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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

#201

Post by torginus »

delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #77
MontyCarloHall wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

You may be right about the correct solution, but nobody actually uses any app long term with it straddling two displays, so the actual impact of this is not huge.

And DIPs have their own problems that I first encountered with WPF - rendering an application on a DPI that's not a neat multiple of what it was designed for means that lines and features don't necessarily line up with the pixel grid.

Depending how the app chose to handle this, it either causes blurriness or uneven and changing line widths as you move the window.

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

#202

Post by torginus »

bschwindHN wrote: post #53
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #14

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…

You "never understand" these posts and then list off a ton of crap I shouldn't have to do to an OS to make it usable. The default experience of using windows is downright user-hostile and it reveals the thinking of the corporation behind it. Yeah, you _can_ do all that to make it somewhat usable, but when alternatives exist that are much less of a pain, I'll be taking those.

UX problems != low-level engineering issues.

I think most people agree that current Windows sucks due to a combination of engineering neglect and deliberate enshittification.

But how the OS is put together and some of the debug tooling (WinDbg, ProcDump, Windows Performance Analyzer, ttd, graphics debuggers etc) mean that it's much easier to debug complex apps like games on Windows. Windows had this stuff since forever.

And due to the stability of the system architecture and the QA MS does mean that Windows might be shitty in some ways, but institutional knowledge has built up over the decades.

Linux in contrast is like the ship of Theseus.

A lot of the work Valve has done on Linux was to plug these gaps and had to develop similar tooling on Linux, otherwise its impossible to fix full-stack problems where the user clicks in a videogame, and something does or does not happen on the screen.

I'm not glazing Windows, I'm just infuriated by the persistent feeling of technical superiority of Linux people, who don't even bother to understand the problems, and explain away the lead Microsoft has as some sort of shadowy anti-user conspiracy, rather than the fact that Windows does a lot of things that users care about better than Linux.

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

#203

Post by Sammi »

hougaard wrote: post #26

Because the "UX" of Windows sucks, Microsoft will switch the "Kernel" to Linux? I don't get the argument. There are parts of Windows I don't like, so I have chosen a 3rd-party (often open-source) replacement. The exact same process as I do on Linux. I don't see why I have to switch to Linux to have that freedom. (and to be honest, I don't care where the taskbar is)

What does it matter if the NT kernel is any good when the rest of the OS isn't? Sooner or later Windows will be as relevant as Internet Explorer.

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

#204

Post by viraptor »

pjmlp wrote: post #174
apexalpha wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The NT kernel misses all modern features like containers though.

Windows containers exist since Windows 10. Containers are hardly modern, they trace back to offerings on 1990's, like HP-UX Vaults.

Actual lightweight isolated processes? The docs are pretty vague about what the windows containers are and they still indicate that both Hyper-V and a chosen kernel is used - so that smells like a VM. Also, available only in windows 10 pro and higher, so no w10 in general.

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

#205

Post by tapete1 »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #9
malkamius wrote: post #2

The "Microsoft Tax" is often cheaper than the "Linux Engineering Salary." While Linux alternatives exist, they require "assembly"—integrating LDAP, Kerberos, DNS, and config management (Ansible/Salt) to do what AD does out of the box. Most businesses don't want to be in the business of maintaining their own identity infrastructure. They want a utility. Between Group Policy’s granular control over the endpoint and the…

I am a sysadmin and Group Policy is the entire moat Microsoft has. Linux has nothing like it, and it probably can't because it requires a level of top down authority over a platform's design and implementation that would be hard in the Linux space. Maybe something like systemd could do something similar which defined policy over all the components they've taken over, but a distro doing it would be pointless, we're no…

Of course Linux clients in your network can be controlled by group policy. You just need to roll out a enterprise-grade distribution like red hat.

See for example:

https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_...

https://documentation.ubuntu.com/adsys/latest/how-to/use-gpo...

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

#206

Post by Sammi »

beAbU wrote: post #191

I'm not so sure. The article starts by stating MS does not have the resources to properly support Windows any more. And the solution is to roll their own linux distro? Also, NT, the Windows kernel, is actually pretty good. Is that the bit MS will swap out? Also also, for better or worse, Windows is famously backwards compatible. Will they throw all that out? But who knows, stranger things have happened.

Like MS ditching Internet Explorer in favor of basing Edge on Chrome?

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

#207

Post by torginus »

skissane wrote: post #103

What I’d like to see them do, is add more POSIX APIs to Win32 (not some separate environment like WSL is). It would make porting apps from Linux/macOS/etc to Win32 a lot easier, and remove the amount of code required in cross-platform apps/frameworks

Cygwin is literally what you describe - some companies (usually engineering firms who make high-end CAD software and the like) use to ship their Linux based tooling on Windows, you can use it, and most Linux CLI tools run on top of it.

It works well, if you mind the limitiations, but it has existed for a long time, and I don't think it's been a huge game changer.

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

#208

Post by pjmlp »

viraptor wrote: post #204
pjmlp wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows containers exist since Windows 10. Containers are hardly modern, they trace back to offerings on 1990's, like HP-UX Vaults.

Actual lightweight isolated processes? The docs are pretty vague about what the windows containers are and they still indicate that both Hyper-V and a chosen kernel is used - so that smells like a VM. Also, available only in windows 10 pro and higher, so no w10 in general.

Yes, there are two modes, Hyper-V isolation and process isolation, which is similar to how Linux does it.

The kernel version has to do with process isolation not being fully there when Windows containers were initially supported, so they had the limitation the container kernel dependency had to match the host version.

Since Windows 11 this has been relaxed.

The namespacing approach is based on Jobs API.

Modern Windows security relies on several sandboxed components, Hyper-V is always running anyway, also one of the reasons of the updated harware requirements, while this configuration is optional on Windows 10, it is always enabled on Windows 11.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/b...

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/hardware-...

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

#209

Post by delta_p_delta_x »

sznio wrote: post #196
delta_p_delta_x wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was that the article is logically flawed. The user mode of the OS sucks, so let's run the same user mode with a different kernel? What? I don't care about configuration. I've had to do plenty of configuration on Linux as well; it's just different (text files instead of GPO/registry). I'm not sure I can list all the Arch Linux wiki articles I've read trying to get one driver or another feature working. I am n…

>The user mode of the OS sucks, Not from the perspective of Microsoft. It sells OneDrive and Office 365. It makes money from ads. >so let's run the same user mode with a different kernel? The kernel is a piece of legacy cruft that isn't necessary for selling OneDrive and Office 365. It's only a cost. Throw that out and replace with an off the shelf Linux kernel. With some minor tweaks, it can sell OneDrive too. Then…

It also makes non-zero money from selling and maintaining Windows.

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

#210

Post by skissane »

torginus wrote: post #207
skissane wrote: post #103

What I’d like to see them do, is add more POSIX APIs to Win32 (not some separate environment like WSL is). It would make porting apps from Linux/macOS/etc to Win32 a lot easier, and remove the amount of code required in cross-platform apps/frameworks

Cygwin is literally what you describe - some companies (usually engineering firms who make high-end CAD software and the like) use to ship their Linux based tooling on Windows, you can use it, and most Linux CLI tools run on top of it. It works well, if you mind the limitiations, but it has existed for a long time, and I don't think it's been a huge game changer.

Cygwin literally isn't what I describe, because it is an additional layer of code which isn't supported by Microsoft, doesn't come with Windows, and contains a lot of complex inefficient hacks to do things which Microsoft could do much more easily.
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