Microsoft Open Source Tool Lets You 'Bring Your Own Linux' To Windows (microsoft.com) 135
Long-time Slashdot reader Billly Gates writes: Debian is now available in the Windows app store. It joins Ubuntu, Suse Leap, SuSe enterprise, and Kali Linux for those who cannot or do not want to bother with a virtual machine or a full install of the OS. However, it included stable 9.3. 9.4 is available from the repository if you run apt-get update and apt-get upgrade.
"Fedora is not yet available, although Microsoft has stated openly that it is working to make it so," reports Computer Weekly. And there's more: Microsoft has also provided an open source tool called Microsoft WSL/DistroLauncher for users who want to build their own Linux package where a particular distribution is either a) not available yet or b) is available, but the user wants to apply a greater degree of customisation to it than comes as standard.
"Fedora is not yet available, although Microsoft has stated openly that it is working to make it so," reports Computer Weekly. And there's more: Microsoft has also provided an open source tool called Microsoft WSL/DistroLauncher for users who want to build their own Linux package where a particular distribution is either a) not available yet or b) is available, but the user wants to apply a greater degree of customisation to it than comes as standard.
Well Linux is over (Score:3, Funny)
What next?
TempleOS anyone? /ducks
Re: Well Linux is over (Score:3)
Hah. Let me know when I can
yum install ms-windows-x86_64
It would be nice if your could do it backwards.
different package name (Score:3)
That package might be called "wine" or "VirtualBox" in yoir distro~~
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You can use QEMU as long as your motherboard and cpu support IOMMU. Takes a little more work but allows you to utilize bare hardware(Google PCI-E Passthrough)
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hahaha! yes same thing happened to me a while back, I had heard of it but never paid any attention until some friends of mine showed me one of his youtube videos. Man its a scary world out there. lol
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I don't think they would survive that long-term. But, MS being fundamentally incompetent and clueless, they may not realize that. So you definitely have a point.
Windows is losing, Office is their money maker (Score:2, Informative)
Microsoft sees that they are losing in the OS space.
Yes, corporate desktops still run Windows, but the vast majority of CPUs sold in the last ten years aren't corporate desktops. Where MS is making their money is MS Office cloud subscriptions.
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So you think they are planning to go no-OS and sell browser-based cloud office licenses? Possibly. I mean, it would not be very difficult to make Windows 11 actually a window-manager on top of X11 and a set of tools. Would not even need to be Linux below that, one of the BSDs or a commercial Unix would do just fine.
That's what they've been doing. (Score:2)
Office 365 (Office in the Cloud) is indeed what they've been pushing, and where they have increased their revenue. They gave away Windows 10 upgrades, didn't even try to sell it.
Windows *is* still important as an Active Directory client. The whole ecosystem around Active Directory, corporate networks with Microsoft everything, is still a money-maker for them. Windows on corporate desktops means they can make money around Exchange, Active Directory, etc, and by extension SQL Server and other things they s
Microsoft's revenue numbers disagree with you (Score:5, Informative)
Here are some revenue numbers quoting directly from Microsoft's audited annual report:
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Office commercial products and cloud services revenue increased 10% (up 10% in constant currency) driven by Office 365 commercial revenue growth of 41% (up 41% in constant currency)
Windows commercial products and cloud services revenue decreased 4% (down 5% in constant currency)
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Office 365 up 41%, Windows down 5â.... Those are the numbers.
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I'd be willing to bet that the windows revenue going down is a function of two things:
1. You no longer need a new machine every few years unless you're a gamer.
2. Win10's disturbing privacy issues which make gamers go for W7, which they often cannot legally get any more. So they have to pirate it.
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Except that revenue numbers don't tell the story about success in the OS space. Rather than just quoting numbers read the report. Windows revenue is down 5% which is better than expectations given the general decline in OEMs. i.e. Windows is doing better than the market and therefore they are just fine in the OS space.
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Is there a Linux distro capable of providing Linux and Windows support on the same desktop?
Any Linux OS that you can install a VM on or use wine with does.
Re:Slowly letting users get used to linux (Score:4, Insightful)
The WSL is more for people who want Windows as a primary OS but would like a few random Linux goodies and tools. Cigwin and the like work too. But they haven’t been kept up to date at the same level as a popular Linux distribution.
WSL vs Cygwin (Score:3)
noy exactly Cygwin
Cygwin boils down to a Windows DLL library that exposes POSIX compatible interfaces against which you can recompile source code (you can recompile Gimp for Windows). But you can't run any Unix binary un-modified.
WSL is the NT kernel exposing(*) barely enough Linux APIs so that (a few, very simple) Linux ELFs can run unmodified on Windows.
