Microsoft Had Another Year Of Big Open-Source Surprises

[moilami]

The biggest surprises are yet to come, when Microsoft formally moves Windows 10 over to the Linux kernel and Wayland. This will include a Windows System Call emulation layer on Linux and a DirectX and GDI to Vulkan/Wayland layer which will allow Windows GUI libraries and program binaries which use GDI and DirectX to be used on Linux , Vulkan, and Wayland. This will also include a device driver compatibility layer allowing Windows device drivers to be used on Linux. The Windows 10 look/feel will be maintained but the Windows userland GUI code will run on Linux and Wayland using system call emulation and the GDI/DirectX over Vulkan/Wayland comptability layer which will support running GDI and DirectX code and the complete Windows GUI on top of Wayland and Vulkan backend.

This move is being conducted by Microsoft to benefit from the collective development of Linux, Microsoft has already started making contributions to the Linux kernel.

Ahhahha, I swear I will buy a bottle of champagne when Microsoft Linux is released

[Luke_Wolf]

Wait, WPF has a steep learning curve? But I thought a lot of (non-Linux) developers thought Windows was the Holy Grail because it's so easy to develop for?

No. The learning curve is no more steep than QML or whatever the XML Android presentation layer is called. Which more just boils down to you need to learn how to structure your GUI apps correctly (IE: MVC and related specializations of the pattern such as MVVM), but after that it's not too bad.

[jpg44]

I think it is a matter of time before WPF and UWP are ported to other operating systems. Windows Forms might be more difficult since it is tied to Win32 API.

The best way to do this would be to run it on Wine and make whatever improvements to Wine to make that possible. Wine already has support for the low level APIs that it uses like GDI and the DirectX. This would make most efficient use of developer resources.

Someone mentioned Linux has no stable ABI. This is *not true*. the Linux kernel ABI is pretty stable and Torvalds has committed to this to refusing demands by some people to remove backward compatible system calls from the kernel. Glibc also commits to a high level of backward compatability. So Linux's ABIs are backward compatible, Even if there was an backward compatability issue, then linking the binary to a specific version series of glibc solves this, so the solution for glibc is to have different binaries use different glibc series if there is an incompatable change to glibc.

Also, on the issue of cross compatability between Linux distros, you can sort of run Ubuntu things on Fedora and vice versa. First of all, there is mostly a compatible ABI between major Linux distros. The issue is not the ABI, but the different packaging systems. This was for years the subject of LSB was to provide cross distro compatibility until Debian decided to drop its support of LSB. LSB was based on RPM and Debian was supposed to provide a way for RPM packages to be installed on Debian.

The next alternative is to use one of the distro independent packaging systems, such as flatpak, docker, snaps, etc which are being supported on a larger and larger number of distros and are providing a way for cross distro packages to be realized.
You could also run Ubuntu userland on Fedora and vice versa by setting up an LXC insta
nce into which you can install the distro, LXC has simple commands to do this. Since you are creating an entirely seperate userland for each distro it does use up some more resources.

[Bucky Balls]

Remember, Miguel de Icaza and Nate Friedman sold their corporate entity Xamarin (monkey in Spanish) to Microsoft for almost $500 MILLION. Miguel is now a Microsoft Fellow. That's what we get for giving him so much crap about Mono. Miguel was a founder of Gnome. Xamarin was his fork of Gnome. Miguel bemoaned the adoption of Java in Android and felt Mono should have been used instead.

[paulpach]

Yeah, but WPF and UWP are tied to Direct2D.
However, it might be possible to create a Direct2D wrapper around Vulkan or OpenGL.
But besides the rendering, there is also input, clipboard, etc.
Then you also need fils system dialogs for open/save, so you need something like GTK or Qt too maybe.

Yes, and I think all of that can be done.

[uid313]

Yes, and I think all of that can be done.

Yeah, but even then WPF is technology from 2006.
UWP is newer but from what I understand it is a derivative of WPF for Windows RT or something and shares much with WPF.
Also I've heard people complain that UWP was done by a different team than WPF and that the UWP team didn't really understand XAML or something, and that it's not so good. I don't know.

Maybe both WPF and UWP sucks. I don't know.
It would be cool if WPF and UWP could run on Linux, but maybe they aren't even cool stuff.

[Aeder]

I think it is a matter of time before WPF and UWP are ported to other operating systems. Windows Forms might be more difficult since it is tied to Win32 API.

Maybe ReactOS will benefit from this.

Remember, Miguel de Icaza and Nate Friedman sold their corporate entity Xamarin (monkey in Spanish) to Microsoft for almost $500 MILLION. Miguel is now a Microsoft Fellow. That's what we get for giving him so much crap about Mono. Miguel was a founder of Gnome. Xamarin was his fork of Gnome. Miguel bemoaned the adoption of Java in Android and felt Mono should have been used instead.

Xamarin doesn't mean monkey in Spanish. Mono can mean that, so long as it's not used as a prefix.

[L_A_G]

Would be nice if they started bringing over desktop applications like Visual Studio proper or the desktop application version of Office. However seeing how that hurts their vertical integration particularly in the office market I have a feeling that won't be happening any time soon. They've never dominated in servers and software development tools, so co-operating in those things is something where they really don't have anything to lose, but the desktop is still a pretty big part of their business.

Also, weren't they supposed to retire their own Visual C/C++ compiler in favor of LLVM? They've made it possible to use external compiler suites like LLVM inside Visual Studio for some time, but I haven't heard anything about the progress on shelving the Visual C/C++ compiler after they announced. Did they catch too much hell for it and shelve the shelving?

It would also be nice if they didn't just limit themselves to running Linux software under Windows and started contributing to cross-compatibility projects going the other way like Wine, DXVK and VK9, but that's obviously just asking them to shoot themselves in the foot with a shotgun or something of equal power.

[kaidenshi]

Xamarin (monkey in Spanish)

Say what? Monkey in Spanish is "mono". Xamarin comes from the name of the Tamarin monkey, and that is not a Spanish name, it's a Cayenne name. Don't spout bullshit you can't back up just to try to look smart.

[paulpach]

I know it is fashionable to hate Microsoft. But I really like what they have been doing lately.
To add to the list:

* They added a pty api to windows and dramatically improved vt support. https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/
Konsole, Gnome terminal and others could be ported to windows with that.

* Visual studio for mac. It works very well (not directly open source related, but I still enjoy it)

* Visual studio code is fantastic. Well done!

They have changed, they seem to acknowledge the entire world does not revolve around windows and are making real progress in making their products work well with others.