I’m really confused what this meme is trying to say.
Yeah I think the clown is supposed to represent Windows Executives changing their tone about Linux over time, but I’m not certain. If anything, accepting that you were wrong is a sign of strength in my opinion.
But are they really accepting they are wrong?
If they still think linux is ideologically opposed to them then they should probably stop funding and promoting its use, but honestly there probably isn’t a consensus at Microsoft.
“Micro$oft bad”
Who cares as long as it says “Microsoft bad”
I can’t be the only one, so WSL = Windows subsystem for Linux.
which, confusingly enough, is a linux subsystem under windows. The name sounds like the opposite.
Really just an English problem. Read it as it is a subsystem by Windows for Linux.
But yeah, LSW would’ve been more clear. Plus, it’s almost LSD.
Linux Subsystem for DOS
Getting DOS within Linux would be pretty interesting to play with and may get my dad a step closer to abandon windows.
There is DOSBox but idk how well that works
LSD?
Yea
I think it makes more sense to read that it’s a “Windows Subsystem for (running) Linux (applications/programs)”.
Maybe it’s some marketing thing? Like their feature MUST start with Windows™ regardless of getting confusing as hell, it may also help not techie people who make decisions and want to still use a Windows™ solution suggested by a techie
It should be Windows’s Subsystem for Linux.
A better acronym might be Windows’ Linux Subsystem.
WSL 1 is a compatibility layer that lets Linux programs run on the Windows kernel by translating Linux system calls to Windows system calls, so in that sense I understand the name: it’s a Windows subsystem for Linux [compatibility]. It doesn’t use the Linux kernel at all. With WSL 2 they’re using a real Linux kernel in a virtual machine, so there the name doesn’t make much sense anymore.
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Isn’t it just Hyper-V with extra steps?
WSL2 is, but WSL1 implemented the Linux kernel API in NT, so ran things directly.
I’m a little concerned Microsoft will make a linux distro and introduce proprietary components into it that will drive users of other distros to it because “why use any other distro when the M$ distro can run my games/microsoft office/whatever?”. Because that’s how they’ll kill linux: a bunch of proprietary kernel modules with which only Windows software can run.
We should have multiple linux mega-corps before that happens, otherwise we’re fucked.
They’d probably just buy canonical in this scenario.
Canonical would have to accept. Given their move towards proprietary code, that wouldn’t surprise me in the least, honestly.
Is the public license meant to be the copyright licensing for your comments? Attribute - Non-commercial - Share Alike
Is it meant for crawlers, AI database creators and the like?
Are your comments automatically appended with the link? Or are you mainly copy-pasting it?
And how does it mesh with the TOS of the lemmy instance you’re on?
I remember that Reddit has royalty free rights over all comments n posts made on the site, which allow them to do anything they want.Is the public license meant to be the copyright licensing for your comments?
Yes
Is it meant for crawlers, AI database creators and the like?
Precisely those
Are your comments automatically appended with the link? Or are you mainly copy-pasting it?
A keyboard shortcut
And how does it mesh with the TOS of the lemmy instance you’re on?
I don’t know. That’s for the crawlers, AI database creators, etc. to figure out. If they’re non-commercial, then there shouldn’t be a problem either way. For commercial uses, I hope it makes it impossible, but I’m not a lawyer, so I’ll just tack on the license and hope it might have an effect 🤷 Takes but a keyboard shortcut (an sometimes time to explain it).
Anti Commercial AI thingy
That’s cool.
How would that affect any of us? Linus Torvalds would still be the lead kernel maintainer, all the other FOSS distros would still exist, and all the people that currently use Linux (out of conviction, out of idealism, out of the FOSS/GNU philosophy) would stick with them, meaning de facto no change whatsoever.
Not everybody uses linux out of conviction, idealism, or principle. Many use it either by chance or convenience. The purists are probably not the majority of linux users.
There are people who already won’t switch to linux because windows has WSL. Gaming has held back many people from switching too, although that’s becoming less of a problem. However, if there were no reason to switch to other distros, and an M$ distro were to become the most used distro…
Do you know what M$ did when they had the largest market share for browsers? Do you know what Google is currently doing with their marketshare on the browser market?
Windows has a pitiful representation on the server side, but if that changed to an M$ distro with proprietary linux modules in order to make certain software work (or something more insidious that I can’t think of), it would change the server landscape too. And suddenly, you can’t write stuff for the most popular servers without installing M$ kernel modules or software.
The linux zealots are not the majority. Zealots never are.
A few things come to mind here.
- MS tried to ship a renegade JDK with proprietary features, back in the 90’s. That didn’t go very well for them, as they drew the ire of Sun Microsystems which was a decently sized player at the time. It was a clear licensing issue, and they lost the case. Point being: they’re historically not great at this kind of thing.