(it's a *realy tiny* subset of Linux kernel's API. so forget about running anything complex like FUSE, other file systems, Docker/LXC/etc, X11 or Wayland,
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Target public are mostly devs who would want to quickly test a compiled executable before deploying to the actual server, but don't want to bother setting up a whole VirtualBox VM.
They could just download an image, they don't have to do it themselves. And testing against not-the-real-thing means you didn't test.
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(it's a *realy tiny* subset of Linux kernel's API. so forget about running anything complex like FUSE, other file systems, Docker/LXC/etc, X11 or Wayland, complex network filtering, ...)
It is also highly feature incomplete and still being developed. So while you're right, I expect your post may be less right as time progresses.
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Best use for WSL that I've found is to finally have a good SSH client on Windows.
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I've switched to using WSL instead of Cygwin on my Windows 10 systems. Cygwin is nice (all binaries are Windows binaries), but it's just a lot easier to have a full Debian or Ubuntu or whatever installation around. (Notably, Cygwin doesn't have standard C library manpages). Plus, I get full access to the repositories of those distributions - if there's no Cygwin port of something, you can try compiling it, but it may or may not
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Ah, but you *can* use Cygwin's X server and run the clients from WSL. At least, I believe you can: https://virtualizationreview.c... [virtualizationreview.com]
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Ah, but you missed the point of giving away the OS - Microsoft saw how the Apple's App Store and iTunes became the focus of Apple's growth strategy; by taking a large cut from store sales, it became more important to get the store into people's hands and building store access into the OSes. Microsoft is trying to duplicate that strategy. This is why Windows 10 was given away for free - get Windows 7 (or even XP) users to upgrade to 10 and have that store button right on the task bar. Windows 8 and 8.1 alrea
Linux with added spyware (Score:4, Insightful)
sorry, I should have said 'Telemetry' !
I wonder if this was at the behest of the NSA who were worried about spy-ware free Linux boxen; this lets the keep tabs on more people.
Mac is official Unix (tm). Linux is not (Score:2)
Fyi MacOS (formerly known as OS X) is actually, officially Unix, and carries the Unix trademark. It's MORE Unix-like than Linux is, because Mac *is* UNIX. Linux is not Unix. (Linux stands for "LInus's Not UniX".
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Linus originally named it Freax, but Ari Lemmke, an administrator of the FUNET FTP server, didn't like that name and called it Linux on the server. Linux does not have a fun "not UNIX" history. XNU, the MacOS kernel, stands for X is Not Unix though.
EulerOS is a Red Hat-derived Linux distribution that actually does have UNIX certification, so there is at least one Linux distribution that is "actually" UNIX.
Good points (Score:2)
Those are good points. The poor support for X is annoying.
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Well count me in. My home laptop which I had Linux for years on it. Then I found I was spending most of my time trying to get Windows games to work on it. So I just switched to Windows and I use WSL for some some scripting or bulk data processing.
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Indeed. Basically the only reason I see for Windows to "integrate Linux" is the fascist fuckups in the NSA fearing the cannot listen to everything anymore, like the perverted creeps they are. MS itself certainly can only lose here. Would be interesting to know what kind of extreme pressure was brought on them to make them do this.
Re:Linux with added spyware (Score:4, Insightful)
MS can't possibly lose from being able to say their product can do everything their competitors can, including running those competitors for free. The "best of both worlds, no risk" argument is just what business wants to hear. And any home user who bothers to figure out WSL is someone who was likely to have tried dual-booting anyway so they can only gain there too.
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The Linux part is free, because Microsoft wasn't going to lower the price of Windows if they didn't include WSL. It's improving their value for money proposition from where it was before.
I've been using exclusively Linux of 15 years now, but the existence of WSL certainly increases the chances of me using Windows someday. How could it not?
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Because if you have used Linux for so long, you obviously had some issue with windows, and that issue will still be there when you install windows to test WSL, and most likely before you even get to installing WSL you will have formatted that NTFS partition back to ext.
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Spending time & effort to find a way to run Linux distros inside Windows is like struggling to find a way to mount an Abrams tank on top of a Mini-Cooper.
What's the point outside of a few edge-cases where it may possibly be helpful/convenient?
Strat
Corporate IT is hostage to Windows (Score:5, Insightful)
> Spending time & effort to find a way to run Linux distros inside Windows is like struggling to find a way to mount an Abrams tank on top of a Mini-Cooper.
> What's the point outside of a few edge-cases where it may possibly be helpful/convenient?
For the user, the point is that for 20 years Microsoft's strategy was to ensure vendor lock-in for corporate IT environments. A lot of companies therefore issue Windows desktops and won't provide Linux desktops. Microsoft did a pretty good job of making it difficult for large corporations to use anything but Windows because of all the inter-related proprietary stuff. An organization can easily run Windows or not run Windows, but if the company chose Windows it's been hard to add a few Linux desktops to the mix. Partially because everyone in corporate IT knows the Microsoft way of doing things, not cross-platform standards.
