I'm just waiting for Microsoft to invert WSL into LSW.
Specifically, I hope they release their own branded Linux distro, built on Ubuntu/Debian, with an optional KVM-hosted NT kernel for Windows syscall support. Maybe call it Windows NC (for Next Century).
I'll probably leave MacOS behind at that point on my work machine, especially if they create a display-PS compositing window manager that's anywhere as good as MacOS's.
They (Microsoft) already have a Linux distribution. Azure Cloud Switch[0].
It does remind me of the old Microsoft Linux joke (http://www.mslinux.org/) of the early 2000's, which has aged more poorly then a younger me would have thought.
> It does remind me of the old Microsoft Linux joke (http://www.mslinux.org/) of the early 2000's, which has aged more poorly then a younger me would have thought.
"I don't remember agreeing to that."
-- Janet Reno
Microsoft is working hard to incorporate the well known "Start" button from the Windows Platform into X Windows' Gnome interface. "We just can't figure out how the hell to get that darn foot out of there! The damn thing is like stuck." The team will have this feature ready by product launch.
Microsoft still only has a few primary applications:
SQL Server (already converted)
MS Office suite (including Project and Visio) and Sharepoint
Exchange (for Outlook's best features)
ActiveDirectory (scalable auth + DNS + client management is still hard to beat, but MDMs are catching up)
Beyond that, all they really have is an open source platform (.Net), and a few open source projects (VS Code, PowerShell), and Visual Studio. Oh, and GitHub, I suppose.
Microsoft will not release their version of Linux for sale. They're going to try to make it a high-availability Azure-only service. They're still chasing Apple's and Google's services-only architecture and Amazon's cloud-dominance strategy. Windows will become their legacy server and user client product.
First we'd need a FOSS window/desktop manager replicating the Windows experience. It would gobble down the market share of existing FOSS WMs/DMs in an instant. Basically any decent Windows experience — 2000, XP, 7 or 10 — would be far ahead of the current big players for the 99% use case. For example, it's 2020 and I could list at least half a dozen graphics glitches I've had on Ubuntu 20.04 so far. On recent Windows installations, no graphics glitches I can think of, certainly none that persisted.
Second, MS would need to port some sort of compatibility layer, which would probably be 10000 person-years to achieve anything like the backward compatibility they currently support.
Third … well, that would be it. The vast majority of non-techies would be ecstatic to find they can upgrade for free for ever, their software would just keep running, and hardware would work basically from day one (because the companies developing cutting edge hardware Windows would pivot their driver development) until the end of time (because FOSS drivers, while slower to appear for most hardware, are supported essentially forever).
> Basically any decent Windows experience — 2000, XP, 7 or 10 — would be far ahead of the current big players for the 99% use case.
I see more and more people - and not just hardcore devs - using Linux.
For me, Linux has been a better desktop experience since around 2005 sometime: faster, easier to configure to my exact liking, easier to install, less hassle to maintain. (Except the time when KDE 4 was new and Ubuntu changed to Unity.)
For a long time I even though it was just a matter of time before everyone would realize but now I have realized that people are just different. Some people actually like Mac and Windows. Some people are driven mad by inconsistencies in my favorite DE (KDE) that I cannot even spot after someone tried to point them out. I however can't stand CMD-tab on Mac but Mac users - like me with the alignment issues on KDE - cannot see how it can be a problem.
Summary: it is not like any of them are way ahead in general. I see more and more people using Linux and expect numbers to rise a few percentage points more.
> it's 2020 and I could list at least half a dozen graphics glitches I've had on Ubuntu 20.04 so far
It depends on what desktop environment / window manager you use.
I don't notice too many weird issues when I run i3 and bsp on my Linux laptop. I think the nice thing about a tiled window manager is if you go down this route, you often hand select a bunch of small components that do 1 thing very well. Even going as far as evaluating and picking a specific compositor (or maybe not even using one at all).
