Interesting that they basically give you a "how to move to the competition" primer. Though a bit of a closer look clears that right up: Option 1: Put it into WSL, thus keeping your windows. Option...
Interesting that they basically give you a "how to move to the competition" primer. Though a bit of a closer look clears that right up:
Option 1: Put it into WSL, thus keeping your windows.
Option 2: Put it on a VM. We recommend either locally via your Windows OS, or hosted by Azure.
Option 3: Bare Metal. You want to multiboot it though, right? Right?
Also seems to be targeted at developers, where I'd reckon the "pull" of linux is a bit more of a threat to MS. Can't corner the OS market if all those devs use Linux and write cross-platform software. Hence the pressure for MS to at least acknowledge the competition and try and retain.
That's not really the reason - it's all about Azure and the web. To be frank, native desktop apps are a bit of a boomer thing now. It's an ever shrinking market. The web, and to a lesser extent...
Can't corner the OS market if all those devs use Linux and write cross-platform software.
That's not really the reason - it's all about Azure and the web. To be frank, native desktop apps are a bit of a boomer thing now. It's an ever shrinking market. The web, and to a lesser extent mobile, is where all the growth is. The lesson Microsoft learned from the iPhone is to never be too attached to your legacy systems, and the Nadella Microsoft is willing to slowly detach from desktop OSes if it means being in a better strategic positioning for a web-first world.
Developers for servers and webapps uniformly prefer unix operating systems, and certainly Microsoft never had the infra for either like they did for desktop apps with Visual Studio as a one-stop-shop.
Basically, Microsoft doesn't care about Linux on the desktop as a threat anymore. It's all about the web, the desktop market is just a dying one for old people.
What’s up with the ‘a boomer thing’ and ‘for old people’? Desktop software vs. web platform is just a decision based on cost, performance, and productivity concerns. Over time, sure, more...
What’s up with the ‘a boomer thing’ and ‘for old people’?
Desktop software vs. web platform is just a decision based on cost, performance, and productivity concerns. Over time, sure, more functionality from desktop software is being transferred to and augmented by mobile apps and cloud platforms but the desktop remains a productivity hub. Anyway, this conversation and related points have everything to do with tech development and not user age. I don’t get it.
It absolutely is a generational thing. The newer generations compute more either entirely off of a "traditional" desktop or laptop, or far more with webapps. As an example, look no further than...
It absolutely is a generational thing. The newer generations compute more either entirely off of a "traditional" desktop or laptop, or far more with webapps. As an example, look no further than this report that college students don't understand what a folder is anymore, to the befuddlement of their professors.
Garland thought it would be an easy fix. She asked each student where they’d saved their project. Could they be on the desktop? Perhaps in the shared drive? But over and over, she was met with confusion. “What are you talking about?” multiple students inquired. Not only did they not know where their files were saved — they didn’t understand the question.
Gradually, Garland came to the same realization that many of her fellow educators have reached in the past four years: the concept of file folders and directories, essential to previous generations’ understanding of computers, is gibberish to many modern students.
Or see how Microsoft, the definition of the juggernaut in desktop productivity software, no longer pushes for their local software - instead, it pushes Office360.
Sure, for now, high performance niches like video editing software or CAD remain entrenched in desktop applications, but that is a niche. The desktop is undoubtedly fading into obscurity for newer, different abstractions. Even in the world of professional software engineering - I'll tell you that Google now has a majority of its engineers use an entirely cloud based, entirely in house set of developer toolings, and give their nooglers chromebooks, and many more companies are following in their footsteps.
There is a very objective (and economical) reason as to why too. For one, web apps are agnostic to any platform. Hence, creating web apps means you only need to do it once and it's going to be...
There is a very objective (and economical) reason as to why too. For one, web apps are agnostic to any platform. Hence, creating web apps means you only need to do it once and it's going to be portable as hell. Fact of the matter is, modern systems design and architecture favour API-centric development. Rapid deployment is also API-favoured. The very concept of APIs being the equivalent of "what functions are to a program" but to that of a system, is what makes them so great - they are extremely flexible and scalable.
Not only that, but web apps also mean almost infinite growth in terms of Cloud-based hosting, which Microsoft has heavily invested in (along with AWS, GCP, IBM, Cisco, etc.). This is the future. The future is Cloud-based apps. It's also extremely great for corporations because of the sheer amount of data they can get, and the level of monitoring and telemetry from the traffic flows from their networks and gateways.
