Eric S. Raymond: Is Microsoft Switching To a Linux Kernel That Emulates Windows? (ibiblio.org) 276
Most of Microsoft's money now comes from its cloud service Azure, points out open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond. Now he posits a future where Windows development will "inevitably" become a drag on Microsoft's business:
So, you're a Microsoft corporate strategist. What's the profit-maximizing path forward given all these factors? It's this: Microsoft Windows becomes a Proton-like emulation layer over a Linux kernel, with the layer getting thinner over time as more of the support lands in the mainline kernel sources. The economic motive is that Microsoft sheds an ever-larger fraction of its development costs as less and less has to be done in-house. If you think this is fantasy, think again. The best evidence that it's already the plan is that Microsoft has already ported Edge to run under Linux. There is only one way that makes any sense, and that is as a trial run for freeing the rest of the Windows utility suite from depending on any emulation layer.
So, the end state this all points at is: New Windows is mostly a Linux kernel, there's an old-Windows emulation over it, but Edge and the rest of the Windows user-land utilities don't use the emulation. The emulation layer is there for games and other legacy third-party software. Economic pressure will be on Microsoft to deprecate the emulation layer... Every increment of Windows/Linux convergence helps with that — reduces administration and the expected volume of support traffic.
Eventually, Microsoft announces upcoming end-of-life on the Windows emulation. The OS itself , and its userland tools, has for some time already been Linux underneath a carefully preserved old-Windows UI. Third-party software providers stop shipping Windows binaries in favor of ELF binaries with a pure Linux API...
...and Linux finally wins the desktop wars, not by displacing Windows but by co-opting it. Perhaps this is always how it had to be.
So, the end state this all points at is: New Windows is mostly a Linux kernel, there's an old-Windows emulation over it, but Edge and the rest of the Windows user-land utilities don't use the emulation. The emulation layer is there for games and other legacy third-party software. Economic pressure will be on Microsoft to deprecate the emulation layer... Every increment of Windows/Linux convergence helps with that — reduces administration and the expected volume of support traffic.
Eventually, Microsoft announces upcoming end-of-life on the Windows emulation. The OS itself , and its userland tools, has for some time already been Linux underneath a carefully preserved old-Windows UI. Third-party software providers stop shipping Windows binaries in favor of ELF binaries with a pure Linux API...
...and Linux finally wins the desktop wars, not by displacing Windows but by co-opting it. Perhaps this is always how it had to be.
Oh God; please No! (Score:3, Insightful)
All we need is another bad version of unix!
Re:Oh God; please No! (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah its called Linux. It used to act like Unix then went off the rails. Now it acts more like Windows. https://linuxconfig.org/disabl... [linuxconfig.org] This service has caused numerous problems with equipment. Once it gets internet access it starts the process and doesn't say anything until you go to reboot (and can't) or want to install something (and can't) because files are locked.
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Re:Oh God; please No! (Score:5, Funny)
How many times has RMS had to tell you?! Words matter. It's called MS/Linux.
Re:Oh God; please No! (Score:5, Informative)
"Words matter" says the man who characterized statutory rape victims as "entirely willing".
I'm not taking a position on what Stallman said, and certainly not defending rapists of any sort... but you know that's exactly what statutory rape is, right? Statutory rape is specifically non-forcible (meaning at least apparently willing) intercourse with a person who is under the age of consent. It's a crime because their consent is not legal, but their consent must be present or it's a different crime, forcible rape of a child.
Re: Oh God; please No! (Score:4, Informative)
Swillden you sure know all the ins and outs of the statutory rape laws. Studied them pretty closely have you?
I know a bit about it because I teach concealed weapons permit classes. An important factor that determines whether it's legal to use deadly force to stop a crime is whether or not that crime is classified as a "forcible felony". Statutory rape is not a forcible felony, because there's no force/coercion involved. Logically, lack of force or coercion (or drugs, etc., I suppose) implies willing participation. Forcible forms of rape are forcible felonies, of course, so use of deadly force to prevent them is legal.
And, no, I don't know "the ins and outs" of statutory rape laws. I know the definition of statutory rape. Since you seem to have access to a web browser, you could easily know the definition, too.
