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posted by janrinok on Saturday February 03 2018, @03:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the 10-or-nothing dept.

Microsoft revealed today that Office 2019 will ship in the second half of 2018, and will run exclusively on Windows 10.

Microsoft's General Manager for Windows, Bernardo Caldas, and General Manager for Office, Jared Spataro announced changes to Office and Windows servicing and support today.

[...] Office 2019 applications will only be supported on a limited number of Windows client and server operating system versions. In particular, Office 2019 will only be supported on the following systems:

  • Any supported Windows 10 SAC (Semi-Annual Channel) release.
  • Windows 10 Enterprise Long Term Servicing Channel 2018.
  • The next Long Term Servicing Channel release of Windows Server.

Unless I'm misreading Microsoft's announcement, Office 2019 won't be available for Windows 8.1 or Windows 7, or older Server versions.

[...] The company plans to support Office 2019 for five years of mainstream support and about two years of extended support.

[...] Office 2019 support will end around the same time that Office 2016 ends. It is unclear why Microsoft made the decision; one explanation is that the company plans to move all-in in regards to Office 365 and Office in the cloud and that 2025 may be the year Microsoft might make that switch.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Marand on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:17AM (8 children)

    by Marand (1081) on Saturday February 03 2018, @08:17AM (#632414) Journal

    If you're upgrading hardware anyway, you could look into making your system viable for GPU passthrough. Get a second GPU, run Windows 10 in a VM, and don't use it for anything else, just the couple pieces of software that hold you to Windows now. It's more work, but you won't have to give anything up and Windows 10 isn't so bad for general use when it can't actually spy on you due to having no network access :)

    I ended up with my W7 license upgraded to 10 unwillingly (long story, W7 broke spectacularly and ended up trying to fix it with a W10 upgrade that also failed...but couldn't go back), so when I did a hardware upgrade I did precisely that. I've got a W10 VM that I only load when I need to use a specific piece of software and it has very little useful data, so MS gets nothing out of me even when I do allow it online. I only boot it rarely, but when I do it beats dual-boot or keeping a second system around.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @07:48PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 03 2018, @07:48PM (#632641)

    I've tentatively dipped my toes into running Windows in a VM to accomodate specific hardware (specifically XP, but then who's counting), but I came away with the impression that graphics in particular are "basically impossible" to fully use properly in a VM. My unhealthy virtual-crack addiction to Windows-only games is dragging me down from a healthy pursuit of Linux-as-primary-OS (or perhaps in light of the systemd-esque fiascos, *BSDs).

    Are you claiming that "GPU passthrough" via a second GPU enables performance at near-native levels for Windows gaming in a VM? If so, would you share a few more tidbits for curious folks like me to get spun up on this new magic of which you speak? (Such as specific VM software, basic example of your working system, etc.?)

    • (Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Saturday February 03 2018, @09:29PM (1 child)

      by Azuma Hazuki (5086) on Saturday February 03 2018, @09:29PM (#632673) Journal

      I've never done this myself, but as I understand it, a CPU with Intel VT-d or AMD IOMMU is required. This allows you to specify, at the Linux commandline, which PCIe slots are to be populated with a "PCI Stub" driver, and then the VM hypervisor of your choice can be directed to dedicate these slots explicitly to a single VM.

      There's a youtube video of someone doing this, IIRC, which I first saw more than a year ago.

      --
      I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
      • (Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday February 04 2018, @05:02AM

        by Marand (1081) on Sunday February 04 2018, @05:02AM (#632804) Journal

        You've got the gist of it. I gave some extra detail in my other comment [soylentnews.org] if you're interested.

    • (Score: 4, Informative) by Marand on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:59AM (2 children)

      by Marand (1081) on Sunday February 04 2018, @04:59AM (#632801) Journal

      I've tentatively dipped my toes into running Windows in a VM to accomodate specific hardware (specifically XP, but then who's counting), but I came away with the impression that graphics in particular are "basically impossible" to fully use properly in a VM. My unhealthy virtual-crack addiction to Windows-only games is dragging me down from a healthy pursuit of Linux-as-primary-OS (or perhaps in light of the systemd-esque fiascos, *BSDs).

      Normally a VM presents an emulated graphics device to the guest OS. It's not exactly impossible to do well, but it tends to be buggy and/or slow. GPU passthrough bypasses that completely, though.