Meanwhile, extremely compute heavy applications are pushed to remote servers as well. Think Machine Learning workloads. No one trains a transformer of appreciable size on their workstation. The...
Sure, for now, high performance niches like video editing software or CAD remain entrenched in desktop applications, but that is a niche.
Meanwhile, extremely compute heavy applications are pushed to remote servers as well. Think Machine Learning workloads. No one trains a transformer of appreciable size on their workstation. The segment of workloads that can feasibly be done locally, but can not be done on mobile devices is narrowing. Well, latency requirements of higher-intensity workloads (e.g. gaming) notwithstanding.
I figured that was just a money maker move. Can't pirate a cloud service (and Microsoft isn't ready to try and force Windows to be cloud). I dunno if I can truly call it a niche until usage and...
how Microsoft, the definition of the juggernaut in desktop productivity software, no longer pushes for their local software - instead, it pushes Office360.
I figured that was just a money maker move. Can't pirate a cloud service (and Microsoft isn't ready to try and force Windows to be cloud).
for now, high performance niches like video editing software or CAD remain entrenched in desktop applications, but that is a niche.
I dunno if I can truly call it a niche until usage and awareness drops down. Owning a tablet is a niche and it's maybe 50/50 on if they own an iPad (and a unicorn if they own an Android one... star at Tab S8+) and I don't feel a desktop/laptop has fallen to that level as of now. owning a portable dedicated camera is a niche and I'd be hard-pressed to find a non-professional photographer who has one on hand.
But hey, that article explains a lot of a certain mentality I've seen in my niche. Games are far from ready from cloud, but PC gamers are extremely fixated with launching through a launcher instead of a good ol' "launch an executable". And of course, consoles obscure their own file systems. I never understood launching an app to launching an app, but if more and more students are failing to understand file systems it makes a whole lot of sense. They see Steam or GOG or whatnot as central to managing their games
I promise, as much as it may be leading to some form of learned helplessness, nobody uses launchers because they're obsessed with them. They're DRM packages that you essentially need to break the...
I promise, as much as it may be leading to some form of learned helplessness, nobody uses launchers because they're obsessed with them. They're DRM packages that you essentially need to break the law to avoid, and because of that, online games (more commonly in the past, but still on occasion) won't let you play with people who bought the same game on different launchers.
Frankly, with regard to online play, launchers are effectively necessary, even if they technically weren't. You need to be updated. It's silly to install a game and have to be prepared to close everything else, launch the game, get an error code because you're out of date since they pushed a hotfix an hour ago, close the game, open a browser, and reinstall it. Unless suddenly people are going to start applying delta patches themselves. So sure, then just install an updater for every online game! Except then you end up in a place like MMO players were in 2009, where every game has a different launcher with different features, some of which are truly abysmal and crash half the time you log in and some of which are able to use bittorrent to increase the speed of updates for everyone and even support playing the parts of the game that aren't impacted by the update which the patches download. Why in the world would anyone want to use those worse launchers? It's not about it being easier to click big shiny buttons and everyone is suddenly afraid of the filesystem, it's that nobody has ever liked manually updating applications, and for most gamers, they'd have to be doing that daily, by either completely reinstalling or dragging and dropping individual updated files into place.
Most games I play that aren't online get launched from a terminal, but I would rather launch an app to launch an app any day than keep a folder in an RSS reader dedicated to tracking game updates.
The desktop OS still seem pretty big for the gaming crowd. And I doubt streaming games online will be good enough for the latency obsessed gamers. And Linux has made substantial improvement as a...
The desktop OS still seem pretty big for the gaming crowd. And I doubt streaming games online will be good enough for the latency obsessed gamers. And Linux has made substantial improvement as a viable gaming OS in recent years.
I suspect Proton will play a big role in breaking or at least weakening MS's stranglehold on the market. The more we're free to play our games on our OSes, the more devs will realize that linux is...
I suspect Proton will play a big role in breaking or at least weakening MS's stranglehold on the market. The more we're free to play our games on our OSes, the more devs will realize that linux is a platform that it's a platform worth targeting. I mean, if you ask the actual code monkeys what platform they prefer to program for, I doubt most would say windows, though there is undoubtedly inertia in that corner.
I've heard the following: The upside of coding for linux is you have a very dedicated community willing to help you get good feedback. The downside of coding for linux is this stream is never...
