While I see an extensive amount of “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” and do agree that this is the typical logic of Microsoft.
It’s obvious this is to try and avoid getting hit with similar monopoly accusations that their competitors are receiving.
“Look, Look!! We support other Operating Systems! We have a guide! We’re not a monopoly! See, See!!”
I don’t think this is the reason. Windows is in no danger of being a monopoly
They just got through the US, EU, and UK courts regarding the Activision/Blizz acquisition. In which they gave up some streaming rights to Ubisoft to appease concerns ragarding game pass monopoly. It’s probably on their mind.
This has way more to do with Azure is their main product and they know what people want to run on the cloud runs on Linux workloads. They’ve seen their Kuberbetes numbers, they know where the money is
and their OS is becoming an AD + 365 sub selling machine
There’s definitely an element of that, but imo their recent embrace of WSL and linux tooling for development is just to try and expand their market share in the software development space. Very few devs develop on windows unless they’re game devs, C# devs or working on something else that requires windows/Microsoft tooling, everyone else is on Linux and macOS because windows is bad for developing software.
It’s basically an admission that their tooling is bad, but it’s fine because you can just run linux development tools on windows now, so please don’t switch to Linux fully
Your assertions are not supported by industry analysis.
While this years survey is closed, the results haven’t been published. In last year’s survey, MacOS slightly edged out Linux, moving to second place.
Why is windows bad for development? Outside of specific languages or IDEs which suck for Windows, why would windows be bad for development?
Start your pc, start the IDE and type away. Docker runs in windows so running databases, redis, rabbitmq, elastic or whatever is not an issue.
In my experience, it’s damn near impossible (or at least used to be. I don’t use windows anymore) to get cli programs to work the way they should. I’d edit the environment variables, logout, login, restart the computer, check the variables again, set the variables again, and after about 20 times windows would go “oh yeah, there’s that compiler you were talking about”. With Linux I just get whatever language/libraries/compiler/interpreter I want and its there. At most I might have to ‘source .bashrc’ or something.
Well, I don’t think it’s anti-monopoly evidence, but instead a way to intercept a popular search phrase and control the narrative.
You search for “how to download and install linux” in google, and the very top link is the Microsoft page. And the narrative is:
-I just want to get started: Oh, use WSL, that way you are using Windows really, and just a touch of Linux
-I need to use it for real: Oh, then use Azure, you can have us set up those scary Linux instances for you and Microsoft Terminal will hook you right up to those instances
-I really really want to use it: Ok, but remember, you’ll lose access to Windows applications, so there are downsides, and also, we are going to make this hands down the scariest looking procedure of the three…
This is a long time coming TBH. It hasn’t made sense for at least 10-15 years for Microsoft to still be trying to “win” against Linux. To me when I see it it seems weird. It’s like your old grandpa who still talks about the “japs” when he sees someone driving a Toyota.
Linux runs most of the smartphones in the world, and a BSD fork runs the rest. It’s done. No one is going to deploy Windows Server 2023 edition to run their web services unless something’s gone pretty badly wrong. We’re all focused on AI and cloud computing now, and have been for some time.
The most critical thing a business can do to remain successful is recognize and adapt to the new reality.
So Linux is an end state utopia of software? Never thought Ballmer was based
but the Linux crowd, in the world of Prez Steve, are communists.
But it’s kinda true though, at least in spirit? Red Hat obviously not though.
I kind of hoped Redhat was going to reverse uno IBM there for a bit, fuck was I wrong…
I mean, to be fair, that article is over 20 years old by now.
After 20 years, lots of people grow out of their mistakes and become wiser.
Ballmer is not one of these people.
Even 10 years ago, this would’ve been unthinkable. Never would I have ever thought Microsoft would oublish a guide on instanjing Linux.
10 minutes ago this was unthinkable lol, I’m shocked at reading this!!
Pretty insane seeing the market dominant OS telling people how to install another OS lol
It’s not that long ago when Steve Ballmer said “Linux is cancer”.
Oh wait, that was 22 years ago.
They’ve been moving this way for years. SQL server, .net core and powershell all run on linux and are a much bigger deal.
MS Office support when?
When windows for arm based on Linux and with backwards compatibility using wine and invisible VMs.
Technically Now. They have a web version, and their latest version of Outlook is basically their web app. If they release a linux binary it’ll just be a wrapper for the web version. It’s also a way for them to reach Chrome books.
Oh, that will explain why outlook runs like shit on my new computer.
Do you actually need to run MS Outlook specifically?
