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?
(Score: 4, Funny) by Arik on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:50AM (15 children)
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:02AM
Why should it?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:10AM
Linux kernel is GPLv2. Microsoft will have to release their modified kernel source code, and anything else that qualifies as part of the "derivative product" of the kernel. The exact definition of "derivative product" depends on how much you and Microsoft are willing to spend on lawyers.
(Score: 2) by caseih on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:19AM (1 child)
You do know what a virtual machine is, right? And yes Microsoft is abiding by the letter and spirit of the gplv2 which is what the Linux kennel is licensed under. You will be able to download their patches.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:25AM
Linusian slip
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:16AM (10 children)
Seeing as they rolled Richard Stallman and ejected him from his own movement I wouldn't be surprised if a new MS-friendly GPL is coming... there's a whole lot of software licensed "..or any subsequent version". It's the same way the Democrats and the union movement were defeated - roll the old believers and stock the management with corporate friendly shills who sell the farm.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Wednesday May 20 2020, @07:24AM (7 children)
Even if a new license is coming it, projects cannot just fork and change the license if it would be incompatible. Quite aa lot of FUD.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday May 20 2020, @07:33AM (5 children)
Fork? The FSF requires contributors on its projects to transfer copyright to them so there's no need.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Wednesday May 20 2020, @08:33AM (3 children)
And? This not stop a fork on the still GPL code. Oracle has pulled such tricks with the db berkeley and made it AGPL. The community just forked and continued on the GPL code.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Wednesday May 20 2020, @08:51AM (2 children)
And GitHub, the US government (US Navy, NASA etc...), Tesla, Netflix, WeChat, Facebook, Zendesk, Twitter, Zappos, YouTube, Spotify etc... including their developer contributions stuck with MySQL. Community divided, victory largely achieved, all while nerds deny reality online so nothing is learned.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by aiwarrior on Wednesday May 20 2020, @10:41AM (1 child)
It goes both ways. I just gave you an example of the other way around, ironically from Oracle also. I do not see any victory achieved, specially in the DB space where there is so much diversity already, open and closed source. Actually your example shows exactly that software where there is plenty of support it is a non issue. I can guarantee you that those exact same companies are the first to switch if the community dies.
So i politely disagree. For what is worth i manage an embedded linux distribution for a very big telecom base station manufacturer. We want to take as much for free as possible. Dead communities do not provide "value" so we just move to the next one. The Open source community is self healing.
(Score: 2) by Pav on Friday May 22 2020, @04:01AM
It doesn't have to result in a project kill. It just has to slow development enough, perhaps make security worse because of less eyes etc... so that life is easier for Oracle. How is that NOT a win?
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday May 20 2020, @12:45PM
What does it even mean to transfer copyright under GPL? You just get the license right back from the entity to which you transfer. I guess the FSF could make it proprietary for subsequent versions. You retain all the GPL rights, right up to the moment they do that. If that ever happened, any of the copies out there could be used for a fork, and that would be perfectly legal AFAIK. Maybe they would have to change the name of the project, but that's about it I think. LOL, we'd have "Free GNU" like "Free DOS".
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 3, Funny) by TheRaven on Thursday May 21 2020, @10:54AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @10:36PM (1 child)
I was sad to see Stallman get booted, but honestly he dug his own grave. It is simply the sad state of public comments, on the whole humanity does not do well with nuance. Trying to debate the fine points of pedophilia and outliers that probably shouldn't be grouped as pedophilia is just a terrible terrible terrible thing to argue about in emails. Pair that with his previous gaffes and "jokes" like "hot girls only" or whatever the note was outside his office door, well, yeah he did it to himself.
He needed someone to manage his PR and set him straight on acceptable behavior. Quite frankly he was given a tremendous amount of slack throughout his time at MIT.
