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Microsoft Open Source Tool Lets You 'Bring Your Own Linux' To Windows (microsoft.com)
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.
What next?
TempleOS anyone? /ducks
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.
Tux is on the menu at microsoft!
Eh... I'll wait for the Linux port. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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.
Have they fixed permissions mapping when accessing files on the Windows partition yet? If so, I'm excited for the update, because it's an issue I deal with daily.
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.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
That is what Microsoft said. Looks like the cancer has metastasized and spread to the brain!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Write an open source tool to detect dupes.
If I had to ( and I did for work ) I'd run Wndoze in a vm on linux ( I used VirtualBox ), but never the other way round.
You live and learn, or you don't learn much.
Why would one want to do that? No, seriously.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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.
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.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
https://github.com/RoliSoft/WS...
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...
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
...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.
Perhaps MS could sell me a nice proprietary version of Wine.
"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/...
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.
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".
> 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.
That package might be called "wine" or "VirtualBox" in yoir distro~~
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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, complex network filtering,
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.
---
(*): NT Kernel has this weird multiple personality disorder, were it can expose entirely different APIs.
That used to be used by Microsoft to enable support for OS/2 applications, back in th early days.
Recently, Microsoft had hoped to miraculously keep Windows 10 Mobile relevant on the smartphone market by tapping into the big Android system by making it able to run apps. That proved too complex and failed miserably. WSL is what they managed to salvage out of the failure, and to repurpose as a dev's testing tool to run ELFs.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Did you mean "Nobody should be deprived of the games Windows plays"?
Those are good points. The poor support for X is annoying.
I won't run on my computer and I don't fucking care. I like Windows 7.
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 already had it, but users were reluctant to upgrade due to the tablet focus.
Here are some revenue numbers quoting directly from Microsoft's audited annual report:
--- ...
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)
---
Office 365 up 41%, Windows down 5â.... Those are the numbers.
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?
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 the other hand, you build your network using standard network protocols, you can easily have Windows, Mac, Linux, Cisco, and Android devices, all talking to each other.
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 a rather complex binary interface to declare that a Word document should have a certain picture or sound embedded in it. Microsoft execs had a heart attack when their billion-dollar effort was replaced by "IMG src".
Anyway, back to MAPI, the protocol used by Outlook, Exchange, and other Microsoft products. MAPI is COM over RPC. RPC is another Microsoft invention-by-committee. Basically imagine Lennart Poettering got super drunk with Weird Al Yankovich and they re-invented SOAP together, with a bit of REST thrown in for metadata, but decided it should all be binary - no readable text allowed. That's Microsoft RPC.
Nobody else but Microsoft uses MAPI, which is, shall we say "not astonishing".
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 sell to Windows-based organizations. Windows itself isn't the money-maker, that's just the (nearly free) client used to access their expensive server and networking products.
Okay so now for the next wave, a windows version that runs in Ubuntu. _That_ would be nice.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Before too long they'll be convincing you that you don't ever NEED to 'install' Linux standalone. Once they accomplish that, Microsoft hegemony will be complete; they will OWN everything.