Microsoft Made More Linux / Open-Source Announcements In 2019 From exFAT To WSL2

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Microsoft Made More Linux / Open-Source Announcements In 2019 From exFAT To WSL2

Under the continued guidance of Satya Nadella, Microsoft made more interesting open-source / Linux moves in 2019 most notably with allowing exFAT support to be introduced into the mainline Linux kernel and also introducing Windows Subsystem for Linux 2...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-Open-Source-2019

[uid313]

I would love to see Microsoft release GitHub Desktop for Linux.
Also to port Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) and XAML to Linux. It is open source and available for .NET Core, but the code doesn't run on Linux.

What would you like Microsoft to do?

[ezst036]

Microsoft for Microsoft.

Dont get me wrong. Many of these things also benefit others, and myself as well. One cant help but notice the developer-focused and/or under the hood-centric nature of many of the items.

When I can plug in a USB drive formatted as xfs or ext4(etc) and it is natively recognized in Windows Explorer as a drive on Windows 10 Home Edition, now that would be something.

I will readily admit though, I am very thankful that Microsoft is no longer acting like Nvidia.

[lowlands]

Yes in 2019 the Redmond PR machine again put a lot of effort in claiming MSFT loves Linux. But have you noticed that zero of their announcements in any way could (negatively) impact their core products? Everything they announce was already sort of available, mostly development related or it was an add-on (aka WSL) or extensions (Powershell on Linux) that also does not threaten their core products.

If they really loved Linux, why not make Active Directory available on Linux (with a PostgreSQL backend)? Why not release Exchange for Linux? Why not release Office for Linux? The answer is simple: it would cost MSFT billions of dollars in unsold Windows, Windows Server & MSSQL Server licenses. So that's a big NO.

All their announcements seem focused on creating easier access to their eco-system from Linux because the world is mostly running on Linux. So next time you hear someone chant the MSFT party line, ask them when AD, Exchange and Office will be available on Linux. And how the Linux eco-system benefits from all this.

[ed31337]

Aside from the exFAT support being added to Linux (which I already had via manually installed fuse packages), none of Microsoft's Linux work has done anything to improve my computing. Even exFAT is pretty worthless to me except in the rare instance that I need to sneaker net some data from Linux to Windows for some reason.

If Microsoft made Active Directory, Exchange, or Office for Linux, none of that would impress me. I don't use any of that stuff.

About the only thing that would impress me is if Microsoft open sourced Windows or contributed to WINE to the point that we could run all legacy Windows software under Linux. But even that keeps getting less and less interesting as genuine open source Linux software keeps coming out with better and better stuff.

[dacha]

Visual Studio Code works well on Linux, Teams works now, .NET Core supports Linux, there is a port of SQL Server to Linux, and a client for SQL Server for Linux. As of November 2020, .NET 5 will be open-source, the Windows version of which could tremendously help Wine (replacing Wine-Mono with the original .NET implementation) - Wine-Mono already ships with Microsoft's open-source WinForms.

Unfortunately, Microsoft is probably friendlier to Linux because they are making money from the cloud now, an even worse situation for us...