- The GPL is designed to thwart this scenario, specifically for things like paid software (e.g. Windows). MS would have to move to a “free Windows software, paid service” model before any of this could happen. But the service must be optional, and they’d have to provide the source to anyone that wants it. That said, they’re on track to make Windows free (as in beer), so who knows?
- Nvidia gets to ship binary Linux drivers, so closed-source binary packages for MS proprietary components on top of Linux might be possible. But again, I don’t think they get to charge for that.
- WRT to drivers/packages, RedHat famously charges for access to their package repository, making automated patching and upgrading a nightmare if you go without. This is one hell of a GPL loophole and worthy of far more corporate exploitation. I can easily see MS following this path.
- “The net treats censorship as a defect and routes around it.” - John Gilmore - (Many) People will just fork away or happily sit somewhere else in the GNU family tree, far from anything MS builds. If the need arises, compatibility layers like WINE will show up eventually.
The chances of seeing an M$ Winix or something in the next decade are pretty slim, IMO, but to me it’s the worst case scenario / beginning of the end. I’m crossing my fingers that windows 12 is shitty, but not too shitty.
I can only hope you’re right.
thats EEE and we are all afraid of that
It’s called Linspire, what you’ve described happened 20 years ago. It was not the cataclysmic event you described it as. TBH I’m not that concerned about a company who charges $400+ for an OS that still shows advertisements and loses support after 5 years when I could go out and get an OS with no ads or bloat for free that will never lose support.
Looking up Linspire, that was not Microsoft, but a separate company. That means they didn’t have the windows kernel source code, nor the windows userbase. If M$ made a distro within which nigh any windows software worked (Photoshop, Visual Studio, Microsoft Office, …, games), it were presented as a frictionless upgrade (“Upgrade to Windows LT!”), and suddenly 1-2 billion people were on it, what would happen to linux?
I’m not sure things would be that rosy.
Linspire is what Windows named the company who made Lindows after acquiring them as a way of settling ongoing litigations against them. It was a Linux Distro that was built on the concept of running everything that Windows could. Windows was always a parent company to Linspire.
2 Billion People won’t use a Microsoft distribution of Linux unless they can control their greed long enough to make it worth using, which is unlikely.
EDIT: I’m getting all my nouns mixed up lol
Microsoft sought a retrial and after this was postponed in February 2004,[9] offered to settle the case. As part of the licensing settlement, Microsoft paid an estimated $20 million, and Lindows, Inc. transferred the Lindows trademark to Microsoft and changed its name to Linspire, Inc.
The company was thus never owned by M$. So there never was M$ proprietary code in Linspire.
2 Billion People won’t use a Microsoft distribution of Linux unless they can control their greed long enough to make it worth using, which is unlikely.
It’s the power of default. If it comes by default on hardware, people will unknowingly use it. And if the upgrade path is smooth and unnoticeable, people will upgrade too.
I’m not sure whether Windows is their cash cow anymore. I’d assume Office 365 (or whatever it’s called now) along with Azure make up the majority of their income. Window is probably just the gateway to their garden. But, change is hard and most likely M$ won’t pull an Edge --> Chromium with their OS any time soon - and I sure hope they don’t.
Microsoft hasn’t changed all that much. They don’t see Linux as an OS to run games or MS Office with. It’s not a consumer platform and never will be, it’s more of a server/container maaybe workstation system for a tech-savvy/developer/scientist. Its UI is meant to open terminals and text editors, not movie players or game launchers. Microsoft loves Linux until it leaves the business area and try to sneak into consumer market. There’s nothing stopping them from doing harm to desktop Linux with all their „love” to Linux the modern mainframe system that happens to be industry standard. They can still patent things and do legality tricks (like in HDMI forums), try to put Windows on devices where Linux could be competition (one Linux handheld console = 10 more new Windows handhelds), bind consumers with something only Windows can run (Xbox Gamepass?) etc
The MS distro you’re talking about already exists - it is called Azure Linux (recently renamed from CBL-Mariner).
You might be right. I sure hope you are. Having M$ take over desktops with “Azure Linux” (or whatever they might decide to call the desktop version) and then servers would suck.
I doubt this, they have been sticking to Windows
And things never change, do they? IE is still the main M$ brow- oh wait
Anti Commercial AI thingy
People who believe Linux is communism really are clowns lol
No one considers Linux to be communism
It was MS propaganda to tarnish the reputation of linuxCan’t imagine why people would call freely distributing a means of production some commie thing
That’s just good patriotism, ensuring everyone, no matter their means, has access to a vital resource for modern life
I like that this exists. Wsl is good.
Ew, virtual machine with a power loss
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Dude, im not native speaker, so i dont clearly understand. I mean, virtual machine that cannot perform just like a real hardware you use is a generally bad idea. Like, i have an 8 core ryzen and its still laggy in basics when i use android emulator or try to run anything demanding in wsl. Its just not good
I mean, I like WSL for what it is. Having suffered through the limitations of MinGW32 and Cygwin, I appreciate that the WSL simply “just works.” But I’m also not kidding myself, as one could get the same experience from VirtualBox and a little more elbow-grease. I also like how the WSL automatically exposes a host-only SMB mount, making the Linux filesystem a lot more accessible from the very start.