You are right tho about Windows. Its UI is very stable and buttery smooth for actions like moving and resizing windows. It has a level of polish that out of the box DEs on Linux usually don't have.
Leveraging the FOSS work and cutting down on maintenance costs, and focus that only for LSW, to guarantee the functioning of that abstraction layer, and leave the harder parts (hardware support, security etc) onto public to pick up - at the cost of a few coupons, t-shirts, coffee-mugs etc thrown at them via "hackathons". (And even perpetuate the "passion for software" hence "public github contributions". May be give a slightly higher tier github subscription for free, they've bought that org anyway. And people are anyway suckers for Internet points)
Glitching graphics are annoying obviously, but as someone who uses macOS, Ubuntu (Gnome) and Win 10 all quite a bit, I find small UI inconsistencies to be extremely frustrating in both Win 10 and Ubuntu. On macOS, it's 90% likely (not perfect even there) that cmd-w will close a window, and cmd-q will quit an application. On the other two, nothing is certain - I guess alt-F4 on Win 10 is fairly reliable, but an awkward combo, on Ubuntu, it's pretty much different for everything. Personally I'd prefer if the OS enforced that, and required devs to do extra work to change the standard open-close-quit keybindings.
>First we'd need a FOSS window/desktop manager replicating the Windows experience. It would gobble down the market share of existing FOSS WMs/DMs in an instant.
ReactOS has been a thing for 20 years now and it just isn't that popular.
For me it was my introduction to UNIX, the teacher would take a PC tower with Xenix into the room, each student group would prepare their UNIX exercises in MS-DOS as good as we could, and then we had a time slot to make them work on the tower.
I've been hoping for Microsoft branded Linux distro too.
I just don't like Windows anymore. So much of the modern development tools are Linux only, and depends on shell scripts. Running the WSL is not ideal either, even though it helps a lot.
Only thing keeping me from switching directly to Linux is the bad memories with the various Linux Desktops I tried in the early 2000s. Clipboard didn't work, font smoothing was very inconsistent, the fight with the (GPU especially) drivers, simple windowing animations was jerky, browser was always slower (e.g. scrolling on web sites, and videos).
All of those, except font smoothing and clipboard issues, I've recently only experienced under Nvidia's proprietary drivers. Intel's i915 and AMD's amdgpu drivers seem to work without issues.
Font smoothing is occasionally inconsistent between modern and ancient apps, but the same happens on Win. As for the clipboard, I've only seen clipboard issues on my ancient Arch install, which I'm surprised even boots up at this point.
As a multi-decade linux user, the thought of a Microsoft distro still makes my stomach churn. The grand-daddy of software copyright enforcement branding the paragon of f/oss... it is just wrong.
But I bet it wouldn't last. MS's institutional inertia would soon see the thing fork away from linux, becoming something else. Something like android. Something more horrible.
Ubuntu is better in almost every way than Windows and macOS, in my opinion. Windows is slow, buggy, require constant updates that often include regression-bugs
For all the hate it gets, the GPL protects from exactly that. Microsoft would need to publish all changes in the copyleft components of the shipped OS.
Which is why you add non-copyleft components and make them not really optional. Like for instance their directX-based graphics and cuda support.
Sure, the "core" stuff is protected and you could do without the optional things for now. But how about when for example your favorite machine learning software says "we support linux, but cuda is only supported under WSL", similarly for graphics, rendering etc. .
Sounds a lot what Google is doing with Android (open source) and Play Services (not). They made on purpose harder and harder the use the former without the latter.
I don’t think counting distributions is the best metric. The majority of hamburger makers are individuals barbecuing at home, but McDonald’s dwarfs them.
Counting users, I guess Android has over 50% of them.
Counting installations (probably one of the fairer methods), I still would think Android has over 50% of Linux installations. Google gives me numbers in the million for the number of Google and Amazon servers, not always for recent years, but I guess they won’t have a hundred million servers combined.
