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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

#541

Post by hiram112 »

m01 wrote: post #492
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.

Dell has put out Linux laptops (XPS and Precision) with both Redhat and now Ubuntu for years.

The problem is that they don't keep up with updates, and so you buy an XPS in 2017, and then decide to update to the next non-LTS version of Ubuntu, and eventually more and more of your hardware no longer 'just works'.

And since moving to Mac, I just can't get used to my Dell Precision anymore because certain things like fonts and touchpad are just so inferior to a Macbook from the same year.

And this is probably half the problem: If they concentrate on only one or two models, then they either have to pick their top-end line (Precision or Thinkpad) to compete for pro users who'd go with $3000 Macbook Pros, or instead target the lower end budget users on Inspirons or Lenovo Yogas who'd otherwise just use Windows.

So instead, it just seems like Linux is mediocrely supported on most of their laptop lines, but not a single one is 100% supported long term like it would be with a Mac or any Windows box.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#542

Post by bb88 »

FeepingCreature wrote: post #207
bb88 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think Windows has been trying to kill linux for what, almost 30 years? Some of that conspiracy mentality may have been valid 15 years ago, but probably not anymore.

You're saying it's invalid because it was too right?

It may be hard to remember way back then, but linux didn't have either the market share or the mind share that windows had back in the late 90's.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#543

Post by m12k »

generalk wrote: post #436
m12k wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, when we look at Microsoft's motivation, considering them driven by profit makes more sense than anything else. Hence why I'm critiquing comments that seem to think Microsoft is driven by some innate desire to destroy Linux and FOSS. They're not, they just want to make money, but back when their making money was based on Windows, and they thought Linux was an existential threat to that, those two goals coinci…

We're not talking about Microsoft's cloud / server strategy though. Linux as a server OS is different from Linux as a development platform. The two have nothing in common except the word "Linux." Microsoft is taking steps to embrace desktop Linux, we've seen that with WSL. Instead of ditching Windows for a different/better dev platform, just keep using Windows. They are extending their own desktop Linux by adding the…

> We're not talking about Microsoft's cloud / server strategy though

Yes we are. I was talking about the motivation behind their action. And I think it's quite obvious that 'get businesses to use Azure over AWS' or 'get web developers to use Windows instead of Macs' is a much, much more likely motivation than 'Extinguish desktop Linux'. Why would they care about that? Desktop Linux is absolutely no threat to them, and there's no money to be made winning that fight more than they already have. Know what, I'll grant you that in their attempt to steal web devs over from MacOS, and getting a better user story for a web dev deploying Linux servers from Windows, they will probably also hurt desktop Linux - if nothing else, simply by creating another viable alternative for devs that isn't MacOS. But I can pretty much guarantee you that extinguishing desktop Linux is not their motivation - it simply makes no sense.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#544

Post by smaudet »

golergka wrote: post #473
franga2000 wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As a game developer, for most mid-tier inside titles releasing Linux version costs more than it makes, so, no. What are the main costs of releasing a Linux version of a game when using Unity or Unreal? My limited experience with Unity has been "check the Linux box, click the build button". It even cross-compiles no problem. People I know tell me Unreal is similar. It's not like they have to do a full run of play-te…

Well, I've been working with Unity for 11 years now, but my experience with building for Linux is limited, so I'll go with experience from mobile and console development, and say that with shaders (which never ceases to surprise with platform-specific glitches), filesystem (although Unity is supposed to abstract it out, once you get serious about resource management, this abstraction starts to leak), input (because y…

I think there's merit to the argument of 'big corporations can't get things done efficiently' here. I think as you mentioned, for a small scale dev it can be done. I agree, shading could be better across platforms, graphics card manufacturers, even, but that all pales in comparison to a large inefficient corp making grossly over-complex games with staggeringly little added value per hired developer (oh yay another 1mil triangles added to the 100th remake of the same garbage FPS or NFL game, extreme sarcasm).