(As an aside, which I include every time I discuss whether deadly force is legal: Keep in mind that whether or not deadly force is legal isn't remotely the same as whether it's a good idea. I'd say that in most circumstances where it's legal, it's not a good idea. It's also generally not possible in the moment to do a detailed legal analysis to determine whether all the elements of a particular forcible felony are met. Although I think it's good to have an understanding of the law, what I recommend to my students is that they use a "balance of fear" evaluation. Specifically, pick something that you really, really, really don't want to happen, such as going to prison for the rest of your life, then look at the developing situation and decide whether whatever's going to happen if you don't shoot is worse than that. If it is, go ahead. This evaluation accomplishes two things. First, odds are very, very high that if you think shooting someone prevents something that's worse than you going to prison forever, the law and, if necessary, a jury will agree you did the right thing and you won't go to prison. Second, if the law and/or jury disagree, well, you still picked the better option.)
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Just kill the offending running instance of Apt, problem solved. To make it stay solved, turn off automatic updates.
It's much easier than solving the problem in Windows.
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When I saw this article I started to wonder if I had ended up on The Daily WTF [thedailywtf.com].
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I prefer TheOnion.com [theonion.com] because it's like an ogre.
Microsoft Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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How would 3D graphics work?
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:5, Funny)
Flat, on a 2D display. To have real 3D graphics you need a 4th dimension.
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:4, Funny)
And with a 5th dimension you get the Age of Aquarius.
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't see Linux replacing anything in Windows. There is no benefit to Microsoft to do this unless they want to get out of the OS business, and that isn't happening when they have 90% of the market.
Azure (the cloud business), on the other hand, is not desktop windows. Microsoft is actively losing the battle by NOT running Linux when Google and Amazon run Linux, thus making their virtual machines not readily mobile or competitive with Azure.
Which means that if Microsoft is to have any long-lived cloud services, they need to meet or beat Linux's virtualization capabilities, and the easiest way to do that is make Windows easier to be virtualized on a Linux hypervisor (eg Xen, VMWare) rather than trying to re-create a BSD userland compatible with the Windows Kernel.
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:4, Informative)
Azure (the cloud business), on the other hand, is not desktop windows. Microsoft is actively losing the battle by NOT running Linux when Google and Amazon run Linux, thus making their virtual machines not readily mobile or competitive with Azure.
Last I checked (which was a long time ago), around 30% of Azure instances run Linux.
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:5, Informative)
And since you haven't checked recently, what you remember is now wrong and has been for a while: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-developer-reveals-linux-is-now-more-used-on-azure-than-windows-server/
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Not this again. The *instances* run Linux. The *host* underneath runs Windows.
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So? The host is irrelevant. It's completely transparent to the guest OS and the user, and could be replaced with something else entirely and customers would never notice. It's so stripped down that it's hard to call it Windows anyhow, it doesn't even have a GUI.
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:4, Informative)
The host is not "irrelevant." It's literally an important point of our discussion here.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:5, Informative)
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... There is no benefit to Microsoft to do this unless they want to get out of the OS business, and that isn't happening when they have 90% of the market. ...
Except that they don't. [statcounter.com]
You pulled that figure out of your ass.
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According to that, they have slightly over 80% of the desktop market, which isn't that far off 90%.
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:5, Informative)
According to that, they have slightly over 80% of the desktop market, which isn't that far off 90%.
Sure but desktop usage has plummeted (percentage-wise at least). A decade ago web browsing was pretty much exclusively done on a desktop, now desktop browsing equates for less than 50% [statcounter.com] of web browsing.
Microsoft used to own 90+% of the personal computing market because it just so happened to be synonymous with the desktop market, that's not so anymore.
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Microsoft used to own 90+% of the personal computing market because it just so happened to be synonymous with the desktop market, that's not so anymore.
Please don't equate "Personal computing" to "whatever you use to browse the internet". Microsoft still very much own nearly all of the personal computing market. Sitting and reading some shitty website is not "personal computing". Hell many people like me will also happily read Slashdot while on the crapper, but will wait until we're sitting in front of a functioning PC to write messages.
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
There are more people using Android than Windows, and more people using iOS than macOS.
What further proof do we need that the desktop is dying*?