I've heard the following:
The upside of coding for linux is you have a very dedicated community willing to help you get good feedback.
The downside of coding for linux is this stream is never ending as everyone has a slightly different version and core libraries push breaking changes with reckless abandon in a way that wouldn't be acceptable for a Windows or Mac machine these days (or at least not at the frequency it can occur in linux).
I have 0 personal experience with linux development so this is just anecdotal at best, but it does seem to track with my own personal attempts to learn/install/use linux.
Wine and Proton have continuous development, which helped a lot for the gaming facet of Linux. Valve stepped in and made its own library and ships it with Steam. It doesn't matter your distro, it...
Wine and Proton have continuous development, which helped a lot for the gaming facet of Linux. Valve stepped in and made its own library and ships it with Steam. It doesn't matter your distro, it installs natively.
Also, Vulkan is getting big there. DXVK is helping a lot to push games out of the Windows ecosystem. But after 2 years, I think Linux isn't in a good position still for the average crowd. Gamers use specialized hardware - e.g. mouse, keyboards, rgb. - and Linux has terrible support for it. Multi-monitor is also a nightmare. And it doesn't help that GTK (Gnome) and QT (KDE) are always in between tribal fights.
Which, to memory, relied on a library that got a breaking change pushed and sorta forced Valve to fix it out of nowhere. This has always been the issue with this kind of development, where even...
Valve stepped in and made its own library and ships it with Steam.
Which, to memory, relied on a library that got a breaking change pushed and sorta forced Valve to fix it out of nowhere. This has always been the issue with this kind of development, where even super low level stuff will just change and break things.
It's obviously leagues better, but I recall the issue vividly because it really highlighted why other large devs tend to avoid the linux space beyond a certain point.
If devs switch to Linux/Mac en mass, it spells the end of Windows ports for hobby software. I've seen it happen myself... "I no longer have a Windows PC so I'm not releasing new builds for Windows."
If devs switch to Linux/Mac en mass, it spells the end of Windows ports for hobby software. I've seen it happen myself... "I no longer have a Windows PC so I'm not releasing new builds for Windows."
I would say Microsoft has been most friendly towards FOSS/Linux ecosystems compared to say Apple and Google's Android over the years. Windows is based on consistent and open standards like...
I would say Microsoft has been most friendly towards FOSS/Linux ecosystems compared to say Apple and Google's Android over the years.
Windows is based on consistent and open standards like NTFS/FAT32/ODF/etc, which enabled Linux compatibility projects like WINE, LibreOffice, etc. to thrive.
Lately, they've been taking extreme care to support Linux in many of their products, .NET Core has long since been open sourced, VSCode is another great example.
Ever since the Ballmer era ended, at least, there is no evidence of Microsoft being hostile or unfriendly towards open source folks.
In contrast, Apple is a closed circuit ecosystem that wants developers to pay hefty registration fee to even exist there. Android is even worse, they follow no standards and there are Frankenstein versions from each vendor like Oppo, Samsung, etc.! Which makes them "technically" open source but lacking in the spirit of open source. And don't even get me started on all the privacy intrusiveness and adware on these other platforms!
Coincidentally, does microsoft still make it impossible to install windows without it overwriting the boot sector on the disk? I remember that being quite frustrating back in the day.
Coincidentally, does microsoft still make it impossible to install windows without it overwriting the boot sector on the disk? I remember that being quite frustrating back in the day.
you can still have multiple bootable efi images, they just have to be signed with a key that has been enrolled with your efi. consumer pcs and motherboards come with microsoft's signing key...
you can still have multiple bootable efi images, they just have to be signed with a key that has been enrolled with your efi. consumer pcs and motherboards come with microsoft's signing key pre-enrolled.
it used to not be uncommon for firmware to lack the ability to enroll your own key, or have buggy implementations that caused problems. this hasn't been a problem for a while though, and even cheap laptops i've seen from walmart let me enroll ventoy's key for example.
Yet, the Windows installer always messes up the partitioning with its own EFI and MSR partitions. For dual booting, installing Windows, then Linux is the right call, since you just use GRUB with...
