Microsoft to ship full Linux kernel within Windows 10

[Drak3]

Just now, HarryNyquist said:

It's going to be open source, so I don't see the issue

Being open source doesn’t factor into EEE fear mongering.

[JensEckervogt]

Really? Wow is Win32 Api died? Are you sure? Can we make  farewell to Win32 Api

Yeah I am proud to Microsoft because Win32 Api is really sick and negative. 

 

That is why Windows 10 should use X11/Xlib with XT and XM right

That is why I release apps only native Linux binary for native linux. Thank you,  richest man Bill Gates!

 

Why do you not listen me since we wait for Visual Studio on Linux ( native executable for Linux ) ? I don't care bad Win32 Api.

[LAwLz]

42 minutes ago, HarryNyquist said:

It's going to be open source, so I don't see the issue.

It's entirely possible to do EEE even though something is open source.

 

40 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

Being open source doesn’t factor into EEE fear mongering. 

That's because open source doesn't offer any protection from EEE. And don't call it "fear mongering" when it has happened over, and over in history. Hell it's still happening these days. If you want a real world example of this look no further than Google and web standards.

 

KHTML, the browser engine developed by the KDE project, was and still is open source and forked over to WebKit by Apple, which kept it open source.

WebKit was then forked to Blink by Google, and it is open source.

 

It's open source all the way through. Yet here we are, with Google creating their own web standards and protocols which can negatively impact other browsers.

 

I am sure even folks over at Microsoft would agree that what Google is doing with the web is a form of EEE, despite all of it being open source.

 

 

 

 

42 minutes ago, HarryNyquist said:

I assume the customization they're talking about will be for things like hardware acceleration & audio, which can't be done most efficiently through virtualization. In customizing the kernel they can provide direct access to hardware instead of routing it through HyperV. 

I don't see why they would need to do a custom Kernel for that to work though. That should be handled through Kernel modules. But maybe that is what they mean by "custom Kernel". I guess it remains to be seen. I am skeptical though.

 

 

24 minutes ago, JensEckervogt said:

Really? Wow is Win32 Api died? Are you sure? Can we make  farewell to Win32 Api

Yeah I am proud to Microsoft because Win32 Api is really sick and negative.  

 

That is why Windows 10 should use X11/Xlib with XT and XM right

That is why I release apps only native Linux binary for native linux. Thank you,  richest man Bill Gates!

 

Why do you not listen me since we wait for Visual Studio on Linux ( native executable for Linux ) ? I don't care bad Win32 Api.

WinAPI is alive and well, and will most likely be the primary tool for a majority of Windows developers for years to come. Microsoft are still introducing new features to it.

[Drak3]

2 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

And don't call it "fear mongering" when it has happened over, and over in history. 

What you describe, is fear mongering. Companies adopt a standard, and if they can improve it for their product, they do. If they come up with a better alternative down the road, they use it.

 

If the creator of a standard can't compete after that, oh well.

 

This happens in the tool and automotive industry all the time. The only thing that makes software different is that not many companies make compelling products.

[LAwLz]

11 minutes ago, Drak3 said:

What you describe, is fear mongering. Companies adopt a standard, and if they can improve it for their product, they do. If they come up with a better alternative down the road, they use it. 

 

If the creator of a standard can't compete after that, oh well.

 

This happens in the tool and automotive industry all the time. The only thing that makes software different is that not many companies make compelling products.

You're assuming that they actually make changes (extensions) to improve their product. However, several times in the past it has been the case where changes were done for the sole purpose of making things more difficult for competitors.

 

I am all for competition, but EEE has in the past been more about making competing solutions worse rather than improving one's own product. When that happens, it's bad.

 

And you also have to think of interoperability, which is a very valuable asset. Even if for example J/Direct (one of Microsoft's attempts at EEE) had offered some benefit over JNI, the pros of that approach (I don't think there were any) should have been weighted against the drawback (it ruined cross compatibility, which was the entire point of Java).

 

And if you try to argue that Microsoft just tried to improve Java, please keep in mind that J++ (Microsoft's now discontinued version of Java for Windows) actually had fewer features than the one offered by Sun.

