I still believe the name should be Linux Subsystem for Windows. The other way around sound like Proton
That would require Microsoft admitting they come in second.
The one Microshaft fanboi downvoting you for speaking facts 🤣
There is always one…
Four
Microsoft has always been terrible at naming things. And at developing things. And at literally everything.
I’d say the one thing they’ve been decent at is input devices, oddly enough. I was pretty happy with my SideWinder 3D Pro joystick and my Intellimouse Explorer back in the day. I also still (very occasionally) use an Xbox 360 controller attached to my Linux PC.
No credit for Xboxes themselves, let alone other hardware like Zunes and Windows Phones and shit, of course.
They were historically good at input devices because they were the only ones with enough weight to get manufacturers to stop fucking around and use xinput, which guaranteed their hegemony with normal controllers for a long time. 5-10 years ago, it was basically impossible to get a normal controller (ie Xbox or ps layout) that was not approved by Microsoft, working in all games.
LOL, my Microsoft joystick is so old it connected to the gameport on my sound card – I’m pretty sure XInput didn’t even exist yet.
I think I had the same thing that we played Duke Nukem 3D with
I love Xbox 360 controllers, I always use the wired ones so you don’t have to fuck about with batteries which I always find annoying to deal with, you also don’t need the receiver thing either. And latency is lower.
I find 360 controllers seem to be the most comfortable to hold in my hands, as well as being pretty well built. You can get them used on eBay for like £15/$20
Shout out to the Sculpt ergonomic keyboard too, my go-to for many years.
Windows phone was their best product
Except VSCode for some reason. VSCode is great.
Say that to the face of a hardcore Vim or Emacs user and enjoy the essay.
I like vim, but I’m not a power user, so trying to code with it sounds…painful. I’ve never cracked emacs, although it has piqued my curiosity.
Learning vim motions in VSCode with the vim plugin was the best decision I made this year. Made programming even more fun and after a year of learning I actually feel that I finally reached a point where I’m a lot more productive. I set up neovim too, but I’m missing some things to fully switch from VSCode and I have to research my options (git integration and debugging are my pet peeves), which I haven’t had time for lately.
mostly because all the good stuff in vscode comes from open source community
And themselves, generally
As well as their founder.
It’s also usually lawyers that create these names. I worked on databases for IBM Cloud and they were all called “IBM Cloud Databases for Elasticsearch” and what have you. Despite it being an offering of the database on IBM’s cloud.
Since Elasticsearch is a brand name, the “host” corporation corporation has to present it as a product “for” the brand name rather than as the brand name itself to avoid implying that they are acting AS Linux or Elasticsearch or whoever is the third party.
From where do you think comes the Balmer peak?
It actually makes sense. It’s a subsystem in Windows (therefore a windows subsystem) that makes Linux work
I can’t cite a source but I read once that the lawyers got involved and said Microsoft/Windows/some other term they have legal control of had to be the first word.
Lawyers, they fuck up everything.
What’s the difference between a lawyer and a hooker? A hooker stops fucking you when you’re dead.
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I think that’s just branding 101
Then why not call it “Windows subsystem of Linux”? Changes the meaning of the sentence completely
Because it isn’t a subsystem of Linux. It is a subsystem in Windows that allows Linux to run as part of Windows.
The windows subsystem gives Linux access to the Windows system.
In what world would Microsoft allow the Linux name to appear before Windows? If MS were a person, they would be diagnosed with Narcissistic Personality Disorder.
It is a subsystem of Windows that Linux runs in. It’s not a subsystem of Linux.
Windows is the system. It’s the host operating system. It created a subsystem specifically for running a child operating system. In this case, Linux
To this day, I still don’t understand what takes windows updates so dam long. Not sure about Mac, but Linux takes, what, 5 minutes at most if you’ve gone a while.
This is a byproduct of one of the largest and more ignored differences between windows and linux. The fact that Linux let’s you modify files while they are open whereas windows doesn’t.
This means that you can update a linux system by just replacing the files with the new ones while it runs. On the other side, Windows can’t modify its own files while it runs, so instead it has a second entire OS to update itself, and requires a reboot to unload all the files and boot from the updater without locking windows files.
In some sense this would even seem an advantage of Windows. (I know it’s the fundamental reason for many hangs and freezes, but the idea that a file is a lockable resource doesn’t seem that bad.)
