Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

pedrocr.pt

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

411–420 of 421 posts

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#411

Post by JohnL4 »

Oof. All these Linux-on-desktop replies.

(1) The web is (slowly) destroying MS on the client-side. Sure, there's a ton of existing WinForms/WPF stuff now, but I think new development is on the web.

(2) Linux is destroying MS on the server-side. It is simply impossible to beat the price (both AMZN and MS offer Linux images at half the price of Windows images).

So, where does that leave MS? Competing with AMZN in cloud infrastructure. They have the technical chops and maybe other-than-1st mover advantage gives them a chance to present a cleaner experience, although it ain't easy being sandwiched between AMZN and Digital Ocean/Netlify.

I think even Blazor is a stretch, dependent on the maturity of WASM, but... requiring devs to switch from React/Angular? And competing with whatever else moves to WASM.

Of course MS loves Linux. It'd be stupid not to.

(For now.)

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#412

Post by eikenberry »

hiram112 wrote: post #281
eikenberry wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, Linux DNS resolution is an arcane mess of upstream components bodged together over decades, about the place where sysvinit was before systemd came along. Systemd has fixed this as well. Using systemd's networking stack DNS becomes completely seamless with the rest of the system. It's not quite 100% baked for average desktop users, but all the components are there and work great. You'll see distros swit…

Does this do away with Network Manager, or do they somehow play nicely together. Part of the reason why I've begun to dislike Linux is that things like networking used to be completely defined in config files, operated on by known commands. Now it just seems like a hodgepodge of a dozen different daemons and applications writing over files, I honestly can't keep track of which is the authoritative config or app for i…

It can do away with NetworkManager or it can work with it. The integration with NM wasn't quite there in time for Debian Buster (which I use) but it was close and might be there now. They were working on it.

I have never used NetworkManager so can't comment intelligently on it. But I have it setup without it and it requires just a few config files. How many/how much config depends on how much you want to tweak things and how you want to organize things.

The main thing missing in the current stack is a nice interface for wifi. Using iwd for wifi has made things much better and if you don't mind CLI management it is quite nice.

For a bit more concrete of an example here is a gist I through up a while back describing replacing the old setup with a systemd based one.

https://gist.github.com/eikenb/1e9faeb8210e639e8caa69e9832db...

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#413

Post by tomxor »

fps_doug wrote: post #393
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…

Agreed. I did a lot of reading about the NT architecture 10+ years ago purely out of interest, and it's pretty amazing. And I'm saying this as a Linux person. The only reason Linux is so successful is actually the fact that it's open source. For individuals (like me) because that gives you much more flexibility in customizing the system, tinkering with it, and more importantly, debugging problems and understanding in…

> The only reason Linux is so successful is actually the fact that it's open source. For individuals (like me) because that gives you much more flexibility in customizing the system, tinkering with it, and more importantly, debugging problems and understanding inner workings.

I agree a significant part (necessary part?) of Linux success among hackers and developers is it being FOSS... I don't know much about NT kernel but it would be quite interesting to see the alternate reality in which it was also FOSS and independent of the rest of windows, I wonder if it would have a similar success in the arenas Linux does.

There are some other really interesting FOSS kernels out there today like Minix3 (quite different from the Minix that inspired Linux), they are sure to have deficiencies when directly compared to something like Linux due to the difference in the shear size of community driving them, but they have noteworthy designs, superior in various aspects, and they make me wonder, is there only enough space in the world for so many popular FOSS kernels? i.e how much of Linux is now inertia much like windows desktop? (and I say this as a full time Linux user)

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#414

Post by oaiey »

tomxor wrote: post #413
fps_doug wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. I did a lot of reading about the NT architecture 10+ years ago purely out of interest, and it's pretty amazing. And I'm saying this as a Linux person. The only reason Linux is so successful is actually the fact that it's open source. For individuals (like me) because that gives you much more flexibility in customizing the system, tinkering with it, and more importantly, debugging problems and understanding in…

> The only reason Linux is so successful is actually the fact that it's open source. For individuals (like me) because that gives you much more flexibility in customizing the system, tinkering with it, and more importantly, debugging problems and understanding inner workings. I agree a significant part (necessary part?) of Linux success among hackers and developers is it being FOSS... I don't know much about NT kerne…

FOSS NT Kernel... It would only be successful when it is really FOSS and not company backed single main contributor FOSS like Chrome or .NET Core. As a kernel contributor I want to shape my kernel, not being overruled by a decision done in a meeting somewhere on a campus I never visited.

You would need extensive partnership agreements like what Google has with Microsoft regards Chrome or Samsung has with Microsoft regards .NET Core. Challenging for smaller vendors.

Linux has a more pure (not owned) FOSS style making it successful.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#415

Post by tracker1 »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #207
tracker1 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Biggest down side for me, is .Net Core 3 had some dramatic breaks, it's better than 2 and before, but still been burdensome. There's two decades of answers and examples out there, many of which don't work. Not to mention many third party libraries that do stuff that's now in the box. Biggest gripe to me, is lack of in the box support for PEM files in the crypto library. There are others, Core 3 breaks DI for logging…

Every language and framework has it warts, and the ones in JS/Node could fill a library. You pick your poison.

Not disagreeing on JS/Node... I will say I get so much better velocity in terms of practical work done with my time. But I've also seen people do some goofy things in JS, but will counter that most people are snooty about it and don't bother actually learning the language, reminds me a lot of VB a couple decades ago (the culture against it).

