Windows: What is my purpose?
User: You are a bootloader to install Linux.
Oh my god
“An expensive bootloader at that, but hey you already paid us when you bought your laptop thanks to our decades-old grip on the market, so we could not care less what you do next”
AHEM powershell activation scripts AHEM
Grub
Oh my Bill
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In exchange, FF uses Google search by default. So they’re also getting direct value from the deal.
Maybe their Linux distro will use bing.
And they’ll bake in ads to the desktop.
Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux Distros, already did that.
Or are we just hating on Windows?
I love when people on the Internet say “X did Y quietly” to make it more suspenseful. This doesn’t look quiet to me…
What does “quietly” even mean? Didn’t take out ads in Times Square?
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Not bad, just ironic
I have one dream for Linux. I’m a huge OSS fan and I want to see it thrive.
I think Microsoft should partner with Oracle to make Oracle Linux 9 support all the Microsoft ecosystem. I want AD in Linux. I want Microsoft Word on Linux. Oracle Linux 9 is the obvious successor to RHEL and Microsoft has an opportunity here to build something great.
Lmao just kidding
I was about 90% reading this going wtf is this guy on?
You got me, I had my torch and pitchfork ready and my FOSS-themed chanting was growing louder…
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No, you don’t. You can just be unverified forever
You can use a Microsoft-approved crack
Today Gates openly concedes that tolerating piracy turned out to be Microsoft’s best long-term strategy. That’s why Windows is used on an estimated 90% of China’s 120 million PCs. “It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not,” Gates says.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/blog/2007/jul/18/winningthrough
Pretty sure that was recently patched, as in last week, though it was open for years. Im sure something will take its place
It has started working again. https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts#note-hwid-activation-is-working-again-with-a-new-method
lmaoooo let’s goooooo
Or they’ll just make it work again
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.
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
My perspective is that it’s there so it shows up on search results for “installing Linux” and recommends WSL over bare metal. At least that’s how I understand the wording.
But who knows.
Microsoft must make 40% of their revenue off of Azure at this point. I would not be surprised if more than 50% of that is on Linux. Windows is probably down to 10% ( around the same as gaming ).
https://www.kamilfranek.com/microsoft-revenue-breakdown/
Sure there are people in the Windows division who want to kill Linux and some dev dev folks will still prefer Windows. At this point though, a huge chunk of Microsoft could not care less about Windows and may actually prefer Linux. Linux is certainly a better place for K8S and OCI stuff. All the GPT and Cognitive Services stuff is likely more Linux than not.
Do people not know that Microsoft has their own Linux distro? I mean an installation guide is not exactly their biggest move in Linux?
Do people not know that Microsoft has their own Linux distro?
MS has been at Linux expos since 2004! They started working on SUSE in friggin 2006! I truly don’t get the amount of bile and ignorance the Lemmy community has towards them, it’s like half these folks are still on 2001-era slashdot, talking about FUD and Micro$oft.
Yeah, Microsoft has been a shit company making mediocre products its whole lifetime, but the amount of unhinged hatred here does not in any way match the present-day company’s actions.
Microsoft contributes to Linux and other open source projects in many ways, including financially. The cynical among us believe it’s for the same reason Google contributes to Mozilla. Legally it’s harder to prove you’re an evil monopoly if you financially support your competition. Microsoft’s involvement in Linux only became noteworthy after their 2001 Antitrust suit.
The hatred literally stems purely from Windows 10 and 11.
They are products engineered so expertly to frustrate you in such a distasteful way it’s downright offensive to anyone who has used any other operating system. It’s genuinely a marvel of human engineering.
I got radicalized by Slashdot. But I don’t regret it.
Great source, but it also shows they make 23% off office. Together with Windows, that’s over 30% of their revenue.
Office doesn’t work on Linux, so it really doesn’t make financial sense to push Linux
Also, if you spend any amount of time around the Linux Kernel Mailing List, there’s no shortage of microsoft.com email addresses involved and contributing here and there.
So the Embrace-Extend-Extinguish continues…
Where I’m from, Triple E is something spread by mosquitoes… something about it just attracts blood suckers I guess
Linux is omnipresent in serverspace, while Windows Server is used for AD and nothing else. I would say that the usual aproach is moot here.
More like:
1 - embrace it in the cloud 2 - profit madly 3 - extend 4 - profit more
It makes me chuckle that people think Microsoft actually wants to extinguish Linux. I mean, the Windows division sees it as a competitor to be vanquished I guess. Over at Azure though, it is the golden goose.
Wouldn’t it happen by now considering how much MSFT/corporate influence Linux already has?
How many years will you people keep parroting this? Show me the extinguish part already…
Thank you.
Ways Lemmy is already feeling like modern reddit: Instead of link to an article, we get screenshot of a post with a screenshot of the article.
To be fair, WSL2 is actually a pretty decent system if you still need to have Windows installed for one reason or another.
It has completely changed my workflow on my work computer and kept me from going insane since my company only allows windows. Having the separate VM I can still use all native Linux tooling and docker-ce is great.
True, for some uses.
If you only need command line use, it’s fine. I personally strongly prefer the environment in, say, Linux distribution running Plasma, but if you are fine with Windows applications, then fine.
If you need GUI Linux… WSLG can kind of sort of get you there, but it sucks. So if you live with any Linux GUI application for significant periods of time, then you’ll want to strangle WSLg and it’s weird behaviors. VcXsrv can help on this front.
If you are like me and find dnf+flathub an appealing strategy for installation and update of software, you like Plasma desktop management, then Linux ‘for real’ is the way to go.
I mean, if you need an all-up system and you’re stuck on windows… virtualbox still works great afaik. You’ll probably need to fiddle with settings to get stuff like PCIe passthrough working for GPGPU workloads, but afaik it’s quite doable. Sure, there’s a bit of slowdown, but if IT straight up doesn’t let you use another OS on the bare metal… that’s probably the best you’re gonna be able to do.
Or, if you’re sick of the perf hit you get running docker crap on non-linux hosts, you can pick up a used SFF/USFF box from eBay and set that up as a remote docker host for executing stuff there. You might also have to set up your “offload box” to tunnel through your work machine if your projects are hitting internally hosted repos and resources, but you can get it to work if you fool around with it enough.
This is consistent with the “Linux is for backend services and command line” mentality. For me those are nice and important, but I prefer the Linux desktop experience, so those options are of no solace. The VM is ultimately constrained on what it can do UI wise.
I flip the relationship the other way around. Linux on bare metal, Windows in a VM. For people needing windows games, this would be a non starter, however I’ve got enough games between Linux native, emulators, and proton with steam. Windows as a separate box would be my strategy if needed.
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.
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.
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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.
Doubt it
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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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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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.
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.
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.
I mean, why not do that, from their perspective. Linux has been around for a long time and Windows still maintains market share. They don’t feel threatened at this point, so might as well have the explanation of how to install Linux be a subtle ad for Windows.
honestly it’s a great ad for windows. i’ve been running debian exclusively for years, and even when i got my new laptop last year, i found dualbooting to be too difficult to set up, so i ended up getting an OEM restore stick from lenovo, then just nuking everything and installing ubuntu (back on debian now). if their guide is useful, i will instal windows and finally be able to play MTG Arena again (and a thousand other games)
Magic: The Gathering Arena? That has a platinum rating on proton DB so should work just fine on any modern Linux distro, like thousands of other games. No need for a dual boot unless you have one of a few problematic games.
is there a tutorial for getting it running?
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 are the problem
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.
Doubt it
