Microsoft Has A Large Presence At This Year's X.Org Conference

[kpedersen]

Oh, for unaccelerated graphics? All day long, run a virtual Wayland compositor inside and stream framebuffer. However I don't really care about that. For me, unaccelerated graphics is as good as nothing.

Interesting. Which virtual Wayland compositor would you recommend?

There aren't exactly many choices and of those I am not even sure any support a headless operation.

[Aeder]

Windows is still 90% of desktops, slightly less on servers (70% or so). Microsoft Office is the "standard" office suite. They already have the upper hand and missed several opportunities of locking out non-Windows OSes from PCs, yet chose not to do so.

So far we don't know what they truly want. What we know is that marketing bullshit like "building bridges" is obviously bullshit.

Unless you didn't write what you meant, your second figure seems to be quite wrong:

• Out of the top 25 websites in the world, only 2 aren’t using Linux.
• 96.3% of the world’s top 1 million servers run on Linux.
• 90% of all cloud infrastructure operates on Linux and practically all the best cloud hosts use it.

[intelfx]

Interesting. Which virtual Wayland compositor would you recommend?

There aren't exactly many choices and of those I am not even sure any support a headless operation.

Weston, pixman renderer, RDP backend.

[chithanh]

It's obviously less that they've stopped and more that they haven't yet gotten to the point where they have a large enough market share in the Linux space to actually pull it off.

How feasible is the "extinguish" part for free software though?

It's probably not feasible to "extinguish" Linux as a whole, as its grasp on many markets is too firm to get rid of it.

However there are markets where Linux is vulnerable, and that is the desktop market. If for example as thought experiment, Microsoft released Office for Linux (and I don't mean Android here) it is likely that they would set new standards for desktop Linux, even if implicit and unintentional. Microsoft will immediately start wielding huge power: Every distro must now cater to the needs of MS Office or face lower relevance.

[angrypie]

It's probably not feasible to "extinguish" Linux as a whole, as its grasp on many markets is too firm to get rid of it.

However there are markets where Linux is vulnerable, and that is the desktop market. If for example as thought experiment, Microsoft released Office for Linux (and I don't mean Android here) it is likely that they would set new standards for desktop Linux, even if implicit and unintentional. Microsoft will immediately start wielding huge power: Every distro must now cater to the needs of MS Office or face lower relevance.

I don't think they're in a position to set any standard in desktop Linux, since pretty much every major application follows its own rules anyway (and that's true even for Windows software right now).

Even if they made a proprietary/commercial toolkit for Office and pushed it to some poor sods, I don't see this happening at all. It'd be just another toolkit.

[L_A_G]

It's probably not feasible to "extinguish" Linux as a whole, as its grasp on many markets is too firm to get rid of it.

I thought it was obvious that this was about the desktop specifically as WSL is for running desktop applications, not for server or embedded applications.

However there are markets where Linux is vulnerable, and that is the desktop market. If for example as thought experiment, Microsoft released Office for Linux (and I don't mean Android here) it is likely that they would set new standards for desktop Linux, even if implicit and unintentional. Microsoft will immediately start wielding huge power: Every distro must now cater to the needs of MS Office or face lower relevance.

Office is just a user space application so it very obviously can't set any standards. It may eat up market share from LibreOffice, but that's it. To truly harm Linux Microsoft needs to go in for more fundamental level stuff like WSL is. It's obviously an attempt at making Linux on the desktop obsolete by removing the need to run Linux to run Linux desktop applications.

Another thing they could do is an official, but proprietary, universal application API for transparently running desktop applications on Windows and Linux, thus making it unnecessary for developers to write separate versions of applications. The idea here would be to cause developers who previously wrote Linux versions of their applications to just not bother anymore and trough this proprietary fundamental level API, which most distros would over time be forced to adopt, exert control over the Linux desktop ecosystem.