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

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

gamesbymason.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–267 of 267 posts

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

#261

Post by shiroiuma »

prima-facie wrote: post #150

I don't want Linux to become as popular as Windows currently is. Its quality would decline drastically as it would be subjected to all sorts of corporate forces. I don't want it to become a commercially driven, adversarial OS like Windows and Mac OS. I want it to remain the free, stable and decent OS it currently is, in a comfortable 3rd place.

>I don't want Linux to become as popular as Windows currently is. Its quality would decline drastically as it would be subjected to all sorts of corporate forces.

Wrong. Linux is open-source: if you don't like it, you're free to fork it and do it your own way. If some forces tried to make Linux too Windows-like, surely someone would do this. We already have a bunch of different desktop environments because Linux people can't agree on one (one distro, Mint, even replaced Gnome with not one, but two different DEs: Cinnamon and MATE).

"Corporate forces" aren't going to somehow take over Linux and make everyone use a Linux distro that looks like Windows 11 (or worse, Windows 8). They can try of course, and they might get a ton of new people using Linux that way, but it isn't going to kill off the more traditional distros, just like Android didn't somehow kill off Ubuntu/Fedora/Debian/Mint/openSUSE/etc.

>I don't want it to become a commercially driven, adversarial OS like Windows and Mac OS.

Like Android?

>I want it to remain the free, stable and decent OS it currently is

Its open-source nature guarantees this.

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

#262

Post by SllX »

tsss wrote: post #236
SllX wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a world where Microsoft could make yet another soulless decision to kill something good they already have on the theory it would save some money, on the mistaken belief that the kernel is the problem with Windows. One would like to believe that as far gone as they are on Windows, they’re not that far gone. But hey, anything could happen.

They don't care if Windows is good or not because they don't make any money on it. Today, the only purpose of Windows OS is to advertise (or force) other more profitable Microsoft products as cheaply as possible.

Windows & Devices is still a $14ish Billion/year or so business for Microsoft. I know that doesn’t seem like a lot, but that’s a lot of money they’re apparently not making which would make their most recent 10K filing with the SEC a lie. It’s apparently enough money they’re not making that they keep screwing with Windows in unproductive ways that make their Windows customers resent them every time they release an update.

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

#263

Post by pjmlp »

rootusrootus wrote: post #251
pjmlp wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Might be, I am only used to countries where families are still expected to buy their own computers, or get to share one among the family, and school life is still quite analog. Actually I would love to see a report per worldwide schools, to settle this argument about high adoption of Chromebooks outside USA.

> to settle this argument It's really a one-sided argument, I don't need to participate. You assert that this is an America-only phenomenon. Austria and Sweden are just easy examples that falsify your assertion. There is no debate about adoption rates or anything else.

Some people tell it is.

Just because I find some random Chromebooks at FNAC doesn't mean all schools are racing to adopt them.

Thus numbers will be welcomed.

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

#264

Post by scott01 »

geon wrote: post #200
scott01 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But if legal system decides the output of LLMs belongs to the entity that trained it, and given that Copilot has the capability to generate any possible code, that means Microsoft, via Copilot, will own copyright to all possible code in the universe, which will naturally allow Microsoft to acquire ReactOS.

Your reasoning makes no sense. It is the output that could be copyrighted, not potential future output. Otherwise anyone could allready claim copyright on everything.

Obviously, I wasn’t serious :)

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

#265

Post by jfoster »

mlrtime wrote: post #213
wmf wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed; the ads and OneDrive and such are not mistakes. They're in Windows because they make money.

The icloud/google ads are worse IMO. They are impossible to remove once you fill up icloud. Try filling your icloud photos to fill up your space, then try to figure out how to download them all and clean your space efficiently, or don't care it's 100% full, remove any icloud ads.

Also if you try to avoid signing in to iCloud on a Mac, prepare to be nagged regularly.

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

#266

Post by tombert »

p_ing wrote: post #254
tombert wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the same reason I want btrfs or ZFS on Linux; cheap snapshots so if something breaks I can easily restore to a safe point. A large part of my complaints about Windows Update have come because it can brick your machine, System Restore doesn’t work, and so you’re stuck spending a weekend trying to back up and fix stuff. When I ran Ubuntu with ZFS on root, I had it so that I every time apt was run, it took a snapsho…

ReFS doesn't give you any more rollback capability than NTFS in that sense. ReFS supports file level snapshots, not volume. And on a client machine, it's of much less importance overall (to you, it may be super important and I don't want to discount that). And on the server side, that's why we have n+2 failovers. No single machine of importance should ever be a point of failure... I realize that's not always reality…

I mean, I think backups and snapshots that actually work is something that most people would benefit from?

There are few pieces of software that are more universally disliked than Windows Update, and while I cannot speak for everyone the main reason I hate it so much is because it's often automatic and I've had it make my computer unbootable multiple times (and it's actually a big reason I ditched Windows completely like sixteen years ago).

If there were full filesystem snapshots and a utility to fully restore from those snapshots, I think a lot of people would be more willing to do the updates. It wouldn't be hard for users that have any tech skills at all; do what NixOS does [1] and on boot allow the user to choose an earlier snapshot to boot from if anything gets toasted.

Windows does have System Restore, but as far as I can tell that never has fixed anyone's problems at any point in time, along with the "Automatic Repair Tools" which has become a running joke in my family.

It just bothers me, because the FOSS community has solved this, a long time ago no less. Back in 2012, I used btrfs + Snapper whenever I would install a "risky" driver like a GPU or Wi-Fi chip, or whenever I did an update. When I did break my video display, restoring from the snapshot took like ten minutes, I'm able to get back into my system and fix the issue, without having to do any major surgery to the internals of Linux. I've never tried it with FreeBSD and ZFS but I suspect it's a similar process.

Microsoft is a trillion dollar corporation, they have a higher market cap than the entire GDP of NYC and Singapore combined. Why exactly can't they just augment ReFS and copy Snapper or Time Machine (with APFS)? They have infinite funds, they have access to Dave Cutler and until about a year ago Leslie Lamport, they already have a CoW filesystem and they could easily afford a license to any version of ZFS if ReFS wasn't up to the task.

[1] I know NixOS isn't doing filesystem interface, but the overall principle is the same in this instance.

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

#267

Post by philistine »

p_ing wrote: post #232
philistine wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the other crap is probably what’s going to get ported. They’ll maintain for a long while a backwards compatible version of Windows that they’ll sell for an arm and a leg, but they’ll try to move their uncaring customers to a Windows userland running on Linux. That’s my belief, and I’m always looking for clues that it’s what develops into their long-term plan. Right now the only thing we could glean is r…

> Right now the only thing we could glean is reduced investments in Windows. What "reduced investments"? They just put out 25H2 with numerous changes and many monthly updates bring new features online.

What I mean is that if you see reduced Windows investments then that's a sign. I'm not saying there are any right now.
Post reply on HN