I do agree that there is likely larger powers using the scandal to push him out and that is a shame. However, as long as misogynerds keep shrieking about being woke it will be incredibly easy to get people kicked out for crossing the professional line. Bigotry is getting the hammer, and we nerds need to just accept that instead of crying about not being able to say faggot or nigger. Dig your own holes if you wish, I'll stick to adapting to new cultural norms myself instead of becoming the asshole no one wants around.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Thursday May 21 2020, @03:33PM
That this is the world we live in is actually dangerous. This is where the alt rights, or extremisms come from. For every action there is a reaction. If you push things too much in one direction regardless of being morally right or wrong you will make the system less stable and easily trigger "explosive" rebalances. More and more i see human societies as dynamic systems that need to accept good and bad or they will eventually veer into extremes of either way.
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:54AM (30 children)
Is that a real use case?
Surely any Linux IDE has a Windows equivalent with similar functions? I must be missing something.
(Score: 4, Touché) by takyon on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:57AM (4 children)
Genuine Microsoft Windows Linux is coming.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Funny) by captain normal on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:58AM
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)
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)
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.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
(Score: 1) by petecox on Wednesday May 20 2020, @11:13PM
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)
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:52AM (7 children)
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)
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:18AM (4 children)
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)
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
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
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
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Pav on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:36AM
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
The night systemd ate the world! Now available on VHS.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(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.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:16AM (1 child)
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
(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)
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(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.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:06PM (8 children)
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...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(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.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 21 2020, @01:01AM (6 children)
This is Redmond we're talking about: dead I'd believe, dead on the money? Like a 1950s nuclear missile.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(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.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:52AM (4 children)
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(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.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 22 2020, @02:35PM (2 children)
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.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday May 22 2020, @03:12PM (1 child)
I thought it was idiots who can't be arsed to learn anything.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 3, Touché) by JoeMerchant on Friday May 22 2020, @04:59PM
Like I said: iOS - and the devices it strangles.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2, Interesting) by petecox on Wednesday May 20 2020, @07:25AM
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
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.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:57AM (4 children)
This will be the year of linux Desktop on the most insecure OS available.
EMBRACE the change my friends...
(Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:18AM (3 children)
That's what I don't understand, I mean:
Why? Why would anyone care about this? I mean, great y'all watch this! Microsoft, but why?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by toddestan on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:30AM (2 children)
It's Microsoft's way of holding onto the desktop. I'm sure Microsoft really prefers that you run Windows, but if you're going to run Linux, they'd much rather have you run their Microsoft Linux than to eschew Microsoft entirely and install and run Linux on the bare metal.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by petecox on Wednesday May 20 2020, @07:41AM (1 child)
Or Microsoft are planning to modernise Windows by progressively shrinking the codebase through FOSS technologies.
So today's announcement of DirectX on Linux but only within WSL looks bad from the E-E-E perspective but hear me out.
The optimist in me sees MS dump their own graphics internals to take advantage of Vulkan and OpenCL via Mesa and Gallium3D. DirectX, like OpenGL is then just a shim over Vulkan and the Windows desktop is now just a Wayland compositor atop an NT kernel. Kernel shim aside, vendors then need to write only one implementation of their driver to target Windows, Chrome OS, Android and various *nixes including *native* Linux.
MS shrinks their code base and gets to focus on their core 21st C business - the cloud, where whether Office 365 runs on Android, ChromeOS or even Windows 10 is immaterial.
(Score: 1) by petecox on Wednesday May 20 2020, @08:16AM
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:16AM (5 children)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish [wikipedia.org]
"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE),[1] also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate",[2] is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found[3] was used internally by Microsoft[4] to describe its strategy for entering product categories involving widely used standards, extending those standards with proprietary capabilities, and then using those differences in order to strongly disadvantage its competitors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:20AM (4 children)
Can't wait to see what they'll do with systemd.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:21AM
Oh, nothing. It's just Windows scheduler code. Relax and breathe normally as we're all assimilated.
(Score: 3, Touché) by toddestan on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:34AM
Microsoft doesn't need systemd. Windows already has svchost.exe.
(Score: 3, Touché) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:35AM
Improve windows.
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:19PM
This whole situation calls into question the calculus behind systemd.
If the idea really was that Linux needed Windows-like service management, then clearly WSL 2 is the better solution. You can run Linux within Windows and get a much more mature solution than anything Red Hat could build in such a short time.
