> but it opens the door to code that runs on WSL2 that doesn't run on regular Linux. Which is exactly what I was expecting since day one when WSL was announced. WSL is going to slowly kill Linux, or to be more accurate, it will kill any Linux (be it on servers or desktops) not Microsoft branded and distributed. Forks on smaller embedded systems will resist for a while, until one day MS decides to port some killer tec…
I think Windows has been trying to kill linux for what, almost 30 years? Some of that conspiracy mentality may have been valid 15 years ago, but probably not anymore.
> EEE was hinged entirely on the dominance of Windows and IE for the Extinguish phase. EEE was more effective when Microsoft was completely dominant, but it's clearly still effective even when that dominance has diminished. This move, for instance, will cause Linux users to depend on a proprietary, closed-source API entirely controlled by Microsoft. It's very bad for Linux and very good for Microsoft. It's a lever of…
> As the other comment explained, they are still a huge gorilla in spaces that are absolutely vital to Linux: server, desktop, and laptop. No reasonable person at Microsoft considers Linux to be a threat on the desktop/laptop. No reasonable person at Microsoft considers Windows Server to be a threat to Linux on the server.
Microsoft holds a large and fast-growing share of the enterprise server market with products like Office365, Exchange, and Sharepoint.
It appears that Microsoft has now initiated the "Extend" phase of their classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook. The key is that the proprietary Microsoft specific API added by this patch is only usable in a WSL environment as it relies on many pieces of proprietary closed source software that Microsoft is unwilling to open source. This patch does nothing but fragment the Linux ecosystem and encourage people to…
Look, I'm not saying saying we should "trust" Microsoft not to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish if they could - but they can't and they know it, so that's not their strategy. EEE was hinged entirely on the dominance of Windows and IE for the Extinguish phase. They won on desktop, but today most of the action has moved to mobile (where Windows lost completely to iOS and Android) and webservers (where Linux is massively dom…
Google is already one step ahead of Microsoft with ChromeOS and Android.
It appears that Microsoft has now initiated the "Extend" phase of their classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook. The key is that the proprietary Microsoft specific API added by this patch is only usable in a WSL environment as it relies on many pieces of proprietary closed source software that Microsoft is unwilling to open source. This patch does nothing but fragment the Linux ecosystem and encourage people to…
> This patch does nothing but fragment the Linux ecosystem
Proof that Microsoft really has embraced Open Source development.
In the linked thread the Microsoft developers explicitly deny that this is the intent, if that's worth anything to you. The goal, rather, is to take all the usual (for the Linux side) GPU stuff and give it access to the Windows host's GPU, when running on WSL. That is, they are already working on getting OpenGL/Vulkan/etc. to run on top of this: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/intr... Rather t…
> In the linked thread the Microsoft developers explicitly deny that this is the intent Unfortunately, the developers don't call the shots in there. And the ones calling the shots don't give a single damn about these developers. Microsoft is back to it's old shenanigans after a big PR blitz.
> Microsoft is back to it's old shenanigans after a big PR blitz.
And your evidence being what exactly? Yes, they’ve done EEE before, but there’s no evidence that they are doing it now. It’s been two decades.
> EEE was hinged entirely on the dominance of Windows and IE for the Extinguish phase. EEE was more effective when Microsoft was completely dominant, but it's clearly still effective even when that dominance has diminished. This move, for instance, will cause Linux users to depend on a proprietary, closed-source API entirely controlled by Microsoft. It's very bad for Linux and very good for Microsoft. It's a lever of…
> As the other comment explained, they are still a huge gorilla in spaces that are absolutely vital to Linux: server, desktop, and laptop. No reasonable person at Microsoft considers Linux to be a threat on the desktop/laptop. No reasonable person at Microsoft considers Windows Server to be a threat to Linux on the server.
There are enough Fortune 500 using Windows Servers to keep Microsoft in business for a long time.
The impression that " most of the action has moved to mobile " is just an impression. First of all the market share of desktop versus mobile is roughly 43% for the desktop, 57% for mobiles and tablets. More importantly however is that the rise of mobiles has been sharp since 2009, but it's been stagnating since 2017 and this stagnation trend is clear. Mobile devices too are a commodity, their market isn't growing any…
> The tooling they make for developers has always been top notch I have to emphatically disagree there. Up until recently Windows didn't even have a decent terminal app. As a developer I tend to shy away from Windows precisely because the *Nix alternatives offer a better development experience, from cli to package management and more.
Not every developer needs a terminal app to feel like one.
It appears that Microsoft has now initiated the "Extend" phase of their classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook. The key is that the proprietary Microsoft specific API added by this patch is only usable in a WSL environment as it relies on many pieces of proprietary closed source software that Microsoft is unwilling to open source. This patch does nothing but fragment the Linux ecosystem and encourage people to…
> It appears that Microsoft has now initiated the "Extend" phase of their classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook.
Or, much worse, M$ now trying to kill Linux as desktop OS, same way as Elop killed Symbian as smartphone OS.
This emulates a GPU driver. If I understand it correctly, it just means that GPU-accelerated code that previously only ran on "proper" Linux now can run on WSL too, being powered by DirectX behind the scenes. What's bad about that?
You don't understand it correctly. Nobody is complaining or even talking about the gpu driver. > DxCore & D3D12 on Linux Projecting a WDDM compatible abstraction for the GPU inside of Linux allowed us to recompile and bring our premiere graphics API to Linux when running in WSL. This is the real and full D3D12 API, no imitations, pretender or reimplementation here… this is the real deal. l > libd3d12.so and libdxcore…
> The plan is for Microsoft to provide shims to allow the existing Linux userspace interact with DX12; I'll explain below why we had to pipe DX12 all the way into the Linux guest, but this is not to introduce DX12 into the Linux world as competition. There is no intent for anyone in
the Linux world to start coding for the DX12 API.
> As a game developer, for most mid-tier inside titles releasing Linux version costs more than it makes, so, no. What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar. It's not like they have to do a full run of play-te…
I can tell you've never released a popular product on Linux. It's a lottttt more effort than you're implying. To do it well, you need to have Linux as a target from the start of your development, it's not something you can tack on to the end. Linux graphics drivers are very different from Windows (the AMD stack isn't even the same codebase). Linux window managers are... wild. You need to build to an ABI that will be…
Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship. If you do that, the cost of supporting all those other things will fall on the distros, not on you, but you need to actually play ball with them and give them something workable that isn't an opaque binary blob that is illegal to redistribute, modify or reverse-engineer. The feelings you're describing (that you need to shelter 100% of those costs and you have no other options) are a side effect of the game industry's cargo-culting of closed-source business models and refusal to even consider that there are ways to make money from open source.