(And of course, there’s the philosophical discussion whether Android is a Linux distribution, or something that uses a Linux)
There's also tons of embedded Linux devices, from your TV, your car, your fridge, home networking equipment... I don't know if theres enough of them to outweigh the massive number of phones in the world, but I think it's enough that Android wouldn't cross 50%, at least in north america.
I wonder if we could train something that would automatically generate typical comments on HN threads.
- This is EEE!
- No it's not, there is no third E
- Well, back in the 90s such and such happened
- Microsoft has changed! Look at VS Code!
- Electron is slow.
- Buy a better machine.
- what about the millions who can't afford a better machine?
- Electron can be good, just code better.
- but muh privacy
- exactly, VS Code is going to take over the world with it's knowledge about your coding habits
- It's all about Azure nowadays, anyway.
- Azure has terrible customer support, we should use bare metal.
How is releasing a tool for linux "extending" it? If so every company that has ever shipped software for linux has "extended" it.
Extend would be forking the linux kernel and adding a bunch of interfaces for it that somehow have patents owned by MS so that they could not be reintegrated into mainline.
Extinguish would be to get all the distros to start using MS'es kernel and interfaces instead of mainline.
If we think back to the web, MS releasing software for linux is like them having a webpage. MS forking and adding proprietary interfaces to the kernel would be like all the DX filters and activeX apis added to IE. MS getting dominant players to use those interfaces would be like all the webpages having "Works best in IE6" logos.
This is still firmly in the first E. It could be argued that back when you could only develop Azure Sphere (their IoT linux distro) on windows it started to creep into the second E, but now you can develop for it on linux too, so perhaps that puts us back on the first E. The directX stuff in WSL is definitely a second E move though.
That's the default response you get from MS "inclined" people, I've seen it everywhere. I had to stop visiting the Windows 10 reddit because it's so tiring. And there's also the anti-floss comments. I truly believe they are not paid by MS and aren't paid shills, they are just people that obsess over brand wars because they are bored, or have a lot of investiment in MS related tech (time, money, career) and feel like they need to preserve that, or in some cases it's just severe mental health issues. If you think it's hyperbole you need to lurk there a few weeks and see it for yourself. I'm talking with technical merits aside, because there are a lot of MS technologies I would love to use if things were different. But I just don't trust them, just like I would never install e.g. a Google Drive native client in my Linux machine.
The EEE debates are very boring and I understand it can feel like MS is being singled out but they deserve all of it. I often wish MS rises to the top again just so newer generations can experience first hand what that feels like. But now that Google and other companies perfected the boiling techniques I'm not sure it would be noticed.
I wish we could all stop fighting each other over these issues and just collectively bashed and scrutinized ALL the companies together, everyone would benefit. But that's easy to say, I can't even read about MS or Google without getting irrationally mad.
You are replying to a question "Where's the extinguish?"
You managed to write 44 words without addressing that. But hey, at least you tried. Most EEE conspiracy folks usually stay silent when asked about the extinguish strategy.
Microsoft making their products better? What an absolutely evil plot they're concocting!
Ya'll stuck in the Microsoft of 20 years ago. I hold no great love for Microsoft or its products, and large corporate power can always be abused, but screeching "EEE!" at the slightest hint with no evidence based on assumptions on what they might do in 5 years is just silly.
MS (like all corporations) only cares about one thing, making money. It's not silly to distrust a corporation that has repeatedly in the past stolen, subverted, and act in bad faith as soon as a 'threat' to their complete dominance has shown up.
Yes, most of the old-guard are gone. (Gates, Ballmer, etc)
But I'm not entirely ready to trust them yet. (Windows10 telemetry, not honouring user-defined configuration [Peer-to-Peer updates active even though it's disabled in user-facing options], Candy Crush and all other game 'apps' being pulled from the MS store.)
So they aren't even acting wholly trustworthy now, even under this current management. Why would I trust them to be nice with Linux?
WSL1 had / has really bad filesystem performance. Git commands would take ages on large repos as a example.
