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DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

devblogs.microsoft.com

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Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#401

Post by ghusbands »

boudin wrote: post #257
mcv wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's exactly what Wine wants to be. Sadly that's not quite the same thing.

What do you mean? Wine has a different architecture because distributing microsoft binaries is not legal, so technically it's not the same thing, but it still does an amazing job and a lot of apps/games works flawlessly.

And a lot don't. And then you have to spend a lot of time researching why and messing around with config options and maybe even compilers. And the games sometimes stop working after an update.

Conversely, if you run Windows, it's rare that you need to work hard to run a game.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#402

Post by AsyncAwait »

ori_b wrote: post #337
AsyncAwait wrote: post #293

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?

> Honest question, is your opinion that we should have been stuck with something like SysVinit just so it's more convenient for the BSDs, BSD init is far better than Sysv. Adopting it would have been a step forward. There are also other init systems that are better designed, like openrc or runit.

> There are also other init systems that are better designed, like openrc or runit.

OpenRC is practically speaking a thin wrapper around SysVinit, not much of an upgrade if you ask me.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#403

Post by fock »

foxhill wrote: post #276
lalaland1125 wrote: post #213

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 (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…

seriously, the problem is apps wanting unfettered, opaque access to your system and data. If the default Steam install can r/w everywhere, anti-cheat needs kernel modules and a game can install a Trojan (like recently exploited with Source) - I say: no thanks to that, have a VM for gaming and all proprietary stuff and say a big fucking NO to the shshow the "games" ecosystem as a whole is...

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#404

Post by Valmar »

traverseda wrote: post #391
Valmar wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why does logind depend on systemd?

It's part of the systemd project umbrella? It's part of the systemd monorepo? It uses libsystemd?

Maybe it's simply easier to maintain this way?

elogind exists, if you care. It exposes the DBus interfaces that logind supports for applications to call.

Thus, environments like Gnome can be supported on non-systemd systems if they emulate and/or expose and implement the required DBus interfaces.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#405

Post by freeone3000 »

CodeGlitch wrote: post #397
pjmlp wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

If you're using a terminal to automate on windows, you're going to have a bad time. You'll want something like AutoHotKey which has been around for a long while.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#406

Post by fartcannon »

ninkendo wrote: post #285
deadbunny wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup, from one of the MS staff replies further in the thread[1] > There is a single usecase for this: WSL2 developer who wants to run machine learning on his GPU. The developer is working on his laptop, which is running Windows and that laptop has a single GPU that Windows is using. Can't say I can get behind MS trying to shift maintenance for a Windows only "feature" onto the Linux devs here. 1. https://lkml.org/lkml…

> Can't say I can get behind MS trying to shift maintenance for a Windows only "feature" onto the Linux devs here. Interesting take on the situation. This is effectively a driver they need to get into the kernel (just one that targets a paravirtualization host and not “real” hardware), and Linus has been adamant that the correct way to write a driver in Linux is to upstream it into the kernel. The perspective that up…

Drivers for use by Linux, not for use by antagonists.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#407

Post by traverseda »

Iv wrote: post #183
nitrogen wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wine has an open source implementation of DirectX, FWIW.

Ok, not my field, but isn't it based on OpenGL? Does it count as an implementation or an emulation layer? My understanding is that Microsoft is trying to give WSL a transparent access to the GPU using the regular linux interface and transmitting it to DirectX. Using that with wine would mean adding two emulation layers before reaching the actual driver. I fail to see any use case for that.

It's based on vulkan, which means that it has low enough level access to the GPU that I think it's fair to call libraries implemented on top of it "native". Most GPU drivers have some kind of translation for directx already, and there's no inherent reason why the open source directx implementation has to perform worse than the GPU implementation of directx. I hear that the open source dx11 implementation actually beats AMD's DX11 implementation in some cases.

So yeah, vulkan is neat and opens up a whole lot for the linux world. In the future you'll probably see userspace implementations of opengl on top of vulkan, maybe even CUDA implemented on AMD gpus, although I'm not sure how practical that is. Also a whole lot of exciting GPU sharing tech, accessing GPUs inside of VMs for example.

DirectX will come to linux, but it won't be thanks to microsoft. You can thank valve hedging their bets on the microsoft store for that.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#408

Post by freeone3000 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #388
computerex wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Linux is ok for certain types of developers, it's still awful for normal users, abysmal for office work and obviously not a choice if you develop Windows software. Don't want to get into an OS war here but merely stating your opinion as fact without supportive evidence is not in the spirit of HackerNews. > it's still awful for normal users, abysmal for office work For office work a lot of workload has moved to the…

> Don't want to get into an OS war here but merely stating your opinion as fact without supportive evidence is not in the spirit of HackerNews. These things are pretty much self evident. > Linux is ok for certain types of developers Web developers and HP computing. Game developers? Haha, no. Embedded? Too many proprietary toolchains that don't run on Linux. Productivity and business applications? See below section on…

ML is actually mostly done on linux. CUDA works absolutely great with nvidia binary drivers. Display performance is irrelevant.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#409

Post by cycloptic »

jaywalk wrote: post #399
cycloptic wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You don't have to give your game away for free. I urge you to look into how prominent open source companies are actually making money and think about how it can be applied to games. It's not an impossible reality.

You claim I am being "self-centered" but the fact is if you don't provide something that the distros can work with and instead try to route around everybody and ship an untestable blob then that's your fault. The reason everyone tells you to just support Ubuntu LTS is because they are the only ones who have the resources to support all these random binary blobs for X amount of years, and that comes with all the pains associated with it, as you are well aware of.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#410

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

traverseda wrote: post #398
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No, it just isn't getting better. Any time you want to do something even remotely interesting, like install software that is actually up to date and therefore not in the repo, you have to jump through a bunch of hoops. One of my other usecases involved a device with only a 16GB internal disk, so naturally I would like to install applications to an external disk so they actually fit. This is usually trivial on Windows but not possible with any package manager on Linux [0]. I still constantly run into issues with hardware, especially sound and video, that require hours of googling and manually tweaking config files to fix. Oh yeah, and half the time the results from google for any issue applied to the way things were done 5 years ago, which in typical Linux fashion means that there's an entirely new way to do it now that bears no resemblance.

[0] Flatpak can do it if you setup an entirely new installation on that disk, but flatpak has its own issues. Snaps can't do it at all, and while AppImage is really great relatively few projects distribute that way.

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