There is flock/fcntl for you. But locking is bad for performance too, especially in multithreaded enviroments.
Yes, the thing is - it’s a choice.
Then there is cooperative locking for you. It becomes a choice.
I think files being locked is really intuitive, which greatly helps new users. Allowing files to be modified or deleted while they are open makes it really easy to shoot yourself in the foot. For example in the video of Linus switching to Linux he was uncompressing a file and tried to open it while it was still uncompressing, which failed since the file wasn’t complete. He didn’t understand why the file wasnt uncompressing correctly. That can’t happen on Windows, since the file being uncompressed would be locked.
I think there should be a ‘lockable mode’, and for distributions oriented to new users the home directory should be mounted like that.
There IS ‘lockable mode’ since System V era. It is extensively used by package managers and similar stuff.
Deleting file does not actually deletes it from disk until last program closes it. And there are ways to open file such that changes to file will not be seen in program.
Yeah with “lockable mode” I mean locking by default instead of requiring every program to specifically call for locking.
It would probably break lots of software, but only using such mode for the users home (or maybe even specific Downloads/documents/desktop/etc folders within the home directory) could reduce the impact.
[Edit] wait I think there is whole fs locking mode on mounting, with the “mand” option, going to test it.
ReplaceFileexists to get everyone else’s semantics though?Silverblue also does this, yet updates are really quick
No, silverblue does all the work before you restart the computer, and the actual work doesn’t involve replacing the OS itself but basically downloading some files and just checking a different git branch when booting.
Mac updates are less frequent but take longer. They also restart the machine. One difference though is that my mac never took it upon itself to start an update without asking my opinion.
/laughs in company enforced updates/
First they nag you. Then they nag even more. Then they blur out everything making your system unusable unless you hit update.
And it’s all done with style, looking good while closing in on ya
Edit: you seem to have a pair of spare / /
May i borrow them?
I somehow lost mine.
¯_(ツ)_¯
Sure. Knock yourself out
\ \ \ / / /
Thanks - now i’m complete
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
One company I worked at had a weird customization for both Windows and Dell UEFI updates, and this shit was super intrusive, basically you could skip it only once, and then it’d count down to the update even if you’re on an important Teams meeting
Lack of proper package management is my assumption.
I hear it takes a long time on Macs too!
thankfully I don’t have this problem on my Gentoo
I’d be using Gentoo if not for installing software being something you have to plan for.
“Sorry boss I can’t come into work today, I need to install important security updates on my fifteen arch and/or gentoo desktops and servers.”
Exactly.
Very true for mainstream distros, but there’s more: Linux updates in the background. No matter how long it takes(if you for example use Gentoo), there is zero downtime. And with kexec your system can be its own bootloader and can do insane stuff like starting new kernel without re-running POST, which is on servers is very important(because they have shitty BIOS that takes ages to boot).
Mac updates are usually at least a GB in my experience, they take a while
They have no packages but do a full patch of the system data. Since this is the most complex approach and almost everything can go wrong down to the core they spend most of the time with checking and cleaning state.
Sometimes I won’t use Tumbleweed for a few months then boot it up and it will update every package on the system (literally full reinstall of the os and all installed software) faster than Windows can search for updates. What the heck?
and on linux you can upgrade while the system is running and then reboot
The Nintendo Switch is the gold standard of updates for me.
Can’t remember a windows update taking longer than 5 minutes. And even if it did take that long, you can just press “update and shutdown” when you stop using the pc. Windows has a lot of problems but this isn’t one of them.
A lot of it happens in the backgound. It is at least a 15-30 minute process from start to finish. Very annoying if you have an older computer as it is sucks up a lot of resources updating during the background updates.
I normally don’t ever shutdown or restart my desktop. I like leaving program and stuff running so I can continue what I am doing when I get back. With an update I have to close out all of my shit and then shutdown and open everything back up.
I also swear when you have updates pending on a restart the computer doesn’t run very well.
I see now. I have pretty beefy computer so I haven’t noticed that. I also shutdown my computer every night so it’s still not problem for me.
Another issue is that windows will eventually force a reboot on you with pending updates. You can postpone it for a while, but eventually you’ll be in the middle of something and it will just do it anyways.