WSL2 has a linux fs which is fast and a bridge to windows fs which is still slow but I just live on the linux fs. WSL2 also runs native docker (and windows docker client and leverage the docker daemon in wsl).
It’s getting better but the inconsistent UI (Control Panel and that other thing) and garbage that comes with it is still quite annoying. There’s probably some corporate environment to avoid the latter, but I’d still rather not have random apps installing when I simply buy the pro version.
Advanced tracing like BPF is amazing and the slow but steady adaption of these tools in one form of another will bring us closer to a sane and comfortable future of transparency and reduced complexity. Glad microsoft is also on the train with WSL.
There would have to be some limitations when not running as root, but it would still be useful for looking at your own processes. I always like it when an app can be installed "per-user" as an alternative to a systemwide install.
Not thread-safe. Shared queues are accessed without a lock. So this will eventually blow up as the queues are swapped in a different thread, or due to inconsistent reads on un-synchronized variables.
Recommendation to MS folks: find someone at MS who knows C++. Barring that, at least run ASAN and TSAN on your stuff before you release it.
I’ll laugh when they get to the third e. It’s the same tricks that they’ve played before, but everyone is too young to remember it on their own skin and the older ones who remember are ridiculed. They’re moving just like the frog stays comfortable in the slowly boiling pot, with a slow and steady embrace. Their target audience is unsuspecting as if Microsoft has become some kind of altruistic force. But no monster of that size is altruistic, they’re hungry for fresh souls:) And they’ll have ‘em it seems. It won’t hurt, the denial will mitigate the pain.
I'm in my late 30s, so I certainly remember the Microsoft and Netscape situation, and the antitrust case, from my later teenage years.
I think it is different now though. Microsoft was trying to leverage their near-monopoly on the desktop into a monopoly in new markets. Now, although Microsoft retains the bulk of desktop/laptop market share, desktops and laptops are not as significant as they once were. Microsoft's attempts at the tablet and phone markets were largely unsuccessful. A lot of apps that used to be desktop-based are now web-based. For desktop apps, cross-platform development solutions (e.g. Electron) are a lot more popular than they used to be. The alternatives to Windows on desktop/laptop (macOS, Linux, ChromeOS) are arguably more compelling and more practical than they used to be. Linux, not Windows, dominates in the server space. In cloud, Microsoft is stuck in second place position. The generation coming up through the school system right now is more familiar with Google Docs than Microsoft Office. Microsoft's language platform (.NET, C#, etc) has decent marketshare but competitors such as Java and Python are ahead.
So even if some people at Microsoft want to repeat Microsoft's EEE strategy from the 1990s, Microsoft doesn't really have the same foundation that it had in the 90s to make such a strategy successful. And that 90s strategy, even if it worked in the short to medium term, doesn't appear to have been a long-term success – Internet Explorer may have killed Netscape, but arguably Chrome has killed Edge. Microsoft's attempts to EEE Java likewise failed – Visual J++ and J# are history, and Java is still more popular than .Net/C#.
Ahead in terms of features, or ahead in terms of market share? I wasn't thinking of the former, more the later.
Which one is ahead in features is debatable. Certainly C# has some goodies which Java lacks, but more recently Java has been catching up.
Which one is ahead in marketshare/mindshare/ecosystem – I think Java is the clear winner here. In part because, despite Oracle's overall ownership, Java gets a lot of attention from other big vendors such as IBM and SAP and Google (putting to one side all the regrettable Oracle-Google legal issues), and a lot of focus from the open source community. By contrast, .Net is basically just Microsoft plus a boatload of small-to-medium vendors, and the .Net open source community has always been smaller than the Java open source community.
(Obligatory disclaimer: I used to work for Oracle, although not directly on Java.)
I work in the Danish public sector, and while I really like what Microsoft is doing and should note that I think they’ve been our best tech business partner, (because they understand how b2b relationships need to work between tech and non-tech enterprise better than anyone else), for three decades, it’s really not a new Microsoft.
They simply moved from selling windows and office licenses to selling office365 and Azure, and using open source helps them do this.
