Microsoft Has A Large Presence At This Year's X.Org Conference

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Microsoft Has A Large Presence At This Year's X.Org Conference

Years ago if saying Microsoft would have multiple developers presenting at the annual X.Org Developers' Conference (XDC) as well as being a sponsor, you'd probably raise some laughs. But this year for XDC2020 Gdansk (albeit virtual due to COVID-19), Microsoft engineers gave not just one talk but three on the opening day...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-XDC-2020

[Eraserstp]

The EEE strategy in full swing.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

The EEE strategy in full swing.

It's hard to "boo" virtually for a talk.

[spykes]

I would prefer Microsoft to open DX12 and contribute to a Linux driver that could be used ON Linux instead of this.

[chithanh]

Then again, Microsoft has sponsored LinuxTag and other events over the years

I was there when Microsoft had a booth at LinuxTag (2013?), across our Gentoo booth (shared with SchilliX) and next to ReactOS.

Turns out that the Microsoft booth staff had never heard of ReactOS before. They were handing out vouchers for their fledgling Azure cloud, hoping that Linux distros would create OS images that Azure customers could then deploy. I presume because Microsoft had neither the desire nor expertise to do this in-house. They've come a long way since then.

The EEE strategy in full swing.

That may be closer to the truth than many think.

• Embrace: Yeah. Linux is now present everywhere in Microsoft's own products. Even Microsoft Office officially runs on Linux (technically, Android).
• Extend: It is now possible to write Linux code that runs only - or makes sense to run only - inside WSL(2). Microsoft themselves are doing this: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?pa...g-Wayland-Comp.
• Extinguish: I guess we can commend Microsoft that they stopped short of that.

It's hard to "boo" virtually for a talk.

That squarely depends on the conference organizers and what technology they choose for live streaming. With YouTube you have live comments right next to the video. Others publish an "official" Twitter hashtag and display a live feed. Aside from the obvious privacy downside of giving your data to Google and Twitter, this works quite well in giving immediate feedback to the presenter.

[shmerl]

MS being MS. DX12 only and etc. Where is Vulkan there?

[ed31337]

Microsoft's WSL strategy seems really dumb to me. Why are they bothering with trying to get Linux to run under Windows so much? This is backwards.

What they should've been doing is getting everybody's Windows apps to work fast and smooth under Linux. Then they could finally sunset Windows as the second rate OS that it always was. This would free themselves from unnecessary OS security and maintenance work that Linux does so much better, for free.

[Remote User]

An Xserver from Microsoft... How many times did that get voted down over the decades, I wonder. Yeah, thin client computing... I know. Remote users are OK, as long as Microsoft gets paid the same as if they had their own PC and Windows license.

[JPFSanders]

Microsoft's WSL strategy seems really dumb to me. Why are they bothering with trying to get Linux to run under Windows so much? This is backwards.

They want windows developers to stick to windows, and windows centric companies to not bother running on metal linux

There is a type of modern developer who is lazy and woefully ignorant (they know very little about low level stuff and leverage copy/paste a lot) MS knows this and want to prevent those developers from ever moving to Linux.

By embracing running Linux on top of windows they keep those developers on an environment that is familiar and works for them.

Trying to run bare metal Linux is not always straight-forward and requires to learn. Those ILD (Ignorant lazy devs) will feel at home running windows while they leverage whatever Linux has to offer that is unavailable on Windows for the time being.

MS might not know how to do the extinguish phase yet, but you can count that they're waiting for the right moment and the right opportunity.

Getting into the action right now getting involved with Linuxland and pretending to be your friend is what they always do to any industry they want to assault.

What count is not words but actions, what has MS done that benefits the Linux ecosystem at large? so far: NOTHING.

Always keep in mind, besides themselves, Linux is their only competition left.

What they should've been doing is getting everybody's Windows apps to work fast and smooth under Linux. Then they could finally sunset Windows as the second rate OS that it always was. This would free themselves from unnecessary OS security and maintenance work that Linux does so much better, for free.

They will never do such a thing, MS only does what is good for MS, and this is what the Linux community/ecosystem should do, do things that are good for Linux, however keeping an eye on not falling into traps from the likes of MS.

MS has a money printing machine with their stronghold of Exchange, Office and Windows on the desktop which also pushes sales of windows servers, why would they break it?

[kpedersen]

Microsoft at an Xorg conference.

Oh god, perhaps Xorg really is obsolete these days.

Is good ol' X11 still the only way that WSL can display GUI programs on Windows? That is a little sad non-one has a better solution. It does kind of demonstrate how important a network aware display system is though. Imagine if all we had was Wayland...