Perhaps it was all a ploy to get us used to an inferior version of Windows instead of the actually different product that used to be Linux.
Or perhaps they really still think that systemd makes RHEL a stronger competitor.
Either way, now is a good time to divest from low-level Linux stuff in general and move to either a BSD for low-level stuff or Docker for pure user-space.
Linux on the desktop is dead, my friends.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Wednesday May 20 2020, @02:57AM (15 children)
I remember running Linux apps on my Windows desktop back around 2002. Check out x-win32!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X-Win32 [wikipedia.org]
(maybe not free software, but based on MIT-licensed X11 server. As per licensing, they used X11 to create something new and useful!)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:29AM (10 children)
I hadn't heard of X-Win32, but it looks to be only a display server, right? Like Cygwin/X, Xming, MochaX, etc., where you don't run the actual app on the Windows machine? The app runs on the Linux machine, and displays on the Windows machine (through the network). I've used MochaX for that in the rare cases when I need to run an X app on a server, but don't want to run X on said server. Or, I'm just not in the server room.
(Score: 2) by DrkShadow on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:10AM (1 child)
In this case, run the app inside the console-based Linux kernel, and display to x-win32. All on the same machine.
(Isn't the Windows linux kernel inside a VM though? So essentially this is VMware with its per-window integration, something that has been doable since.. 2012? Now with Hyper-V!)
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:13PM
Well, yes, but why do that?
(Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:20AM (7 children)
Using Cygwin/X, I currently have two *nix apps running natively on my Windows desktop. There are many more, but I'm only using two right this minute.
I've been doing that for decades, in fact.
In fact, there are (currently) 9,423 *nix apps that can run locally on your Windows box with Cygwin [cygwin.com]. What's more Cygwin has a fully functional development environment which will allow you to port whatever you want to run natively (if not already supported) on Windows.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:16PM (6 children)
Thanks. I've known of Cygwin/X for years, but thought it was just a big X-server project. Didn't know it was a Linux kernel / libs emulator too. And it looks like it was abandoned years ago? But maybe it's just fully mature?
But why run Linux apps on Windows?
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday May 20 2020, @05:12PM (5 children)
Cygwin is not a linux kernel/libs emulator. Rather, Cygwin [wikipedia.org]:
Abandoned? Where did you get that idea? The latest *stable* version of the cygwin1.dll was released this past February.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 20 2020, @05:36PM (4 children)
I was looking at "Cygwin/X". This answers both of your questions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin/X [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by NotSanguine on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:08PM (3 children)
Your link didn't answer either of those questions.
Cygwin/X is *not* an emulator [wikipedia.org]:
What's more, Cygwin/X [github.com] (despite what the link above claims) is *not* an X Server. Rather, it's a set of patches for XOrg [wikipedia.org], allowing XOrg to run with Cygwin.
XOrg is most certainly under active development (latest release: 29 March 2020), and since the API is stable, there's little reason (aside from security issues) to modify those patches.
In fact, aside from core cygwin1.dll development, all other "cygwin" development is based around patching *nix packages to support running via Cygwin and once that support is available, there's little reason to update it unless there are security issues and/or API changes to the core cygwin1.dll.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:32PM
Thank you!!
(Score: 3, Interesting) by RS3 on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:39PM (1 child)
BTW, what I meant to communicate, in my overly-brief way, is that the link answers your questions about what _I_ understood. Context, right?
I observe a big factor in Internet forum miscommunications is that most people perceive comments as being made from some kind of omniscient attitude. I keep in mind that we're all just people, most doing our best- in spite of the ego we all have.
(Score: 4, Informative) by NotSanguine on Wednesday May 20 2020, @07:28PM
Absolutely. Context is almost always important. My reply wasn't a dig at you, nor was it through any sense of omniscience on my part. You brought up some interesting points, in fact. While discussion doesn't *require* agreement (that would make discussion really boring IMHO), focusing on the discussion itself rather than the participants (hopefully with the understanding, as you correctly point out, that "we're all just people, most doing our best- in spite of the ego we all have.") is generally much more productive and interesting.
