Microsoft's “Love” of Linux • Hacker News Board

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#291

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:47 PM UTC

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.

The bigger competitor for Word and the rest of the office suite is not Libre or Open Office but Google Docs. It's cross platform and does away with local file storage, which is a security risk and a data loss risk.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#292

Post by K0SM0S » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #184

Spooky23 wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As corporate datacenters migrate to the cloud, the distinction between internal and external will fade. Additionally, with cloud email/office becoming the standard, there’s powerful levers to incentive cloud adoption and shifting of compliance standards.

> As corporate datacenters migrate to the cloud I don't think this trend is as large as SV web devs think it is, nor do I think the trend will continue indefinitely in that direction. My current corporate masters hate the cloud because they want to be in control of their own data and services. They don't want to twiddle their thumbs when somethings wrong while waiting for BigCorp to get around to fixing it. They real…

Consider both ways: even if you run 100% of your backend on-prems, a significant portion of your routes may go outside to reach roaming employees, remotes, maybe customers for some apps, etc. You likely have some Infrastructure-as-a-Service, dynamic subnetting and addressing for containers, VPNs, firewalls to cross, etc. AD and MS Server DCs in general are just not suited to this environment, where IPs may change on-the-fly, hosts die quickly, etc.

You typically need a more robust, web-compliant solution using e.g. tokens + MFA and web-compliant centralization of authority and certs on e.g. Consul or Red Hat Identity Management.

That being said, IMHO, it's a much saner and safer approach to bite that bullet and setup a rock-solid ID/Auth system on-prems (or at least vendor-agnostic and load-balanced over at least 2 major providers). It's really the kind of low-level infra that you can setup properly once and use for a decade, + cost of extra features you may want to add later.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#293

Post by rectang » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:48 PM UTC

himinlomax wrote: post #190

robenkleene wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was really surprised to learn that according to Okta’s Businesses at Work 2019 report[1] Microsoft Office is still significantly more popular than G Suite, at least in the workplace: > Office 365 increased its lead and continues to dominate the total pool of apps by number of customers, and it’s growing its active unique users by 55% year over year. I wrote a bit about the report[2]. Another interesting finding is…

The Google Docs word processor objectively sucks, it's barely a rich text editor. To wit, you can't even define custom styles!

And both Word and Google Docs pale in comparison to LaTeX for demanding customization work. But "barely a rich text editor" suffices for the vast universe of documents which barely need rich text.

Except when your target market is captured by network effects and demands a particular file format regardless of how appropriate it is for the material.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#294

Post by vetinari » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

WorldMaker wrote: post #272

vetinari wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.local is reserved for mDNS by the same RFC that defines mDNS itself (RFC6762), which is from 2013, so not that recent. If Windows plays games with responder, it is them breaking the standard. Last time I looked, (which is some time ago), Bonjour was available only for modern apps, where they could do discovery for their own counterparts on the network, but not as general, system integrated service. For example, I've…

> .local is reserved for mDNS by the same RFC that defines mDNS itself (RFC6762), which is from 2013, so not that recent Right, but A) the RFC post-dates a lot early implementation of "Bonjour" (and the name "Bonjour"), and B) 2013 is unfortunately still "recent" in Windows terms given that Windows 7 was released in 2009. (And Microsoft was trying to get standardized their own variation on mDNS, PNRP in just the prev…

> A) the RFC post-dates a lot early implementation of "Bonjour" (and the name "Bonjour"),

It was called "Rendezvous" originally in OSX 10.2. When the RFC came out, the protocol was already ~11 years old. Apple can drag its feet too :) But then, I'm not sure if that makes the whole situation for better, or worse.

> B) 2013 is unfortunately still "recent" in Windows terms given that Windows 7 was released in 2009.

Windows 7 could at least use the Apple Bonjour implementation, so the support, or lack of it, would be understandable. For Windows 10, soon to be the only supported version, I would expect differently.

> And Microsoft was trying to get standardized their own variation on mDNS, PNRP in just the previous Windows release.

Microsoft also got us LLMNR with Vista/2008... So they were aware about Bonjour, but they made their own.

