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DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

devblogs.microsoft.com

311–320 of 548 posts

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#311

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> things need setting up and tearing down all the time. Well not really, that's an artifact of systemd's over-engineered design. There's nothing stopping you from tearing something down from an init script or doing more complicated dependency management using the CLI as your RPC mechanism (but red hat needed a reason to use their in-house RPC mechanism). Honestly something like systemd could be pretty reasonable if i…

> There's nothing stopping you from tearing something down from an init script

Except most init scripts I've seen are rather brittle and only "work" if the PID dance is exactly as the author predicted, are not declarative and hard to debug.

I don't want to go back to init scripts, for all systemd's faults, the past was worse.

Using the CLI as my RPC mechanism etc. just sounds like I should spend a bunch of time doing work that systemd can do a better job of managing for me.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#312
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah, most of the consumption has moved to mobile. But people who make stuff are still predominantly using desktop/notebook computers.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#313
post #305

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?

This is a loaded way to frame the question, some of us were just fine being "stuck" with SysVinit. I try not to get dragged into systemd flamewars because life is too short but it's disingenuous to claim that before systemd init systems were some kind of inescapable hellscape. I administrate multiple systemd-based linux distros, FreeBSD servers and buildroot-based embedded systems and I can tell you that systemd stil…

> systemd still gets in my way regularly while the sh-based init systems tend to Just Work

For me systemd based systems allow me to have declarative, portable unit files where init scripts don't. They allow me to reliably monitor and restart services, they shut things down properly instead of just force killing as many init scripts end up doing.

I instantly know how to manage most major distros now that systemd's common among all of them, have no hesitation of writing a proper service file even for minor tasks and I get a ton of functionality 'for free' too.

Init scripts were always a poor-quality mess, non-portable among systems, non-consistent, non-deterministic. If your experience differs there's still plenty of non-systemd choices out there. They're not as prevalent as systemd ones, but that's because the people who sit down and actually write the code we all use find the services systemd provides valuable.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#314

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…

How can people replace SysVinit without "doing their own take on EEE"? Your alternative approach is still not going to be compatible with SysVinit either, not to mention it being strikingly similar to systemd.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#315
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are also adding an wayland server. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/the-windows-subsy...

> These changes are on the WSL’s team roadmap and you can expect to hear more about this work by holiday 2020. As if describing things in terms of northern hemisphere temperate seasons wasn’t bad enough (and still worse commonly showing how little you care about any place other than the USA and maybe Canada by using the name “fall”), now we have this: “holiday 2020”. I don’t know when this is talking about. I’d have…

Northern hemisphere summer school breaks vary but typically run in the May-August time range, so they're just starting rather than ending.

They're referring to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_and_holiday_season

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#316

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…

How exactly will they extinguish Linux and open source?

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#317
post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest I don't quite understand what stopped those developers from running machine learning on their GPUs under Windows itself. Most frameworks work just fine. I've been doing quite a lot of TensorFlow with both Python and .NET. The only time I faced the need for Linux box is trying a demo project from OpenAI, which did not use the features it required Linux for on a single machine anyway.

But Windows is a painful OS to use for anything other than gaming. Ideally, I'd like to see the exact opposite of this: run Linux with a Windows subsystem just for gaming.

Many companies, including the one I work for, have most development happening on Windows. It is far easier to manage for Enterprise use-cases, with all relevant services integrated and obtained from a single vendor.

Not to mention that there are quite a few development environments for more obscure platforms that still only exist for Windows.

Overall, since most development time is spent in an IDE, the OS is really of little relevance to software development. Sure, some people insist in using command line tools, and that is unlikely to be pleasant on Windows, but a lot of other developers don't, and we couldn't care whether we're running our Emacs on Linux or Windows or Genera or whatever.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#318

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…

I even doubt the patch will be accepted upstream. That patch adds nothing for other distros and is not convenient to maintain upstream.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#320

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…

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.

Linux getting first-class support from applications isn't a valid basis for criticism. It's not like Linux is actively doing harm to FreeBSD or anything.
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