Yet, the Windows installer always messes up the partitioning with its own EFI and MSR partitions. For dual booting, installing Windows, then Linux is the right call, since you just use GRUB with OS PROBER to manage it.
windows vista through 10 officially support both gpt and mbr configurations. gpt has been the recommended configuration since at least windows 8, maybe 7. how windows determined which...
windows vista through 10 officially support both gpt and mbr configurations. gpt has been the recommended configuration since at least windows 8, maybe 7. how windows determined which configuration to use was based on how the install media was booted. i would argue that it has been best practice to install windows to a gpt drive since windows 8, as that is around when most uefi implementations started feeling reasonably mature.
starting with windows 11, only gpt is officially supported. it can be made to boot from an mbr partition with some clever re-use of windows 10's mbr bootloader and your motherboard set to boot in "legacy bios mode" (there are a few different names for this), but i am not sure why you would want to do this beyond morbid curiosity.
Morbid curiosity is right. I haven't installed Windows on bare hardware since I built my now largely abandoned gaming desktop, which got a used copy of Windows 7. As a gaming machine I didn't...
Morbid curiosity is right.
I haven't installed Windows on bare hardware since I built my now largely abandoned gaming desktop, which got a used copy of Windows 7. As a gaming machine I didn't install Linux on it, so I just left it on the defaults. With virtualization as good as it is now, there's basically no reason why I would want to install Windows on bare hardware anymore.
They started this lip service support to linux when the antitrust lawsuits they went through required them to find something to point to as 'competition' in a courtroom. Joke was on them though,...
They started this lip service support to linux when the antitrust lawsuits they went through required them to find something to point to as 'competition' in a courtroom. Joke was on them though, since it actually did become competition that's still eating at them all the time like a weak acid. :)
Um, not really though. They really started actively, actually supporting Linux about the time they finally saw the writing on the wall and began positioning themselves to be a SaaS-first company,...
Um, not really though. They really started actively, actually supporting Linux about the time they finally saw the writing on the wall and began positioning themselves to be a SaaS-first company, about the time they launched Azure.
An open-source, largely royalty-free kernel is very attractive to them for a few reasons, not the least of which is they don't have to rebuild their dumb OS from the ground up every decade.
It’s still bizarre to me as someone who grew up in the 90s that Microsoft has embraced Linux so much over the past decade. I understand why they are doing it, but it is really weird to see the...
It’s still bizarre to me as someone who grew up in the 90s that Microsoft has embraced Linux so much over the past decade.
I understand why they are doing it, but it is really weird to see the company that was so staunchly against Linux and actively advocated against it to have integrated it so thoroughly into their business.
IMO they are still fairly staunchly against Linux. They just begrugingly accept that they lost the server war. The only thing they have server-side that is best-in-class is Active Directory. For...
IMO they are still fairly staunchly against Linux. They just begrugingly accept that they lost the server war. The only thing they have server-side that is best-in-class is Active Directory. For most everything else there is at least a compelling alternative.
WSL works well enough until it doesn't. Right now I'm dealing with some weird network issue that prevents it from booting unless I run a netsocket reset after every reboot.
But you can say that about almost anything. iOS is great and I love it until I hit a bug. It’s a matter of how often you run into those issues. But I think WSL is good enough for the 80% part of...
WSL works well enough until it doesn't.
But you can say that about almost anything. iOS is great and I love it until I hit a bug. It’s a matter of how often you run into those issues. But I think WSL is good enough for the 80% part of the bell curve they’re after.
Sounds like you didn't use that word intentionally: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish I wouldn't even trust them if they turned Microsoft into an employee-owned cooperative that dumps Windows in favor...
I use WSL all the time, one of the killer features of VSCode is being able to connect to your WSL session to get a linux terminal, file system, and developer environment. So you get the benefits...
I use WSL all the time, one of the killer features of VSCode is being able to connect to your WSL session to get a linux terminal, file system, and developer environment. So you get the benefits of that in the gui of windows with all your windows apps running alongside.
Its also potentially a security risk in that my laptop is heavily locked down on windows but my WSL is not, so for example yesterday i needed an admin to approve my installation of ffmpeg to convert some video files, instead of wait for that bs, i just fired up WSL and installed it there instead.
That sounds more like a poorly setup installer than a security issue. You can likely just grab the ffmpeg.exe file and use it without issue from a folder you have permissions for. You only need...
That sounds more like a poorly setup installer than a security issue. You can likely just grab the ffmpeg.exe file and use it without issue from a folder you have permissions for. You only need admin privileges to put files in /Program Files/, which isn’t really necessary.
I use Azure for work every day since a couple years and even there, they are moving some PaaS from Windows hosting into Linux hosting. I mean, at this point is quite the farce. The only reason I...