That is the new Microsoft - selling cloud services and subscriptions while developing a ton of OSS - naturally they are doing this for profit - but their incentives are now aligned with OSS instead of being in direct conflict.
They also enjoy getting OSS to work for MS later. MS understands very well that Cloud and SaaS is the future. And in B2B, which is their forte, MS Servers don't have much of a play. Hence, their focus is on getting that working for them.
Ex. PyMSSQL is now officially supported by MS. This implies, their costs of maintaining an ODBC driver for Python-MSSQL will be largely reduced thanks to the OSS model.
Same deal with Linux-Azure tooling (there have been many tools that came out), or be it .Net-Core.
They are looking at "extinguishing" Linux not by doing better than competition, but rather by absorbing the competition and getting them to work for MS in the long run. Great business move, not sure for the larger ecosystem.
But then, OSS will always be there. If not Linux, something else.
From everyone I know on the inside, I think the sentiment is genuine this time.
Microsoft is in the IBM position of 1985. IBM made a bunch of crucial missteps because they saw the PC as part of a larger mainframe and minicomputer strategy and was unwilling to cater to the microcomputer customer as just a microcomputer customer.
So they were blinded and dropped the ball a bunch.
Microsoft, like IBM in the 80s doesn't have full stack monopoly anymore. But unlike IBM, they have admitted this and most importantly that they can't claw it back. IBM ran off to fairytale land trying to claw things back with OS/2, the MCA bus, and their line of PS/2 workstations.
Microsoft knows this well, they built the first versions of OS/2 for IBM.
Like a good general who studies the battles of the past, they're trying to do the early Apple/early Google strategy: make good products and get developers to be enthusiastic about them.
Their will be new marketing opportunities opening in the future and their job is to position themselves to capture it.
They won't get there by pretending like it's still 1998.
I’m glad I’m not the only one who sees Microsoft’s well documented playbook. Embrace (Linux on Windows yay!), Extend (Procmon for Linux yay!). Is extinguish around the corner?
Then again it is different people with a seemingly different playbook. I’m still slightly uncomfortable with it.
They just might extinguish Windows with that. Think about it: if the next Windows release becomes just another Linux distribution with some fancy proprietary features, and proprietary driver/hardware support they just might convince enough Linux firebrands switch over. The Bulk of their income is not the sale of Windows Licenses anymore but cloud services. If enough developers get around the idea that a "Windows flavored Linux" is not such a bad thing after all, they might be able to establish it as a de-facto standard platform for desktop and servers (and someday maybe even embedded devices).
I am also slightly uncomfortable with that, but they are not the player they once were back in the 90ies, they definitly don't have an OS monopoly these days, and that is a good thing. Everyone who wants to use other distributions is free to do so.
I think you would have a case if they had any chance of embracing and extending OSS in a real way. Linux and Windows are on different planes. Microsoft works in personal computing. Linux is the backbone of the web. I'd like to see Windows Server "extinguish" that.
"Altruistic" is a category error when applied to companies.
The question is to what extent and in which areas Microsoft's interests and strategies align with ours. The answer to that question has changed in recent years, especially if we consider the alternatives.
This seems more like a product of love from one developer. Doesn't seem like a cunning move in some grand scheme. Companies don't have personality and even company culture is very hard to maintain across many offices spread out over the globe.
"Embrace and extend" I think - appear to adopt or support a technology only to attempt to influence, limit and block later developments. Other examples: J#, the Office XML standards etc etc
I prefer the look of terminal applications. Additionally I get more control over the fonts and colors. Unlike most Windows applications, which have no customization (generally) and no consistency.
Some would definitely like terminal applications more, but the fact that on Linux by default it comes up to be terminal apps says a lot about the platform. One can just go and compare the ProcMon on Linux and Windows. Probably over the years people have figured out that there are so many hurdles in making basic GUI applications work on it? Some random Linux distribution would always complain about missing some random dependency, and the users would get totally confused, so developers are like let's not even go that way. Half the times Anti-aliasing wouldn't work on text fonts and mouse cursors and what not.
