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Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

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Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#151

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

askvictor wrote: post #80
crispinb wrote: post #10

I'd like to use linux, and install it from time to time, but am always eventually worn down by problems, some trivial & some less so, that could mostly be solved, but at the cost of research & fiddling time I'm not interested in spending. The issues largely fall into two categories - missing software, and missing or undercooked hardware support. If Microsoft did signal to the market an increased long-term support for…

Having had a decent go at all three major OSes (windows, osx and Linux) in the past few years, I've found all of them to have a whole bunch of annoyances that stop me being able to do what I want, how I want it.

Definitely. It's more a matter of choosing the one that sucks the least for your needs than anything else. And since they all seem to be drifting farther and farther away from what I actually want in a personal computer I've started entertaining the idea of making my own (not a new kernel, just most of the stuff on top of it, a new "operating environment"). But it's a ton of work and I'm not really qualified to do most of it, plus I have other projects. It would be great if there was a community with a similar conception I could work with, but I haven't found one yet.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#152

Post by aasasd »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #149
cwyers wrote: post #25

The Windows NT kernel has better hardware support and Microsoft is showing that they can run a full Linux userland on top of it. What do they gain from shipping Linux for the desktop?

WSL is a slow joke compared against native GNU/Linux. Also, you missed that WSL don't support GUI apps. However the inverse, Wine, works very well and sometimes it's faster that native Windows

Just a passing note, if WSL can run programs with GUI libs, those programs likely can draw to a Windows-native graphical server. (I've briefly used this technique with CoLinux the userspace-Linux-for-Windows).

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#153

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

pritambaral wrote: post #108
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, because you know what'd be really great? If Windows had the same fragmentation mess that Linux Desktop does.

One's "fragmentation" is another's "choice".

Yeah, and one man's "kink" is another man's "getting kicked in the balls".

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#154

Post by fouc »

sterlind wrote: post #60
gingerbread-man wrote: post #34

Here's a dopey idea: What if Microsoft open-sourced the Windows NT kernel? (While retaining some proprietary drivers, etc..) If handled well, a community would blossom around "NT," with multiple "unofficial" distros (maybe one with full POSIX compatibility), and lots and lots of happy developers. If things went really well, they might even achieve the resources necessary to create Windows Phone 2.0. Microsoft could s…

Amazon and Google are likely to make cloud-ready NT distros, cutting off Microsoft's last cash lifeline on rival clouds. So it would have significant costs. On the other hand, Flash once had API dominance and lost it as they (fortunately!) abdicated to HTML5. MS is now extremely aware that Win32 isn't the future - they even cut the OS into pieces and reorg'd NT under us (Azure.) .NET Core is the way forward for the c…

at some point we're going to have to converge our operating systems so there's no differentiation on desktop or mobile, and usable for both developers or phone users.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#155

Post by aasasd »

Endy wrote: post #32
simonblack wrote: post #3

I suggested on Mini-Microsoft about 10 years ago that Microsoft do an 'Apple'. Apple took a free OS from BSD and put their own GUI over the top of it. I suggested that MSFT do the same sort of thing, that being to put their Windows GUI on top of the Linux OS instead of using the Linux X11 GUIs. This had the advantage that the underlying OS base would no longer need maintaining by Microsoft, and all their coding effor…

That would have been the end of me using computers, right then and there. An operating system that updates or upgrades more than about once per decade is moving entirely too fast. 5 years about the fastest possible rate that even approaches being reasonable. The fact that Windows has always bent over backwards to provide backward compatibility would be totally invalidated by shifting toward Linux. I run a bunch of DO…

> I run a bunch of DOS programs in Win 7 still, without needing to go through DOSBox

Afaik pure DOS mode wasn't in Win2000 and XP, and it uses virtualization or something like it.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#156

Post by pzone »

vbezhenar wrote: post #138
wscott wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with your conclusion but I wanted to comment about the IO performance remark. If you take an IO-heavy application and compile it natively on both platforms you will find that IO performance on Linux is dramaticly faster than windows(1) (and OSX for that matter). For certain workloads, I could see a Windows application running faster under emulation on Linux than natively. 1) This is maybe not true for…

Is there any particular reason why Linux IO is dramatically faster? NTFS is polished FS, Fat32 is extremely simple (may be unreliable but that's not the point) and both should be performant enough. Also there's new ReFS. May be there's some stupid bug like Windows Defender checking file for viruses every write() call which could be easily fixed?