Microsoft went "oh you want to use that feature? Sorry but that doesn't work on Windows" and as a result, programs which ran on things like GNU/Linux and MacOS would not work on Windows. And because of that people stopped using those functions even though they were useful.

[bcredeur97]

they said Windows 10 is the last "windows"

maybe that meant the next one will be linux based?

[Arika]

7 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

You're assuming that they actually make changes (extensions) to improve their product. However, several times in the past it has been the case where changes were done for the sole purpose of making things more difficult for competitors.

 

I am all for competition, but EEE has in the past been more about making competing solutions worse rather than improving one's own product. When that happens, it's bad.

 

And you also have to think of interoperability, which is a very valuable asset. Even if for example J/Direct (one of Microsoft's attempts at EEE) had offered some benefit over JNI, the pros of that approach (I don't think there were any) should have been weighted against the drawback (it ruined cross compatibility, which was the entire point of Java).

Do you honestly think that "EEE" is capable of taking down Linux?

[Sauron]

7 hours ago, Nowak said:

Thoughts?

If we've come to the point of packaging an entire Linux distribution inside Windows, why the hell are we still using Windows?

5 hours ago, Nowak said:

Yeah. It actually is possible to run graphical Linux software on Windows via an X server and a few bash commands, but there's no audio support and I don't believe there's hardware acceleration. I wonder if this'll add those missing features.

That would just be a virtual machine...

5 hours ago, Tedny said:

Interesting, if Microsoft will update kernel faster than arc Linux, it really alternative to all other destros

Arch gets new kernels within a couple of days from the upstream release, even Microsoft needs a few hours to build it, test it and ship it... also on a real Linux distro you can run RC kernels if you really want a new feature right now.

6 hours ago, laminutederire said:

Mostly machine learning people who need linux because of unfit support of windows for most things they need

...they can just use Linux... WSL is far from a seamless experience, it's a crutch at best and I doubt this will change that.

[Bouzoo]

Just now, Sauron said:

If we've come to the point of packaging an entire Linux distribution inside Windows, why the hell are we still using Windows?

Options and simplicity.

[Sauron]

Just now, Bouzoo said:

Options and simplicity.

WSL is the exact opposite of simplicity. It's complexity for complexity's sake.

[Bouzoo]

8 minutes ago, Sauron said:

WSL is the exact opposite of simplicity. It's complexity for complexity's sake.

You said windows though, not WSL. But since you mention that, obviously convenience for some people. Not sure which poeple but some people. 

[LAwLz]

36 minutes ago, Arika S said:

Do you honestly think that "EEE" is capable of taking down Linux?

Depends on what you mean by "taking down Linux".

I don't think Microsoft are capable of taking down Linux entirely, but I guess the same could have been said about Google taking over web standards ~10 years ago...

Ubuntu's chief recently said that he had been surprised by a fairly recent surge in support contracts from corporations. I think that's because a lot of things has moved to the cloud, and on there it's mostly Linux severs. It makes sense to develop on the same platform you develop for, so running Ubuntu on the developer computers seems logical and reasonable.

 

I am pretty sure that's why Microsoft are doing this. They can't (and don't want to) stop the progression of cloud services (Azure is a massive cash cow for them). But that means that more and more developers will want to run GNU/Linux on their dev machines. So Microsoft are investing a lot of time and money into things like the Linux subsystem.

 

However, I can't help shake the feeling that Microsoft would love to lock people into Azure over AWS or Google Cloud if they could. Extending the way Linux on Windows works, and integrating that into Azure functions could be a way to make cross platform development between Azure and AWS more difficult.

That would not really "kill Linux", but it would create more friction for if someone decides that Azure is too expensive and would like to switch to Google or Amazon for example.

Right now Azure is not the dominant player so Microsoft has to be humble and careful, but I doubt they would act this way if they had for example 70% market share (which they might in the future).

[Sauron]

3 minutes ago, Tedny said:

yes, if Microsoft makes it app in the store and will push same day, Windows 10 will become supremer to Arch Linux 

That's... not how it works... how new the kernel is isn't the only thing that makes a distro good...

