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DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

devblogs.microsoft.com

291–300 of 548 posts

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#291
post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wine / Steam's Proton does a decent job, and some older games even work better with Wine than with Windows 10. If you have a spare GPU, a VM with PCI passthrough does an even better job, except for some anti-cheat software that artificially discriminates against this setup. In theory it ought to be possible to switch a single GPU to/from a VM without a reboot. In practice I have no idea how huge a refactoring to the…

> "some older games even work better with Wine than with Windows 10." This has been true for 16 bit games since long before Windows 10. Ages ago one of my favourite games stopped working on Windows, but Wine had no problems with it. So my impression has always been that Wine is excellent for really old games, but slightly more recent games, it could already be very hit and miss. > "If you have a spare GPU, a VM with…

Wine has gotten very good at recent games... or more specifically, Proton has. (Proton is a Steam-maintained fork of Wine, and is built in to the Steam client.)

Official Proton "support" is limited, because it requires certification by Valve and/or the game developers that the game runs well (the equivalent of a "native" rating on winedb/protondb), but if you're willing to go down to "gold" levels of support it still runs 70-80% of all Steam windows games.

See https://www.protondb.com/

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#292
post #264

It appears that Microsoft has now initiated the "Extend" phase of their classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook. The key is that the proprietary Microsoft specific API added by this patch is only usable in a WSL environment as it relies on many pieces of proprietary closed source software that Microsoft is unwilling to open source. This patch does nothing but fragment the Linux ecosystem and encourage people to…

Look, I'm not saying saying we should "trust" Microsoft not to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish if they could - but they can't and they know it, so that's not their strategy. EEE was hinged entirely on the dominance of Windows and IE for the Extinguish phase. They won on desktop, but today most of the action has moved to mobile (where Windows lost completely to iOS and Android) and webservers (where Linux is massively dom…

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Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a FreeBSD user I find this kind of comment hilarious given I see Linux specific code littering upstream open source projects with no thought for other platforms on a regular basis. I occasionally see resistance to fixing these issues as well.

I think a lot of that is coming from redhat/IBM, which is currently doing their own take on EEE. Believe me I get pissy about that too.

Honest question, is your opinion that we should have been stuck with something like SysVinit just so it's more convenient for the BSDs, while the likes of RedHat contribute the majority of the work?

And if yes, can you point to an example of *BSD doing something similar while pushing their platform forward?

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#294
post #264

It appears that Microsoft has now initiated the "Extend" phase of their classic Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook. The key is that the proprietary Microsoft specific API added by this patch is only usable in a WSL environment as it relies on many pieces of proprietary closed source software that Microsoft is unwilling to open source. This patch does nothing but fragment the Linux ecosystem and encourage people to…

Look, I'm not saying saying we should "trust" Microsoft not to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish if they could - but they can't and they know it, so that's not their strategy. EEE was hinged entirely on the dominance of Windows and IE for the Extinguish phase. They won on desktop, but today most of the action has moved to mobile (where Windows lost completely to iOS and Android) and webservers (where Linux is massively dom…

The impression that "most of the action has moved to mobile" is just an impression.

First of all the market share of desktop versus mobile is roughly 43% for the desktop, 57% for mobiles and tablets. More importantly however is that the rise of mobiles has been sharp since 2009, but it's been stagnating since 2017 and this stagnation trend is clear. Mobile devices too are a commodity, their market isn't growing any bigger and people aren't replacing their phones as often. The market for the desktop did not shrink. It just reached saturation. And as it will become increasingly clear, mobiles have reached saturation too.

What devices do people use in companies to do their jobs? Laptops. Sometimes tablets, for drawing on them, although a piece of paper would do. Mobile devices have been and remain essential for communications, this meant phone calls in the past, nowadays it means WhatsApp, Slack, email, along with shitposting on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, but that's about it.

> "webservers (where Linux is massively dominant)"

Sorry to disappoint you, but the market for web servers is actually small, unless you're Amazon and Microsoft realized at some point that selling Linux boxes on Azure is probably more lucrative than what they were doing. The web servers space was never Microsoft's so they had nothing to lose.

But the enterprise space is dominated by Microsoft, with their dominance only increasing. Exchange, Sharepoint, Office 365, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Azure DevOps, freaking Yammer, MS SQL, soon GitHub, their reach in the enterprise and their adoption, once you're familiar with the space, is actually quite scary.

I have to hand it to them, they became really good at marketing. Otherwise I can't explain this portrayal of them as being the underdog. Or the constant nagging messages I see about them having changed, due to them releasing VS Code or .NET Core.