It's the general overhead and speed of syscalls for reading and writing files. It's very noticeable in software like git which works by reading and writing hundreds of small chunk files to disk. This is a well known fact and there's no way the team responsible for Windows filesystems is unaware. I would be shocked if it were possible to fix with a small or non-breaking change.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#157

Post by Joeri »

geofft wrote: post #15

> In addition, for several years now, Microsoft's WSL developers have been working on mapping Linux API calls to Windows and vice-versa. A lot of the work needed for Windows apps to run without modification on Linux has already been done. This argument makes little sense: that "vice versa" is wholly unsubstantiated and without it the rest collapses. Making Linux binaries work on NT (which already has a subsystem conc…

On the other hand, Microsoft has been trying for years to get developers off win32 and onto .NET. Windows S mode was an experiment where they didn't support win32 at all. Much of .NET is already open source. One could argue they are ready to make a .NET shell around a linux kernel and ship MS Linux.

But ... why would they? The only reasoning I can see is if they could stop maintaining the windows kernel, like how the move to chromium means they have one less thing to maintain. But they have to keep maintaining it for all those enterprise windows deployments which are tied hard to win32 apps. So I think there's nothing here but clickbait. And yes, I clicked.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#158

Post by Lio »

crispinb wrote: post #59
halbritt wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you guys tried Linux on the desktop recently? There's a host of folks in my org running Ubuntu on Dell XPS laptops. Issues do arise, but they're pretty rare. I made the switch from Mac almost two years ago and it's been great.

Yep, on the XPS this year (the last time a new Ubuntu install a couple of weeks ago). Many problems. Some fixable, but a poorer use of my time than running or sailing or any number of three-dimensional activities I choose over screen flatland when not working.

I have an evaluation DeV Edition XPS 13 to try out.

So far I’ve tried it out with Ubuntu 18.04, 18.10, Fedora and Intel Clear Linux. There’s not much set up involved in getting any of these installed and working.

The only issues I've seen have been, the trackpad’s a bit jumpy and I still don’t have a HiDPI and 1440 mix working nicely together under Gnome.

Currently I’m trying out Arch which is great as a learning tool.

I still have an old Mac for day to day work but I’ll be permanently switching to Linux soon I think.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#159

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

Zardoz84 wrote: post #145
justinclift wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... the practices of Linux/Unix devs who have little or no respect for the past Maybe some Linux devs, but many Unix devs have been around a long time and are pretty insistent on backwards compatibility too. ;)

shit... There are some Unix software from 80's that runs unmodified on modern Linux. You only need to recompile it.

Linux (the kernel) is an extreme outlier in this case because Linus actually cares deeply about compatibility. You don't even need to recompile statically linked old Linux software to have it work in most cases.

But otherwise UNIX's compatibility story is pretty damned atrocious because part of its culture is relying on everybody to recompile everything.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#160

Post by aasasd »

simonblack wrote: post #3

I suggested on Mini-Microsoft about 10 years ago that Microsoft do an 'Apple'. Apple took a free OS from BSD and put their own GUI over the top of it. I suggested that MSFT do the same sort of thing, that being to put their Windows GUI on top of the Linux OS instead of using the Linux X11 GUIs. This had the advantage that the underlying OS base would no longer need maintaining by Microsoft, and all their coding effor…

Among all the other reasons why not, I think GPL would pose a hurdle. (And I wonder if that influenced Apple's choice of BSD vs GNU―though I guess GNU didn't have a popular OS back in '95.)
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