This is, in some regards, similar to rape…
Edit: to clarify,
Another issue is that
windowsa predatory person will eventuallyforce a reboot onrape you with pendingupdatesupknocking. You can sometimes postpone it for a while, but eventually you’ll be in the middle of something anditthey will just do it anyways.Hopefully, we’ll agree that rape is much worse, but the underlying principle is the same: some entity abuses something you own - your body/property. Since you’re the owner, you exclusively should be in control.
Unfortunately, it can sometimes be necessary to leave an abusive partner/OS. This can be challenging if you “need” one but they’re all evil and dominating. M$ is not abusing its users as violently as some people are abusing their partners. However, their subtle abuse of their users takes place on a much bigger scale. Not only in this (pretty unimportant) regard, but also by e.g. unwanted telemetry/tracking. Luckily, non-abusive partners of the Linux family are becoming easier to find and date, and many are already flirting with one or more of them.
Bruh what
You heard him, its RAPE!
I’ve clarified my answer.
If your computer is always running it may never take longer than five minutes. But try to leave your computer shut down for a month or more. Then updates accumulate and it can take really long to make them.
WSL allowed my stupid Windows desktop to run Pihole. Very cool? Meh.
Not as cool as running Pihole on an old android phone. Somehow that’s much more stable.
Everything that doesn’t involve Microsoft is more stable.
Meh, Microsoft has put out some shitty fucking software but Windows XP, 7, and 10 were tight.
The only time any of these OS’s fell apart was when I downloaded viruses from sketchy sites.
The security on XP was comically bad. When people say “physical access is full access,” they aren’t even considering XP despite it being the textbook definition to the phrase. You were able to access the command line without even logging in.
Yeah, i found an old laptop running xp that had a password i didn’t know, was ridiculously easy to reset it, just reboot to safe mode and change it there
Insert BIOS password. Not foolproof, but helpful for detering people that weren’t going to open the box
I’m talking without the need to reboot or enter BIOS
Oh I know, I’m just saying a BIOS password helped mitigate the safe mode security flaw
I will never understand why people liked Windows XP, I’d rather use Gentoo Linux from 2002 compiled from a stage 1 tarball than this steaming pile of shit. Windows 7 was solid, but 10 was (again) the biggest piece of garbage. Horrible UWP UI, Cortana, the garbage Windows Store, the Windows Phone integration, the useless Xbox app, the shitty version of OneNote, crappy MS Edge, Candy Crush ads in the fucking start menu and tons of data collection. Oh yeah, what a great operating system!
I will never understand why people liked Windows XP, I’d rather use Gentoo Linux from 2002 compiled from a stage 1 tarball than this steaming pile of shit.
It was necessary for games. (Source: I dual-booted Windows XP and Gentoo Linux in 2002.)
Games is one of the blockers for me. I’m really hoping the Steam Deck changes things so that Windows is no longer needed at all.
Right now we’re just on stage 1, where almost everything that runs on the Steam Deck needs a compatibility layer. I’m hoping that the next step is developers building for Linux as well as Windows to run better on the Steam Deck, which would mean zero performance loss playing on a Linux desktop.
Dude, I said I needed Windows for games in 2002. I’ve been Linux-only for gaming for the better part of a decade now.
As long as you’re okay with skipping the few games from asshole developers who deliberately make it difficult, the transition you’re hoping for already happened.
I don’t game much, but with the few games I do occasionally play I’ve had really good success at getting them to run on Linux under proton. It’s way better than it was even a few years ago.
It’s the “under proton” I don’t like. It means the performance is never going to be 100% of what you get if you run it natively. Maybe in 90% of games the performance is close enough that I’d never notice, but I play enough games that for now it makes sense to have a dedicated game OS, which is all Windows is these days to me.
Preinstalled
Same as every other version
For the record, hot single milfs in your area are typically not found by “clicking here.”
Ya only know if ya try
That’s how you get a different kind of virus lol
Thank god for amoxicillin.
BizTalk was (is?) a solid and also quite impressive product. That said, I’m happy I haven’t had to work with it for years 🙂
One would think this only involves their
operatingspyware system, but all of their “professional” software is just as bad too!Nothing about Microsoft is professional.
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Well yeah, stable running on unstable is still unstable. Cant’t build a fundament on sand. etc.
I think the word you’re looking for is “foundation” lol
fundament
noun- The buttocks.
- The anus.
- The natural features of a land surface unaltered by humans.