> I think Microsoft is trying too hard to distance themselves from many decades of mistakes in SMB1.

Bonjour discovery doesn't need SMB1. SMB2 and 3 (which have the discovery part of SMB1 removed) work great with Bonjour, so that would allow Microsoft to distance themselves from SMB1. In the SOHO market, Synology devices support this mode with a nice GUI config; not sure about QNAP/Asustor/others. What Microsoft is currently doing, is that they support WSD discovery for SMB, when SMB1 is off.

Here, we are also getting slightly off-course. While both name resolution and discovery are hidden under the name Bonjour, only the name resolution and .local domain are part of the mDNS. The service discovery is DNS-SD, separate protocol, which can run on top of mDNS, but also on top of classic, infrastructure DNS.

> Ironically, .local was used as an example for several years in Active Directory setup documentation, though even then it was highlighted only as a possible stop-gap until a proper DNS name and proper TLS Certificates could be purchased.

Ah, so there it comes from. Obviously, I didn't read the AD setup documentation either :).

The funny thing is, that they didn't need to purchase TLS certificates, only to have a single real domain and make a subdomain for AD. For certificates, they could use ADCS! (but I guess that would be additional reading).

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#295

Post by 8bitsrule » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:49 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #206

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #17

Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently. They won't release products like Office for Linux (though a web interface is possible), and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs. Neither of those actions would have any tangible benefit for the primary users of those produts (Windows users and Windows developers, respectively). Active Directory is so deeply in…

> 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…

>the market for desktop Linux applications is too small to be worth considering.

The market for Beethoven is also too small to be worth considering. What does the market know?

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#296

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

himinlomax wrote: post #190

robenkleene wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was really surprised to learn that according to Okta’s Businesses at Work 2019 report[1] Microsoft Office is still significantly more popular than G Suite, at least in the workplace: > Office 365 increased its lead and continues to dominate the total pool of apps by number of customers, and it’s growing its active unique users by 55% year over year. I wrote a bit about the report[2]. Another interesting finding is…

The Google Docs word processor objectively sucks, it's barely a rich text editor. To wit, you can't even define custom styles!

Yes, it does. At the same time it works incredibly well for collaborative editing. But the number of quirks and errors in the product are enough to drive you mad.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#297

Post by curt15 » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:50 PM UTC

dependenttypes wrote: post #282

jabits wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>Any UI program that you write will work just fine on KDE, GNOME, DWM, etc

But which versions of which libraries do you target? Every distribution has its own menagerie. There is no well-defined "Linux platform" like there is with Windows (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/).

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#298

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:52 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#299

Post by giancarlostoro » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

smacktoward wrote: post #206

juliangoldsmith wrote: post #17

Microsoft loves Linux because it makes them money. I'm not sure why anyone would expect differently. They won't release products like Office for Linux (though a web interface is possible), and they won't move away from Windows-only APIs. Neither of those actions would have any tangible benefit for the primary users of those produts (Windows users and Windows developers, respectively). Active Directory is so deeply in…

> 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…

Would it be too crazy to think Microsoft could one day adopt Linux as their core for their OS though? They could probably implement the Win32 API as an API for a distro much like Wine does (but much better and from scratch) and keep those portions proprietary. This allows their OS to run on more platforms than Windows ever has. Much like how Edge is now Chromium based.

Nothing is stopping them from making Linux server distros either since they do produce SQL Server for Linux as it is. They ported a lot of VS code to Mac (not it isnt just MonoDevelop) and were surprised by how much just worked due to the OO design.

Microsoft is embedding the Linux kernel already. Whats next? A linux friendly file system? Things are going to get interesting overtime.

I have no knowledge of what they are up to truly just a bit of speculation. But given what has happened in the last decade that is "not Microsofts MO" none of this would surprise me.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#300

Post by gmueckl » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 9:54 PM UTC

dependenttypes wrote: post #282

jabits wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That is only true on X. With the wayland protocol, the DE also becomes the display server. And because of barndoor sized holes in the standard wayland protocol, apps will either have enormous testing effort or be limited to a DE or two.