* of course it's not "dying", it's just going back down to the percentage of people who need a computer to work. Regular people never needed a desktop/laptop in the first place.
i.e. everybody was driving trucks because that was the only vehicle available. Now people are switching to cars but that doesn't mean trucks will disappear.
Re: Microsoft Linux (Score:5, Interesting)
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Ya, that's what we need, more demented Microsoft UI.
Re: Microsoft Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Ya, that's what we need, more demented Microsoft UI.
Linux don't need no stinkin' Microsoft to dish out "demented" UI's; witness Unity, Gnome 3 before its worse excesses were temporarily reversed, and Gnome 4 which promises to entirely do away with such 'reversals' and will actively enforce the utter dementia of forcing touchscreen paradigms on keyboard-and-mouse users.
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Azure was written as an alternative OS. That part got stripped from Microsoft research but the Azure OS/platform has all the things you mentioned and much more. It doesn't run off Windows Server. True Windows Server runs on a VM but so does FreeBSD or Linux on the Azure kernel and platform.
Azure does use it's hypervisor which is a cousin to Hyper-V so there is some interlap betweeen the 2 but like Windows Server is different than Windows Desktop the same is true.
Microsoft doesn't need a linux kernel as the
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If you were around 40 years ago, you would know that "cloud-hosted" is the mainframe scam all over again. Just because some people are too lazy to install an OS on their own kit (probably WIndows Lusers).
An Old Person
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We’ve been talking for years about how the NT kernel is what you might call unnecessary biodiversity. Google doesn’t really maintain an operating system - they have a browser, and services. Apple only maintains an operating system so they can lock up their walled garden. If the mo
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I seriously doubt they're looking to do it. Having Edge run on Linux doesn't really indicate much. IE used to run on Linux.
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:5, Informative)
Microsoft is indeed moving towards a cross-platform world, but I think ESR's line of reasoning is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Windows internals.
So, the end state this all points at is: New Windows is mostly a Linux kernel, there’s an old-Windows emulation over it, but Edge and the rest of the Windows user-land utilities don’t use the emulation. The emulation layer is there for games and other legacy third-party software.
There's nothing "new" about this. Windows NT kernel was written in a mostly OS-agnostic fashion. The Windows API communicates via the kernel through a translation layer that enables Windows-specific features and behavior. So really, "Windows" is just one of many possible OSes that could be built on top of that kernel. It's a bit of a stretch to call Windows "emulated" when it's always worked this way.
This is why it is possible for Microsoft to introduce a POSIX compatible emulation layer. It's exactly what the kernel was designed to do, except that Windows has been such a dominant force among desktop OSes that there hasn't been much of a need to do so until recently. More to the point, there's nothing fundamentally "thinner" about the POSIX API layer than the Windows API layer, except that POSIX doesn't really cover everything that the Windows API does, like with graphics, sound, input, etc. It's literally just a different translation layer for the kernel.
The notion that Edge or the rest of the system utilities and applications would not use the Windows API also seems far-fetched to me. Is he suggesting they would be ported to POSIX APIs? If maintaining Windows is too expensive, how insanely expensive would it be to port the entirety of Windows built-in apps and utilities to the POSIX API? And again, what about what POSIX functionality doesn't cover? You can't port an app until you have roughly equivalent APIs on both systems. They'd have to port all the mid-level subsystems as well.
Sorry, this just doesn't sound realistic in any way, or really even make sense.
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Microsoft is indeed moving towards a cross-platform world, but I think ESR's line of reasoning is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of Windows internals.
It's based on a fundamentally flawed premise:
" Now he posits a future where Windows development will "inevitably" become a drag on Microsoft's business:"
Why would the mostly widely used desktop OS in the world, by far, become a drag when no one has a viable alternative? As long as Linux has a dozen different competing GUI solutions, it isn't going to challenge Windows in the PC gaming arena. That alone gives Windows a killer advantage over any competitor. Add in all the other apps people are used to using o
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As long as Linux has a dozen different competing GUI solutions, it isn't going to challenge Windows in the PC gaming arena.
You: "Your argument is nonsensical. Now check out my nonsensical argument."
