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posted by martyb on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:36AM   Printer-friendly
from the year-of-linux-on-the-desktop dept.

Microsoft is bringing Linux GUI apps to Windows 10:

Linux on Windows 10 gets a big boost and GPU acceleration

Microsoft is promising to dramatically improve its Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) with GUI app support and GPU hardware acceleration. The software giant is adding a full Linux kernel to Windows 10 with WSL version 2 later this month, and it’s now planning to support Linux GUI apps that will run alongside regular Windows apps.

This will be enabled without Windows users having to use X11 forwarding, and it’s mainly designed for developers to run Linux integrated development environments (IDE) alongside regular Windows apps.

While it has been possible to run Linux GUI apps within Windows previously using a third-party X server, poor graphics performance has always been an issue. Microsoft is promising to solve this, too. Windows 10 will soon get added support for GPU hardware acceleration with Linux tools. This is primarily focused on development scenarios involving parallels computation or training machine learning and artificial intelligence models.

So is it the year of Linux on the Desktop?


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  • (Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:54AM (30 children)

    by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:54AM (#996658)

    ...it’s mainly designed for developers to run Linux integrated development environments (IDE) alongside regular Windows apps.

    Is that a real use case?

    Surely any Linux IDE has a Windows equivalent with similar functions? I must be missing something.

    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 4, Touché) by takyon on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:57AM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:57AM (#996661) Journal

    Genuine Microsoft Windows Linux is coming.

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    • (Score: 3, Funny) by captain normal on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:58AM

      by captain normal (2205) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:58AM (#996738)

      Finally the age of the Linux Desktop on our PCs. /s

      --
      When life isn't going right, go left.
    • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:59PM (2 children)

      by Freeman (732) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:59PM (#996915) Journal

      Microsoft Google Edge Chrome was just the beginning. Soon, it shall be Windows Linux 10.10.

      --
      Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
      • (Score: 3, Funny) by DECbot on Wednesday May 20 2020, @09:33PM (1 child)

        by DECbot (832) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @09:33PM (#997103) Journal

        They will hide the Linux part and it will be simply Microsoft Windows X11. Five years later, the next product would be MS Windows X11 - Wayland Edition.

        --
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        • (Score: 1) by petecox on Wednesday May 20 2020, @11:13PM

          by petecox (3228) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @11:13PM (#997139)
          According to Phoronix [phoronix.com], it is Wayland.

          One of the complaints of Wayland is network transparency, which is served over RDP.

  • (Score: 5, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:38AM (22 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:38AM (#996684)

    If you haven't heard it before: Embrace Extend Extinguish...

    MS has periodically made big pushes to "own" as much of the software developer mindshare as possible, including free versions of Visual Studio, and even occasional pushes to improve Visual Studio to keep it competitive with the other tools on the market (but seemingly only when it falls significantly behind...)

    The more they can wrap control around the Linux ecosystem the more they can influence it - the usual tricks being to throw monkey wrenches into the free software works to make their (paid) software look better. I'd like to believe this latest "come to Jesus" round of "Redmond Really Respects Open Source, Honest!" but experience points to the other conclusion.

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    • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:52AM (7 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:52AM (#996687)

      Ha! The joke is on them this time. RedHat has already got into Linux and has it against the wall with systemd. Too late MS!

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:05AM (6 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:05AM (#996697)

        I'm ambivalent about systemd - it's not any harder (or easier) to work with than the hodge podge collection of schema it tries to replace. The one thing that really got me to respect systemd as a legitimate step forward was the generation of Raspbian that let you optionally switch to systemd, the Pi would boot in something less than half the time with the systemd version.

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        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:18AM (4 children)

          by PartTimeZombie (4827) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:18AM (#996706)

          I'm perfectly happy with Systemd.

          It is way easier to work with than the hodge-podge, ramshackle nonsense we had to try to figure out in the past.

          Unfortunately there are a bunch of Internet posters who think it is edgy to pretend Systemd is somehow a bad thing.