      Are you claiming that "GPU passthrough" via a second GPU enables performance at near-native levels for Windows gaming in a VM? If so, would you share a few more tidbits for curious folks like me to get spun up on this new magic of which you speak?

      Yeah, that's correct. Azuma Hazuki's response covers the gist of it already, but I'll add some detail since I have experience with it.

      Typically, VMs provide emulated hardware for the guest OS, but sometimes you want to give them direct access to real hardware. With USB devices it's easy, so USB passthrough is fairly well supported in just about any virt software, and has been for quite a while. You pick the device by ID and when the VM starts, that device becomes unvailable to the host OS, and can be used directly by the guest. So, using a wacom tablet as an example, you then install wacom's driver in the guest OS and the tablet works in the guest directly.

      Not everything you want to pass through is USB, though. If you wanted to pass through PCI-e devices you were out of luck for a while, but hardware with IOMMU virtualisation extensions (branded VT-d for Intel, or AMD-Vi for AMD) splits up hardware address ranges into groups, and you can pass these IOMMU groups to VMs, which gives them direct access to that hardware.

      So, the idea is you assign the secondary GPU to a stub driver to prevent any GPU drivers on the host OS from picking it up, and pass the IOMMU group to the guest OS. Now, when you boot the VM, it gets direct control of that secondary GPU, and uses the native drivers of the guest OS, just like if it were a bare-metal install. (Of course, that means you also have to attach the secondary GPU to a monitor, or a second input on another monitor, because one of the benefits of the virtualised GPUs that VM software uses is how it allows you to see the contents of the VM in a window.)

      (Such as specific VM software, basic example of your working system, etc.?)

      I believe all the major VM options have it in some form, though each one has different caveats:

      * With VMWare, you have to be using ESXi
      * VirtualBox can do PCI passthrough, but lacks some extra features that help "hide" the hypervisor from the guest OS. This means AMD GPUs should still work, but nvidia GPUs will not because the nvidia driver attempts to detect if it's being used in a VM and throws an error if it does in an attempt to drive sales of enterprise-class GPUs.
      * Xen supports it. I didn't feel like messing with Xen, though, so that's all I know about it.
      * KVM supports it. Kernels older than 4.15 have a couple bugs that could reduce GPU passthrough performance in some situations, but a workaround was available, and as of 4.15 the workaround is no longer necessary.

      For hardware, I'm using a Ryzen 7 1700, MSI x370 SLI PLUS motherboard, 32GB of RAM, a GTX 1070 Ti for the host OS (Debian) and a GTX 1060 for the guest. Typically, if the purpose is gaming, people pass through the more powerful GPU and leave something weak and inexpensive for the host, but I still prefer Debian for most use, only using the Windows VM as a fallback when required, so I gave the midrange card to the guest instead.

      As a side note, I would have preferred an AMD card for the passthrough because it makes things a lot easier compared to fighting with nvidia's drivers, but the cryptocurrency GPU apocalypse made that practically impossible. I was using a 1060 (6gb) and had been considering either a second 3gb one or a 1050 for the guest OS, but when the 1070 Ti released I got lucky and was able to acquire one before the miners had a chance to figure out if it was worth buying or not. That's the bad thing about a passthrough setup right now: GPU costs are ludicrous and only getting worse. At current rates, I could sell that Ti for more than I spent on both GPUs combined. You can do a trial-run with an older GPU, in theory, but if the card is too old its firmware might not have UEFI support, which complicates things. I ran into that problem attempting to pass through a GTX 660 to a guest OS :/

      Anyway, I went with KVM because vbox and vmware were out of the question and xen required more effort to get started. Rather than deal with qemu directly, I used a GUI tool called virt-manager that acts as a frontend for a virtualisation abstraction named libvirt that tries to provide a consistent interface to features available to different virtualisation systems (xen, vmware, qemu, virtualbox). All said, it worked pretty well, and I was able to do most of the setup via GUI, with a few tweaks for passthrough- and qemu-specific things made by editing the XML configuration.

      Most of the software setup wasn't too bad. There's some old info floating around so it took a little trial and error to stub out the card, but the passthrough was simple enough, and even there, most of the trouble for me came not from the passthrough itself, but from figuring out the magic combination of settings to hide the hypervisor from the Windows nvidia driver. (Hence why I would have preferred an AMD GPU for the guest.) This is oversimplifying a bit, since I've also spent a good bit of time tweaking miscallenous things on both host and guest, but I don't want to go into it since it's mostly tangential to the passthrough and this comment is long enough already.

