Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution

blog.jreypo.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 123 posts

Re: A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution

#21

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

dboreham wrote: post #19
jeswin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certainly not for me. Registry was one of the worst parts of the Windows experience for me; but I understand it can be subjective. With separate files, the ability to download and replace them individually is a big win. Also, I can use terminal tools on them which is great for automation.

Registry never made much sense on the local system: just use the filesystem. I assume there was once a plan to use it in a networked fashion. But Active Directory replaced it for that purpose.

The filesystem isn't inherently bad, but the lack of a standard config format, location, and APIs is quite terrible. There's no reason a thousand programs should have a thousand different ways to be configured, it's just a legacy of poor design with no standardization.

Re: A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution

#22

Post by 0xbadcafebee »

l0b0 wrote: post #4

It seems almost inevitable that Windows will eventually become a Linux distro. Microsoft could replace incredibly resilient cruft like NTFS with EXT4 or ZFS and the registry with human readable configuration files. On the other hand, they could replace Bash with PowerShell and hopefully pressure various orgs to adopt some sensible subset of configuration formats.

Hopefully not using the Linux kernel though. It changes too much, stuff gets dropped too often, it's buggy, it's insecure as hell, there no test framework. It releases features quickly, sure. But I kind of hate using it, both on my desktop and in production. Would rather BSD, but then you don't get features.

Re: A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution

#24

Post by chasil »

an_opabinia wrote: post #9
l0b0 wrote: post #4

It seems almost inevitable that Windows will eventually become a Linux distro. Microsoft could replace incredibly resilient cruft like NTFS with EXT4 or ZFS and the registry with human readable configuration files. On the other hand, they could replace Bash with PowerShell and hopefully pressure various orgs to adopt some sensible subset of configuration formats.

> replace Bash with PowerShell On the contrary I wish Windows shipped with busybox, so that it would be easier to run scripts with some bashisms portably.

I've looked at the busybox source, and it appears to me that bash compatibility that is added to the Almquist shell is a very thin veneer, not much more than defining [[ as an alias for [ (test).

If you're looking for arrays, you will be sorely disappointed AFAIK.

Re: A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution

#25

Post by gwbas1c »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #5
l0b0 wrote: post #4

It seems almost inevitable that Windows will eventually become a Linux distro. Microsoft could replace incredibly resilient cruft like NTFS with EXT4 or ZFS and the registry with human readable configuration files. On the other hand, they could replace Bash with PowerShell and hopefully pressure various orgs to adopt some sensible subset of configuration formats.

I love the idea of windows registry though, I hope it stays. With linux, i have to to poke around the file system or google "package X config location" and many programs have their own idiosyncratic rules around which config paths take precedence over others. Windows registry as implemented is not the best, but the idea of something like a central sqlite db for config is great.

Personally I like the Mac plist system the best. It just works, and it works so well that you never hear about it because no one ever complains about it!

Re: A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution

#26

Post by osigurdson »

an_opabinia wrote: post #9
l0b0 wrote: post #4

It seems almost inevitable that Windows will eventually become a Linux distro. Microsoft could replace incredibly resilient cruft like NTFS with EXT4 or ZFS and the registry with human readable configuration files. On the other hand, they could replace Bash with PowerShell and hopefully pressure various orgs to adopt some sensible subset of configuration formats.

> replace Bash with PowerShell On the contrary I wish Windows shipped with busybox, so that it would be easier to run scripts with some bashisms portably.

Agree. Make Windows more Linux like where possible, not the other way around. Understand that most of us will never use Windows Server products but we will use Windows 10 if it works well enough as a development platform. Do away with the Teen Titans design aesthetic - carefully study what macOS is doing. Keep the fast, keep the low power consumption and keep the solidness however.

Re: A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution

#27

Post by marcodiego »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #21
dboreham wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Registry never made much sense on the local system: just use the filesystem. I assume there was once a plan to use it in a networked fashion. But Active Directory replaced it for that purpose.

The filesystem isn't inherently bad, but the lack of a standard config format, location, and APIs is quite terrible. There's no reason a thousand programs should have a thousand different ways to be configured, it's just a legacy of poor design with no standardization.

Actually there is a standard location for user settings: https://specifications.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-...

Dconf complements it: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/dconf and dconf-editor is even similar to regedit.

For system settings... that is a bit more complicated.

Re: A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution

#28

Post by marcodiego »

Osiris wrote: post #6
l0b0 wrote: post #4

It seems almost inevitable that Windows will eventually become a Linux distro. Microsoft could replace incredibly resilient cruft like NTFS with EXT4 or ZFS and the registry with human readable configuration files. On the other hand, they could replace Bash with PowerShell and hopefully pressure various orgs to adopt some sensible subset of configuration formats.

I'm not so sure. Windows driver model is vastly different than Linux. Linux drivers have to be compiled for every kernel release. Windows drivers that are more than a decade old can still be installed and work correctly.

Linux drivers can work for much longer than a decade once they reach mainline. Out of tree drivers are another story.

Re: A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution

#29

Post by michrassena »

jeswin wrote: post #12
zaptheimpaler wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love the idea of windows registry though, I hope it stays. With linux, i have to to poke around the file system or google "package X config location" and many programs have their own idiosyncratic rules around which config paths take precedence over others. Windows registry as implemented is not the best, but the idea of something like a central sqlite db for config is great.

Certainly not for me. Registry was one of the worst parts of the Windows experience for me; but I understand it can be subjective. With separate files, the ability to download and replace them individually is a big win. Also, I can use terminal tools on them which is great for automation.

I've never understood the criticism of the registry. The only times I've ever had an issue with it were when there were RAM or disk problems with the computer. On Windows there's nothing at all stopping developers of standard Windows applications from implementing their own config files and many do.

Re: A Look into CBL-Mariner, Microsoft’s Internal Linux Distribution

#30

Post by GoOnThenDoTell »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #22
l0b0 wrote: post #4

It seems almost inevitable that Windows will eventually become a Linux distro. Microsoft could replace incredibly resilient cruft like NTFS with EXT4 or ZFS and the registry with human readable configuration files. On the other hand, they could replace Bash with PowerShell and hopefully pressure various orgs to adopt some sensible subset of configuration formats.

Hopefully not using the Linux kernel though. It changes too much, stuff gets dropped too often, it's buggy, it's insecure as hell, there no test framework. It releases features quickly, sure. But I kind of hate using it, both on my desktop and in production. Would rather BSD, but then you don't get features.

They can use an LTS kernel, and I hear there is some work in the android world to give LTS kernels a stablish driver interface
Post reply on HN