I can be FAR more productive using Linux than Windows. Now, I can continue to use Linux, on the Windows desktop issued by corporate headquarters.
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One of the casino corps I do electrical for here in Las Vegas supplies their devs and IT with Microsoft, Macintosh and Linux desktops and laptops upon request. I guess they don't let the small cost get in the way of helping their employees have a comfortable work environment? I don't know know the exact reason they allow it. I guess I will have to ask someone next time I'm there. But I personally think if someone can do their work on an other OS system and it doesn't interfere with production it should be r
Active Directory etc (Score:3)
Microsoft provides a big network system, with Active Directory at the center. Active Directory is a database for storing user information, a configuration management system, a DNS server, an email server, and about 20 other things. It interacts with a bunch of other products using Microsoft proprietary protocols. If a company buys into the Microsoft network plan, where Active Directory is the central brain of everything, it can be a hassle to use any non-Microsoft products anywhere in the network.
If, on t
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I really dont see what would stop my linux device from communicating with a microsoft dns server, or mail server or any of the file servers a company would use. config utilitys yes, but if its built around SNMP i dont see it not working either.
MAPI (Score:2)
Any mail client can use standardized email protocols such as SMTP, pop3, and IMAP, to interface with any mail server that is based on standard protocols.
In Microsoft-based networks, Outlook speaks MAPI with Exchange. There is no SMTP, IMAP, or pop3. MAPI is based on COM, a too-clever-by-half programming model that Microsoft developed COM (aka Active X) as the next version of Object Linking and Embedding, before the whole concept was obsoleted by HTML. Basically what COM is designed for is to set up
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Sometimes I've had success using 'nsupdate' to add the entry, but the DNS server seems to forget them periodically.
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As someone who has been using the Linux-in-Windows for a year or more, perhaps I can answer your question. I do all my software development using the Linux sub-system: Python, finite state transducers, as well as TeX stuff. I could perhaps install Linux instead of Windows; the main reason I don't is that for nearly 30 years I've been using a keyboard remapper that is (afaict) unavailable in vanilla Linux. I've tried various Linux key mapping programs, and none does what my program does in Windows. Needl
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Linux distros inside Windows is like struggling to find a way to mount an Abrams tank on top of a Mini-Cooper.
Except they aren't running Linux or even components of it. They are running a few GNU userland tools. More like mounting the gun from an Abrams tank on a Mini-Cooper to end up with something that is small but still useful if someone is trying to carjack you. *
Probably the worst car analogy on Slashdot in a while. :-)
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Interestingly, I already use Linux in Windows for some of the things I no longer trust Windows for. Just not Microsoft's version of Linux, of course, because I will never trust that. I use VirtualBox.
Of course, any VM running in Windows is just as vulnerable as any other piece of software, but it's an extra layer of difficulty. My VirtualBox VM's filesystem is encrypted, so a random piece of Windows malware can't just read its files indiscriminately, and any malware (and by that I mean software antagonis
It's a trap! (Score:1)
Tux is on the menu at microsoft!
On Windows? (Score:3)
Eh... I'll wait for the Linux port. ;)
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https://i.imgur.com/MVqLdQF.pn... [imgur.com]
Docker (Score:2)
Yo dawg
...which is exactly what Docker (and LXC, and systemd-nspwan, etc.) is on Linux.
(and for the "and Knuckles and Knuckles and Knuckles" meme people out there: yes you can run docker inside docket)
Missing Linux Feature: Seamless OS Crossing (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd really appreciate the ability to switch between OSes like I can virtual desktops. Modern hardware certainly supports this potential.
I hope someone within the Linux community returns with a competing feature, enabling a seamless OS transition, founded upon Linux, an OS that doesn't invade your privacy, while eventually providing additional sand boxing & integration features around Windows, locking it into it's own little garden.
Could an authentic Microsoft Windows installation be forced into becoming a mere compatibility layer built on top of Linux?
The best of both worlds: Windows compatibility coupled with Linux security.
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You mean like WINE? ;)
https://www.winehq.org/
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Any case of adapting will be a transitioning state.
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Xen [xenproject.org]
Re: Missing Linux Feature: Seamless OS Crossing (Score:3)
Windows 10 has virtual desktops
Permissions? (Score:4, Interesting)
Their excuse is that they don't want to change Windows ACLs, and that's fine, I get that, but it's a poor excuse; WSL applies 0777 to all Windows files currently and, to add to it, doesn't seem to use Windows ACLs for the files within the lxss directory, which strongly implies that they're already storing Linux file permissions as metadata elsewhere, which is what they should be doing for Linux file permissions for Windows files -- defaulting to values mapped from Windows ACLs, of course.
