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

Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

esr.ibiblio.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 166 posts

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#111

Post by unnouinceput »

alyandon wrote: post #100
unnouinceput wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I solve it. Here's my setup: - don't use online account, but offline (local) one - use WPD to uncheck absolutely everything related to windows telemetry / sending info. I keep only updates and those set to manual. - and can't stress this enough - get a PiHole, either on RPi or re-purpose a crappy old laptop. This one is also good for your smartcrap you usually get to your spouse/kids

In addition to that all that, I once caught Windows Defender submitting places.sqlite out of my Firefox profile directory so I'd recommend you turn off "automatic sample submission" in Windows Defender if WPD doesn't already do that.

It does.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#113

Post by mr_toad »

tedyoung wrote: post #23

> "Ten years later, Azure makes Microsoft most of its money." Well, no, not yet. Microsoft doesn't break out Azure separately. It's usually included in their "Intelligent Cloud", which is the largest segment, but that also includes SQL Server (a big money maker), Windows Server, GitHub, and other stuff. "Commercial Cloud" revenue (which is all the cloud portions of their products, from Azure to Office 365 Commercial)…

Whichever way you spin it, Microsoft isn’t making much money from desktop Windows licenses.

And if they did move to Linux you’d still need CALs for all the proprietary stuff on top, so it’s unlikely they’d be losing much, if any money by doing this.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#114

Post by indigodaddy »

oxygenoxy wrote: post #42
indigodaddy wrote: post #41

“The OS itself , and its userland tools, has for some time already been Linux underneath a carefully preserved old-Windows UI.” I’m not sure how anyone could arrive at this conclusion. The OS itself is certainly not “Linux underneath a carefully preserved old-Windows UI.”

This is a prediction as to how Microsoft can announce EOL for Windows.

Sure, but that’s not what Windows is right now. You can’t just make up facts to support a hypothesis or conclusion.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#115

Post by [deleted] »

pjmlp wrote: post #97
TheRealPomax wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And that's another thing the vast majority of folks this is for couldn't care less about. It's all the same "make it irrelevant, this is not something I should need to care about to do whatever I need WSL for".

Indeed, had Microsoft been more serious about the POSIX subsystem on NT, and Linux would be as relevant as Minix. WSL is about fixing that little mistake, while taping on Linux ABI as extra.

[deleted]

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#117

Post by cjohnson318 »

mdifrgechd wrote: post #18

I'm buying a new computer. Currently I have only ubuntu linux machines and was just saying to someone that I would actually consider trying windows and WSL because it would let me use the linux tools I want alongside MS office, and it might be interesting to play with windows versions of things. The reason I wont actually do it though is because I'm sure that windows will be filled with commercially oriented intrusio…

I tried to use WSL to run a cron job, but that wasn't supported as of 2019. I wasn't able to figure out how to schedule and run arbitrary Python code on Windows.

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#119

Post by jchb »

grishka wrote: post #107
moogly wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple keeps dropping old APIs to make their OSes better and simpler internally. Hand on heart, do you really feel OS X/macOS is improving much?

Honestly, beyond around 10.9, it's been pretty pointless from the end user perspective. Technically, they rewrote the window server to use Metal instead of OpenGL in 10.13 and that did bring performance improvements (and surfaced many bugs in the nvidia driver that they fixed in 10.14 which I'm currently on), but there were no noticeable improvements to anything since. 10.15 aka catalina just brings more restrictions…

Well, macOS 10.15 has a user-space network stack. 11.0 can run on ARM as well on x86. So there are a bunch of things going on under the hood

Re: Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?

#120

Post by pjmlp »

alkonaut wrote: post #104
pjmlp wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, a distro implies GNU/Linux. Neither ChromeOS nor Android expose the Linux kernel directly to userspace apps, so for them is irrelevant what kernel is being used.

"a distro implies GNU/Linux" So you mean your definition is "distro" is slang for "GNU/Linux distribution", whereas an os using the linux kernel is not necessarily a "Linux distribution"? Or can it be a "Linux distribution" without being a "distro"?

I use Linux distributions since Slackware 2.0, it is hardly my definition, rather something that I have read somewhere on Usenet or while reading Linux Journal.

Goinng back to Android and ChromeOS.

On Android, NDK states very clerarly what are the APIs available to userspace applications written in C and C++, and none of them are Linux syscalls. Additionally everything outside of the application's installation directory is forbidden.

Starting with Android 7, Google has started to introduce security measures that kill applications that try to work around the rules.

Likewise on ChromeOS, applications are written with the Web stack, ART running on its container and same access rules, with Crostini running on top of a container, using its own kernel and talking to the ChromeOS in a way similar to WSL2 on Windows.

Hence why applications like Termux have several limitations and workarounds to fake being on Linux, and going forward they may not even work anymore, because they refuse to use Java to access the features that Google forbids direct access to the NDK.

So hardly a Linux distribuition.

Post reply on HN