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Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

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Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#91

Post by silverfox17 »

hapless wrote: post #55
juliangoldsmith wrote: post #17

Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently. They won't release products like Office for Linux (though a web interface is possible), and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs. Neither of those actions would have any tangible benefit for the primary users of those produts (Windows users and Windows developers, respectively). Active Directory is so deeply in…

You can’t really auth Linux clients against AD, because you will kill the AD servers. AD and ADAM are shockingly low performance compared to Sun/Netscape LDAP. They depend on extensive client side caching to work at all. If you want to tie Unix clients to AD, the first step is to mirror your AD content in a more competent LDAP cluster

Absolutely not true at all. Various Linux distributions support MSAD integration out of the box.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#93

Post by Someone1234 »

excursionist wrote: post #62
tw04 wrote: post #28

I'm not sure I follow what the author is getting at other than "We should hate MS and do our best to not work with them on anything!". First it was "MS breaks compatibility on purpose, screw those guys!". Now it's "sure, they're playing nice but they don't have a product in every market segment we want so they must have some nefarious master plan we haven't figure out yet!" Everytime I hear someone say "just look, th…

Microsoft has historically been the single greatest enemy of Linux and Open Source in general. The only reason they now changed face and hopped on the Linux train is that they realized they lost or cannot possibly win the battle when it comes to servers, embedded devices, a large section of developers, mobile, etc. > I can tell you unequivocally the thing holding back the average enterprise from moving their entire b…

People don't use Linux Desktop because it is bad. Constantly looking for others to blame (Microsoft, DRM, Google, Valve, Apple, etc) doesn't change that fact.

The fact that Google has been able to take the Linux kernel twice and produce a better and more popular desktop experience (with Android and then Chromebook) should be a good indication of that.

Linux Desktop is exclusively designed for Linux developers, it is user hostile, highly inconsistent, difficult to centrally manage, not accessible (and thus could leave employers liable to lawsuits in some countries), and buggy.

Incidentally Microsoft does have a version of Office that runs on Linux: Office Online. Yet somehow nobody is quitting Windows, MacOS, and Chromebook to go Linux Desktop even for completely free. If you want Linux Desktop to be a success, maybe spend less time finding the latest scapegoat and more time helping make it a good user experience.

Personally I don't think it can be fixed not because the software is beyond saving, but the community surrounding it doesn't actually want it to be an experience for regular non-technical people. Try going to a mailing list and suggesting that editing text files in /etc isn't a practical end-user experience and see what response you get.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#94

Post by tyingq »

winkeltripel wrote: post #66
tyingq wrote: post #14

"I think all of these would be strategic blunders from the point of view of Microsoft shareholders" It seems to be working well for MS thus far, so I'm curious why the author thinks this.

it's referring to the author's suggestions to show authentic love.

I'm not clear on why that would help shareholders as compared to current course.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#95

Post by KingMachiavelli »

darkcha0s wrote: post #68
KingMachiavelli wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If Office was available for Linux, some organizations could consider deploying Linux workstations with Office since that's what most users/employees need is basically a browser (100%/users) and the Office suite (50-90%/users). Office Online is severely gimped as noted in the article and is solely to counteract adoption of Google Office.

What kind of an assumption is this. Most people need an operating system they are comfortable doing their daily work, not just a browser and a notepad. Jesus christ, not all non-devs work only in office.

> Most people need an operating system they are comfortable doing their daily work.

True, and Windows is very entrenched partly due to Office and legacy software depending on it. Chromebooks and Mac OS seem to be adopted without to much hindrance from a UI perspective. i.e How much more populate would Chromebooks be if they ran the full desktop Office suite?

> not all non-devs work only in office.

Certainly not all but a lot of jobs, particularly in management consist mostly of emails, meetings, spreadsheets, word documents + a few web apps.

Also, lets not forget about all the jobs where the computer isn't really part of the job at all; it's just a tool to communicate (email) and for document production/consumption. These machines are basically kiosks that Microsoft has milking licenses out of for Windows + Office + 365 Storage.