      Now I have a system where both GPUs are connected to the same monitor, one to HDMI and one to DVI, and I press the monitor's input button to switch when I need. Recently a frame relay for KVM called Looking Glass [hostfission.com] has shown up, which should make this part unnecessary, but I haven't tried it out yet.

      Like anything else, there are tradeoffs here. GPU perfromance is native and CPU is something like 95%, but the second GPU and monitor trickery means you could get a similar result by building a second system and using Synergy or a keyboard/mouse switch, and doing so would be much easier, so one might wonder why bother at all. The advantage, as I see it, is I was able to put my money into a single, better system, so that I have more flexibility in how I use it. Instead of two systems with 16GB of RAM, half the threads, and separate GPUs, I have an 8c/16t system with 32GB, and I only give up resources to the second OS when I need to. I can even get the second GPU back by un-stubbing it temporarily, if I ever run into a need for using both on the host.

      Finally, a note about Windows 10. First off, as maligned as it is, my impression of it has been that it is, overall, an improvement on Windows 7 in many (maybe even most) ways, and I say this as someone that doesn't particularly like Windows. Unfortunately, anything good one can say about it ends up overshadowed by a handful of brain-dead decisions that drag the entire thing down, mostly related to the removal or reduction of user control.

      Still, despite that, it does have one major benefit for uses like this: Microsoft's licensing terms have finally started allowing for VM installation. Even the plain old home edition is usable in a VM without violating the license, assuming you care about such things. They also provide images directly on their site now, and it works for a while without a key entered, making it good for experimentation.

      Also, running it in a VM means some of those annoyances aren't nearly as annoying. I don't care what it does about changing application defaults, because I don't use them; doesn't matter to me if Edge makes itself the browser default when I only browse from the host OS. Its pushy update behaviour doesn't matter much, because I can just go back to working from my primary OS while it does. I've disabled as much telemetry as possible, but again, it matters less when I'm not actually giving it useful data to phone home.

      I wouldn't want it as my main OS, but it has its use as a win10do. :)

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @06:33AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @06:33AM (#632827)

        Thank you kindly! Yeah, the real solution for addicts like me is to get off of windows entirely, but your detailed information on using VMs with passthroughs sounds like a good plan to exit gracefully rather than white-knuckle cold turkey.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @08:33AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 04 2018, @08:33AM (#632848)

        Even the plain old home edition is usable in a VM without violating the license,

        As if I cared even a scintilla about violating the license of an convicted felon corporation! I have violated every license of every Windoze operating system, some more than a dozen times! I have shared them with my enemies, who have suffered greatly therefrom! I have edited Registries without authorization, I have killed Blue Screens of Death! I have left installs of Win98 running, without rebooting, for months, until they were begging to be put out of their misery! Cruel, I know, but after what they did to me! So I violate Microsoft with a VM. Ha! I would prefer a red-hot axle shaft from a Toyota Fuji! If only to let them know a smidgeon of the pain and suffering that Micro$oft has inflicted on me, my friends, my family, and my fellow humans. Some things are unforgiveable, and what Micro$oft has done to computing is one of those things.

  • (Score: 2) by black6host on Sunday February 04 2018, @03:02AM (1 child)

    by black6host (3827) on Sunday February 04 2018, @03:02AM (#632764) Journal

    I appreciate your advice. Unfortunately money is a factor, especially when I have to replace industry specific hardware or software. So, those things will take any money I could towards better hardware, and my machine is no slouch as it is.

    I guess I just accept my departure from Windows as inevitable. And won't I breathe a sigh of relief when that's done.

    Besides, if I stopped looking at games for silly graphics and more for game play I think I'd be a happier gamer. Plenty of good games on the Linux front.

    • (Score: 2) by Marand on Sunday February 04 2018, @05:09AM

      by Marand (1081) on Sunday February 04 2018, @05:09AM (#632807) Journal

      Well, if your hardware still works fine but just needs Windows to run, you can most likely pass it through just like the GPU and avoid having to replace it all. USB passthrough is easy, and the virt. extensions for IOMMU allow any PCI-e passthrough, not just GPUs. (That's just the most common use.) There's also a possibility that your system's already able to do passthrough, you'd just need a second GPU.

      Keep the idea in mind, because having that safety net might ease the transition some. Either way, though, good luck with it. Ditching Windows as primary OS isn't the easy path, but you end up with more flexibility and control in the end. :)