I use Azure for work every day since a couple years and even there, they are moving some PaaS from Windows hosting into Linux hosting.
I mean, at this point is quite the farce.
The only reason I myself still use a Windows machine is because of games. Thanks heavens Proton is moving things, hopefully, soon (years) I'll be able to just drop windows entirely.
I'm not exactly a "hardcore" PC gamer, but last year I got a Steam Deck and have exclusively gaming on it. I was dual booting on my pc "just in case" I needed windows for something, but a recent...
I'm not exactly a "hardcore" PC gamer, but last year I got a Steam Deck and have exclusively gaming on it. I was dual booting on my pc "just in case" I needed windows for something, but a recent windows update fucked with my bootloader, and rather than going through the hassle of fixing it, I just removed the drive that had windows on it. Boots just fine and I haven't needed windows for anything. I'm at the point now where if I wanted to play a game that did need it, I'd just shrug my shoulders and play a different game.
Hoping Proton gets there with 100% of games working flawlessly by the time Windows 12 allegedly becomes a subscription service. That's when I'm gonna call it quits either way and I hope my games...
Hoping Proton gets there with 100% of games working flawlessly by the time Windows 12 allegedly becomes a subscription service. That's when I'm gonna call it quits either way and I hope my games will come with me.
Interesting! Anyone have advice on downloading Ubuntu mint to a USB to install on a PC with no os? I spent an hour on the website last night and every single download I tried was just a few kb....
Interesting! Anyone have advice on downloading Ubuntu mint to a USB to install on a PC with no os?
I spent an hour on the website last night and every single download I tried was just a few kb.
Even its torrent option wouldn't recognize my torrent client apps.
I'd use Balena Etcher from here: https://etcher.balena.io/ I'd then download a torrent from this page: https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=305 and I'd open the file with my torrent software. (I'm...
I'd then download a torrent from this page: https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=305 and I'd open the file with my torrent software. (I'm currently using qBittorrent and the file works with that). Alternatively, I'd download one of the ISO files from one of the mirrors.
I'd have a USB stick ready. I'd burn the ISO to the stick using Balena Etcher. I'd reboot the machine and use the boot menu to select to boot from the USB stick. Once Linux Mint had loaded I'd install it from the live install environment.
I assume you mean Linux Mint? Ubuntu is a different thing. You want one of the links in the table labeled "Download mirrors". Pick whichever one is close to you and/or has the coolest sounding...
I assume you mean Linux Mint? Ubuntu is a different thing.
You want one of the links in the table labeled "Download mirrors". Pick whichever one is close to you and/or has the coolest sounding name, they're all the same file.
Admittedly, that is a very poorly arranged download page. I went through two iterations of "what are you talking about, it's right ther-- oh wait what" and almost linked you to the wrong thing.
Interesting that they basically give you a "how to move to the competition" primer. Though a bit of a closer look clears that right up:
Option 1: Put it into WSL, thus keeping your windows.
Option 2: Put it on a VM. We recommend either locally via your Windows OS, or hosted by Azure.
Option 3: Bare Metal. You want to multiboot it though, right? Right?
Also seems to be targeted at developers, where I'd reckon the "pull" of linux is a bit more of a threat to MS. Can't corner the OS market if all those devs use Linux and write cross-platform software. Hence the pressure for MS to at least acknowledge the competition and try and retain.
That's not really the reason - it's all about Azure and the web. To be frank, native desktop apps are a bit of a boomer thing now. It's an ever shrinking market. The web, and to a lesser extent mobile, is where all the growth is. The lesson Microsoft learned from the iPhone is to never be too attached to your legacy systems, and the Nadella Microsoft is willing to slowly detach from desktop OSes if it means being in a better strategic positioning for a web-first world.
Developers for servers and webapps uniformly prefer unix operating systems, and certainly Microsoft never had the infra for either like they did for desktop apps with Visual Studio as a one-stop-shop.
Basically, Microsoft doesn't care about Linux on the desktop as a threat anymore. It's all about the web, the desktop market is just a dying one for old people.
What’s up with the ‘a boomer thing’ and ‘for old people’?
Desktop software vs. web platform is just a decision based on cost, performance, and productivity concerns. Over time, sure, more functionality from desktop software is being transferred to and augmented by mobile apps and cloud platforms but the desktop remains a productivity hub. Anyway, this conversation and related points have everything to do with tech development and not user age. I don’t get it.