Some businesses can switch to Google but many rely on existing Excel spreadsheets elsewhere in their organization so there is a lot of momentum to switch away from non-desktop spreadsheet and document applications.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#96

Post by tracker1 »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #73
outside1234 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a good example of it being gimped? I honestly think its better online than the apps themselves.

In Office 365 Excel, there is no way to zoom out or in besides the browser's zoom which causes the whole UI to be scaled.

You may want to look in their uservoice forums to see how requested that feature is, and upvote it. I've seen a few of the features I've requested and supported bear fruit from this.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#97

Post by zamalek »

tracker1 wrote: post #76

It feels like this article is a lot of FUD spreading. MS is a business that likes to make money. At this point, there are developer minded people at the helm, and it makes more sense selling their software and cloud services than chasing negative returns on Windows. I can see that side of it through and through. MS has open sourced huge amounts of resource and platform building code in .Net Core the past several year…

> MS has open sourced huge amounts of resource and platform building code in .Net Core the past several years

Maybe they're trying to embrace, extend and exterminate open source. /s

As far as I can tell, EEE ended during Balmer. Not because he's necessarily a "good guy," but because he genuinely hated everything 'not Microsoft' too much in order to following through with the first step of EEE: embrace. There can't be a consistent "EEE strategy" because that strategy ended (for completely different reasons). If Microsoft has decided to attempt EEE again then, sure, there's something to be worried about.

There is certainly one thing that has always been more reliable than Microsoft and EEE: lose if you do, lose if you don't. Microsoft could shut their doors for good tomorrow and there would likely still be people spouting nonsense about how that's actually EEE.

> Defend and aggressively expand APIs and technologies where Microsoft leads (e.g., keep DirectX the only first-class API for games)

It's curious that Microsoft partners so closely with Unity, then, who provide a way to develop games outside of DirectX.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#98

Post by autechr3 »

stevbov wrote: post #29

Why would any Linux shop use SQL Server anyways? Why would they use .NET Core? The only people I know pushing .NET Core are .NET people, not Linux people. My general rule is to never use a technology where your primary platform is a second class citizen. It just makes things a pain: not only could support be dropped in the future because there's no profit in it, its also harder to find answers to problems on the inte…

We are about to launch a new .NET core service and I've been working with .NET core for about 2 years now. Not only is Linux not a second class citizen (it is the easiest platform to run on and scale), but dropping support would make no sense from a business or technical standpoint. Microsoft is making a ton of money by supporting cross platform.

We aren't using SQL Server, but I've used most of the big RDBMS and SQL Server is the best. It just tends to be more expensive.

So far it has been anything but a "pain".

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#99

Post by zamalek »

ripley12 wrote: post #58
lghh wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a Linux person who likes .NET Core. I like C# quite a bit, and I don't think Linux is a 2nd class citizen for .NET Core.

It is still a 2nd class citizen, IMO – but I think that's improving rapidly. Some examples: -IDE support from MS is markedly better on Windows (real Visual Studio) and Mac (VS for Mac). VS Code+Omnisharp is still pretty rough around the edges for C#. -Many of the older .NET class libraries were just not designed with *nix in mind. System.IO still doesn't support symlinks https://github.com/dotnet/corefx/issues/26310

> Many of the older .NET class libraries were just not designed with *nix in mind. System.IO still doesn't support symlinks

Windows supports symlinks, so that problem is not unique to netcore on nix. Many of the newer APIs are designed with explicit support for nix.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#100

Post by shmerl »

While things improved in some aspects (like recent freeing up of exFAT), as a Linux gamer, I still see MS if not outright hostile, then surely by far not friendly when it comes to Linux.

Thanks to Phil Spencer, they didn't join the Vulkan working group, and continue pushing their DX lock-in. For Linux it means dxvk and vkd3d are important tools to break it. When MS will start using Vulkan proper, I might change my mind about them being hostile towards Linux.

Same applies to other lock-in cases the article mentions.

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