Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux? • Hacker News Board

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#161

Post by geofft » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 2:10 PM UTC

halbritt wrote: post #45

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…

The existence of MSSQL-Linux is proof that Microsoft can get this done. The story is pretty interesting: https://cloudblogs.microsoft.com/sqlserver/2016/12/16/sql-se...

Oh yeah, that's a pretty good point. There's no GUI involved, though... but another good example is Internet Explorer for UNIX, which used a third-party WINE-like product from the mid-'90s. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX But even then, that was with source access to IE.

I definitely believe MS has the skills to make a binary-level implementation of Win32 on Linux happen. I just don't think it will be easy.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#162

Post by sawantuday » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #130

sterlind wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Amazon has supported Windows VMs since at least 2010, the first time I did a Windows cloud based deployment. So far it hasn't been that interesting for Windows projects. Regarding the ever-shrinking desktop market, laptops and 2-1 are "desktops" as well. Plugging phones into docking stations will never caught on.

Whats your logic behind that? Current phones with 10gb of ram and 8 cores already surpass average computers. Its only a matter of right user interface.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#163

Post by geofft » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 2:12 PM UTC

jcelerier wrote: post #134

kerng wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's even more so true. The complexity of kernel calls is much higher when custom memory and scheduler involved I'd say. Getting Office running is probably rather simple in comparison.

> The complexity of kernel calls is much higher when custom memory and scheduler involved I'd say I really don't think so. MS used to render scrollbars in the kernel (was still the case in early Win10 versions)

I believe TrueType fonts are still rendered in kernel mode. (They have a policy option for blocking untrusted fonts, because of course that parser has bugs.)

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#164

Post by Joeri » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 2:14 PM UTC

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…

But it would pull a bunch of developers away from new scenarios to put onto an ever-shrinking desktop market. Most likely we'll just see all new products become cross-platform and the execs will wait until a new "iPhone moment" comes along to get ahead with consumer OS.

I'm still fascinated by that. The iPad Pro and the Chromebook have taken away a lot of windows' traditional market. But ... you look at how people are using them, and they're using them as laptops. Why couldn't windows take that place?

The logical answer is: because of all the legacy. Windows is too easy to break (even microsoft can't upgrade it without breaking it), and too hard to use, and it needs major investment to fix those problems. So, why stop investing in windows when it's the lack of investment that makes it unable to compete? I'm still struggling to understand that one.

It seems microsoft's management has concluded they can't and won't compete after windows 8 flopped, and they'll just stretch out the decline of windows as long as they can and hope to catch the next wave. I'm sure google and apple love them for doing that, but I still don't quite understand it.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#165

Post by geofft » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 2:16 PM UTC

pzone wrote: post #156

vbezhenar wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn't it a programming model thing? There's no Linux version of IOCP, and my impression is Windows apps that do use IOCP get good performance—but apps using cross-platform APIs or ported from UNIX tend not to have an IOCP-shaped IO layer and just use blocking calls, which are less optimized on Windows.

Maybe I'm confusing this with subprocess creation speed (which also hurt git back when lots of tools were shell or Perl scripts) or network performance (many years ago, my boss and I found that Apache on Linux on VMware Workstation on Windows with bridged networking performed better than Apache directly on Windows, presumably because it's using select() or something)?

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#166

Post by Santosh83 » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 2:20 PM UTC

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?

I read previously on HN that it has something to do with NTFS's MFT structures... particularly when large number of small files are involved. I don't think FAT32 suffers from the same problem but then again, it isn't widely used on desktops or servers any more.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#167

Post by geofft » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

unixhero wrote: post #83

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…

NT has the capabilities to run different API "Personalities". This was pretty major. WIN32 was only one of the APIs NT supported. IBM also did the same with Workplace OS, but it failed. NT could have been a lot of things, if the competitive landscape was different. From Wikipedia: A main design goal of NT was hardware and software portability. Various versions of NT family operating systems have been released for a v…

Yup, that's what I meant by "subsystems" (which is NT's own term; not sure why Wikipedia calls them "personalities," and Linux's personality(2) syscall is much more limited).

In any case, that support is in the wrong direction. The article proposes dropping NT and moving to Linux, which doesn't have subsystem support at all. Even if it did, the existing WSL code isn't helpful.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#168

Post by zozbot123 » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 2:25 PM UTC

sawantuday wrote: post #162

pjmlp wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has supported Windows VMs since at least 2010, the first time I did a Windows cloud based deployment. So far it hasn't been that interesting for Windows projects. Regarding the ever-shrinking desktop market, laptops and 2-1 are "desktops" as well. Plugging phones into docking stations will never caught on.

Whats your logic behind that? Current phones with 10gb of ram and 8 cores already surpass average computers. Its only a matter of right user interface.

It's not about the hardware (who am I kidding there, of course it is... ARM SoC's, blech). It's about the software side of the equation. Maybe Purism can pull this off, but Android definitely can't (and not for lack of trying, see Samsung DeX), and iOS is going the other way, with macOS getting more iOS-like over time.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#169

Post by marsrover » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 2:26 PM UTC

When one of these companies realizes they can create a polished Linux distribution, using the absurd amount of funds they have, the future of desktop computing is theirs.

And the funny thing is it is probably less work than maintaining their current solution.

Also I don’t think it has to be an either or situation. There is nothing stopping MS from supporting NT systems and putting future development into Linux systems. Similar to how they’re doing .NET and .NET Core. Over time they can port their office suite and other programs and drivers to the Linux system and the users will come with them.

And at this point they’ve already started to drive developers away from NT because of their Linux offerings. Let’s be honest, most developers would pick Unix in a heartbeat over NT (to develop in and deploy to) and now they have that option.

Also if anyone with power at Microsoft is reading this and this is a path the company ever takes: don’t make a ChromeOS, make an Ubuntu.

Re: Could Microsoft release a desktop Linux?

#170

Post by whyonearth » Sat, Dec 15, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

crispinb wrote: post #133

whyonearth wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's a bit contradictory to choose an insecure OS because a more secure one doesn't support a nice-to-have piece of security hardware. That aside, I'd be interested in the specifics of the "too many problems" that you anticipate on supported hardware (which includes most configurations of the XPS and Precision).

> I think it's a bit contradictory to choose an insecure OS because a more secure one doesn't support a nice-to-have piece of security hardware. Maybe. But that has nothing to do with what I wrote. > I'd be interested in the specifics Would you? Or would you like to gather factoids in pursuit of your belief that everyone must make the choices you make? > that you anticipate on supported hardware Not "anticipate". Exp…

You really fail to see the irony in investing in a strong padlock for a building with thin glass windows? You have defensive replies to everybody here so please don't project your attitude onto those of us who are legitimately curious about what's giving you trouble. Note the name of the website.