In practice the word is almost always used in the adjective form “fundamental”, which actually refers more to a foundation than a fundament.
I thought it was pretty cool I could migrate my RISC CPU design from Logisim to Verilator, and even throw in some GTK so I could display some video, and have it all just work.
I once tried wsl on my work machine instead of having to deal with cygwin or msys2. Unfortunately the virus scanner didn’t like that a whole lot and my account was locked. Man do I love enterprise problems on top of normal problems.
That must have been an incredibly shitty virus scanner if it complains about Windows features.
Probably McAfee or Norton, which are pretty much viruses themselves.
Windows is the real virus.
Enterprise security software tends to err much more on the side of caution.
There are plenty of Windows features who’s usage will flag because they are also favourite tactics by actual threats, such as Powershell one liners. Bonus if it’s in Base64.
Powershell one liners are uglier than the worst winner of Obfuscated Perl Contest. Super cringe…
That I would agree… But they’re excellent for getting fileless reverse shell on a victim’s machine
My company’s shut off my Internet for using visual studio. Sometimes they’re just too aggressive
If you need visual studio for work, you’ll also need the internet. So you’re chilling out the rest of the day? Congrats.
Lmao no I had to use my phone to reach out to the helpdesk
Agreed. It was Sophos.
The VPN client I’m using doesn’t play properly with wsl, so I can often randomly not use internal services, because there’s no route available. Unfortunately, that includes our k8s cluster, so I have to use a different kubectl outside of wsl to work with it. Awesome.
I feel like your company could get you another vpn right? Like that seems really annoying to have to deal with
Sure, they could. But they won’t. Simply because those who could enact the changes are working from the offices, and those don’t have these problems.
That’s a real bummer, always sucks when higher ups just don’t get why something is a problem
WSL, the best example of how absolute freedom will be misused!
Why? What’s wrong with WSL?
It’s backwards lol. We want windows stuff to work in Linux so we have a stable system that can do everything we need, instead they gave us Linux on top the unstable pile of shit we all hate
Its for development and testing not to play around.
Nah, that’s what actual Linux distributions are for. Linux runs on almost every server and powers nearly the entire internet while Windows is used to play fancy video games.
Linux runs on the majority of webservers. If you were to look at the usage breakdown of servers in general, Windows would probably be more common, by what I’d imagine would be a wide margin. I’ve never in my life seen an enterprise run anything internally besides Windows Server with Active Directory and a majority fleet of Windows workstations. There isn’t really a viable alternative.
Linux is definitely a go-to as a web server, load balancer, or some other appliance, but behind that a lot of the time are a bunch of Windows Servers as well.
I’m not sure is you are joking or serious.
It is a verifiable fact. The vast majority of web services run on Linux.
I was doubting the fact that the only function of windows is to run video games. Literally every business in the world runs on windows PCs
I feel like that should be incredibly obvious, why would you want to run Windows on a web server outside of incredibly niche situations.
Development and testing, aka playing around
I think you perchance have a very poor understanding of OSes, their history, the purpose of Windows and “Linux”, and the purpose WSL serves.
and the purpose WSL serves.
Keeping developers on Windows. Otherwise, MS would have invested in Wine or created their own Windows thing on Linux.
My director got knocked off in the middle of a call where we were trying to establish requirements with a specialist due to a Windows update. I would have laughed if these guys weren’t worth so much.
Should have laughed if this was a corporate device. They ignored the continuous popups for too long and was forced into compliance at an inconvenient time because they couldn’t be bothered to reboot at the end of the day for likely 2 weeks.
Our corporate devices are set to update and reboot automatically. This is set to happen in the evenings and usually works, but sometimes does not. I leave my device online and powered on 24/7 and still get caught by midday updates that were scheduled for 2am.
Honestly incredible that this issue has persisted in OEM versions for decades but seems to be progressively getting worse instead of better, now affecting even LTSC copies (for people too stupid to remember to turn automatic updates off). Windows, if you take hours to update a machine twice a week then you’re making important equipment inoperable during that time. Please fix that, or you will lose market share even faster than you inevitably will.
