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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

#461

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

confusedreeder wrote: post #457
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…

what do you mean you wanted to install applications to an external disk? if you have a separate OS on the external drive, you could chroot in and install it. If you just want that one application to be on the other disk, you could mount it to wherever on the filesystem the program would be installed. However you probably don't wanna do that on an application by application basis. you could mount /usr/bin/ on the exte…

> what do you mean you wanted to install applications to an external disk?

Kinda illustrates my point about this being a foreign concept to Linux Desktop people. It's pretty simple: I want to put an application on an external disk and run it from there.

> if you have a separate OS on the external drive, you could chroot in and install it.

No thanks. I'd just like to have the application stored on an external disk, and execute it on the OS I have installed.

> If you just want that one application to be on the other disk, you could mount it to wherever on the filesystem the program would be installed.

Not really, because Linux likes to have an application spread its files all over the hierarchy, so in reality I need to either use some form of union-mounting, and/or simlinks. Of course that is only sufficient if there are no library conflicts between what the application wants and what the system uses, in that case I need to use LD_LIBRARY_PATH and other tricks. In some cases I'll need to use a launch script that calls a different ld.so.

That's a lot of hoops compared to how sane operating systems do it.

> LVM to share disk space between the disks

System breaks when disk is removed. No good.

> Flatpak, Snap, Appimage and other portable format aren't really preferable. they lead to a software ecosystem that amounts to just downloading and running executable binaries off the internet, each with their own overhead.

Which is pretty much what I want, because the alternative is dealing with the bullshit I mentioned above whenever you step outside the package manager's sandbox.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#462

Post by maelkum »

m12k wrote: post #346
skohan wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's what WSL is about, trying to win back developers. That's why they bought Xamarin and Github. That's why they released VS Code. They're trying to win back developers by meeting them whereever they are, even if they know they are targeting platforms where Microsoft is not dominant and has no hope of becoming so. They're trying to make it feasible to target a linux webserver while developing on Windows. They're…

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.

I think the Shadowrun adage is applicable here: "Watch your back, shoot straight, and never, ever, cut a deal with a dragon."

Microsoft is the dragon here. Even if it appears friendly you still don't cut a deal with it, or you become a pawn in its game.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#463

Post by chrsw »

monocasa wrote: post #334
chrsw wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends. If VMWare had the history Microsoft had one would be naive not to get "so worked up".

VMWare is probably the company with the worse reputation than Microsoft since they spent more than a decade shipping large part of Linux linked against their proprietary hypervisor in a blatant GPL violation. And yet here's where their paravirtualized GPU driver lives https://github.com/torvalds/linux/tree/master/drivers/gpu/dr...

Microsoft has a history of anti-competitive practices that crippled the industry. In either case, serious objections are justified and severe handling of one case doesn't invalidate the handling of the other.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#464

Post by fesoliveira »

lostmsu wrote: post #438
mcv wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Painful? What exactly is painful? Apart from the Settings/Control Panel debacle, I don't know any issues you could be facing on Windows, unless you do a lot of C/C++ development which is still problematic due to the lack of a proper package manager.

I must disagree with the C/C++ take. Visual Studio is still, for me, one of the best IDEs out there, and the single best one for C/C++ development. And for the longest time, Windows indeed didn't have a good package manager, but over the past few years we've had vcpkg, which fills the vacuum pretty well when it comes to getting libraries without much hassle.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#465

Post by Icathian »

simiones wrote: post #413
larrik wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The same is mostly true for me when trying to use a Linux desktop. However, if I'm using IntelliJ or Emacs and Firefox, I don't really need to care what OS is running underneath too much. Edit: of course, Linux and Mac are available for devs that prefer them. It's still much easier for IT to manage 7000 Windows desktops and a couple hundred Linux ones than it would be to manage 7000 Linux desktops.

I'm not sure I agree with that. 7k "normal" machines for any given value of "normal" seems like it would always be easier than 7k "normal" machines and 200 oddballs. Is the sysadmin tooling for Windows really that much better?

