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Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

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Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

#101
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine being ok with trillion dollar companies using opensource code you wrote, for free. Imagine if the people who work at those companies aren't your enemy. But instead are potential customers and potential collaborators, who see value in your work and want it to succeed. Imagine if there was a good implementation of some idea, expressed as code. And we can all share and contribute to that single good implementati…

PRs to improve zstd's embarrassingly slow decoder require you to assign your firstborn to Zuck and new Microsoft is selling me a subscription to use my laundered open source code to generate autocomplete suggestions in their closed-source IDE that pegs 2 cores and needs 4 gigs of memory (on the remote machine only) to edit 50k text files over ssh

Ah yes, the embarrassingly slow decoder that just happens to be on the Pareto frontier for decompression speed: http://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

#102

No. Microsoft will buy Canonical for Ubuntu and that sweet, sweet developer mindshare. Ubuntu is the developer distro after all. Ubuntu will become Microsoft Linux.

I have defaulted to Ubuntu for familiarity reasons, but recently I got to learn

- the procedure for upgrading to a newer release of ubuntu it you run sed as root to fix your sources.list, then you do-release-upgrade, but it doesn't work because it has an undocumented dependency on pciutils

- at this point i should be used to this pciutils thing since ~all software has undocumented dependencies on autoconf, automake, autotools, libtool, cmake, ninja, rust, python2, python3, calling the binary called python in your path and expecting it to be a particular version that is 2 or 3 but some stuff needs 2 and other stuff needs 3, perl, npm but not the latest npm, clang but not the clang in the repositories, gcc, nvm, ruby, lua but not the latest lua, bazel, make, openssl, libressl, libcrypto, a different version of libc that will break almost all software on your machine when you install it, a bunch of optional obscurely named C header packages that install the headers into folders that the build won't search for header files and that turn out not to be optional if you want the thing to work at all, and a hundred different javascript build automation and test automation tools that exist mainly to call each other

- snap will just install broken package updates for you and is incapable of undoing this operation by design

- systemd-resolved will randomly just start taking 250+ms to return cached DNS entries so if you call connect() many times per second you need a much bigger threadpool than you may have expected (and this is maybe an architectural change to your software if your previous threadpool size for connect() offloding was 1 or if you were naively calling connect() on your thread where you do actual work)

- if you thought you knew how to set the open file limit for a user, systemd has rearranged your furniture and by the way this operation now requires you to reboot your computer

so i'm not sure ubuntu has been a great fit, but i'm also not switching to anything else

Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft seems to have basically given up on windows except for legacy support. I suppose satya’s master plan is to eventually compete with Amazon on the price of Linux VMs

On the contrary, they’ve been adding new features which bring it closer to POSIX in capabilities - for example, various Windows 10 builds introduced Unix domain sockets, a pseudoterminal API, proper UTF-8 support, POSIX file delete semantics, etc. The pain of porting software from Linux/macOS to Windows has been reduced (significantly for some types of apps) and here’s to hoping they reduce it even further.

All of this is towards the goal of deprecating the NT-Kernel and work on it.

Today they "emulate" Linux on Windows (WSL2), tomorrow they will "emulate" Windows on Linux (i.e. all the Win32, etc APIs on Linux - think WINE++).

Rather than windows::nt or gnu::linux, the first "Linux on Desktop" will happen with windows::linux.

In 2015 I bet my friends this would happen in 2025. It might not happen exactly that year, but all signs point towards before 2030.

Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Edit: who's extending, embracing and extinguishing now?! Still an open question, I'd say.

Yeah, we're just now reaching the embracing. First Windows+WSL becomes the ideal dev environment, then Linux apps run natively without WSL, and then... why run a Linux kernel? After that they'll have their sights on the real prize: being the dominant browser again.

> First Windows+WSL becomes the ideal dev environment, then Linux apps run natively without WSL, and then... why run a Linux kernel?

I think it's more like, "Why run a NT Kernel?" or from an MS internal perspective, "Why fund development and testing of an NT Kernel? We already made it so all legacy Windows apps run natively on Linux anyways"

Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the same reason they have already tried with WSL... They are losing too many developers.

WSL on my office laptop takes 10s to boot and if you CTRL+C before it gives the prompt it shows a python stacktrace. I can only hope that by the time the people who have only ever used windows retire, windows will become as relevant as what cobol is today which is probably an insult to cobol as it's not known to make blue death screen on ATM and airport screen

As everyone else you're living in a bubble. In your bubble people probably do hate Windows. Given HN origin in the Silicon Valley - where macOS and Linux are very popular - probably the majority of HN users also hate Windows.

But that doesn't say anything about the majority of the developers out there. From my experience Python and Ruby guys usually do use Linux and macOS, while .NET and Java devs run almost always Windows on their PCs and laptops.

Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

#106
Microsoft employs primary maintainers of the Linux kernel (gregkh) and systemd (Lennart Poettering), among other Linux contributors.

(correction: gregkh works for Linux Foundation, Sasha Levin works for MS).

Azure Sphere OS for embedded is based on the Linux kernel, https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/ossna19/91/Crossover_E...

There's also their NOS for merchant silicon whitebox networking, https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/software...

> SONiC is an open source network operating system (NOS) based on Linux that runs on over 100 different switches from multiple vendors and ASICs.. members including Alibaba, Broadcom, Dell, Google, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA.. Microsoft founded SONiC.. as open source so the entire networking ecosystem would grow stronger. SONiC already runs on millions of ports in the networks of cloud scalers, enterprises, and fintechs.

Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

#107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LFS wouldn't be the ideal disto to create a Linux distribution. It might be good to help train people how to make one but Yocto and other projects are better suited for creating a distro. The use of RPM though is IMO a bad choice and one that lets me know that it is very unlikely that this would ever become a major distro for Microsoft.

Of all the Linux package managers (sans 'frontends/wrappers'), RPM is probably the least horrible.

Sure, but why use a Linux package manager when you can use pkgsrc instead?

Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

#108
post #70
post #19

Makes me think of Eric S. Raymond's erotic fanfic: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764 If this is going to be a desktop offering from Microsoft, I think it will be for remote cloud and potentially WSL2 use only. The future of desktop Linux is a VM under Windows.

> The future of desktop Linux is a VM under Windows. Is there really any demand for this though? What Linux gui apps exist that windows users want/need? Enough that Microsoft sees an addressable market large enough to get roi? The inverse seems to have way more practical use cases that could actually drive revenue - games and legacy business applications (as mentioned in the esr prose).

I got quite excited when I heard about wslG and rushed to install it.

Never used it since. I did have the Linux version of dBeaver installed that way but there is little/no difference just running the native Windows install for that.

The only use I can really think of is doing cross-platform GUI development, but even then MS will say "hey look, native Linux windowing support in WSL" and also "Not yours, no linux version of MAUI for .NET"

Kind of a mixed message.

Re: Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

#109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PRs to improve zstd's embarrassingly slow decoder require you to assign your firstborn to Zuck and new Microsoft is selling me a subscription to use my laundered open source code to generate autocomplete suggestions in their closed-source IDE that pegs 2 cores and needs 4 gigs of memory (on the remote machine only) to edit 50k text files over ssh

Ah yes, the embarrassingly slow decoder that just happens to be on the Pareto frontier for decompression speed: http://www.mattmahoney.net/dc/text.html

If you exclude oodle from your benchmarks?
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