          Anyway, it's Linux. If you don't like it, use something else.

          • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:24AM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:24AM (#996746)

            Can you explain to me why updating Firefox silently installed systemd on one of my machines? Because that happened, and it left that system unbootable. Both KDE and Gnome have undeclared dependencies on systemd, and every other desktop environment is under pressure to follow suit. I never wanted the damned thing in the first place. Now get off my lawn.

            • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @09:42PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @09:42PM (#997108)

              Because your distribution maintainers suck at their job, would be my first guess. My second guess would be you were using a distro, that you then highly customized outside of the expected norm. If you want full control of your system use a distro that provides that, you want an "easy to use" all-in-one solution, don't be shocked when your hyper-customizationed system breaks during an update.

          • (Score: 5, Interesting) by darkfeline on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:18AM

            by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:18AM (#996769) Homepage

            Most anti-systemd folks aren't capable of reasonable criticism, but systemd has issues, in particular, its abstraction model is complicated in a negative sense and poorly documented.

            This extremely long article provides the historical context around systemd and a technical analysis: https://blog.darknedgy.net/technology/2020/05/02/0/ [darknedgy.net]

            The thing is, even with all of the issues that systemd has:

            1. By now, most of the issues that matter for actual use cases have been stamped out.
            2. For all its faults, it makes a lot of things better, especially for distro maintainers

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          • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Pav on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:36AM

            by Pav (114) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:36AM (#996771)

            It was a genius move by Redhat - take over a codebase almost as fundamental to Linux as the kernel itself. Nerds as a whole aren't even socially competent let alone politically astute, so there's less need to eg. push corporate climbers into the Debian and Firefox leadership. After Richard Stallman got linked (??!!) to Jeffrey Epstein and rolled out of his own movement there will probably even be a new more friendly GPL on all that code they control, or at least no new GPL that addresses any new issues threatening the movement (unless it's "gender equality" or some other smokescreen issue that has no effect on corporate profits). Control code bases, lock unaffiliated hackers out, complicate things beyond the ability of unaffiliated hackers or small groups to fork and fix... The Empire Strikes Back it seems.

        • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:19PM

          by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:19PM (#997028) Journal

          The night systemd ate the world! Now available on VHS.

          --
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    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:57AM (13 children)

      That's not what MS is doing nowadays. What they're doing lately is embracing free shit instead of spending tons of money on something that makes them fuck-all. They're never going to be anything but ruthless cunts who code badly but they're not entirely stupid given enough time.

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      • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:16AM (1 child)

        by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:16AM (#996743) Homepage Journal

        What they're doing lately is embracing free shit instead of spending tons of money on something that makes them fuck-all.

        I just upgraded my Edge browser to "New Edge". They just cloned Chrome and called it "New Edge". Oh well, it's better than Edge was.

        Speaking of ripping shit off... isn't VMware built off OSS? How are they keeping the source closed and selling it?

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        • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 20 2020, @05:17AM

          They're not actually ripping it off any more than if you forked chrome and called it Sally. I kind of wish they'd forked Firefox instead though, for the rust'y edge jokes.

          No idea on VMWare. It's been too long since I've even thought about it. Wouldn't surprise me if they used some LGPL/BSD/MIT stuff but I doubt they're using GPL stuff without distributing the modified source. Too many folks would have thrown a shit fit by now.

          --
          My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 20 2020, @12:54PM (10 children)

        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @12:54PM (#996854)

        I agree that they're trying to catch up with the rest of the world that realized 10-20 years ago that it's a hell of a lot more efficient to copy and use free stuff than it is to reinvent the free wheel and try to charge for it.

        However, I still think they're trying (successfully, in my neighborhood) to lasso developers into their camp, put them on treadmills and feed them bullshit to keep them ignorant of what lies outside. In my experience, MS developers spend all their brain cycles keeping up with the latest MS APIs, and think that it's just too hard to learn something new outside their previous knowledge base. Color that with vague mostly unsubstantiated fear (uncertainty and doubt, of course) about hardware incompatibility, license issues, lack of support and you get the current closed source software development community - they are legion, they are stalwart, they are a simple fact of life in our corporate culture.