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#466

Post by Maakuth »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #336
m12k wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look, I'm not saying saying we should "trust" Microsoft not to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish if they could - but they can't and they know it, so that's not their strategy. EEE was hinged entirely on the dominance of Windows and IE for the Extinguish phase. They won on desktop, but today most of the action has moved to mobile (where Windows lost completely to iOS and Android) and webservers (where Linux is massively dom…

> In those domains, they are no longer the 500 pound gorilla in the room, they're the "hey, fellow kids" oldtimer trying to fit in and get in on a piece of the action. Said of a company which owns a market-shaping player in every layer of the stack: OS, directory, database, applications, development languages, source code repository, and the second-biggest cloud to host it all in. Given that mobile and web involve ab…

Not to mention the biggest public company in the world, alternating with Apple.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#467

Post by dang »

momokoko wrote: post #140

I see all the Microsoft team members are here in votes and comments as always. dang, this is not a fallacy with Microsoft. There are huge numbers of marketing employees in these threads

You're breaking the site guidelines with this comment. They ask you not to post allegations of astroturfing, etc., without evidence. Things appearing that you happen to dislike (from Microsoft or any other source) are not evidence of astroturfing, they're just evidence of a large community.

If you think you're seeing abuse you should be contacting us at hn@ycombinator.com with links, so we can investigate. No more posting like this, please.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#468

Post by rezonant »

lostmsu wrote: post #201
hetspookjee wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well CUDA is only one thing. Especially in the python environment it's only a matter for time before you run in some wierd dependency issue that is Windows only. For example, getting XGBoost completely up and running on Windows requires you to either build it yourself or download a .dll from a university link. Installing it on Linux is just a proper pip install. Also windows not having a build in C compiler makes you…

It looks like Anaconda supports XGBoost on Windows. You might be right about C compiler. But something itched when you mentioned Docker. Could getting Windows SDK installed be harder, than installing Docker?

I just use chocolatey for that > choco install windows-sdk-10.0

That being said I had to avoid installing VS 2019 for quite awhile because Node.js native module build chain couldn't work with it. There are complexities

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#469

Post by josefx »

dcgudeman wrote: post #458
josefx wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use Wayland with NVIDIA drivers. The problem is that NVIDIA and the open source drivers expose different buffer management APIs and Wayland does not abstract over that, so it has to be explicitly handled by every client application. Some Wayland clients refuse to support both, others had NVIDIA support patched in by NVIDIA itself.

Sorry if this question misses the point but how did AMD avoid this issue? Are their drivers open source?

AMD started to support the development of the open source driver several years ago by publishing hardware specs. . I am not sure if they switched completely or are still maintaining a closed source driver on the side - I haven't bought AMD cards in years, my last one only "works" with the binary blob.

The people working on the NVIDIA open source driver have no official support and were fighting with signed firmware blobs last I heard. I wish them luck, but even on older cards it is more likely to crash your system than render anything.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#470

Post by cartoonfoxes »

computerex wrote: post #442
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Embedded? Too many proprietary toolchains that don't run on Linux. It's funny/surprising that you'd say that, given that Linux is the single most dominant OS in the embedded device space. What toolchains are you referring to? Here are some well known ones. https://www.yoctoproject.org/ https://www.ptxdist.org/ https://openwrt.org/ > ML? nVidia [apparently I'm incorrect on this one]. Not only are you wrong about CUD…

>It's funny/surprising that you'd say that, given that Linux is the single most dominant OS in the embedded device space. What toolchains are you referring to? Here are some well known ones.

No, and no.

The parent was referring to embedded development toolchains - compilers, IDEs, endless small utilities, debuggers, analyzers, etc. etc. Commercial tooling is almost all Windows-exclusive, even if it's using a smattering of open-source bits underneath.

Also no. The "embedded device space" is v a s t. New projects for phones and similar hardware profiles might choose an Android or other flavor of embedded linux, for sure. Even within sexytech consumer products you're more likely targeting something like VxWorks or QNX as not. The physical world, the domain of embedded devices, is not smartphones and SaaS. Unless you're talking about a very specific product category it's laughable to call Linux dominant here.

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