I agree Windows applications don't have a lot of consistency as well, but it's at least better than Linux where half are on terminal only, and half have some kind of casually created GUI.
Terminal applications are more open to automation - something that Linux excels in. GUI applications are far harder to automate. In the case of ProcMon I'm not sure there's a case for automation, although happy to be proven wrong.
Agreed about the casually created GUIs on Linux, but I'm happy someone has put the effort into them.
Actually, our company's product supports both GUI and a text user interface so everything can be automated as well as used via GUI (and that's on both Windows and Linux versions). I'm not sure why more people don't do that.
Linux servers don't (and shouldn't) have GUI libraries installed. A procmon-like tool would then be a server component, that'd be invoked over, maybe, a ssh session, and a client component that'd expose that functionality over a GUI or a web page.
That's a lot of work for a simple tool when a text-based terminal interface solves the problem very neatly. Personally, I'd do it with strace, sysdig or something else that would spit a long text file I could parse rather than updating a terminal screen.
The only GUIs worth using are a terminal and a browser. Everything else is garbage, and will only degrade over time . This is a developer tool, and no Linux developer worth a damn uses GUIs for anything.
That disdain right there for people that use a GUI application - that's what I don't understand (and I was talking about in another comment). I have quite a few people in my company who believe the same, and I know damn well that they're not any better programmers than the ones who don't (even if they might like to believe that). It's like using a console somehow makes them a better developer than others, it's a laughable assumption. If a GUI condenses 5 steps into 1, there is no shame in using that. The key is to know when to use a GUI v/s when to use a CLI.
Good luck using a command line spreadsheet software and producing good results in time ;). I am a little surprised by your belief that only two classes of GUI software in the entire world are useful (because you use those two?), everything else is garbage. :)
That's your big assumption. It doesn't happen very often and, more often than not, those 5 steps you could do with one command without your hands leaving the keyboard will require a couple clicks of the mouse at not-always repeating spots on the screen.
Terminal users aren't masochists. They use terminals because it makes the work easier. I use an IDE to write Java code. I use Emacs to write Python code because it's easier to me. I use a terminal to investigate because it's much simpler than attaching a GUI-based IDE to a running remote machine.
And nobody seriously uses text based spreadsheets. We I need to crunch numbers or reads lots of data, I use Jupyter and pandas.
Considering the linked announcement contains exactly one picture and that picture is not of "everything on linux" but one MS cli app, what are you basing your opinion on?
Also, can you give an example of a non-ugly MS cli app for windows?
Because it's Linux and not an entirely new thing that's getting launched today, you'd assume I'd have seen more of it before in my life?
And why would you want an example of a CLI app? That's the whole problem with Linux - you take some of the biggest software distributions for it and even they'll have you change some secret ascii file somewhere on the disk for it to work properly, while on windows you just click a few 'Next' buttons and you're done installing (before people start talking about package managers and how easy it is in comparison to Windows, I know about that, but they're honestly not foolproof). If Linux wants to get popular among masses (rather than a bunch of proud geeks who feel that the ones who use a GUI are all dumb people), it would have to be better at that front. Just updating a graphics card driver is so much pain on it - it would randomly not work, or it wouldn't update all symbolic links that you have to waste a day in finding, or always something like that).
Instead, you should give examples of the best looking GUI applications for it. Our company has a flagship product on both Linux and Windows and we use Qt for the UI. Exact same cross-platform code produces relatively ugly looking UI on Linux. In almost all discussions people start blaming both users and developers alike as if it's their problem.
> Because it's Linux and not an entirely new thing that's getting launched today, you'd assume I'd have seen more of it before in my life?
> And why would you want an example of a CLI app?
Because we are discussing an article about a cli app by MS and I thought your post was at least tangentially related. So please explain to me how this MS is somehow more ugly/pretty than other linux cli apps or what GUI apps have to do with anything in the article.