Your argument is nonsensical because Linux applications don't give a shit which GUI you're using. A window manager written using libQt can manage applications written using libGTK+. How many GUI toolkits exist is irrelevant. You do know that many if not most of those toolkits also exist on Windows, right? If your argument were relevant then Windows would be equally impaired by the existence of multiple toolkits. Or did you mean Wayla
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You say that as if you're surprised. You did see ESR in the headline, right?
Quite. I still vividly remember the days when every hacker worth their salt was releasing actual software on USENET (for others to compile), all the while when ESR focused on "compiling" and releasing The Hacker's Dictionary on USENET.
Real hackers compile code, not dictionaries.
Re:Microsoft Linux (Score:4, Interesting)
"Microsoft Wine" (Score:3)
"Microsoft Wine" would be better :)
Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:3, Insightful)
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Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
The mindless citation of Betteridge's law as though it is actually founded in fact has become almost as tiresome as the habit of lazy editors to use "question headlines". Here's a dash of reality: [wikipedia.org]
In 2015, a study of 26,000 articles from 13 news sites on the World Wide Web, conducted by data scientist Mats Linander, found that the majority (54 percent) were yes/no questions, which divided into 20 percent "yes" answers, 17 percent "no" answers and 16 percent whose answers he could not determine.
MIcrosoft's use of containers fits here too. (Score:2)
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Azure services run on Windows hosts. It does not run in a Docker container or on Linux.
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Maybe good time to switch to Hurd (Score:2)
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If Windows starts to take over Linux, It may be a good time to switch. If they ever get around to creating a 64 bit version, that is.
Why Hurd? BSD is still around.
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Why Hurd? BSD is still around.
If you are dumb enough to believe that Microsoft will "take over" Linux, then you should also be dumb enough to believe that Apple has taken over BSD.
The vast majority of running BSD kernels are either MacOS or iOS.
Re:Maybe good time to switch to Hurd (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't think the comparison is as straightforward as you make it sound. Apple's goal has always been to refine technologies into slick consumer products. Microsoft competes with Apple in some instances, but they have always been driven more by the desire to control business and government critical software systems.
In other words, Apple's business model makes controlling FreeBSD of no real interest to them. Apple isn't worried about courting BSD users/developers. Microsoft, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with users/developers. There's a reason they bought GitHub.
Also, Microsoft still demands royalties for Android devices because they claim Linux infringes on their patents. The only reason they don't go after System76 and Pinebook is because they're small fries (I wouldn't be surprised if Dell and Lenovo give MS money for the Linux desktops/laptops they sell).
I'm not arguing that MS will take over Linux, but I would argue that they're trying.
Edge (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: Edge (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll have what he's having (Score:2)
2020 story. Who had "Microsoft EOLs Windows kernel, switches to Linux" for October?
Monolithic (Score:2)
I don't know about anyone else, but I really don't like the idea of a single attack surface for both linux and windows users ( combined, arguably the largest user group in the world ).
W.I.N.E for Windows? Ouch! (Score:5, Funny)
"Wine is not a windows emulator, but it's the windows compatibility layer used by Windows to run Windows." HAHAHA.
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Re: W.I.N.E for Windows? Ouch! (Score:2)
Actually WINE's been on Windows for a while (Score:2)
I seem to remember reading that some folks were using it to run ancient Win9x productivity software on Windows 10. I used to work for a print shop that had some custom VB app for doing quotes, I could see using WINE for Windows to do something like that when the software otherwise wouldn't run. IIRC Microsoft pulled some of the really old APIs out of Win 10.
Year of Linux on the desktop (Score:2)
Just In Time (Score:2)
Just in time when the MS-loving/Linux-hating millennials start to outnumber the geezers on /. ...
At least, will this put the "year when Linux comes to the desktop" meme to rest?
(Posted from my happily Linux-running machine...)
lol IBM (Score:3)
I'll this story if only the fact that: ...As soon as IBM buys RedHat Linux, Microsoft decides to become another Linux flavor and destroy Redhat.
I don't always bet on Microsoft, but I always bet against IBM.
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
There is only one way that makes any sense, and that is as a trial run for freeing the rest of the Windows utility suite from depending on any emulation layer.
Edge is based on a highly portable browser. It has already been ported to macOS and Android. Porting to Linux probably doesn’t take that much effort.