Not really fond of it. But so far it’s the best tool I’ve found to be used in a professional environment that supports Exchange.
I’m beginning to like Microsoft more and more when I can’t use FOSS. GitHub, typescript and vs code are all great. Also it’s getting easy enough to de-google and replace any remaining dependency with the MS suite, which might not be any better but at least google is no longer a monolithic monopoly.
Just suggesting;
- Codeberg instead of Github
- VScodium instead of VScode
Does codium support the same GitHub integrations as VS code? I’m quite enjoying GitHub copilot and Actions integrations, among others.
Yes you can get Copilot running, although last time I did it required a few extra steps. The guide I was using was on Github I believe. I would try to find it for you, but busy rn 🙃
why codeberg instead of github
Codeberg is managed by a non profit organization, while github is owned by Microsoft
Yupp, and open source of course ✨
I’d go with gitlab instead of codeberg if I had the choice. However the same kinda problem exists as social media with critical mass. The mass is with GitHub and until activitypub federation with gitlab becomes feasible you are cutting out contributors, reviewers, etc by not using GitHub.
GitLab’s website is very slow and bloated, even more so that GitHub.
It’s not super difficult to host your own gitlab instance tbh.
It’s hard when you don’t have a server:
I think Linux community is holding on hate and toxicity towards Microsoft and their software, you can even see it in comments to this post. Like lemmy is holding on hate towards Reddit (there is even Reddit community to share your anger). So if Microsoft somehow proves that they doesn’t deserve hate they are getting, Linux community will be shaved.
Microsoft’s entire business success was taking someone else’s work, building on it, then once they found any level of success they used anti-competitive business practices to become a mega corp and stay that way. The founder is still alive and profiting from the company.
There is no point in our lifetimes when MS won’t deserve hate for everything they have done, even if there is a begrudging acceptance that they have made changes that make them appear more welcoming to competition.
Youre talking about a huge megacorporation like a person. Oh no poor billy is getting bullied by a few nerds who use a different operating system.
wat? it’s a corporation, the hate is 100% warranted.
just because google’s eclipsed them to become the current worst thing ever, it doesnt mean MS isnt a blood sucking monster. if they were in the right position, they’d still be fucking us over.
…doesn’t mean MS isnt a blood sucking monster.
Bill Gates hatred of mosquitos finally clicked for me. He’s getting rid of the competition!
So if Microsoft somehow proves that they doesn’t deserve hate they are getting
Ok i know you’re not being serious but my mind reels. What would that look like? There would have to be Clancy novel levels of shit going on
not impressed, wanna see how to single boot linux and put windows in virtual machine as a guest
Embrace, extend, and extinguish
It makes sense for Microsoft to support Linux though…
They tried their hardest to kill Linux under Steve Ballmer but now they’re moving (or in reality have moved) to a model where Xbox and cloud are their main income-generating industries. The former is unrelated to Windows/Linux and the latter is frankly more dependant on Linux than it is on Windows - Microsoft have been supportive of Linux through Azure for years now and it doesn’t exactly make sense for them to be developing two different operating systems, so it’s not far fetched to imagine they’ll drop
DOSNT as a backend for windows entirely in the future and move to a Linux backend, with Windows just being a closed source DM with tracking etc added on.This covers embrace & extend, but I don’t think the extinguish part makes sense - sure they may add features the FOSS community disagree with, but at worst we’re in a similar position to where we are now with things being released separately for Linux and Windows
I think you mean NT, not DOS. DOS stopped being the backbone of Windows in 2000/XP.
That is the opposite of what I want to happen. I want them to release Windows (NT) under a free license, not to start basing Windows on Linux.
NT isn’t even a bad kernel, it’s everything around it that’s the problem.
I’m not sure they’ll succeed in extinguishing linux. But I do get the worry, especially with WSL.
What I am more worried about is them potentially extinguishing git via their control of github. In particular, with their github cli tool and such >.<
The thing is, I don’t think a guide is really needed to install Linux. Most of it is pretty straight-forward. (The only tricky bit that comes to mind is making the USB that you’ve put your distro on bootable. That probably isn’t obvious; and it might not be obvious how to get your computer to boot from a USB anyway if you’ve never done it before.)
Anyway, the way I see it, Microsoft’s guide is more about how you can use Linux while still having Windows. If someone is searching for “how do I install Linux?” Microsoft would obviously prefer the answer to involve something that preserves Windows. First preference: WSL, second preference: Virtual Machine, third preference: dual-boot. And after that, you’re on your own.
