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Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

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Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#281

Post by hiram112 »

eikenberry wrote: post #205
derefr wrote: post #42

I’m honestly surprised that Microsoft aren’t working with Linux vendors in an attempt to solve Linux problems by more deeply integrating Windows-styled solutions into Linux, such that the Linux client ecosystem becomes more dependent on the Windows infrastructure ecosystem. That’d be the natural Azure-focused equivalent to “embrace, extend, extinguish.” For example, Linux DNS resolution is an arcane mess of upstream…

> For example, Linux DNS resolution is an arcane mess of upstream components bodged together over decades, about the place where sysvinit was before systemd came along. Systemd has fixed this as well. Using systemd's networking stack DNS becomes completely seamless with the rest of the system. It's not quite 100% baked for average desktop users, but all the components are there and work great. You'll see distros swit…

Does this do away with Network Manager, or do they somehow play nicely together.

Part of the reason why I've begun to dislike Linux is that things like networking used to be completely defined in config files, operated on by known commands.

Now it just seems like a hodgepodge of a dozen different daemons and applications writing over files, I honestly can't keep track of which is the authoritative config or app for interfaces, DNS, wifi, etc.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#282

Post by dependenttypes »

jabits wrote: post #277
smacktoward wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They won't release products like Office for Linux Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. The whole reason they "love Linux" now is because Linux on the server gained too much market share for them to realistically oppose. They had to find a way to make money in that market that didn't involve somehow boiling an ocean of Linux machines. So they did. Windows is still o…

Vanishingly small...the Linux community are usually fan-faring increases in usage on a fractional part of a percentage increase, ~ 2%. And to me, how could they anyway, I can't find "a Linux desktop". There are many, which one would they port to? And as a shareholder, I would not want them to waste the money at this point...

> ~ 2%.

2% of the human population are 154 million people. Sure, not everyone has a computer, so let's say 66 million people, this is the population of France.

> There are many, which one would they port to?

You don't actually need to support a specific desktop environment. Any UI program that you write will work just fine on KDE, GNOME, DWM, etc

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#283

Post by thom »

SimianLogic2 wrote: post #75

I used cygwin to do web development circa 2007/2008. It was a huge pain in the ass and one of the main reasons I switched to Macs. I've been back on Windows for a couple of years now using WSL and it's been pretty great. I'm excited for that integration to get even tighter with WSL2. The broad categories I use professionally are office crap, web dev, and creative tools. Macs used to suck at the first and rule the las…

Could you describe your workflow with WSL?

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#284

Post by jay_kyburz »

at-fates-hands wrote: post #275
smacktoward wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They won't release products like Office for Linux Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. The whole reason they "love Linux" now is because Linux on the server gained too much market share for them to realistically oppose. They had to find a way to make money in that market that didn't involve somehow boiling an ocean of Linux machines. So they did. Windows is still o…

> Because the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering. I would also add in there are other open source options that are compatible and work well with MS Office now. Libre Office and Open Office are two such examples. I can now write my resume in either or and save it in a docx format, send it to a recruiter and then they can open it with MS Word without any issues.

errr... I would still export it as PDF first. I wouldn't trust something as important as a job application to work perfectly. (I'm a Libre Office user on Windows. )

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#285

Post by JeremyNT »

Data point: MS teams disables all of Teams' A/V features for Linux users based on browser user agent. If you use chromium and spoof your UA as if you were using Edge/Windows, said features work. [1]

Microsoft is what it is - a very large company with various business units with differing priorities. I do feel like they are much improved from the bad old days, where they seemed to enact a company-wide strategy aimed at actively sabotaging Linux. In the face of that, I suppose indifference is an improvement, and their "we love linux" marketing is at least an admission that Linux support is a consideration for some elements of their business.

[1] https://github.com/meetfranz/franz/issues/1095

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#286

Post by dependenttypes »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #212
disintegore wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A "cobbled-together kludge of disparately developed software" is how I would describe the average Windows' user's workstation. You only need to boot it to be immediately hit by a barrage of dysfunction. I think you're simply comfortable in your own mess.

I use Linux on 3 of the 5 computers I interact with frequently, and the Windows mess is not comparable to the Linux mess.