It absolutely is a generational thing. The newer generations compute more either entirely off of a "traditional" desktop or laptop, or far more with webapps. As an example, look no further than this report that college students don't understand what a folder is anymore, to the befuddlement of their professors.
Or see how Microsoft, the definition of the juggernaut in desktop productivity software, no longer pushes for their local software - instead, it pushes Office360.
Sure, for now, high performance niches like video editing software or CAD remain entrenched in desktop applications, but that is a niche. The desktop is undoubtedly fading into obscurity for newer, different abstractions. Even in the world of professional software engineering - I'll tell you that Google now has a majority of its engineers use an entirely cloud based, entirely in house set of developer toolings, and give their nooglers chromebooks, and many more companies are following in their footsteps.
There is a very objective (and economical) reason as to why too. For one, web apps are agnostic to any platform. Hence, creating web apps means you only need to do it once and it's going to be portable as hell. Fact of the matter is, modern systems design and architecture favour API-centric development. Rapid deployment is also API-favoured. The very concept of APIs being the equivalent of "what functions are to a program" but to that of a system, is what makes them so great - they are extremely flexible and scalable.
Not only that, but web apps also mean almost infinite growth in terms of Cloud-based hosting, which Microsoft has heavily invested in (along with AWS, GCP, IBM, Cisco, etc.). This is the future. The future is Cloud-based apps. It's also extremely great for corporations because of the sheer amount of data they can get, and the level of monitoring and telemetry from the traffic flows from their networks and gateways.
Everyone is just seeing the bigger picture now.
Meanwhile, extremely compute heavy applications are pushed to remote servers as well. Think Machine Learning workloads. No one trains a transformer of appreciable size on their workstation. The segment of workloads that can feasibly be done locally, but can not be done on mobile devices is narrowing. Well, latency requirements of higher-intensity workloads (e.g. gaming) notwithstanding.
I figured that was just a money maker move. Can't pirate a cloud service (and Microsoft isn't ready to try and force Windows to be cloud).
I dunno if I can truly call it a niche until usage and awareness drops down. Owning a tablet is a niche and it's maybe 50/50 on if they own an iPad (and a unicorn if they own an Android one... star at Tab S8+) and I don't feel a desktop/laptop has fallen to that level as of now. owning a portable dedicated camera is a niche and I'd be hard-pressed to find a non-professional photographer who has one on hand.
But hey, that article explains a lot of a certain mentality I've seen in my niche. Games are far from ready from cloud, but PC gamers are extremely fixated with launching through a launcher instead of a good ol' "launch an executable". And of course, consoles obscure their own file systems. I never understood launching an app to launching an app, but if more and more students are failing to understand file systems it makes a whole lot of sense. They see Steam or GOG or whatnot as central to managing their games
I promise, as much as it may be leading to some form of learned helplessness, nobody uses launchers because they're obsessed with them. They're DRM packages that you essentially need to break the law to avoid, and because of that, online games (more commonly in the past, but still on occasion) won't let you play with people who bought the same game on different launchers.
Frankly, with regard to online play, launchers are effectively necessary, even if they technically weren't. You need to be updated. It's silly to install a game and have to be prepared to close everything else, launch the game, get an error code because you're out of date since they pushed a hotfix an hour ago, close the game, open a browser, and reinstall it. Unless suddenly people are going to start applying delta patches themselves. So sure, then just install an updater for every online game! Except then you end up in a place like MMO players were in 2009, where every game has a different launcher with different features, some of which are truly abysmal and crash half the time you log in and some of which are able to use bittorrent to increase the speed of updates for everyone and even support playing the parts of the game that aren't impacted by the update which the patches download. Why in the world would anyone want to use those worse launchers? It's not about it being easier to click big shiny buttons and everyone is suddenly afraid of the filesystem, it's that nobody has ever liked manually updating applications, and for most gamers, they'd have to be doing that daily, by either completely reinstalling or dragging and dropping individual updated files into place.
Most games I play that aren't online get launched from a terminal, but I would rather launch an app to launch an app any day than keep a folder in an RSS reader dedicated to tracking game updates.
The desktop OS still seem pretty big for the gaming crowd. And I doubt streaming games online will be good enough for the latency obsessed gamers. And Linux has made substantial improvement as a viable gaming OS in recent years.