While Linux users probably aren’t as likely to use Edge as users on other platforms, quite a few web devs use Linux and are likely to install Edge for testing purposes. There certainly isn’t “only one way” this makes sense.
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This is the correct answer. Just because Edge, already based on a very portable technology, runs on Linux has nothing to do with what Windows runs.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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As if MS won't just pull a "we're switching driver architectures again, write new shit" to all of the companies that want to have "supports Windows" on the box of their stuff, just like with the XP -> Vista switch.
Also, you wouldn't NEED a large kernel team if 90% of the kernel is maintained by someone else. They wouldn't have to pay to maintain and fix old bugs in the code that they don't work directly on in the kernel if they switch.
That said, I'm not saying they will or won't switch, just that there a
Windows kernel vs Linux kernel (Score:2)
The volunteers thing is as much myth as reality (Score:2)
Plenty are paid to support various parts of Linux. It's just not as a single employer is all. The GPL is there to stabilise the financial input to the collaboration.
first they ignore you (Score:2)
first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win
M Gandhi (or maybe not)
Apple did this already with OSX... (Score:2)
...except the kernel was a Mach/BSD hybrid IIRC, as the license meant it could be kept closed-source.
And it's for that reason - the licensing - that MS will never use a Linux kernel for Windows.
I see the Linux version of Edge as a "how hard is it to port a core Windows application to a *nix platform" proof-of-concept, perhaps as a preamble to a full Office release.
Re: Apple did this already with OSX... (Score:3)
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I see the Linux version of Edge as a "how hard is it to port a core Windows application to a *nix platform" proof-of-concept, perhaps as a preamble to a full Office release.
With Edge being a Chromium-based browser these days, I'm guessing it's not super difficult.
A full Office release wouldn't surprise me though, particularly as Microsoft is betting on recurring revenue via 365.
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And it's for that reason - the licensing - that MS will never use a Linux kernel for Windows.
I suspect this quote won't age well.
In fact, I won't be a bit surprised if this does indeed come to pass.
Trolltech, err..Qt (Score:2)
Of course they will (Score:2)
There are several aspects to it:
1. Windows is not a money-maker anymore, hence there is no reason to invest in it. Simply keeping it running is very expensive, and everybody can see how bad a job MS is doing. Using a kernel maintained by others would fix that.
2. MS never managed to create a good, solid, secure, stable kernel. They just do not have what it takes. Hence the only real long-term fix is to use one created by others.
3. Linux is now generally accepted. They would not lose face by such a move (expe
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Silly (Score:4, Insightful)
This is perhaps one of the most idiotic takes Iâ(TM)ve ever seen on Windows/Linux relations. Microsoft is releasing Edge-based-on-Chromium on Linux simply because its an easy argument to pass during compilation, not because Microsoft wants to move all Windows service and brand attributes to a Linux platform architecture.
Microsoft didnâ(TM)t release the previous version of Edge on Linux because it was built on the failed UWP platform, but Microsoft has been on a stead path to purging that nonsense in favor of classical win32 apps with select UWP features backported, ensuring it will be available to applications that people actually use.
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"not because Microsoft wants to move all Windows service and brand attributes to a Linux platform architecture."
Except they've kinda been doing just that. Not overtly, but they've been standing up more and more Linux boxes, and not just in Azure. There are plenty of Linux teams at MS, and they're busy seeing what they can copy and stuff into Windows.
They saw the writing on the wall very clearly when Linux on Azure quickly overtook Windows on Azure.
wrong on all counts (Score:2)
i would expect such a prominent figure on open source to get some actual insights. the best he can do is give Edge as an argument? Edge was portable to begin with. It's chromium FFS.
no, windows will never die or be a skin over the linux kernel
co-opt: adopt (an idea/policy) for one's own use (Score:2)
Sounds more like Microsoft/Windows co-opting Linux -- embracing and extending, if you will. Can't remember what comes next...
Linux kernel can't replace the Windows kernel... (Score:4, Insightful)
until Linux comes up with a working device driver API.
Somebody who wants to sell a piece of hardware that works with Windows merely has to build a single binary image that will work with all builds of a major Windows version. One driver binary for all builds of Windows 10, for example.
