platforms like Ruby on Rails where Unix has better support.

WSL feels no more dangerous than Wine.

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#37

Post by oblio »

frankohn wrote: post #8

I advice people to not use WSL. It seems to me that this is the first step of their well-known embrace, extend, extinguish microsoft's strategy. They are now embracing the gnu/linux way of working like the packaging tools, the command line with the shells, the easy of having a compiler and developer tools, etc etc. At the same time they don't let you create from WSL standard Windows application that you can redistrib…

I’ve been using Linux for more than 10 years. Don’t be ridiculous. Linux desktop usage has always been pitiful, 2% of the market at best. What is there to extinguish? There is a reason “the year of Linux on the desktop” is a meme.

You’re completely misreading their strategy. They’re targeting development for Azure. These days a ton of development tools are *nix native and Windows is a second class citizen, because Linux on the server is massive. And Microsoft can’t budge it, it tried, it gave up: Linux runs on Azure. But Microsoft needs to take dev mindshare from Mac, especially. Mac is the real target here, another proprietary OS. Mac is closer to Linux so many devs work on it and later deploy to Linux.

Microsoft wants to attract Mac devs to Windows so that they can up-sell things that make it easy to work with Azure.

And you forgot one thing from the days of EEE: Microsoft was uncontested #1. Those days are GONE. They can’t extinguish anything these days, even if they try. They did successfully extinguish Windows Phone, now that I think about it... :p

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#38

Post by hirsin »

zmix wrote: post #23

Wouldn't it have been better for Microsoft to support https://midipix.org , which would have resulted in more finegrained POSIX support for Windows, rather than installing an isolated machine, that runs seperate?

What isolated machine? Open up WSL, run "CMD.exe notepad", then top. You'll see the instance of notepad running, and then you can go kill it with taskmanager. People still seem to think it's a VM when it's not - the pid in the Linux system is the same pid in Windows, it just hits a different part of the kernel.

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#39

Post by [deleted] »

newnewpdro wrote: post #25
willtim wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are they extending Linux? It also sounds like you are asking them to, since you want to build Windows apps from WSL! A large part of the attraction of WSL for many, is that native windows ports are not needed. Windows will never extinguish Linux, while it remains closed and proprietary, so I wouldn't worry about that.

They're in the embracing phase. Linux, the kernel, is actively in the process of losing a majority of its non-server market share and thus related development resources. It will become a very real possibility for Linux to be relatively unusable directly on modern consumer hardware if nothing is done to prevent it. WSL, if successful, will deter potential desktop Linux users from leaving Windows if they consider WSL a…

[deleted]

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#40

Post by ape4 »

zmix wrote: post #23

Wouldn't it have been better for Microsoft to support https://midipix.org , which would have resulted in more finegrained POSIX support for Windows, rather than installing an isolated machine, that runs seperate?

The utf-8 everywhere is great. Microsoft should admit that their utf-16 was a mistake a provide utf-8 version of all functions - eg GetWindowTextA() GetWindowTextM() exist and now... GetWindowTextU()
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