I use Linux on 3 of the 4 computers I interact with frequently and my experience is the exact opposite of yours. The linux ecosystem might be a mess but at least it is usable, unlike windows, where it is painful to do even the simplest task.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#287

Post by jay_kyburz »

onei wrote: post #278
tracker1 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wouldn't say they'd never do an Office on Linux... If you look at how they've been leveraging web tech and Electron for VS Code and MS Teams, I'd be very surprised if we didn't see an Electron based version of Office in a couple years. Electron has an amazing cross platform appeal for developers and MS has taken advantage of that. Not to mention managing to write applications under Electron that don't suck (though…

I can't see an Electron based Excel appearing. Excel is pretty much the best spreadsheet application that exists in terms of performance. Using Electron would likely kill that to the point that no one would use it. The browser based versions of Office applications fall short when you start pushing them hard already - they're fine for light editing, but I wouldn't use them for anything substantial.

I can very much imagine a Goole Stadia but for real apps rather than games, where you are interacting with a video stream rather than the app itself.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#288

Post by sova »

Tremendous. Well written and well played. If there are two facets to divide and conquer (in this case, play along until you can conquer and conquer right away) Microsoft is certainly doing their best to fulfill the Caesarian commandment. Thanks for revealing this very snide practice, clearly if their intent was an embrace of OSS there would be much revamped in the base layers of their offerings. Yet, here we are. The number of life-seconds lost to Microsoft greediness is likely measurable and might even out-exceed the wealth of shrewd and pernicious altruists like Billy G. Not to be nefarious with this comment, but to assume that propaganda is honest is to wonder why the propaganda has to exist in the first place.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#289

Post by Nullabillity »

scarface74 wrote: post #34
stevbov wrote: post #29

Why would any Linux shop use SQL Server anyways? Why would they use .NET Core? The only people I know pushing .NET Core are .NET people, not Linux people. My general rule is to never use a technology where your primary platform is a second class citizen. It just makes things a pain: not only could support be dropped in the future because there's no profit in it, its also harder to find answers to problems on the inte…

How is Linux a second class citizen for .Net Core? Have you ever had a problem with .Net Core on Linux that you couldn't find an answer to?

- dotnet-cli will try to cache a bunch of junk into its install folder, rather than respecting $XDG_CACHE_HOME, or even just using a plain old dotfile. These days it just generates an annoying warning on each run, but it used to be a hard error.

- OmniSharp just plain doesn't work on NixOS, because it hardcodes a bunch of Ubuntu paths.

- It seems to support automatically switching between multiple SDK versions, but I've never been able to get that to work.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#290

Post by alexeldeib »

vrthrowaway wrote: post #61
raesene9 wrote: post #13

From what I see in general MS like Linux on the server, not so much the desktop. The reason for that is pretty obvious. They want as many organizations as possible to use their cloud platform, for that to work, they need first class Linux server support. On the desktop, they'd prefer people to be using Windows, but they want to ensure that developers who deploy to Linux have a great experience, thus WSL, VS Code et a…

They don't _like_ it, that's the author's whole point. They would obviously prefer that everyone pay for windows server, but they've lost that battle. "Like" is pure marketing. >You only have to look at MS presence at Kubecon where you'll often see MS staff with Macs or Ubuntu laptops on their stand. marketing in a market. I think we (or you and the author, I'm just re-iterating his points) are talking past each othe…

"marketing in a market"

As one of those MS employees at kubecon, I'm typing this on an x1 running ubuntu. I'm not on booth duty or any official marketing duty. I regularly use both linux and windows where necessary to get the job done, preferring linux for personal and development work where possible.

The colleagues I have who run macOS/Linux but are on official duty, are absolutely not here to show off their laptops running macOS or linux. Those are simply the devices they work on.

re: windows server, I really don't think so. Internally, most teams I work with on .NET framework running server applications are in the process of migrating to .NET core, linux containers, and Kubernetes. I know many teams going through this process. They don't want to be on windows server, and no one inside the company is trying to force them to as far as I can tell.

Desktop is still a different story, there's a comment elsewhere in the thread (something about suggesting alternatives to editing text files in /etc) which I thought was pretty apt about the failings of linux there.

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