I suspect Proton will play a big role in breaking or at least weakening MS's stranglehold on the market. The more we're free to play our games on our OSes, the more devs will realize that linux is a platform that it's a platform worth targeting. I mean, if you ask the actual code monkeys what platform they prefer to program for, I doubt most would say windows, though there is undoubtedly inertia in that corner.
I've heard the following:
The upside of coding for linux is you have a very dedicated community willing to help you get good feedback.
The downside of coding for linux is this stream is never ending as everyone has a slightly different version and core libraries push breaking changes with reckless abandon in a way that wouldn't be acceptable for a Windows or Mac machine these days (or at least not at the frequency it can occur in linux).
I have 0 personal experience with linux development so this is just anecdotal at best, but it does seem to track with my own personal attempts to learn/install/use linux.
Wine and Proton have continuous development, which helped a lot for the gaming facet of Linux. Valve stepped in and made its own library and ships it with Steam. It doesn't matter your distro, it installs natively.
Also, Vulkan is getting big there. DXVK is helping a lot to push games out of the Windows ecosystem. But after 2 years, I think Linux isn't in a good position still for the average crowd. Gamers use specialized hardware - e.g. mouse, keyboards, rgb. - and Linux has terrible support for it. Multi-monitor is also a nightmare. And it doesn't help that GTK (Gnome) and QT (KDE) are always in between tribal fights.
Which, to memory, relied on a library that got a breaking change pushed and sorta forced Valve to fix it out of nowhere. This has always been the issue with this kind of development, where even super low level stuff will just change and break things.
It's obviously leagues better, but I recall the issue vividly because it really highlighted why other large devs tend to avoid the linux space beyond a certain point.
If devs switch to Linux/Mac en mass, it spells the end of Windows ports for hobby software. I've seen it happen myself... "I no longer have a Windows PC so I'm not releasing new builds for Windows."
Ooo hobby software like what? Genuinely curious about some niche hobbies :)
Oh I was using it more as in "hobbiest" opposed to "professional."
I would say Microsoft has been most friendly towards FOSS/Linux ecosystems compared to say Apple and Google's Android over the years.
In contrast, Apple is a closed circuit ecosystem that wants developers to pay hefty registration fee to even exist there. Android is even worse, they follow no standards and there are Frankenstein versions from each vendor like Oppo, Samsung, etc.! Which makes them "technically" open source but lacking in the spirit of open source. And don't even get me started on all the privacy intrusiveness and adware on these other platforms!
Coincidentally, does microsoft still make it impossible to install windows without it overwriting the boot sector on the disk? I remember that being quite frustrating back in the day.
these days your disk doesn't have a boot sector, it has an efi partition which can contain multiple bootable efi images.
Unless secureboot is enabled. Then it gets messy fast
you can still have multiple bootable efi images, they just have to be signed with a key that has been enrolled with your efi. consumer pcs and motherboards come with microsoft's signing key pre-enrolled.
it used to not be uncommon for firmware to lack the ability to enroll your own key, or have buggy implementations that caused problems. this hasn't been a problem for a while though, and even cheap laptops i've seen from walmart let me enroll ventoy's key for example.
Yet, the Windows installer always messes up the partitioning with its own EFI and MSR partitions. For dual booting, installing Windows, then Linux is the right call, since you just use GRUB with OS PROBER to manage it.
Unless you're using something like pop!OS, which doesn't do well unless it's installed first before Windows
So I assume that to mean that Windows doesn't even support MBR anymore and requires the install disk to be set up as GUID?
windows vista through 10 officially support both gpt and mbr configurations. gpt has been the recommended configuration since at least windows 8, maybe 7. how windows determined which configuration to use was based on how the install media was booted. i would argue that it has been best practice to install windows to a gpt drive since windows 8, as that is around when most uefi implementations started feeling reasonably mature.
starting with windows 11, only gpt is officially supported. it can be made to boot from an mbr partition with some clever re-use of windows 10's mbr bootloader and your motherboard set to boot in "legacy bios mode" (there are a few different names for this), but i am not sure why you would want to do this beyond morbid curiosity.
Morbid curiosity is right.
I haven't installed Windows on bare hardware since I built my now largely abandoned gaming desktop, which got a used copy of Windows 7. As a gaming machine I didn't install Linux on it, so I just left it on the defaults. With virtualization as good as it is now, there's basically no reason why I would want to install Windows on bare hardware anymore.