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#416

Post by rstuart4133 »

aiCeivi9 wrote: post #392
dredmorbius wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sarcastic or ignorant?

Both. GP knows Chrome for Linux exists but ignores that its need for auto-update doesn't play well with distros package management and it also statically-links or ships 3rd party libs. Clearly supporting diverse (fragmented) linux ecosystem is not easy at all.

> Chrome for Linux exists but ignores that its need for auto-update doesn't play well with distros package management and it also statically-links or ships 3rd party libs.

At least on Debian, it plays perfectly well with the Distro's package management. They use it to auto update google-chrome in preference to their roll their own on effort Windows. The same update system works perfect well on all Debian derived distro's. I'm not familiar with an rpm based distro to say for sure, but I imagine the situation is the same. So "fragmented" means supporting 2 very well tested distribution systems rather than rolling their own - and having the "take out all Macbooks" problems they did on OSX.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#417

Post by ClumsyPilot »

int_19h wrote: post #270
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #222

I am getting the impression the author is fighting yesterday’s war and on top of that has not been following what's going on in windows/.Net development lately. There has been a large-scale effort to open-source and port chunks of Windows and .Net Framework WinForms 'the win95-style UI' https://github.com/dotnet/winforms WPF 'the Vista-style UI' https://github.com/dotnet/wpf WinUI3 'the Modern-style UI' https://githu…

None of the UI frameworks have been ported.

Efforts like Avalonia and Uno platform enjoy a level of support from MS, and Microsoft produces Xamarin Forms to enable Xaml-based cross platform development.

Microsoft themselves have stated that it's a requested development, but they have not yet figured out a sensible way forward.A lot of effort was invested and I feel accusing them of ill will is unfair.

Meanwhile Linux UI/Graphics situation is a mess and Avalonia developers struggle with it. The same flexibility that makes Linux a good as embedded/server, makes it a horrible target for client application development.

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#418

Post by ripley12 »

keithnz wrote: post #355
ripley12 wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> SSMS is an unusable hog. ...huh? SSMS (plus the free Red Gate SQL Search addin) is hands-down the best DB tooling I've ever used. If you're aware of similarly full-featured equivalents for Postgres (or any other RDBMS), I'd love to hear about them.

have you tried DataGrip? I went from SSMS to DataGrip for most of my database work. SSMS is still better for management of the SQL Server instance, but for database work, DataGrip is a lot nicer than SSMS (and SSMS is a lot nicer than a LOT of other tools for other RDBMSs)

Interesting, thanks!

I have tried DataGrip briefly with Postgres – my first impression was that it's a competent tool for things that are generic across all RDBMSs, but limited in RDBMS-specific management/administration functionality. Not far off from what you said :)

If you have time, what about DataGrip do you find to be "a lot nicer than SSMS"? Which features should I (a DataGrip noob) try using?

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#419

Post by keithnz »

ripley12 wrote: post #418
keithnz wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

have you tried DataGrip? I went from SSMS to DataGrip for most of my database work. SSMS is still better for management of the SQL Server instance, but for database work, DataGrip is a lot nicer than SSMS (and SSMS is a lot nicer than a LOT of other tools for other RDBMSs)

Interesting, thanks! I have tried DataGrip briefly with Postgres – my first impression was that it's a competent tool for things that are generic across all RDBMSs, but limited in RDBMS-specific management/administration functionality. Not far off from what you said :) If you have time, what about DataGrip do you find to be "a lot nicer than SSMS"? Which features should I (a DataGrip noob) try using?

First of all, I don't think I've personally scratched the surface of what you can do. But I use it mostly as a direct replacement of what I would have done in SSMS.

First of all Start writing queries and see how much it will help you, for the most it will autocomplete lots of things, once you are used to joins been auto written for you, hard to go back!

personal preference, but, it supports vim bindings.

Its table editor works on partial queries for updates, so you can select something and as long as you selected the key, you can do a update using the table editor. Speaking of the table editor, it is vastly superior and allows batching of changes, it shows you queries its going to do, has lots of helpers for all sorts of things including datetimes. It has lots of options to capture the table in lots of formats. It also allows across database comparisons of tables and synchronization or generation of sql scripts of differences/database changes.

Its ide is standard jetbrains ide ish and has lots editing goodness, refactoring, auto generation, surrounds, templates, local change history, lots of navigation tools ( go to references / usages etc )

Re: Microsoft's “Love” of Linux

#420

Post by int_19h »

asveikau wrote: post #328
dcolkitt wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maintaining it after This is the real elephant in the room. Despite all their other flaws Microsoft has an excellent record of maintaining their software well after release. Particularly when it comes to their core products like Office or Windows. WIN32 programs or XLS files from 30 years ago still work on the latest versions. If Microsoft didn't have this commitment, then porting Office to Linux as an experiment m…

To echo what you were saying, binary distribution on Linux is indeed tough. A while ago I needed to experiment with an old file format, and I found a Linux binary of a proprietary tool from the 90s. It linked to libc version 5 (from before the Linux world adopted glibc). It would have been complicated to get it running. I found a Windows binary of the same tool. Put it on a Win10 VM I had for other purposes. No issue…

If that tool linked libc statically, it would have worked. Linux does provide a very stable binary ABI in form of syscalls, so long as you bundle all your dependencies. The problem is that nobody does it that way in practice, at least not with the commonly used tools.
Post reply on HN