No they haven't changed much. The tooling they make for developers has always been top notch and while .NET was proprietary, they standardized it and they never attacked Mono. Office has been available on Macs since 1989. And they no longer target Linux with patent threats of course, they target Android instead. Until they'll find some way to sell Android. They adopted Chromium, a master move since now they can cut some development costs and win back some users and sell them on Bing too. We'll probably see them windowfying Android too.

---

Note that I do enjoy several Microsoft products. But I'm always skeptical when hearing about their motivation. I don't understand what makes people cheer for these big companies, as if they are sports teams. Use their products for what they are and dump them as soon as you find something better.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#295

Ohhh, such a smart move. If there was any momentum of gaining developers on Linux for gaming this will crush it. Microsoft is eating Linux with a "loving" embrace.

I'm curious why you think this would make any difference to Linux gaming? If you want games to only run on Windows, they can just develop them for Windows. There's no need to put Linux in the middle.

Vulkan means cross-platform independent of OS. This is a move by Microsoft to lure any undecided/new game developers back to their walled garden. If you don't see this, let's talk in 10 years again - assuming Microsoft doesn't crap on it along the way.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#296
I remember starting to use and learn Visual J++ just to find out that if one wasn't really careful the code you wrote didn't run on other systems. If I was going to keep making a Windows only program, I preferred to stick with Visual Basic at the time. The real Java SDK was harder to learn for teenager me so I dropped it for a couple years until I started at Georgia Tech, which used Java extensively.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah that sucks, for a moment I thought I would be able to run Wine from within WSL2 and get my game on.

if you are already running Windows and using Linux through WSL, why would you want to use WINE to run games?

Because older games run better on wine than they do on windows. Though there's more recent software available to mitigate some of that (wined3d, winevdm, etc).

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of that is coming from redhat/IBM, which is currently doing their own take on EEE. Believe me I get pissy about that too.

Honest question, is your opinion that we should have been stuck with something like SysVinit just so it's more convenient for the BSDs, while the likes of RedHat contribute the majority of the work? And if yes, can you point to an example of *BSD doing something similar while pushing their platform forward?

I don't think we should have stuck with something like SysVinit, there's definitely room for improvement, but saying "it's either SysVinit or systemd" is a false dichotomy.

If I was approaching building an init system I'd make a better language for writing init scripts than bash, some kind of interpreter that processes mostly declarative init files, sets things up, and then exits. An incremental improvement that works with existing systems instead of putting a whole bunch of new (generally un-audited) code into PID 1, with all the security implications that implies.

Redhat may contribute the majority of the work but they're also very good at positioning themselves so that outsiders can't really contribute any work, or get any independently developed standards implemented.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#299
post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi. PM on Windows & WSL here. Imagine if you could run AI/ML apps and tools that are coded to take advantage of DirectML on Windows and/or atop DirectML via WSL. Now you can run the tools you want and need in whichever environment you like ... on any (capable) GPU you like: You don't have to buy a particular vendor's GPU to run your code. If you're old like me and remember the dark ol' days when games shipped with sp…

> If you're old like me and remember the dark ol' days when games shipped with specific drivers for (early) GPU cards/chips, but failed to run at all if you didn't have one of the supported cards, you'll understand why this is a big deal. Maybe I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember the days when microsoft was intentionally degrading opengl performance on windows ;).

> Maybe I'm not that old, but I'm old enough to remember the days when microsoft was intentionally degrading opengl performance on windows ;).

Which is still nonsense, since this only affected the OGL driver shipped by Microsoft. In contrast to truly bad actors like Apple, OEM were free to ship their own OGL drivers from day 1.

So sorry mate, but I have to call BS on that one.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honest question, is your opinion that we should have been stuck with something like SysVinit just so it's more convenient for the BSDs, while the likes of RedHat contribute the majority of the work? And if yes, can you point to an example of *BSD doing something similar while pushing their platform forward?

I don't think we should have stuck with something like SysVinit, there's definitely room for improvement, but saying "it's either SysVinit or systemd" is a false dichotomy. If I was approaching building an init system I'd make a better language for writing init scripts than bash, some kind of interpreter that processes mostly declarative init files, sets things up, and then exits. An incremental improvement that work…

> If I was approaching building an init system I'd make a better language for writing init scripts than bash, some kind of interpreter that processes mostly declarative init file

Guess what systemd does?

> sets things up, and then exits

And that's the crux of the issue isn't it? Because on modern systems, things need setting up and tearing down all the time.

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