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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

#491

Post by majewsky »

ori_b wrote: post #362
Valmar wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Portable to other systemd-using Linux distros. sysv init scripts simply weren't portable between distros, leading to tons of non-standard, incompatible fragmentation. Users simply couldn't simply take their own scripts over to another distro and expect them to just work, given said differences. With systemd, unit files will simply just work between all systemd distros, given the standardized format.

Oh. That hasn't been my experience. Where did they standardize the names and set of the services you can depend on?

If the names of dependencies are the only unportable thing, we have indeed come a long way.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#492

Post by m01 »

hiram112 wrote: post #144

I was a beta user of WSL1. It was interesting, but the very slow file system performance from Windows to Linux and vice versa was a deal breaker for development use. I haven't even bothered to use WSL2 because I hardly use Windows anymore, and I was forced to use VMWare with Linux on Windows for a few years of development work. It was always a pain, too, and once I switched to MacBook, I never looked back. Since then…

Dell have developer edition laptops that come with Ubuntu preinstalled and I saw a link on HN not long ago about Fedora coming to Lenovo laptops (I think it was https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-lapt...). I've not used them myself but I'd hope the situation isn't as dire as you describe, at least for those selected models.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#493

Post by majewsky »

cycloptic wrote: post #428
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #418

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Linux LTS releases are not particularly stable from the perspective of someone who wants to distribute applications as binaries. Its API can change with every release, i.e. every two years. It's incredibly unlikely that a binary compiled for Ubuntu 18.04 will be able to run on Ubuntu 20.04 (as in Python etc.).

To contrast, if you take a Win32 game from 2003 that targets DirectX 9, it probably runs fine on the latest Windows releases. (You might have to enable some compatibility mode.)

"BUT BUT BUT if it's packaged with the distro it's no problem." Remember we're talking about proprietary applications (mostly games) here. Having these packaged with distros for years after the devs moved on to the next project is just a pipe dream.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#494

Post by cycloptic »

golergka wrote: post #480
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…

These prominent open source companies that you're taking about make money from consulting or cloud services. There's no well understood and well rested way to do that as a game company. It doesn't mean that there's no such way, but it does mean that attempting to find it is very risky. Making games is already a very high-risk, high-reward industry, do adding this amount of risk to the equation is advice that's insane…

A multiplayer game is just like any other cloud service in terms of economics. And a game that allows a certain degree of customization is analogous to a consultancy. Find the pain points your business customers/partners are having and then charge for solutions. If you don't have any business customers/partners then get some, not having them is a much bigger risk than choosing any specific development model.

One of the ways these companies can reduce risk is actually by using other proven open source components. If they won't even make an effort to try to expand this, then there will never be a well-understood way.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#495

Post by majewsky »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #252
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…

This feels more like a reverse takeover to me. MS actually has a legacy problem in the form of the windows ecosystem. Under Ballmer this was a problem that required defensive moves and rhetoric to not lose people to Linux and OS X and it didn't work. Under Nadella, a bait and switch was initiated where the problem (windows legacy) is slowly switched out for Linux. This is not the embrace and extend policy of last cen…

> Under Nadella, a bait and switch was initiated where the problem (windows legacy) is slowly switched out for Linux.

If that is what's happening, then what's the endgame? Switching WSL around so that "Windows host + Linux guest" becomes "Linux host + Windows guest", i.e. Windows becomes a Linux distribution running native Windows apps in a VM with seamless integration? I'm somewhat intrigued by the possibility, but I don't see how it could work given the ubiquity of vendor-supplied device drivers targeting Windows kernel API/ABIs.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#496

Post by majewsky »

zokier wrote: post #287
dependenttypes wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single versions has a lot of improvements, esp regarding compatibility. I suggest giving it a try once again.

That directly implies that every single version has had lot to improve. And this is not to diss wine, but it is difficult problem they are tackling.

Holding software to that standard eliminates most of it. "No, I haven't tried Google Docs yet. They're still adding features and fixing bugs. I'm holding out until it's stable."

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#497

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

monocasa wrote: post #481
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, an…

NixOS gets you there I think. They deviate from the standard hierarchy to keep each application in its own directory that could be installed on it's own drive if need be, then with symlinks back to the main tree for legacy purposes. Like /bin/sh would be a symlink to /nix/store/s/5rnfzla9kcx4mj5zdc7nlnv8na1najvg-bash-4.3.43/bash but only because there's enough legacy out there that expects /bin/sh to be runnable verb…

Now if only I didn't need to learn a new language in addition to all the OS tooling to use NixOS.

This is what AppImage gets that the rest of Linux doesn't seem to: if an application is a single file/folder, you don't need anything more complicated than a file manager to manage it.

P.S.: after a quick glance at some documentation, I don't see any mechanism that would allow me to install nix packages to arbitrary locations anyway.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#498

Post by drran »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #461
confusedreeder wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, an…

You mean you want an actual installer, like in DOS or Windows? IMHO, it's crazy.

I had similar problem. I joined two physical disks into one logical using LVM and forgot about problem. :-/

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#499

Post by ric2b »

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.

Open sourcing doesn't mean you need to provide all the souds/music/3d models/assets/etc. Those can all be copyrighted separately.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#500

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

drran wrote: post #498
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, an…

You mean you want an actual installer, like in DOS or Windows? IMHO, it's crazy. I had similar problem. I joined two physical disks into one logical using LVM and forgot about problem. :-/

> You mean you want an actual installer, like in DOS or Windows? IMHO, it's crazy.

Well that's still better, in my opinion, than package managers and all their various restrictions. But ideally I want something like AppImage, where an application is a singular entity that can just be moved at will and run from wherever [0]. Most DOS programs and many Windows programs (if you extract them from the installer) will still work like that.

> I had similar problem. I joined two physical disks into one logical using LVM and forgot about problem. :-/

If you unplug the external disk, your system stops working. This is not what I want, as I mentioned already in the post you're replying to.

[0] classic MacOS, RiscOS, and NeXT all had programs that worked like this too. Linux has yet to achieve the flexibility in application management afforded by the OSs of the 1980s.

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