Last week an update broke my moms mandatory TPM nonsense module thingy. Like bro, this is a laptop that ships with win11 preinstalled and an update breaks your preconfigured system? I can’t even comprehend. Like how the heck are casual users supposed to deal with that?
not trying to be the one person who pushes linux down everyones throats, but in all of my time using it i had to restart to update only once
You do have to reboot to use your new kernel after an update. But it’s just a normal reboot, not the whole blocking installation process like in Windows.
And a Linux reboot takes like 40s at most and everything works. Where in Windows it takes like 2m to be able to log in and a good 5-10m for all the apps to start working at normal speed
Not always, but mostly yeah. Especially for home users, it’s not worth the hassle.
Same thing canonical pushes with Ubuntu pro right?
kpatchis what RHEL uses. The Ubuntu one is calledlivepatch. IIRC, it’s not open source.
Aren’t there distros that treat the kernal like anyother package and can hot swap it?
you can’t really hot swap the kernel, because all of the system runs on it.
you’d need to stop the system (you can save its state and recover where you left), reboot to load the new kernel and let it take control.
however, there are some distros and programs that allow you to hot swap certain parts of the kernel (mainly drivers) without rebooting. Note that, even though the system doesn’t reboot, most packages still need to be restarted for them to pick up the new driver.
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Not quite like that but there is a thing called live patching that some distros offer. It’s mainly to used fix security issues rather than a typical update
Ubuntu livepatching and kpatch are some different tools out there for that if you want to look into it
Ever since I switched to Arch, I’ve never had to restart to update. I always restart anyway, because I want the update to apply to my current session, but I don’t have to.
lol Arch was the distro where I had to reboot the most after updates because the new kernel modules wouldn’t load with the old kernel
To be fair, I’ve never used pure Arch. The Arch derivatives I’ve used are Manjaro and Garuda.
Look at those eyes, this guy is peaking
what does windows updates have to do with WSL
WSL exists on a Windows system which means you’re still subject to Microsoft’s rather insane update practices.
linux: sudo pacman -Syyu/sudo apt update/whatever your distro uses
windows: updates whenever the hell it feels like
See also ->
Linux: you need to update some core system component? Don’t worry, we’ll keep right on running until you decide to reboot.
Windows: notepad.exe has an update, we’re rebooting in .3s I hope you can save fuckin quick bro
Linux: hey dude, you should probably restart…I mean it’s been months.
Windows: so imma just gonna nuke your work, ok cool.
I just type “yay”
same
WSL is just a weird and slow VM. Still beats C++ development with visual studio tho.
Well there’s msys64/mingw for clang/gcc anyway. Fuck VS.
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
They can try to extinguish over my dead body.
Do you know that there is a Linux port of DirectX that runs only with WSL?
Microsoft really doesn’t want Linux running on bare metal.
Back when Microsoft started showing interest in and contributing to Linux, I knew that they were up to something no good like this. But honestly, anyone who thinks that WSL running inside a very abusive Windows environment is an alternative to true Linux/BSD experience, is frankly clueless. They deserve everything MS subjects them to.
I tried WSL for a week to give it a fair shake. It sucked just horrible all around. The worst part is that it left behind reginfo and other crap I’m too afraid of trying to remove from fear of borking my windows install. Yeah I can reinstall it but I’m lazy.
I’m not trying to defend windows, it has a myriad of issues, but I’ve never understood the meme of it updating at inconvenient times. I run windows 11 pro, I set it to only update when i tell it to and it does… Like it’s never been a problem, wasn’t a problem in windows 10 or 7 pro either.
I don’t get it, am i windows whisperer and not know it?
There’s always the centrally managed corporate Windows desktops. My workplace is better about this now, but previously they’d just push down updates and with some of them you’d have little other choice but to let it proceed no matter how inconvenient the timing.
I mean… There’s videos of it suddenly doing an update in the middle of people’s gaming/work sessions lol. I used to stream way back when windows updates were at their troll peak and had one kick off in the middle of a stream. It just happened randomly to some of us regardless of what was scheduled. I don’t imagine it happened more than once for too many people. Generally speaking it’s pretty good about sneaking updates in even though I detest how aggressive it is about them
As a software developer, I still struggle with windows fuckery. I have to manage about a dozen machines, each of which has different tasks, and sometimes they decide to just up and reboot for the mandatory update. While I am out of state.
Uhg. I spent time yesterday writing a windows service to perpetually send a WoL magic packet to those computers just to avoid this situation again. They may never shut off again.
Wow, that one is old.
