0. Embrace
1. Extend
2. Extinguish (or at least Exhaust Energy on Extraneous complexity through Engineering design-by-committee feature creep)
(But never Excellent Enginerding, unless trying to gain status at a conference.)
Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
271–280 of 421 posts
Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
#272Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows works just fine with mDNS/DNS-SD, it's just that they learned a lot from WINS and SMB1 and are a lot tighter on which multicast IPs they respond to and when. (With security things like "HomeGroups" and similar mediating.) It doesn't always support the .local pseudo-DNS, but that's a relatively more recent standard, and also another place where Windows' back compat and learned mistakes cause it to be very caut…
.local is reserved for mDNS by the same RFC that defines mDNS itself (RFC6762), which is from 2013, so not that recent. If Windows plays games with responder, it is them breaking the standard. Last time I looked, (which is some time ago), Bonjour was available only for modern apps, where they could do discovery for their own counterparts on the network, but not as general, system integrated service. For example, I've…
> .local is reserved for mDNS by the same RFC that defines mDNS itself (RFC6762), which is from 2013, so not that recent
Right, but A) the RFC post-dates a lot early implementation of "Bonjour" (and the name "Bonjour"), and B) 2013 is unfortunately still "recent" in Windows terms given that Windows 7 was released in 2009. (And Microsoft was trying to get standardized their own variation on mDNS, PNRP in just the previous Windows release. It was kind of a neat attempt as it was built as a DHT rather than purely multicast, though I digress.)
mDNS currently is still limited to UWP APIs, but now more than ever Win32 applications and not just "Modern Apps" can make use of them. Unfortunately, I don't think it will ever be built into SMB share support at the network filesystem level, because again I think Microsoft is trying too hard to distance themselves from many decades of mistakes in SMB1. We'll see what happens.
> where these "best practices" are from
Ironically, .local was used as an example for several years in Active Directory setup documentation, though even then it was highlighted only as a possible stop-gap until a proper DNS name and proper TLS Certificates could be purchased. But, of course, people read the first half and ignore the caveats (especially because they cost money and time to correct) and think they are following "best practices". More evidence for the pile that so much of "best practices" in IT are a cult mentality that only ever read the first half of some recommendation and then blindly followed it forever after.
Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
#273How on earth can you have any kind of meaningful conversation about Microsoft's Linux strategy and not even mention Azure?
Microsoft's Cloud service is one of their fastest growth businesses and Linux is a huge piece of that.
Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
#274Microsoft 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…
FYI, Samba version 4+ is an Active Directory Domain Controller that runs on Linux.
Samba 4.11 is scalable to 100,000+ users.
In case you want to give us a try :-).
Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
#275Microsoft 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…
> They won't release products like Office for Linux Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. The whole reason they "love Linux" now is because Linux on the server gained too much market share for them to realistically oppose. They had to find a way to make money in that market that didn't involve somehow boiling an ocean of Linux machines. So they did. Windows is still o…
> Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering.
I would also add in there are other open source options that are compatible and work well with MS Office now. Libre Office and Open Office are two such examples. I can now write my resume in either or and save it in a docx format, send it to a recruiter and then they can open it with MS Word without any issues.
Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
#276Earlier quoted context omitted.
> People don't use Linux Desktop because it is bad. People do you Linux Desktop because it is great. I do. > 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. In what way is Android or Chromebook better than, say, Debian or Ubuntu on desktop? > Linux Desktop is exclusively d…
Your response is little more than, "no, you're wrong, and I'm right." I tend to agree with parent that the general Linux UI/UX experience (even the flagship Linux OS, Ubuntu) is subpar compared to commercial operating systems. You only make a serious argument in the last bullet: > First of all, it is perfectly practical, especially given the fact that you can find step-by-step instruction to do just about anything in…
> I tend to agree with parent that the general Linux UI/UX experience (even the flagship Linux OS, Ubuntu) is subpar compared to commercial operating systems.
Have you used linux is a desktop for a non-trivial amount of time? The fact that you call Ubuntu 'the flagship Linux OS' makes me think that you haven't. What is lacking in linux UI experience?
