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
Windows phone was their best product
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.
And themselves, generally
As well as their founder.
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
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.
I suppose it becomes a product name instead of a tech description.
I think that’s just branding 101
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
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.
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
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.
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.
ReplaceFileexists to get everyone else’s semantics though?
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)_¯
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
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.
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.
Mac updates are usually at least a GB in my experience, they take a while
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).
The Nintendo Switch is the gold standard of updates for me.
and on linux you can upgrade while the system is running and then reboot
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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
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.
Lately WSL has become unresponsive and unkillable every time I wake my work laptop from sleep, so now I have to shut it down every day instead. Sucks.
