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Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

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Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#371

Post by sudosteph »

jra_samba wrote: post #274
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…

FYI, Samba version 4+ is an Active Directory Domain Controller that runs on Linux. Samba 4.11 is scalable to 100,000+ users. In case you want to give us a try :-).

I have fond memories of running Samba on CentOS at my first tech job at a university. We only had to support enough infrastructure for a couple hundred people in our department, but we wanted to do it with entirely open-source software. There's no way we could have done that if not for Samba. So thank you for working so hard to make that possible!

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#372

Post by jtl999 »

finder83 wrote: post #311
frankohn wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And to me, how could they anyway, I can't find "a Linux desktop". There are many, which one would they port to? This was the very reason that prevented Google to release Google Chrome for Linux.

Maybe I'm missing your point, but Google Chrome is available on Linux and is available on pretty much any distro I've tried (and has been for many years).

If I remember right from years ago (2008-2010) the initial release of Chrome was just for Windows, and the Linux version was in beta for quite a while as just "Chromium" without much Google "cloud" integration.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#373

Post by will4274 »

excursionist wrote: post #276
dlivingston wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your response is little more than, "no, you're wrong, and I'm right." I tend to agree with parent that the general Linux UI/UX experience (even the flagship Linux OS, Ubuntu) is subpar compared to commercial operating systems. You only make a serious argument in the last bullet: > First of all, it is perfectly practical, especially given the fact that you can find step-by-step instruction to do just about anything in…

> I tend to agree with parent that the general Linux UI/UX experience (even the flagship Linux OS, Ubuntu) is subpar compared to commercial operating systems. Have you used linux is a desktop for a non-trivial amount of time? The fact that you call Ubuntu 'the flagship Linux OS' makes me think that you haven't. What is lacking in linux UI experience? > The vast majority of Windows users do not need to edit registry s…

What is the flagship Linux OS on the desktop for an average user?

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#374

Post by balakk »

jay_kyburz wrote: post #363
filmgirlcw wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That already exists. Citrix was doing this a decade ago - VMware too. I think Office was even one of the apps Citrix used to demo its thin client plan when Chromebooks first launched. Honestly, containerize it (for easy spinups), and if you have the bandwidth, a lot of apps would probably be really great run fully remote. Microsoft released Windows Virtual Desktop earlier this year that is basically a cloud version o…

Do you know if they run in a browser on Linux?

If you're asking if WVD desktops can be delivered to a Linux browser, yes - there's a HTML5 client that renders desktops. In addition, a Linux toolkit was announced for thin clients in the recent Ignite conference.

https://myignite.techcommunity.microsoft.com/sessions/81670?...

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#375

Post by corey_moncure »

purple-again wrote: post #131
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’m 90% teams doesn’t work on Linux and have been using the web app for a long time now. I sorely miss the slack desktop app and would to be corrected if this is possible now.

It used to work fine in the browser if you spoofed your user agent to Edge. They shut that down somehow. The standalone client still works with a little wrapper (see teams-for-linux).

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#376

Post by swader999 »

galkk wrote: post #358
stiray wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have dumped windows completely after spending some time on windows 8 (fyi: system level developer, but... Well i did my share on aix, hpux, solaris, linux, vms too, but I did love windows... Before the age of manifests, putting com interfaces into kernel32.dll,...) What troubles me THE most on linux is interoperability of applications, there is literally nothing replacing microsoft "office" (not a product Office) s…

> Sharepoint Sharepoint is an abomination, always was and always will be. It's not something that you'd use voluntarely.

Amen.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#377

Post by oneplane »

skissane wrote: post #234
oneplane wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on shareholders, doesn't it? Those are the people that 'make up' the corp. The rest are pawns that either fall in line or end up recognizing that the only way to win the game is to not play (and thus quit).

If employees think their employer is doing something unethical, that harms morale. If morale is harmed, good people are more likely to leave. If an employer has a poor reputation, it becomes harder to hire employees with in-demand skills. Poor retention and difficulty in recruiting employees can end up harming the business.

Sadly there are far more workers with a broken moral compass than you'd think. Luckily, there are also enough with ethics and key positions to somewhat cancel that out, but I wouldn't say that unethical employers have a much harder time than ethical ones. It's probably simply a different spread on money/package/freedom within one such company. Plenty of people will believe what they are doing is justified and ignore any signs of cognitive dissonance if the pay check is right and internal communication is 'managed' enough by HR.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#378

Post by mjh2539 »

threatofrain wrote: post #341
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things is like publisher, illustrator, etc. can replace word. Open office is respectable. But all the google docs champions need to wake up. Google docs is absolutely inferior in its power, formatting options, display performance, ability to write mathematical equations and diagrams directly into the document, etc. Every time I had to produce a non-trivial report in google docs I grind my teeth and end up rendering t…

What do you use for math document formatting and presentation? The publishing world I'm aware of is still running on Adobe.

LaTeX

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#379

Post by tomxor »

oaiey wrote: post #319
giancarlostoro wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 serve…

That is crazy. Because NT is an excellent kernel done by a industry legend (David Cutler). It runs on 80%+ of all desktop, is the grid below a cloud platform, is a game console and has a track record of being flexible enough to run on microcontrollers, phones, etc. And the complete hardware industry supports it. There is no reason to switch to Linux, considering that they would need to reinvent the whole UI stack of…

> they would need to reinvent the whole UI stack of Linux like MacOS did.

MacOS X is not based on Linux or GNU and it's UI evolved out of a combination of Next technology and features combined with re-implemented classic Mac OS features. So it wasn't exactly a clean slate.

More relevantly though, they put some effort into maintaining compatibility with programs written for their previous OS by both porting their APIs and providing CPU emulation! And that is on top of bringing the rest of nextstep up to standard for what consumers were expecting out of a desktop OS at the time.

> Keeping a 50 people hired for Kernel development sounds cheaper.

I doubt it, Microsoft can and has rewritten their UI multiple times... if they wanted to, they could write it for Linux atop their own ported windows API with little effort. I think they just lack the incentive to do so, Linux users wont care because they wont use it, Windows users wont care because they don't care about Linux... who will benefit? not Microsoft that's for sure.

From a business perspective MS behavior makes sense, they are embracing Linux because that's the way one half of the market is headed whether they like it or not... meanwhile their desktop business still has a hold on the market mostly out of inertia and legacy, so why would they do something as radical as change the core OS to mess that up?

However as the parent said "one day", maybe, in the future, when windows makes zero sense to run on metal, then perhaps microsoft will create an official and FOSS windows API... if only to relieve themselves from security support hell.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#380

Post by robdachshund »

tomxor wrote: post #379
oaiey wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is crazy. Because NT is an excellent kernel done by a industry legend (David Cutler). It runs on 80%+ of all desktop, is the grid below a cloud platform, is a game console and has a track record of being flexible enough to run on microcontrollers, phones, etc. And the complete hardware industry supports it. There is no reason to switch to Linux, considering that they would need to reinvent the whole UI stack of…

> they would need to reinvent the whole UI stack of Linux like MacOS did. MacOS X is not based on Linux or GNU and it's UI evolved out of a combination of Next technology and features combined with re-implemented classic Mac OS features. So it wasn't exactly a clean slate. More relevantly though, they put some effort into maintaining compatibility with programs written for their previous OS by both porting their APIs…

OSX is basically unix, as it's based on Next
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