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windows mapped drives are using the ACLs granted to your windows user access token when launching the shell
Indeed they are, as you're still technically signed in as your Windows user, so you can only access what your Windows user can access, regardless of how you're accessing it. WSL still shows permissions of 0777 for all Windows mapped drives and all files and directories contained therein, regardless of your actual permissions. I'm not guessing at this; as I said, this is an issue I deal with on a daily basis. I can chmod those files all day long and the operation will appear to succeed, but when I list them
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I see your concern but wouldn't this require some method of UID/GID mapping to the windows user for it to work properly?
They "set" everything to 0777 without mapping users or groups, why would they need to map them to display your effective permissions? Everything in the Windows mapped drives is owned by root anyway, so no, no user or group mapping is necessary. Just display what the current ACLs will allow my user to do.
And there would have to be further distillation as the NTFS ACLs are more granular than Linux permissions (though doesn't SELinux allow ACLs?)
Do the current ACLs allow my Windows user to execute this file? Set the execute bit accordingly. Do they allow my Windows user to read this file? Set the read bit accordingly. Do they allow my Windows user t
Open source is cancer. (Score:3)
Better use of resources... (Score:2)
Write an open source tool to detect dupes.
If I had to ... (Score:1)
Why? (Score:2)
And why would I want that? (Score:3)
Windows is becoming less and less usable and more and more unstable. The only applications left that really need it are MS office (because too many other people use it) and games. I am currently preparing a move of everything besides these two to Linux, because I pretty much have had enough. Spying, always changing GUI, bad features, insecurity, and general stupidity, arrogance and greed. MS really is in rapid decline. They were evil and incompetent before, but now they try very hard to top that. Yes, I am aware "Linux is user friendly, but it is selective about who its friends are", but fortunately I am not one of the masses that have to eat whatever dog-food MS gives them and I am quite capable to run Linux without the MS like atrocity that systemd is.
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Windows is becoming less and less usable and more and more unstable.
I'd be interested in seeing the evidence for your assertion.
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Me too.
It's like Wine (Score:1)
It's just an emulator for the userland, and since stuff like LVM, ext4, etc. drivers are missing, it really is not any more useful than just running Cygwin in my opinion. If people need a real Linux kernel just run a Virtualbox VM, it's free and a headless Linux VM is very light on resources while being very fast.
WSL-Distribution-Switcher (Score:2)
https://github.com/RoliSoft/WS... [github.com]
Just two days ago I set up CentOS on a Windows laptop provided by my employer using WSL-Distribution-Switcher. It'll download and run any distro published as a docker image on Docker Hub.
Related: What terminal emulator are people using on Windows? I'm using wsl-terminal currently, but I'm curious if there are compelling alternatives.
https://github.com/goreliu/wsl... [github.com]
Running Linux on Windows is like... (Score:1)
...letting someone tow your Porsche around 24/7 instead of driving it yourself. It's slow, prone to collisions, you can't get everywhere and if the driver of the tow truck at some point says you can't turn right, there's nothing you can do about it.
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Awesome lol I wish I had mod points.
I'd rather it was the other way around. (Score:2)
Does no one remember Microsoft's 3 E's? (Score:3, Informative)
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish",[1] also known as "Embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences to disadvantage its competitors.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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"Embrace, extend, and extinguish"
Everyone remembers it. We also know what is involved and what it requires. So let's have a quick look at it:
The embrace stage involves embracing a complete system, protocol whatever. Being compatible with it so that MS becomes a proper alternative to the previous use case. WSL only achieves a very small subset of embracing. They are able to run a few select GNU tools, nothing more. They haven't embraced Linux.
The extend stage involves having sufficient market share of the target market to be able to force t
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With Satya Nadella as CEO, Microsoft seems to be quite more interested in "Embrace, have the user pay rent for Azure-related things forever". It doesn't sound as nifty as the 3 E's of yesteryear but it's clearer than the Underpants gnomes strategy.
don't care (Score:2)
NetBSD (Score:2)
Is it able to run a non Linux system, for instance NetBSD?
It depends on how it is implemented. Is it an hypervisor? A Linux kernel API emulation? A POSIX API?
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It emulates the Linux kernel system calls and loads Linux ELF binaries. You won't be able to run NetBSD binaries with this, only Linux binaries.
Proposal: Windows version that runs in Linux (Score:2)
Okay so now for the next wave, a windows version that runs in Ubuntu. _That_ would be nice.
Annexation of Linux continues on schedule (Score:2)
Re: Great news (Score:1)