Linux's unstable driver API, kernel-version-dependent symbols and run-time late linking means that the only viable path for a hardware device driver is for it to be adopted/maintained by the kernel team (or a distro maintainer) and built/distributed as part of a kernel release.
Otherwise, the poor guy trying to sell hardware either has to build the driver for every single kernel release/variant, or expect the user to compile the driver on their system. Neither path is viable.
Getting your driver accepted by the kernel team is a chicken/egg problem: The Kernel team is unlikely to bother with it unless your hardware is widely used under Linux, wide use is unlikely without a driver.
Linux will never be a viable desktop operating system until it has a stable device driver API comparable to what Microsoft provides for the Windows kernel.
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No problem, just use WINE to run the driver.
Re:Linux kernel can't replace the Windows kernel.. (Score:5, Insightful)
If your driver is decently written the kernel team will accept it... There are plenty of niche drivers in the kernel that can't be used by more than a tiny handful of people, as well as drivers being added for hardware that is not generally available yet.
Once your driver is in the kernel, the amount of maintenance required is quite low, and your hardware will be supported for a long time on all manner of devices.
Your single binary image for windows has a limited shelf life... There were significant changes moving from xp->vista, significant changes moving from x86 to amd64 and significant changes again now that there's support for arm.
By contrast there are drivers in the linux kernel written in the x86 days which still work on amd64, arm and a bunch of other architectures. I used to use a sun pci ethernet card, intended for use on a sparc, in both x86 and alpha based machines - the official drivers only ever supported solaris. I doubt this was a very widely used configuration, but it worked fine.
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The Kernel team is unlikely to bother with it unless your hardware is widely used under Linux
You base this on what, exactly? It's not based on reality; the Kernel team are happy to accept a driver written according to their guidelines. And if you weren't planning to write it according to their guidelines, how do you expect it to be stable and work well with Linux in the first place?
And then the Kernel team will be maintaining your driver for you, in many cases long after your company has gone defunct and your developers are nowhere to be found.
This is actually what makes Linux such an excellent des
Kernel, yes - X11, no (Score:4, Insightful)
Windows on linux solves problems for Microsoft but their lock-in is backwards compatibility so Windows the API and DE will remain for as long as possible. Even if they leverage Wayland for low level graphics, they have no reason to run an X server.
I mean (Score:2)
Probably not gonna happen, but it's not *that* absurd to think it could happen.
What would 2005 me think?
time tunnel time (Score:2)
Couple of Questions (Score:4, Interesting)
So the first question might be [and I appreciate that I'm asking this of a very different Microsoft]: are there risks to the Linux platform from having the 800lb gorilla want to take a free ride?
The second question is sort-of related to the first. If you're an application developer that uses the Windows platform - you're Oracle, IBM, SAP, Symantec, EMC, HP, Salesforce, Intuit, Autodesk, Adobe, or any of the biggest Windows Game Studios, why would you continue to develop for Windows *at all*?
As recently as 2 or 3 years ago, we might have said that most of the above list with the excepting of gaming might possibly maybe port to Linux, but with Vulcan, there's little to hold game studios back either.
Which means that the biggest single challenge might no longer be a challenge either: 30 years ago Oracle would have said they supported literally hundreds of flavours of Unix... but that problem hasn't so much gone away with Linux as been rendered moot with the advent of containerization as a technology...
In fact, if GNU/Linux came up with a robust, effective containerization model built reasonable tightly with the kernel... then the reasons for *not* going this route might look hard to ignore...
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That was their approach for destroying industry-standard protocols and practices - adopt it, add Microsoft-only "bells and whistles", then quietly break things to trip up "default" users.
The things that was actually attributed to are HTML standards and Java...far from being 'extinguished', both of them underpin much of personal computing in their use on the web and in Android devices respectively.
So the first question might be [and I appreciate that I'm asking this of a very different Microsoft]: are there risks to the Linux platform from having the 800lb gorilla want to take a free ride?
Microsoft have been contributing to the Linux kernel for many years, in fact most contributions to the Linux kernel come from corporate sponsors. The change suggested here is that Microsoft would pivot to tie the success of it's OS directly to the Linux kernel, i.e. if the Linux kernel goes to shit
Drivers (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows, unlike Linux, has a stable API/ABI for third party drivers.