I don’t think a guide is really needed to install Linux
I had a guide and it was still a big learning curve. Linus had a guide and he still bricked his machine trying to install Steam. Imagine your parents or grandparents being told without context to mount an ISO to a USB and set up their BIOS - for 90% of people there is no way in hell they’re installing Linux without a guide unless they can double click an exe and have an install wizard do it for them.
I agree; but please take my comment in the context of Microsoft’s guide - which doesn’t tell users how to do any of things that you’ve mentioned. My point is that the underlying purpose of the guide is not so much about how to install linux, but how you might try linux while still keeping Windows.
The thing is, I don’t think a guide is really needed to install Linux. Most of it is pretty straight-forward. (The only tricky bit that comes to mind is making the USB that you’ve put your distro on bootable. That probably isn’t obvious; and it might not be obvious how to get your computer to boot from a USB anyway if you’ve never done it before.)
It’s been awhile since I installed a Linux distro…Have some of them improved guidance related to allocating disk space on install? I remember that was one of the parts that I wasn’t entirely confident I’d handled properly the last few times I did so. Something something swap, something /, and the like.
I did a Mint install a few weeks ago, and I’d say that if you want to preserve some existing OS (i.e. dual boot), then it isn’t super easy. You have to tell it what new partitions you want - and therefore you have to know something about what partitions you should have. The good news is that you don’t actually need any swap or home partition. You can just put it all on one partition - but I don’t think it’s obvious what to do.
On the other hand, if you aren’t trying to preserve something you already have, you can tell the installer to just go with all the defaults, and then you don’t have to know anything about it.
Note: Microsoft’s guide doesn’t mention any of that detail. It basically just says to follow the instructions of the installer.
Ou can dual-boot with the default options, but iirc if you want to choose how much of your Windows partition you want to use you have to do it manually. Haven’t done it in ages though so I could be wrong
And after trying Linux inside windows and then inside a VM and realising it runs like shit, they’ll be convinced windows is better, but they’ve been deceived.
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Doubt it
windows hasn’t overwritten my uefi settings on major update in 3ish years
I personally haven’t seen windows do that in many many years (last time I saw it happen was with windows XP, though I haven’t ran dual-boot system with every windows since then, just some).
In my dual-Linux setup though, one keeps trying to get over the other in every minor update.
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I prefer having Windows safely tucked away on a virtual machine where it can’t hurt anything.
You know that could be interpreted as a challenge.
You have to install Windows first, then your Linux distro.
Doing that has solved all my problems with Windows being a douche
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I wouldn’t count on it… From Microsoft’s point of view, dual booting works as long as you install Windows first - which probably suits them just fine.
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Those are (made up) problems that might arise after you’ve already installed it; and I doubt Microsoft’s guide says much about them.
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Umm… I really don’t know why you’re coming at me with some sarcastic anti-linux shit right now. All I said was that it was pretty easy to install. I didn’t say or imply that it was problem free. As for the problems being ‘made up’, I made a reasonable assumption that GRUB doesn’t care what day of the week it is - and so what you described was hypothetical only.
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While I agree with you, the issues described are definitely not made up. Linux tends to remove proprietary drivers on every update and the open source drivers for Nvidia still fail with a lot of hardware.
this only happens if you install proprietary drivers manually and not through the software center (or package manager for the cli folks) on almost every given linux distro
this is why no sane linux user recommends installing download scripts from websites, you rely instead on your package manager to handle everythingI never installed any driver in any way other than the software center and it happened to me in every single update for several years until I finally bothered to search how to configure the update process to stop doing it (last month).
Multiple machines, distros, DEs, you name it. None of them ever not had this problem.
You’re so right! I feel like I always need to try two programs and I am never doing it often enough to actually remember which works.
Does this mean that windows updates will no longer bork Linux?
Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is still the name of the game.
It’s a problem if big corp doesn’t support linux. It’s a problem if big corp supports linux.
Big Corps aren’t the issue (or well they are but not because they’re big corps), they only become an issue when a regular tool in their playbook is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. See Facebook, XMPP and the effect that hostile takeover had on their recent plans to create a Fediverse platform. I agree that the Microsoft hate is overblown and unhealthy but to pretend that Microsoft engaging more in Linux is something to be enjoyed without worry is equally a bad idea. There is no guarantee they’ll try to shoehorn their own bad ideas into Linux and quite frankly I think Linux is too big for them to manage that but it is a concern nonetheless.