What I don’t appreciate is that the WSL places the Linux firewall outside the Windows firewall. Locking that thing down can be daunting for a novice, if it’s ever done at all. Considering that the main use-case for this is development, that means there can be a lot of WSL setups out there with exposed and vulnerable web services on 'em.
EMBRACE
EEE only works if you can corner the market for the technology. I almost guarantee you nobody is dropping Linux in favor of WSL.
“Almost”
Guarantee is not actual guarantee. Void in all lower 48 states , Alaska, Hawaii and worldwide. Guarantee cannot be combined with other offers warranting that product exists.
Not really. MS and others have grown dependent on it, and going forward with eee would be shooting their own web service foot.
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Of Windows, right?
Sudo
Pretty sure this should be in reverse? And can you really say you’re into Linux if you don’t even know what the fuck WSL is?
It makes sense from MS’s perspective. They started not liking Linux, and now have integrated it in their OS with WSL, thusly becoming a full clown for the great hypocrisy compared to their original dislike of Linux.
I think there’s probably some linux users that have never heard of WSL
raises hand
I live in Linux; what I do not know is Windows. Don’t have any, and haven’t had to touch it in over a decade. Should I know WSL if I expect to never have to use Windows for the rest of my life?
nope. it’s just a fancy word for a linux VM running on windows with special integrations like full file system access etc.
it’s mainly used by developers who need to use windows for work but want a linux filesystem and command line for development. integrates well eith VSCode.
Ah. So equally irrelevant for Mac folks?
15 years ago, it was hard to be a developer and avoid some contact with Windows (unless you were senior enough to have some pull), especially in the East Coast, where all high tech lags by about 5 years. Now days, the assumption that everyone must have to have some Windows interaction is more of an ass-U-me.
There’s exactly one Windows machine in my life right now, and it’s my wife’s work computer. I only have to touch it when it’s fucking something basic up, like audio, and I couldn’t install something like WSL on it in any case.
I think WSL was Microsofts way of trying to get developers to keep using Windows.
Windows is linux
That’s a funny way to spell DOS
That’s a funny way to spell NT
That’s a funny way to spell.
That’s funny.
.
Fun
F
Windows is based on VMS which was based on RSX-11. Rsx-11 was the OS that Unix was written on.
So a truly traditionally authentic Linux kernel should be compiled under Windows.
No no, I wrote it as an expansion for WSL (Window’S Linux)
I realize you’re trying to be funny, but just in case you don’t know the actual history:
The Windows NT kernel was architected by Dave Cutler, who had previously designed the VMS and RSX-11M kernels. (RSX-11 is actually a family of PDP-11 operating systems; the “M” stood for “multitasking.”) No code was ever shared between the three.
The Unix implementation team started out on a PDP-7, which was a much smaller computer than a PDP-11. Its first code was cross-compiled from a GE 635 mainframe left over at AT&T from the Multics project, which (if it ran anything) would have only had GECOS available. They did eventually graduate to a PDP-11/45, but to do this they used their PDP-7 system to cross-compile. Unix was ported to the PDP-11 in 1970, two years before the first RSX-11 release from DEC (which wasn’t even Cutler’s RSX-11M; that was 1974).
The appropriate precursor to Linux would be Minix, a much later Unix-like system, which Torvalds was trying to clone. At the time, Microsoft did have its hands in the x86 'nix pie, however; Xenix was popular in business.
A minor correction:
No code was ever shared between the three.
I remember the lawsuit threats back in the 90’s. Here’s an article from 1996:
“Last year, somone from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology apparently found whole chunks of Mica comment for comment, note for note still there in Windows NT.”
https://techmonitor.ai/technology/dec_forced_microsoft_into_alliance_with_legal_threat
Right; Mica wasn’t VMS as far as I know, but rather a generic kernel that would have hosted VMS as a client API, a little like how NT hosts Win32 and POSIX (and not OS/2), or how IBM’s Workplace OS was going to host OS/2, AIX, and Mac OS as “personalities.” It’s not likely that any VMS-specific code would have been salvaged from Mica for use in NT, but rather the nucleus of a portable API-agnostic kernel, in which case any architectural resemblance to VMS has more to do with Cutler’s sensibilities and less to do with code re-use.
microsoft has never really been anti linux though… some executives might have been but not the company as a whole.
and wsl is one of the best things they’ve done. windows 10+ is an even better development machine (basically what os x was in the snow leopard days)
dude … ‘happy’ there’s wsl and visual studio code right now, but you should’ve been here 20 years ago
better development machine
By developing on a GNU/Linux VM instead? fuck MS for not finding a suitable solution for developing on their OS for years and shoving an entire another OS inside instead
