Microsoft Works To Port Ubuntu To Windows ARM (neowin.net)

Billly Gates shares a report: It was this time last year that Microsoft announced that it was bringing Ubuntu to the Windows Store (now the Microsoft Store), along with other Linux distributions. If you check out the app in the Store now though, you'll find that it only works on x64 devices, meaning that you can't run it on any of the new Windows 10 on ARM PCs. That's all about to change though. In a session at Microsoft's Build 2018 developer conference today called Windows 10 on ARM for Developers, the company showed off Ubuntu running on an ARM PC, with the app coming from the Microsoft Store. It will finally support ARM64 PCs, although x86 devices are still out of luck.

Comments

It's *not* Linux!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not "running Linux" by definition, because Linux is only a kernel and it is completely absent. Instead, MS is providing an emulation of the Linux syscall interface enabling unaltered Linux applications to run.

(That said, this will probably prove to be the simplest way of running "Linux" on an ARM laptop, thanks to the joys of ARM SoC vendors not providing sane drivers..)

Re: It's *not* Linux!

[DickBreath]

It only looks, smells and tastes like Linux until you find that your app doesn't run on Linux in production because you did your development on "Linux" on Windows.

Microsoft has an incentive to make this happen in the future so that people in crisis mode will throw up their hands and just switch to Microsoft-Linux, and then maybe get rid of Linux altogether.

Microsoft tried to do the same with Java. Introduce sweet addictive delicious Microsoft-only APIs into Java, hoping lazy developers wouldn't notice that these APIs are only on Microsoft's Java. This was in directly violation of the black-letter language of the written contract. Sun sued. Won $1.2 Billion. Microsoft abandoned Java and created .NET because the Java story was just too compelling. Here we are today where Java popularity (on various sites like TIOBE) exceeds .NET popularity.

Too bad nobody will ensure the "purity" of Linux. And who says Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is dead?

Re: It's *not* Linux!

[Tenebrousedge]

Nobody will ensure the "purity" of Linux, because that's what the GPL does. I'm not sure what specific FUD you're trying to imply with the EEE remarks, but the evidence for chicanery is pretty weak, and you're sort of pointing out that they aren't that effective at it.

And not to defend Microsoft, but .NET is better than Java in most respects, and Java's popularity has been propped up by Android. I'm not sure where .NET is headed, but Kotlin is likely to start cutting into Java on mobile in a big way.