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

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[SystemCrasher]

I would have to say Microsoft actions take with MonoDevelop are a prime to highlight the Extinguish mentality. Wrapped into Visual Studio for Mac while not applying any code to support Linux, where is was created.

From what I've seen about .NET development, MS just never gives crap about users/devs/downstream issues. Not at all. They aren't ecosystem. They live in isolated space. It's pretty normal to release new .NET version, push it to throats via windows update in a forced manner since their marketing nuts decided it's cool, and who gives crap half of world has collapsed with numerous programs crashing/failing in odd ways to extent one may need to urgently recall all devs from vacations/weekends/holidays/whatever just because programs totally stopped working and customers are tearing supports apart. Seems it haven't changed: MS still dangerous, inconvenient and very troublesome upstream. They are even hard to call ecosystem. Something borg-like is hardly ecosystem. Rather slavery system, assimilation system or so. A rather bad place to be to my taste.

[SystemCrasher]

That was followed by Pronovost talking about X11/Wayland application support under WSL and then the third and final Microsoft talk of the day was Jesse talking about their Mesa Direct3D 12 mapping layers for getting OpenCL/OpenGL over D3D12.

Oh come on, when they are going to ditch NT kernel? Any ETA? Though I'm pretty sure M$ could turn even Linux into backdoored, misbehaving, vendorlocked something, boasting brand-new keyloggers and M$ online accoutns if they spit their own distro.

[Yndoendo]

I would have to say Microsoft actions take with MonoDevelop are a prime to highlight the Extinguish mentality. Wrapped into Visual Studio for Mac while not applying any code to support Linux, where is was created.

[piorunz]

Microsoft and Linux.
Hell has officially frozen over.