Microsoft's Windows Subsystem For Linux Exits Beta

[pracedru]

Didn't take long for that nonsense to be regurgitated. Do tell, how could this possibly "extinguish" Linux?

Well we should make note of the actions that could.
If Microsoft begins to offer services and extensions that are exclusive to WSL and Azure, then they are extending in a way that could later be used to extinguish.

[Xaero_Vincent]

Windows Subsystem For Linux is fun to play with but not very useful when the main OS is Linux and many things still don't work in it, although at least cowsay does!

[zamadatix]

It's NTFS, so normally you can't. (If you do, Windows displays only one of those.)

NTFS is case sensitiveby design, normally you can't create such files in Windows unless you change group policy but WSL will create them regardless of this setting, when you do explorer shows both (regardless of if you've enabled case sensitive creation). 3 strikes, you're out.

Edit: never switched "insensitive" to "sensitive" when I flipped the sentence order around in editing, corrected.

[ElectricPrism]

Didn't take long for that nonsense to be regurgitated. Do tell, how could this possibly "extinguish" Linux?

Easy - find ways to ruin the Linux name and brand.

One way to "get rid of something" is to find ways to make it slow and shitty so that it has a bad reputation. All Microsoft has to do is offer Microsoft Azure to as many as possible and then make it suck to make their Windows offering more appealing. Ignorant Arrogant Admins will just assume Linux sucks and stop there.

It's like a teenage girl who convinces her friend to cut off all her hair and date a looser just so she can talk shit about her to everyone who knows her.

[Michael_S]

That's surprising to me because I thought Azure was making a lot of progress with some vendors like Wal-mart, Whole Foods, etc. I know AWS is still a big game but I thought there was momentum towards Azure.

I understand Azure is popular. I don't mean that Azure is failing. I mean that Linux VMs on Azure are gaining popularity. I haven't seen any recent news, but as of summer 2016 one third of the VMs on Azure run Linux. That's up from one fourth a year earlier. I wouldn't be surprised if the number is near forty percent now, but Microsoft isn't announcing it because it's embarrassing to them.

If Linux server virtual machines are so wildly popular that Microsoft is even running them on its own cloud service, then Microsoft has given up plans of wiping out Linux on the server.

[DeepDayze]

Their moves make a lot more sense if the long term goal is for them to kill off Windows and sell their software to run on other platforms. There's literally no other reason a lot of their recent moves make sense since their change in CEO.

I don't think they will ever fully kill off Windows even if they made it into Windows as a service platform, and being able to say access your Windows virtual desktop anywhere on Azure anywhere. With Office 365 they basically moved their Office suite to the cloud and it can be accessed from different platforms. I am sure many of their other server oriented products may move to the cloud too, such as SCCM for example in doing app deployments from Azure rather than from a physical server. Windows may become not so relevant soon enough but not totally dead.

[ssokolow]

NTFS is case insensitive by design, normally you can't create such files in Windows unless you change group policy but WSL will create them regardless of this setting, when you do explorer shows both (regardless of if you've enabled case sensitive creation). 3 strikes, you're out.

Actually, that's a feature of the "Win32 namespace". Like the NT kernel's "subsystems", NTFS was designed to support multiple "namespaces" so that Win32, OS/2, and UNIX applications could coexist on top of it. (With WSL being the latest incarnation of the NT kernel's POSIX personality)

The POSIX namespace is case-sensitive and allows filenames to contain any sequence of valid UTF-16 code points except NUL and the / directory separator. (And, if you go for the NT kernel's object manager APIs, the forward slash (directory separator) is the only disallowed character because, internally, it uses Pascal/Rust-style length+blob strings rather than NUL-terminated ones.)

Source: Wikipedia: NTFS and Project Zero: The Definitive Guide on Win32 to NT Path Conversion

[zamadatix]

Actually, that's a feature of the "Win32 namespace".

Woops, thanks meant to say "sensitive", otherwise both wouldn't have shown in explorer! Originally had it written in the negative form before I added the group policy section and never went to switch it back. Edited, thanks!

[Geopirate]

I don't think they will ever fully kill off Windows even if they made it into Windows as a service platform, and being able to say access your Windows virtual desktop anywhere on Azure anywhere. With Office 365 they basically moved their Office suite to the cloud and it can be accessed from different platforms. I am sure many of their other server oriented products may move to the cloud too, such as SCCM for example in doing app deployments from Azure rather than from a physical server. Windows may become not so relevant soon enough but not totally dead.

I'm imagining it becoming more of an Android type situation where they pass on the headaches of managing the kernel to someone else and they can just focus on user space.

[Guest]

The free software community has been unable to make big progress on the desktop market for years. Chrome OS and Android don't count, they have Linux cores but proprietary software and services layered all throughout.

The same about os x. It's desktop oriented OS since beginning, but it's still meaningless.