Still at least with Linux there are plenty of other giants who have a vested interest in making sure the status quo is upheld with no single company having a monopolistic influence on the development so I don’t think there’s any reason to worry about the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook working here at all.
I’m holding out hope (i.e. pure fantasy) that the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish playbook backfires so that Microsoft becomes just another corporation supporting what is basically another Linux distribution, called Windows, and contributing upstream. I suppose it would have to be more like what Apple did with BSD. I feel like they’d still be very able to profit this way and everyone would play together a little better. If there was enough basic and built-in on-by-default interoperability between Windows and things like ssh, NFS, filesystems, etc., many people may never bother uninstalling windows from pre-built devices like laptops that come bundled with it now.
I obviously wasn’t speaking in generalities about big corporation, so put away the straw-man argument. This specific corporation, Microsoft, has a long history of using “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” to stifle competition. Denying or trivializing that concern is at best naive, but more likely just a little bad faith rhetorical trolling.
=> Big corps are the problem
Doubt it
Another thing they have “slipped” in recently is Linux (only Ubuntu for now) support in Microsoft Intune.
This change will make it possible to run Linux in a Microsoft cloud/azure workplace.
Which is one of the things that people seem to forget about with Microsoft when they think that them pushing Linux is some nefarious plot to kill Linux and get everyone on Windows. At this point, it’s like 12% of their total revenue. Not insignificant, but they’re likely going to see far more growth pushing products related to Azure, which most instances are going to be running some sort of Linux VMs.
Microsoft saw the writing on the wall a while ago, and knows that the desktop and even embedded environment is a small slice of the computing pie. They would obviously still prefer to own 100% of that, but they also saw that there’s a finite number of users and devices that’ll use Windows, while there’s effectively an infinite number of things that people can put on their cloud services. Even if it has to be a “competing” OS, they’re making a shitton of money regardless.
Will Microsoft stop to undermine hardware interoperability with their sucky API, closed implementation and co ?
I don’t mind Windows as long as the hardware platform remains “open”
well windows is the reason why some laptops don’t have s3 sleep anymore
I know, that’s why I am totally cold to any of their “opensource” contribution. Most are not useful to non Windows system, Microsoft is getting more than doing.
- Vscode? really
- .Net Core? who cares?
- Github? hem
- WSL ? who cares? Better using a VM
- Naturally, zero contribution to Proton
Even the laptop surface lineup is reverse engineered by the community.
wsl is better, faster and much more convenient than a vm for most tasks. If you think a vm is a replacement for wsl, you don’t know what you’re talking about. (it targets a completely different usecases and audience).
vscode is a… decent open source* code editor (official builds are licensed under EULA and packaged with proprietary components, but there’s also codeoss/codium) with an enormous plugin ecosystem (with an unofficial open source backend available)
It works great for (Rust) development for me and a lot of other people.
I don’t feel like learning vim, and there aren’t many other (mature) alternatives..net core is a good thing; it brings the most important parts of the .net ecosystem (that some people are used to) to Linux, mac and other platforms.
Extra choice and software compatability is always great.Github… yeah it’s… sketchy
but it’s still the de-facto standard, and while it’s completely proprietary, it’s main usecase is public projects. (it’s safe to assume that most private repos are hosted on private git instances)
Also MS is doing a decent job at keeping it “not shitty” (unlike windows; i actually agree with most changes to github) and all improvements made to it improve life for millions of open source developers.Also Microsoft mostly contributes to projects they’re actually using (open source libraries, linux, etc), so why would they ever contribute to Wine or Proton?
It doesn’t affect them or their software in any way.(btw I’m not a native English speaker so please forgive my mistakes)
Just make sure you host every thing you develop on azure and we gucci! Oh and get Office 365!
Aren’t Office Suite apps not even released for Linux? I feel like I remember having to use the web based apps, and not by choice
That’s why the guide teach you how to dual boot, not entirely replacing windows partition with Linux.
This is a thing about huge companies. They can only ignore alternatives at their own peril.
The Windows team probably prefers you don’t ever install Linux even though they wised up and created WSL (so they don’t lose developers to Linux desktop the way they lost creative designers to Mac).
The other teams? VSCode, Office 365, Azure, GitHub, Bing, Skype, etc wisely DGAF what your OS is - just that it’s supported so you can use it.
But depending on the software (looking at you Teams) they GAF which browser you use.
teams is just a web page, the app is electron
They rebuilt a whole new version, it’s using webview2 now.
That is not better.