I was actually a little surprised that the Wikipedia article so badly misstated what Cygwin/X might be. Which is why I made sure to check both https://x.cygwin.com [cygwin.com] and github [github.com] to make sure I was, in fact, correct.
It's unfortunate, and if I hadn't been an active (and enthusiastic) user of Cygwin for at least two decades (I believe I was already using it in 1998, but memory is a tricky thing sometimes), and known how Cygwin works, I'd likely have left it with the Wikipedia article.
An interesting tidbit: For most apps that have been modified to support Cygwin that don't have other dependencies, binaries require *only* a local copy of cygwin1.dll to function normally on a Windows system -- no installation or configuration (aside from configurations required by the particular app) required.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:16PM (3 children)
I used to run colinux [colinux.org] and I also used to use blackbox [blackbox4windows.com] because "Windows" window management was shit.
(Score: 2) by RS3 on Wednesday May 20 2020, @04:21PM (2 children)
Thanks little AC. Those look very interesting. I've heard of them but must not have learnt much. Did MS simply "adopt" colinux?
Trying to do some research... is blackbox pretty much wine?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:33PM
blackbox for Windows is a port of blackbox [archlinux.org] On Windows, a desktop shell replacement that allowed for workspaces (and from memory) pinning and rolling windows up and down. This was around 15-20 years back when I was forced to W2k. A MSCE colleague was impressed enough to start using it himself.
(Score: 3, Informative) by dry on Thursday May 21 2020, @04:43AM
Blackbox is (was) a simple window manager for X11. It's been forked a few times with the most famous being fluxbox. I used to use it on OS/2, where Xfree86 ran fine, though full screen so it could take over the graphics system.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by fustakrakich on Wednesday May 20 2020, @03:26AM
We will have have all sorts of Windows malware leaking back into Linux. Anything accessed by Windows is in grave danger.
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:55AM (4 children)
When Windows NT first came out the adverts said, "A better Unix than Unix."
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @09:18AM (1 child)
I thought it was a "better VAX than UNIX", but I am getting forgetful. A better VMS, which was better than CP/M, neither of which were written by Microsoft. And only now, at the end, do you see the true power of the Dark Side, to steal code written by others, brand it, and in the darkness bind it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @12:57PM
I loved VMS. I miss it. It was a shame the OpenVMS project never went anywhere.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DannyB on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:25PM (1 child)
Another one was: Windows XX, Designed for the Internet!
(where XX was some version, maybe XP?)
Answer to that was: The Internet, Designed for Unix.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 3, Informative) by turgid on Thursday May 21 2020, @06:38PM
Winows NT: built on the BSD networking stack.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @12:14PM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXpNU2fAtCs [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday May 20 2020, @12:36PM
When MS introduced its "store", my reaction was, "If I wanted the Apple experience, I'd buy Apple products". Now it's, "If I wanted to run Linux GUI apps, I'd run Linux"!
Appended to the end of comments you post. Max: 120 chars.
(Score: 2) by iWantToKeepAnon on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:00PM
"Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." -- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @01:36PM (1 child)
Just run any windows x server and most linux gui programs work, also you can run any program off a remote server through a ssh session once you have an x server. There are stacks of free ones, just choose one.
(Score: 2) by canopic jug on Wednesday May 20 2020, @06:04PM
Forwarding X over SSH would allow any application to run. That won't tie people further into M$ products. They might even end up running GNU/Linux applications natively and not inside WSL2. These applications, once infected with DirectX, will only run on Window's new Linux Subsystem for Windows (WSL2) and nowhere else.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday May 20 2020, @08:01PM (2 children)
The application availability of Linux with the security and privacy of Windows!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @11:25AM
Score 0? This comment just won the whole internet!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @07:06PM
there's plenty of apps for linux. just not your gay-ass, proprietary shit, you dumb fucking whore.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 21 2020, @06:57PM
MS is using the open source code of linux software to do what linux distros should be doing (making MS apps run transparently on linux) but probably can't very easily due to MS code being closed source. IOW, MS is using linux' openness against itself. i hate MS so much.