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

DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

devblogs.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 548 posts

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#421

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

traverseda wrote: post #414
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Hmm, that's fair. I'd encourage you to try something outside of the standard redhat/ubuntu distros. Manjaro is nice and is pretty much always up to date. Also has access to the AUR, so there are packages for pretty much everything. It's a lot easier to do interesting stuff. LVM can make two disks appear like they're one, but of course if you remove any of them they both fail. Doesn't really solve the underlying "I wa…

> I'd encourage you to try something outside of the standard redhat/ubuntu distros.

Generally speaking they have the same problems as the mainstream distros, but with the additional caveat of even less chance of googling solutions and worse or no support at all from non-oss software.

> LVM can make two disks appear like they're one, but of course if you remove any of them they both fail. Doesn't really solve the underlying "I want to install apps outside of the root partition" problem though.

Precisely. The very concept is just so foreign to most of the Linux community that even talking about it gets you strange looks. It is actually possible to do with some significant AUFS-fu, but its a hell of a hoop to jump through for functionality that is pretty natural in every other desktop OS that ever existed.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#422

Post by Rusky »

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…

> The key is that the proprietary Microsoft specific API added by this patch is only usable in a WSL environment

The other key, which everyone crying "Extend" seems so eager to ignore, is that they don't actually want anyone to use this API: https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/19/1139

"I'll explain below why we had to pipe DX12 all the way into the Linux guest, but this is not to introduce DX12 into the Linux world as competition. There is no intent for anyone in the Linux world to start coding for the DX12 API."

They want people to continue to use OpenGL/Vulkan/OpenCL/etc., and this is just their mechanism for getting those APIs GPU access when running under WSL: https://www.collabora.com/news-and-blog/news-and-events/intr...

"We have recently announced work on mapping layers that will bring hardware acceleration for OpenCL and OpenGL on top of DX12. We will be using these layers to provide hardware accelerated OpenGL and OpenCL to WSL through the Mesa library."

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#423

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

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 :)

You can automate just fine in a console with PowerShell.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#424

Post by pjmlp »

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 :)

You can automate with scripting languages and REPL.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#425

Post by pjmlp »

mhd wrote: post #419
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.

Doesn't MPW count?

Yeah, but most people were using the GUI tooling anyway and not everyone was a MPW user.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#426

Post by mwcampbell »

wicket wrote: post #420
mwcampbell wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

I don't think it's hyperbolic. If someone has sent you an email in plain text with wrapped lines, your mail client will know this and it would be reasonable to assume that perhaps the sender may be using a mail client not capable of rendering HTML emails nor autowrapping long lines. It would be a sensible choice to format the reply in the same format as that of the email received. By stating "HTML email has features…

I think what we have here isn't a deliberate effort to extinguish a standard, but a clash between two different cultures. LKML follows traditional hacker norms, from the days of actual terminals and slow connections, whereas Outlook is built for the world of GUIs, WYSIWYG, and more or less high-speed connections. The latter is what the vast majority of people have chosen, so it's a sensible business decision for Microsoft to not pay much attention to the old ways. It's just unfortunate when those two worlds collide.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#427

Post by bubblethink »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #85
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…

Is there a possibility Linux upstream won't accept it?

What would be the big loss other than MS bundling a ppa ? Nvidia drivers and cuda anyway need a ppa. So wsl + nvidia + cuda being a single ppa is anyway not that far off.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#428

Post by cycloptic »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #418
cycloptic wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 faul…

> You claim I am being "self-centered" but the fact is if you don't provide something that the distros can work with Alternative view: distros don't provide a stable platform that developers can target.

Some do provide that, such as Ubuntu LTS and RHEL. Others don't.

Expecting every distro to have the exact same release & support cycle is nonsensical.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#429

Post by syshum »

mcv wrote: post #236
lostmsu wrote: post #146

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.

>>run Linux with a Windows subsystem just for gaming.

aka wine / proton

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#430

Post by cycloptic »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #416
cycloptic wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "Linux Desktop" is not and has never been a thing beyond a vague marketing term. What you're thinking of is a loose collection of unrelated projects. Pick a single stack and go with it and things get better.

....Which might be one of the reasons Linux Desktop is so awful to develop for. You wonder why people ignore your platform? Saying it isn't actually a single platform and instead is dozens of different platforms just means each of those platforms is even less relevant. Saying you're not just one platform with 10% market share but actually 20 with 0.5% each doesn't make the case for shipping on Linux Desktop any bette…

I'm not making a case for shipping on the "Linux desktop" because that doesn't exist and has never been a real platform. Most smaller distros are not trying to be "relevant" to whatever the gaming community's fad of the day is. They're perfectly fine filling what niche they do. If you want to target those smaller distros as a platform, you can give them some source code to work with, or you can pay all the cost of maintaining things yourself, or you can just ignore those. They will do fine without your game.
Post reply on HN