Archlinux had their own non-sysvinit system (which went away in favor of systemd) as does voidlinux (runit based) and alpine (OpenRC) today. The problem is less the init system itself, but applications that depend on a specific init system [1] (gnome used to be a major source of contention in that regard). [1] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Hard_dependencies_on_systemd
What apps depend on a specific init system? Gnome does not depend on systemd, but rather logind. KDE used to be the same, until someone started maintaining ConsoleKit2 again, proper, at which point they were happy to support it. ConsoleKit was dropped because it just wasn't being maintained, and had various limitations.
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 o…
I disagree, Windows is very painful for me to use at a basic level compared to Linux. I would be very unlikely to take a job that forced me to develop under Windows.
Is applications depending on systemd particularly a bad thing? If we don't want applications to use non-SysVinit features, we might as well keep using SysVinit.
Why should my window manager dictate what programs are allowed to start it?
For the same reason every piece of software 'dictates' its dependencies.
Could you explain to me what you think an Extinguish step would look like in that sequence? Because I don't think there is a realistic one, and I don't think Microsoft thinks so either.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but my impression here is that Windows Subsystem for Linux will support DX12, but not broader Linux support for DX12. So if you want a machine that can play games and run a Linux dev toolchain, that would require a Windows install. If you can incentivize folks who may never have installed Windows to do so, and keep them there as the only place they can both play games and use their preferred…
I agree, when we look at Microsoft's motivation, considering them driven by profit makes more sense than anything else. Hence why I'm critiquing comments that seem to think Microsoft is driven by some innate desire to destroy Linux and FOSS. They're not, they just want to make money, but back when their making money was based on Windows, and they thought Linux was an existential threat to that, those two goals coincided. Today, I think Microsoft cares much more about building up Azure to beat AWS and become the biggest cloud platform - they don't care if the servers are running Linux or Windows, as long as it's running on Azure - being seen by developers as Linux-hostile runs counter to that goal. So again, I'm not saying they wouldn't go for an Extinguish if they could, but I think they know that they can't and they have a strategy where they don't need to.
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 hate how this is constantly brought up. Yes- that was a Microsoft strategy and might still be. With that said, Microsoft has no power to make people switch. If people switch off of desktop Linux in favor of Windows it's because Windows is either a better product or Linux was too much of an issue. Why shouldn't consumers choose the better product for themselves? Why shouldn't Microsoft or Linux compete for business? Why do you care so much if someone wants to use Linux or Windows?
>With the "benefit" of forcing the Linux kernel developers to pay the maintenance costs of course.
No. Nobody is forced to maintain this. If Microsoft stops maintaining it then Linux is free to kick this to the curb.
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…
> The tooling they make for developers has always been top notch I have to emphatically disagree there. Up until recently Windows didn't even have a decent terminal app. As a developer I tend to shy away from Windows precisely because the *Nix alternatives offer a better development experience, from cli to package management and more.
Windows still doesn't have a decent terminal app! The new one just crashes when I resume from suspend. (I believe it's because when the computer suspends, it forgets about the external monitor. But it's still not evident to me why that should make it crash.)
> The tooling they make for developers has always been top notch I have to emphatically disagree there. Up until recently Windows didn't even have a decent terminal app. As a developer I tend to shy away from Windows precisely because the *Nix alternatives offer a better development experience, from cli to package management and more.
Not every developer needs a terminal app to feel like one. In fact Mac OS also didn't have any until OS X.
Real developers automate. It's hard to automate without a terminal :)
i (and others) called this 3 years ago[1]. people need to stop using windows, entirely. i recently built a gaming machine, pretty high spec, and i've resolved to never install windows on it. there are plenty of games i can't play, a few that i would like to. but i wont give money to developers that wont release linux versions of their games - even when they are utilising engines that have linux ports (PUBG being the…
I'd love to be using an open source desktop, but sadly Linux Desktop is still a goddamn garbage fire as far as I'm concerned. Not that long ago (months) I would say that 4 out of 5 of my desktop and laptop computers ran Linux, but now that number is 1/5 because I just got sick of dealing with Linux Desktop bullshit on them. My main gaming rig runs nVidia because it is frankly best in class, and nVidia has shit Linux…
What kind of linux desktop bullshit? Has it been getting worse?
I can tell you've never released a popular product on Linux. It's a lottttt more effort than you're implying. To do it well, you need to have Linux as a target from the start of your development, it's not something you can tack on to the end. Linux graphics drivers are very different from Windows (the AMD stack isn't even the same codebase). Linux window managers are... wild. You need to build to an ABI that will be…
Open source your games. Open source is the only practical way that existing distros are able to test and support the majority of packages that they ship. If you do that, the cost of supporting all those other things will fall on the distros, not on you, but you need to actually play ball with them and give them something workable that isn't an opaque binary blob that is illegal to redistribute, modify or reverse-engi…
Yeah, the solution to a platform not making enough money to justify supporting it is... giving away your game for free! The self-centered attitude of your comment is astounding, but all too common in open source communities.
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…
It looks like they are already at the "Extinguish" phase for email. Try reading this: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/19/1527 :(
I think that's a bit hyperbolic. The Outlook team's choice to not do word wrapping in the plain-text version of an email is unfortunate, but defensible IMO, considering that most people use an email client that can display HTML email. And before the defenders of plain-text-only email chime in, HTML email has features that most people actually want. The world has moved on from the time when emails were displayed in fixed-width terminals. So Microsoft has as well.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft (on the Windows accessibility team). At work, I use Outlook. Outside of work, I use Mozilla Thunderbird, but even there I send HTML emails sometimes.