[Doobeedoo]

Oh interesting move, cool though. I really wonder about future of Win and Linux relation. Especially for desktop consumer maintenance space. 

I wonder how MS may change kernel over time, they can still further improve memory management. 

[Commodus]

1 hour ago, bcredeur97 said:

they said Windows 10 is the last "windows"

maybe that meant the next one will be linux based?

Nah, they just meant that it'd be the last monolithic Windows update, and that you'd see constant iterative updates from now on.  There's zero incentive to re-do Windows around Linux!  It'd break compatibility without much benefit.

[Hellion]

Microshaft has been slowly slithering it's way into the open source community for years now. They bought their way onto the linux board and have since been throwing money at other directives along the way, slowly spreading like cancer in what those with any foresight can only assume is to eventually gain so much control that they push out those that currently have influence. They have already canned their internal testing team forcing users to be their guinea pigs. How long until they attempt to have the open source community do the work of former employees free of charge to fix their ineptitude?

[Ithanul]

 

6 hours ago, Nowak said:

Yeah. It actually is possible to run graphical Linux software on Windows via an X server and a few bash commands, but there's no audio support and I don't believe there's hardware acceleration. I wonder if this'll add those missing features.

I seen some folks wonder about that.  Be super nice if this update can improve upon that.

[Lagercat1]

8 hours ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

Windows has needed to be rebuilt for ages. Wouldn't be that bad of an idea to center it around Linux.

True it would not be the worst idea.. but its unrealistic, i mean all popular programs that dont support linux allready would have to be rebuilt, or windows would have to have a WINE like application built in.

 

It would be cool but yeah i dont think its gonna happen...

[HarryNyquist]

2 hours ago, LAwLz said:

However, I can't help shake the feeling that Microsoft would love to lock people into Azure over AWS or Google Cloud if they could. Extending the way Linux on Windows works, and integrating that into Azure functions could be a way to make cross platform development between Azure and AWS more difficult.

I'd believe that if they weren't pushing .NET Core and .NET 5 (which are fully cross-platform) so readily.

[Nowak]

4 hours ago, LAwLz said:

But maybe that is what they mean by "custom Kernel". I guess it remains to be seen. I am skeptical though

We'll see when the source code gets released. No doubt someone will compare the source for the Microsoft kernel to the standard Linux kernel.

[laminutederire]

6 hours ago, Sauron said:

If we've come to the point of packaging an entire Linux distribution inside Windows, why the hell are we still using Windows?

That would just be a virtual machine...

Arch gets new kernels within a couple of days from the upstream release, even Microsoft needs a few hours to build it, test it and ship it... also on a real Linux distro you can run RC kernels if you really want a new feature right now.

...they can just use Linux... WSL is far from a seamless experience, it's a crutch at best and I doubt this will change that.

Well not really. The main issue with wsl is gpu access for opencl/cuda. Other than that its basically just a terminal like linux terminals

[BachChain]

I know this is supposed to be a "good" thing, but all I hear is more disk and resource usage for a feature that the vast majority of users will never even know about, let alone use.

[Curious Pineapple]

4 hours ago, Lagercat1 said:

True it would not be the worst idea.. but its unrealistic, i mean all popular programs that dont support linux allready would have to be rebuilt, or windows would have to have a WINE like application built in.

 

It would be cool but yeah i dont think its gonna happen...

Baking WINE into an OS wouldn't be that hard if you had the Windows source code to hand. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to have engineers able to write an ahead-of-time translator either.

[Nowak]

19 minutes ago, BachChain said:

I know this is supposed to be a "good" thing, but all I hear is more disk and resource usage for a feature that the vast majority of users will never even know about, let alone use.

I can't imagine that the Linux kernel takes up more than a couple megabytes. Lemme go check.

 

Yeah, it's just 7 megabytes on my Ubuntu MATE installation. Barely any disk space used to store the kernel image.

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

13 hours ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

Windows has needed to be rebuilt for ages. Wouldn't be that bad of an idea to center it around Linux.

Windows is a flaming garbage pile of an OS under the hood TBH. I would switch to Linux, but laziness.