> The vast majority of Windows users do not need to edit registry settings, just as the vast majority of macOS users don't need to edit `defaults write com.apple.[star]`. More importantly, they don't want to.
I don't think you have any data to make such a claim about the vast majority of users. Many Linux users also do no need to edit /etc configuration files.
> My grandma is deathly afraid that any wrong action she takes will brick her PC. You're telling me that she'll be fine running sudo in a terminal, even if there's step by step directions?
You're telling me your grandma is okay with editing firewall settings, installing new software, editing registry settings, etc on Windows?
Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
#277Microsoft 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…
> They won't release products like Office for Linux Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. The whole reason they "love Linux" now is because Linux on the server gained too much market share for them to realistically oppose. They had to find a way to make money in that market that didn't involve somehow boiling an ocean of Linux machines. So they did. Windows is still o…
Vanishingly small...the Linux community are usually fan-faring increases in usage on a fractional part of a percentage increase, ~ 2%. And to me, how could they anyway, I can't find "a Linux desktop". There are many, which one would they port to? And as a shareholder, I would not want them to waste the money at this point...
Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
#278Microsoft 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…
I wouldn't say they'd never do an Office on Linux... If you look at how they've been leveraging web tech and Electron for VS Code and MS Teams, I'd be very surprised if we didn't see an Electron based version of Office in a couple years. Electron has an amazing cross platform appeal for developers and MS has taken advantage of that. Not to mention managing to write applications under Electron that don't suck (though…
I can't see an Electron based Excel appearing. Excel is pretty much the best spreadsheet application that exists in terms of performance. Using Electron would likely kill that to the point that no one would use it. The browser based versions of Office applications fall short when you start pushing them hard already - they're fine for light editing, but I wouldn't use them for anything substantial.
Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
#279Earlier quoted context omitted.
tbf, those workflow probably can be replaced by a much better alternative. The only downside is people who wouldn’t learn a newer system of interaction with their computer. It’s like 737 Max8 except that mistakes and problems won’t cause lives to be lost.
Please, do suggest it. I, personally dont see a product group in oss that would function in that manner. Yes, you can set up LibreOffice with postfix, dovecot, nextcloud (with sh__load of plugins),... But the integration of it, even after some serious scripting is nowhere near from the microsoft solutions. You only have a bunch of lonely programs knowing how to do their job... more or less... well but completely unaw…
> well but completely unaware of each other
The dysfunction on the main GUI level is even more obvious: using command line is still not necessary for a Windows user. Linux would be utterly unusable without the command line and the command line programs. I believe that even those who write GUI and GUI apps themselves aren't using them.
Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd be very surprised if this were true. My experience is that in actual offices, MS Office is king and it would be very hard to move most workflows away from it without exactly replicating it bug-for-bug.
Bug-for-bug? Nah. Just come up with something even remotely as productivity-enhancing as Excel is and you might have a shot. Fact is, people who think this already exists underestimate that powerhouse of productivity. It is possibly the most used programming environment on earth.
Here's my hot take, as a Linux distro developer with an Office356 sub: Excel is absolutely ridiculous and anyone who thinks anything in the FOSS world can compare or stand up to what Excel does is completely deluding themselves, and this is a major reason why Excel will never be replaced, or even touched, by FOSS solutions. PowerQuery is absolutely game changing (and no I will not accept "but you can cobble together awk and 5 other tools to run a preprocessing pipeline before opening your spreadsheet", that's not competition, it's a joke.)
I hate saying this considering how much LibreOffice, etc have invested -- but OTOH I imagine they understand their competition better than the average programmer who uses Office suites to track their month-to-month finances and thinks they've got it figured out.
There is the fact that actually challenging Excel as a product and implementing any competitor would technically require a substantial amount of labor and effort, on a very large scale. But that's just one part; the fact is that you can't actually win a battle unless you're willing to analyze where you've already lost. I think most FOSS users don't actually realize how badly they are losing to products like Office or even (the inferior, IMO) G-Suite. This isn't surprising in the grand scheme considering how much software freedom we've lost in the past few decades; it's just one more lost battle, but it still stings.
This isn't a situation that pleases me, but at the end of the day between an O365 family sub and the alternatives, it was very easy to make the choice given the returns I got.