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Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro

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Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro

#71

As a Windows system and user-mode dev, I absolutely never understand these sorts of drive-by posts with nearly zero technical depth. If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture, and absolute plethora of user-mode libraries that come with the OS , that can be programmed against with a variety of languages from ancient to brand-new, all maintained by the vendor. Doi…

> Everything one sees on Windows can be stripped out and reverted to Windows 2000 mode. That grey boxy UI is literally still there.

Can the horrendous W11 taskbar be reverted to the classic taskbar, with full support for changing its size and screen position etc?

Can classic Explorer, without any OneDrive/Copilot nonsense, be restored?

Can the new "Settings" (*excuse me while I vomit) layouts be junked in favour of the Control Panel, along with all the associated modals such as the WiFi selection sidebar etc.?

Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro

#72
post #63

I'll consider switching to Linux when the GUI becomes as configurable as Windows 10 or earlier. For example, this is my taskbar layout: https://i.ibb.co/1GqKH27L/taskbar-layout.png To my knowledge, it's not possible to achieve anything like this layout on Windows 11, Linux or Mac. I did try it in various Linux distros a few times but frankly got sick of navigating the maze of window managers et cetera. I think someth…

You can definitely do this with KDE Plasma. Plasma is so configurable you can make things that are almost impossible to use!

And probably good layouts too.

Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro

#74
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exchange is very dependent on Win32 and .NET Framework. As is ODSP and Dynamics. Azure under the hood is Hyper-V with most services built upon that dependency. Yes, millions of man hours, monkies, and typewriters you could transform this to Linux. The economics aren't there when Azure/M365 keeps pulling in money running on it's current platform hand over fist.

Well, for one, you may have noticed that MS put in the work, over years, to make .NET the same implementation across all three platforms. So that’s at least one pillar of impossibility removed.

Except ODSP/EXO/Dynamics don't use CoreCLR -- they use good ole fashioned .NET Framework. Those products with their 20+ year old code base would require a full rewrite.

That doesn't make economic sense.

Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro

#75

As a Windows system and user-mode dev, I absolutely never understand these sorts of drive-by posts with nearly zero technical depth. If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture, and absolute plethora of user-mode libraries that come with the OS , that can be programmed against with a variety of languages from ancient to brand-new, all maintained by the vendor. Doi…

The start menu sometimes glitches out for a few seconds, so it makes total sense to replace the whole OS from the kernel up.

Signed, a npm jockey who lives in the world of churn

Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro

#76
post #33
post #17

I would never predict this, but I think it's an idea which has occurred to many people over the years. the name WSL always hinted to me at a group inside MS who wanted Windows to BE the subsystem. I think people who have run UNIX over non-traditional FS get this vibe too. We're used to thinking it has to be some linear progression from FS to VFS to UFS to "all the other FS" and the idea "nah, I can run on NTFS just f…

WSL was originally going to be named LSW, but had to switch name AFAIR.

[dead]

Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro

#77

As a Windows system and user-mode dev, I absolutely never understand these sorts of drive-by posts with nearly zero technical depth. If there is one thing about Windows that is really good, it is its kernel and driver architecture, and absolute plethora of user-mode libraries that come with the OS , that can be programmed against with a variety of languages from ancient to brand-new, all maintained by the vendor. Doi…

>Windows is the only OS that does scaling properly. macOS just pretends non-'retina' displays don't exist Not true. I use a high-DPI (~250) MacBook with a non-high-DPI (~100) external monitor [0] and the transition between the two is seamless. Windows are identically sized when dragging from one screen to another. The same holds true when I use the laptop with a mid-DPI (~150) monitor. I could not say the same was tr…

I have a long blog post stewing here. I'll give you the gist.

Moving windows between monitors of different pixel densities is a rather difficult problem. Windows handles pixel density per-application, not globally, and it uses something called device-independent pixels (DIPs) for scaling. macOS and every desktop environment I've tried on Linux does scaling globally, or at least globally per-display.

On Windows, when a window is moved across two displays with different scaling factors, a simple algorithm is used. It will choose the display that the greater fraction of the window is in to select the DIP, render, compose and rasterise, and hence and one part of the window may appear too small or too large on the other display.

On the other hand, macOS, GNOME, and KDE take the easy (but IMO very lazy) way out by rasterising the entire application window to the pixel density of whichever display that the greater fraction of the window is in, copying that framebuffer to the viewport of the other displays, scaling with some filtering algorithm, and then composing, leading to blurring on at least one display. I am happy to bet that you're just not noticing the early rasterisation and filtered scaling going on. Having used all 3 OSs across a variety of monitors, I am extremely particular about blurry text; enough that I will stop using a certain setup if it doesn't satisfy me (it's why I stopped using Linux on my personal system).

I'll concede neither is good enough. The real solution here is:

  1. Render the application to as many viewports as there are displays that the application window is in, with the appropriate DIP for each display's scale factor
  2. Compose the application viewports into each display's viewport depending on the apparent window position
  3. The above will automatically clip away the fraction of the window that is outside each display
  4. Rasterise the composed viewport for each display
Another concession: I personally prefer pixel-perfect rendering rather than having the same visual size, and hardly ever use windows spanning multiple displays (especially of different pixel density), so Windows' behaviour is less of a problem to me.

My bigger issue is other desktop environments not supporting subpixel anti-aliasing, not supporting 'fractional' scaling (macOS is by far the biggest offender), and edge artifacts that result from bad clipping. I have a few photos I took of KDE, where random pixels are lit up at the bottom of my secondary display, with my laptop below it.

Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro

#78
post #63

I'll consider switching to Linux when the GUI becomes as configurable as Windows 10 or earlier. For example, this is my taskbar layout: https://i.ibb.co/1GqKH27L/taskbar-layout.png To my knowledge, it's not possible to achieve anything like this layout on Windows 11, Linux or Mac. I did try it in various Linux distros a few times but frankly got sick of navigating the maze of window managers et cetera. I think someth…

Wow! I used to love doing something very similar. I think it was my last year with Windows (XP). https://cdn.oinam.com/img/oinam/brajeshwar-windows-homescree...

Nowadays, I just have as few as visible, and everything is either Keyboard Shortcuts or some form of `CMD + K` or `CMD + Spacebar`, and start typing.

Re: Prediction: Microsoft will eventually ship a Windows-themed Linux distro

#80
Oh man, it's been too long since someone made this prediction. Last one was Eric "Equivalent Series Resistance" Raymond 5 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/j2k9ph/open_so...

It's not any more true now than it was then. Windows isn't going anywhere.

The author talks about Windows getting worse, and cites someone's low-tier computer taking 5 minutes to start an Unreal game. Nah, not convincing when my NVMe drive works fine.

The author talks about games running on Linux. I guess the author missed the part where half of the most popular PC games have been consistently unplayable for 6+ years because the company doesn't believe that they can make anti-cheat work.

Ironically, based on that theory, the author says that everyone will "follow the gamers". Yeah, they're currently following the gamers... to where the anti-cheat works.

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