It means that hardware manufacturer can provide a driver that will continue to work as long as the current major Windows version is maintained, often several versions. On Linux, the interfaces change regularly, and if your driver isn't in the mainline, it can stop working at any time. The proper way is to have it in the mainline, fully open source and have someone to maintain it. In the ideal world, it has many advantages: because the kernel with its drivers is open, it will be constantly tested maintained, and better integrated for performance. But in the real world, such a model is not possible for every hardware manufacturer, either because of the efforts involved in integration with the mainline, or GPL licensing conflicts.
To see what happens when consumer hardware manufacturers work with Linux, just look at Android, it is not pretty. First, Android is barely able to run on a mainline kernel, and by that, I mean bare AOSP, OEMs tend to make things much harder. Originally, Android had a fork of Linux conflicting with the mainline, it took many years to find an agreement. Second, at least Google respects the GPL, not all manufacturers do. Having a functional kernel you can compile is more the exception than the norm: either the manufacturer illegally refuses to release the source, or releases something unusable. Third, Android systems are self contained: the manufacturers packages a system with a kernel, driver, apps,... and you have to upgrade everything at once, you are completely dependent from the manufacturer. If you want to go beyond that, not only you need to unlock you bootloader, but good luck getting that proprietary camera module work on your custom ROM.
Should Microsoft stop working on Windows, I am sure their Linux policy will be much more Android-like than what we consider Linux desktops today. If that's the case, I'd rather keep Windows.
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I think I speak for pretty much the entire Linux world when I say "fuck the winmodem model". Hardware makers who can't live with their driver in the kernel need to die as quickly as we can make it happen.
No, they'd go BSD like Apple (Score:3)
Microsoft Switching To a Linux Kernel That Emulates Windows?
No, they'd go BSD like Apple. That preserves the proprietary nature of all the other layers.
RIght idea, wrong direction (Score:4, Interesting)
Linux finally wins the desktop wars, not by displacing Windows but by co-opting it
He means, by being co-opted.
Remember, the Microsoft mantra is, "Embrace, extend, extinguish," and there's little reason to believe that has disappeared all of a sudden.
No. That was easy. (Score:3)
I have no idea where this idea keeps coming up, except to make the case for "Linux Desktop" via semantics. People were speculating this would happen 10 years ago.
Yes, Microsoft is doing OS work related to Windows, but no, it is not to replace the kernel with Linux. For one, treating Linux as a subsystem (not in the NT sense, really, but err, close enough) for software development works fine.
And Linux has fundamental issues for many use cases. Graphics, audio and other kinds of media interactivity are super problematic. There's tons of legacy built in to support X (yes, even GDI is better than X in many ways), the driver support is 100% YMMV because stable kernel ABIs = bad and all in all, the architecture is a bit of mess. And audio, forget it. A complete and utter nightmare. ASIO is very usable in Windows and macOS support is excellent.
The scheduler is just completely oriented around server use cases, because, of course it is. But that does affect response and feel. There are some other issues, but mainly, interactive desktop use cases are just not important. There's a reason Fuchsia exists at Google and why macOS is very much it's own thing as well. You just optimize for different things.
I doubt anybody made it this far and some may just think I'm a MS shill. But, Linux has it's space and it is big. You need to manage a complex software defined network and get stuff on the wire fast. Linux. General disk IO? Done. Lightweight, minimal OS overhead. Done. And so on. What Microsoft is doing is using Linux where it makes sense and Windows where it makes sense. There's no need to shoehorn all the changes needed into Linux to get it to do desktop stuff. The demand just isn't there and the cost to other use cases might be too high.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
you must have a brain so slow you never noticed Linux is incapable of UI-friendly latency levels.
Is this really what the internet has become? All you have to do is state an obvious lie while insulting someone and then smugly walk away?
Re: (Score:2)
So what is MacOS - or whatever they call it - based on?
Re: (Score:2)
Darwin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: (Score:3)
How lovely would it be if it were run under systemd??? :-D
I'm thinking: defenestrationd
Re: (Score:2)
"Plenty of synergies there"
Okay, who let the MBA in here?
Re: (Score:3)
One of my macs is a 10-year old machine.[...] it runs the current os perfectly fine.
Except the most recent version of macOS doesn't support anything more than ~8 years old.