They started this lip service support to linux when the antitrust lawsuits they went through required them to find something to point to as 'competition' in a courtroom. Joke was on them though, since it actually did become competition that's still eating at them all the time like a weak acid. :)
Um, not really though. They really started actively, actually supporting Linux about the time they finally saw the writing on the wall and began positioning themselves to be a SaaS-first company, about the time they launched Azure.
An open-source, largely royalty-free kernel is very attractive to them for a few reasons, not the least of which is they don't have to rebuild their dumb OS from the ground up every decade.
It’s still bizarre to me as someone who grew up in the 90s that Microsoft has embraced Linux so much over the past decade.
I understand why they are doing it, but it is really weird to see the company that was so staunchly against Linux and actively advocated against it to have integrated it so thoroughly into their business.
IMO they are still fairly staunchly against Linux. They just begrugingly accept that they lost the server war. The only thing they have server-side that is best-in-class is Active Directory. For most everything else there is at least a compelling alternative.
WSL works well enough until it doesn't. Right now I'm dealing with some weird network issue that prevents it from booting unless I run a netsocket reset after every reboot.
But you can say that about almost anything. iOS is great and I love it until I hit a bug. It’s a matter of how often you run into those issues. But I think WSL is good enough for the 80% part of the bell curve they’re after.
Aye, but tis very disruptive. All part of Extend.
Sounds like you didn't use that word intentionally: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish
I wouldn't even trust them if they turned Microsoft into an employee-owned cooperative that dumps Windows in favor of a FLOSS Linux distro.
Very much used intentionally. That’s why I said I understand why they’re doing it.
I use WSL all the time, one of the killer features of VSCode is being able to connect to your WSL session to get a linux terminal, file system, and developer environment. So you get the benefits of that in the gui of windows with all your windows apps running alongside.
Its also potentially a security risk in that my laptop is heavily locked down on windows but my WSL is not, so for example yesterday i needed an admin to approve my installation of ffmpeg to convert some video files, instead of wait for that bs, i just fired up WSL and installed it there instead.
That sounds more like a poorly setup installer than a security issue. You can likely just grab the ffmpeg.exe file and use it without issue from a folder you have permissions for. You only need admin privileges to put files in /Program Files/, which isn’t really necessary.
I use Azure for work every day since a couple years and even there, they are moving some PaaS from Windows hosting into Linux hosting.
I mean, at this point is quite the farce.
The only reason I myself still use a Windows machine is because of games. Thanks heavens Proton is moving things, hopefully, soon (years) I'll be able to just drop windows entirely.
I'm not exactly a "hardcore" PC gamer, but last year I got a Steam Deck and have exclusively gaming on it. I was dual booting on my pc "just in case" I needed windows for something, but a recent windows update fucked with my bootloader, and rather than going through the hassle of fixing it, I just removed the drive that had windows on it. Boots just fine and I haven't needed windows for anything. I'm at the point now where if I wanted to play a game that did need it, I'd just shrug my shoulders and play a different game.
Hoping Proton gets there with 100% of games working flawlessly by the time Windows 12 allegedly becomes a subscription service. That's when I'm gonna call it quits either way and I hope my games will come with me.
this is just fud people have been spreading based on a ui that is intended for a cloud-based vm subscription service
Interesting! Anyone have advice on downloading Ubuntu mint to a USB to install on a PC with no os?
I spent an hour on the website last night and every single download I tried was just a few kb.
Even its torrent option wouldn't recognize my torrent client apps.
I'd use Balena Etcher from here: https://etcher.balena.io/
I'd then download a torrent from this page: https://linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=305 and I'd open the file with my torrent software. (I'm currently using qBittorrent and the file works with that). Alternatively, I'd download one of the ISO files from one of the mirrors.
I'd have a USB stick ready. I'd burn the ISO to the stick using Balena Etcher. I'd reboot the machine and use the boot menu to select to boot from the USB stick. Once Linux Mint had loaded I'd install it from the live install environment.
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/choose.html
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/burn.html
https://linuxmint-installation-guide.readthedocs.io/en/latest/install.html
Thank you so much! I'll be trying this, hopefully tomorrow!
I assume you mean Linux Mint? Ubuntu is a different thing.
You want one of the links in the table labeled "Download mirrors". Pick whichever one is close to you and/or has the coolest sounding name, they're all the same file.
Admittedly, that is a very poorly arranged download page. I went through two iterations of "what are you talking about, it's right ther-- oh wait what" and almost linked you to the wrong thing.