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        • (Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:24PM (9 children)

          Oh they're too conservative a company nowadays to put all their eggs in one basket, so they'll keep making proprietary shat where it's making them wads of cash. But they'll go OSS as much as they can (though not necessarily quickly) where they're losing money or making a shitty ROI. Honestly, it's what they should do from a business perspective, though they should put a bit more effort into coming at it from the other direction and being able to free up all the effort they put into maintaining/"improving" an operating system that makes them little if anything.

          --
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          • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:06PM (8 children)

            by JoeMerchant (3937) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:06PM (#996884)

            But the OS is their "hook" the Prime of their Amazon, it's how they own the bitches. They lose that and their value multipliers fall precipitously...

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            • (Score: 3, Interesting) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 20 2020, @11:46PM (7 children)

              Not if their closed source wine rewrite is dead on the money while wine itself is still buggy and slow.

              --
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              • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:01AM (6 children)

                by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:01AM (#997177)

                This is Redmond we're talking about: dead I'd believe, dead on the money? Like a 1950s nuclear missile.

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                • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday May 21 2020, @04:10AM (5 children)

                  Nah, simple as hell to code exactly the same bugs in when you have the original source.

                  --
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                  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:52AM (4 children)

                    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:52AM (#997339)

                    Do you do much open source system code modification?

                    I've worked with a team of 2 trying to track down discrepancies between the NVIDIA and Intel MESA OpenGL implementations, literally months of work to tweak out 3 little quirks - and we didn't even have to fix the MESA code, just find work-arounds so our code would run the same on both.

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                    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 22 2020, @02:03PM (3 children)

                      You're missing that MS can do whatever they like with MS source, including copy-pasta-ing 99% of it directly over, writing wrappers to make Linux calls look like MS calls for whatever they can for much of the rest, and only rewriting the bits they absolutely have to.

                      --
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                      • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 22 2020, @02:35PM (2 children)

                        by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday May 22 2020, @02:35PM (#997857)

                        We had the MESA source, it's the only way we were able to fix what we did.

                        CopyPasta is powerful juju, but it holds little sway in the realms of shifting hardware layers. Writing wrappers around Linux calls is an efficient shortcut, but it puts MS on the defensive, having to update their wrappers when Linux shifts under them, that's not their traditional role, traditionally they control the shifting sands and force everyone else to scramble to keep their heads up. If they move to a "wrap Linux" strategy (like Apple did), they've surrendered and their valuation will suffer accordingly. Apple's value isn't based on OS-X at all, it's their proprietary iOS that drives their cash machine.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by petecox on Wednesday May 20 2020, @07:25AM

    by petecox (3228) on Wednesday May 20 2020, @07:25AM (#996780)

    VS Code runs on Windows. VS Code runs on Linux. But if you're a Microsoft employee running the company-wide Windows desktop developing VS Code for Linux, you get to run the Linux version without a Windows-Linux cross compilation phase!

  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday May 20 2020, @05:31PM

    ...it’s mainly designed for developers to run Linux integrated development environments (IDE) alongside regular Windows apps.

    Is that a real use case?

    Surely any Linux IDE has a Windows equivalent with similar functions? I must be missing something.

    Assuming you're developing *for* Linux, it makes sense to be able to develop in the target environment.

    Besides, excluding emulators like Wine [wikipedia.org] or an API interface layer like Cygwin [wikipedia.org], Windows and Linux don't share the same APIs, binary formats, dynamic library schemes, etc.

    As such, what advantage would there be in compiling/linking with, say, CLANG or GCC under Windows, when you'd just need to modify your code to run on Linux, recompile/relink under Linux in order to run it on Linux?

    I suppose that if you're writing code (in a compiled language) that can compile, *unmodified*, under Windows and Linux, that might be useful. Then again, you'd still need to build it twice (once on Windows and once on Linux) to have binaries that would run on both platforms.

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