But outside EA Games e.g., some of the best games I've ever played were written by solo devs in a cross platform engine you may have heard of called Flash. Yeah, not always smooth sailing on Linux, but it worked, pretty well even.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#545

Post by simiones »

mcv wrote: post #535
simiones wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You generally have some good points, and some points that have more to do with preferences, or luck with hardware. I would note that the lack of anti-virus software is one of the reasons a lot of companies don't want to run Linux on employee systems. Locked-in Windows systems at least have the advantage that even if you Run as Administrator some .exe that you got emailed, there is a good chance that your AV will not…

I admit I've never really looked into how detailed Linux is in access rights, but on Unix systems, it's very normal to have install rights for specific directories. If Linux doesn't allow that, that would be disappointing, but I strongly suspect Linux allows this just as much as other unixen. So that would mean you can install stuff without sudo rights as long as you get group rights to the right directory. And that'…

I'm pretty sure neither `apt` or `yum` or other common package managers support any way of running as non-root. Of course you can download the sources and compile yourself, or maybe even find a binary distribution with all dependencies included (good luck with that).

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#546

Post by simiones »

toohotatopic wrote: post #526
simiones wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand what "being managed entirely hands-off" means. I can assure you there is no manual intervention from IT on every desktop system in the fleet, so I would call that exactly "being managed hands-off". I am certain there are always a few systems that do need some manual intervention for whatever reason, but that seems to just be the way with computers. It's not like Ubuntu updates never break, or no on…

I mean with 'entirely hands-off' that the computer just keep on running. On Linux, most packages are part of the repository and update automatically. On Windows, those packages have to be updated manually. Even if everything is automated, the computer will have to be restarted quite regularly. At least to me, Windows seems to be more difficult, especially if you have a fleet of desktop systems that can be chosen to b…

Even on Linux, you need restarts if you want the updates to shared libraries to actually happen. You can't just apply a critical security update to OpenSSL for example and hope that the user actually restarts their programs at some point - if you care about the update being applied, you need to know that by some date all of the programs on that system are actually restarted, and a scheduled reboot is by far the simplest way to do this.

Then there's the question of pushing an update to all managed computers. Maybe it's not a package update, but you want to change some SELinux policy for all users, or update some DNS server or the default search domain and so on.

Never mind the question of how you can instruct one of those Linux computers to delete all data it holds whenever it next connects to the internet (to handle the case of a stolen company laptop).

There are so many things that you need in an enterprise setting that have common (though probably quite expensive) tools available for Windows. Maybe some of these exist for Linux as well (I would expect RedHat to have some), but I'm not sure. Linux admin is usually reserved for servers much more than desktop computers.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#547

Post by smaudet »

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…

I'd like to point out that having random programs scatted across external HDDs is an anti-feature to me. I never remember which files are where as it is. And too easy to screw things up by unplugging the drive...

Nevertheless it can be done - if you are dedicated, recompile the program with the prefix changed to the mounted root of your separate drive. Presto, automated installs to your external drive. Now, linking up all the bits can still be a right headache, but this is just a bigger nightmare on Windows (what will you DO if your drive letter changes?? You mean I don't have any system to automatically link up random programs on random drives which may or may not be present. Gosh darn, that package manager sounds like a good idea now...)

If you're using a laptop, you're probably due for an upgrade in HDD capacity, or if you're lucky enough to be on Desktop I'd recommend a board with hotplug capability and using LVM. I think no matter your platform you're going to have a hell of a lot of problems doing things your way. If you can patch the package manager to be able to do this, amazing! I don't think any system exists like this, period.

Re: DirectX is coming to the Windows Subsystem for Linux

#548

Post by toohotatopic »

simiones wrote: post #546
toohotatopic wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean with 'entirely hands-off' that the computer just keep on running. On Linux, most packages are part of the repository and update automatically. On Windows, those packages have to be updated manually. Even if everything is automated, the computer will have to be restarted quite regularly. At least to me, Windows seems to be more difficult, especially if you have a fleet of desktop systems that can be chosen to b…

Even on Linux, you need restarts if you want the updates to shared libraries to actually happen. You can't just apply a critical security update to OpenSSL for example and hope that the user actually restarts their programs at some point - if you care about the update being applied, you need to know that by some date all of the programs on that system are actually restarted, and a scheduled reboot is by far the simpl…

Why would you want to delete the data? That's when you open the door for an attacker to access it. If the data is encrypted, it can remain on its partition because it is inaccessible.

Interestingly, apples have to be compared to oranges. On Linux, it is easy to identify the programs that are using a library. Thus it is easy to restart just the services that are patched. In general, things can be scripted so there are no tools available. But this requires somebody who understands the system. From a business perspective, this might be more expensive, or not, if the tools are expensive.

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