WSL has actually been part of Windows in one form or the other since the very first NT, initially because US state contracts required a “supports POSIX” checkbox and the implemented just enough to be able to tick that (and, consequently, it sucked), it’s also why NTFS has a POSIX mode for filenames. It was definitely a very unloved stepchild during the Gates/Ballmer years, back when MS was pushing Windows servers. Nowadays they have their own Linux distro to do server stuff, the whole company strategy shifted, Windows isn’t an anchor point, any more, their corporate support contracts are. In a sense they’re trying to be SAP for small companies (for SAP values of “small”. MS itself is a small company on the SAP scale). That is cloud-supported, which has some (but not gigantic) synergy with their gaming arm.
They just realized that an Azure subscription will generate far more revenue (as in “several orders of magnitude” more) than selling licenses or even OS subscriptions to final users. This was by design. The current CEO doesn’t care what happens to Windows as long as it supports his quest for infinite profits.
ironic, a FOSS kernel killing windows in the name of profit
Why wouldn’t they? Windows 10+ is a great development machine and Microsoft knows that a lot of developers develop with Linux. WSL is great for all parties - including Linux
Windows 10+ is a great development machine
If doing Windows development, I agree. WSL is a nice “I would like to have a Linux-like environment without losing Windows or running a full-blown VM” measure. This idea has existed for a long time with things like Cygwin, but at the end of the day, a natively-ran Linux distro will be considerably better for many development stacks than WSL.
Yea anyone who says wsl is good is a windows user and shouldn’t try to administer Linux systems.
If you are going to use Linux on windows just use virtualbox
I, too, have had the audacity to say WSL is useful on this community and it was also met with down votes. Purists hating and gate keeping, and then they wonder why Linux isn’t more popular.
I’m by no means a purest but I’ve found WSL… More annoying than using Linux as is. Network oddities, random programs not functioning and just generally subpar as is.
WSL may be fine for a Windows user to get some access to Linux, however for me it misses the vast majority of what I value in a desktop distribution -Better Window managers. This is subjective, but with Windows you are stuck with Microsoft implementation, and if you might like a tiling window manager, or Plasma workspaces better, well you need to run something other than Windows or OSX.
-Better networking. I can do all kinds of stuff with networking. Niche relative to most folks, but the Windows networking stack is awfully inflexible and frustrating after doing a lot of complex networking tasks in Linux
-More understanding and control over the “background” pieces. With Windows doing nothing a lot is happening and it’s not really clear what is happening where. With Linux, it can be daunting like Windows, but the pieces can be inspected more easily and things are more obvious.
-Easier “repair”. If Windows can’t fix itself, then it’s really hard to recover from a lot of scenarios. Generally speaking a Linux system has to be pretty far gone
-Easier license wrangling. Am I allowed to run another copy of Windows? Can I run a VM of it or does it have to be baremetal? Is it tied to the system I bought with it preloaded, or is it bound to my microsoft account? With most Linux distributions, this is a lot easier, the answer is “sure you can run it”.
-Better package management. If I use flatpak, dnf, apt, zypper, or snap, I can pretty much find any software I want to run and by virtue of installing in that way, it also gets updated. Microsoft has added winget, which is a step in the right direction, but the default ‘update’ flow for a lazy user still ignores all winget content, and many applications ignore all that and push their own self-updater, which is maddening.
The biggest concern, like this thread has, is that WSL sets the tone for “ok, you have enough Linux to do what you need from the comfort of the ‘obviously’ better Microsoft ecosystem” and causes people to not consider actually trying it for real.
Just in case a Windows user sees this, install WingetUI and your update flow will be fixed.
Of course the problem is that wingetui isn’t there by default, isn’t integrated to Windows Update, no matter what, WinGetUI basically becomes yet another tray icon, alongside a half dozen other auto-updater tray icons that various vendors added since there’s no integrated facility to rely upon.
So sure, it’s a bandaid on winget, but it’s still awkward and the ecosystem is a mess. Compared to Linux where a distribution will have, in the box, an extensible central update facility maybe serving two different types of repositories (e.g. apt and snap, or dnf and flatpak).
well about networking: windows proxy settings just work transparently, while on linux it’s just a config option that applications may or may not respect (vpn still works perfectly, but not proxy)
True, though I’m mostly invested in the kernel networking behaviors, rather than having a nicely standardized place for proxy settings so that applications have a logical place to go.
It’s a fair criticism that in userspace, proxy settings have been not standardized and also TLS certificates are similarly a bit messy.