My post was about the fact that even though ProcMon Windows is a GUI app, they thought of releasing a CLI app for Linux rather than making a consistent interface for the same just as windows.
> Our company has a flagship product on both Linux and Windows and we use Qt for the UI. Exact same cross-platform code produces relatively ugly looking UI on Linux. In almost all discussions people start blaming both users and developers alike as if it's their problem.
That is either because of a Qt problem or a problem in your implementation, not with Linux in particular.
I've heard this before - in fact, every single time. But application writers blame third party library vendor, third party library vendor blames difficulties in implementation - I have seen it multiple times. Every time the problem is "not with Linux", but it ends up being one.
A problem in Qt would still be a problem in Qt regardless of which platform the library is being used (and it runs on LOTS of platforms). It's hardly an OS problem.
Terminal applications only get you so far. It's the greatest common denominator. Has it been ugly for decades? Probably, some might disagree. But it sure as heck has been stable.
Not sure about the stability part too actually. IT people update kernels on our Linux distributions and it often completely messes up Graphics drivers on that. Surprising, right? There can be two reasons - either our IT people are not competent enough, or Linux flavors that we use have some problems. Then, they sometimes take months to update those graphics drivers because it never works correctly the first few times.
Simple enough: you likely use proprietary drivers, which you shouldn't if you want a hassle-free experience.
Proprietary drivers are like getting an a third-party accessory like a new set of rearview mirrors for your car. However, you get your cars for free from the manufacturer, and complain when the mirror you bought doesn't fit the new car frame.
The ideal answer here is working with the manufacturer to get those issues fixed upstream. Where the comparison with car accesories stop, is that software drivers isn't the core product you are being sold, so there is no real reason for not upstreaming it.
Now, onto the real point the comment you are replying to made: the TUI interface has been very stable and good at backwards compatibility for multiple decades. New extensions exist for displaying images, getting mouse coordinates, more colors, etc. But the basic mechanisms have stayed the same, hence stability. Drop a greybeard UNIX tech strakight from the 80s inside a WSL2 environment, and they will be able to do their business as usual.
I'm getting better at working with MAC GUIs. Last time I used one (6 years ago), I was able to open a terminal myself to fix the issue the person had with their storage device. Unsure if the GUI changed much since, but I can likely still manage to do so from the CLI.
Well... Most of my Linux software looks better than this. You can file a bug with your concerns and the team responsible will address it. Also, looking at the Windows version of Process Monitor, I wouldn't call it a beautiful UI: it's a grid of values with a little bit of drill-down ability and a couple colorful buttons on a toolbar. I assume they prefered to make it a text user interface because it's much easier to get to a remote machine and run it there than it'd be with a GUI tool without having to either split the app into remote and local parts or install an X client on the server and pipe it over X to the user's workstation (and relying on an X server on the graphical side).
I would have chosen different colors though, but I also imagine they wanted to restrain themselves to the base ANSI color palette for compatibility reasons.
This seems to use eBPF. As far as I know, WSL2 doesn't support eBPF. I don't understand how this can be seen as the Extend part of EEE. People really need to calm down.
I don't understand why WSL2 wouldn't support eBPF. It is a mostly vanilla[1] Linux kernel running under a hypervisor, so why couldn't a kernel with eBPF support be used? Indeed, Microsoft's WSL2 kernel has eBPF JIT support turned on – https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel/blob/master/M...
WSL1 yes I agree, it is just a translation layer between Linux and NT syscalls, and features such as eBPF would not be implemented in such a layer.
[1] there may at times be various enhancements to HyperV paravirt drivers that haven't been upstreamed yet
Specifically, I hope they release their own branded Linux distro, built on Ubuntu/Debian, with an optional KVM-hosted NT kernel for Windows syscall support. Maybe call it Windows NC (for Next Century).
I'll probably leave MacOS behind at that point on my work machine, especially if they create a display-PS compositing window manager that's anywhere as good as MacOS's.