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Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by banachtarski on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:23PM (#22594870)
I installed Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 on an older machine just now. The MSFT of today is definitely a far cry from the MSFT of yesteryear. Such a thing would have been unheard of 15 years ago.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by ibiza on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:10PM (#22596302)
You do remember one of the original Windows NT subsystems was OS/2 1.x, right? http://www.os2museum.com/wp/nt-and-os2/ And look how that turned out :)
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by fredsted on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:38PM (#22595101)
Embrace, extend, extinguish?
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by reaperducer on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:51PM (#22595280)
My prediction, that my IT department hates to hear, is that Windows is going away.

Microsoft doesn't want to be Microsoft anymore; it wants to be Oracle and IBM and primarily make money off of business consulting and the cloud.

I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out compatibility layer on top of Linux, similar to the way macOS became Unix, but even less different than its underlying OS.

However, it should be noted that I'm not very good at predicting things.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by dnautics on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:27PM (#22595716)
> I think Windows will eventually become a presentation and slowly-phased-out compatibility layer on top of Linux.

I think this is unlikely. In many ways the NT kernel is superior to the Linux kernel. I just wish it were open source and didn't have the rest of windows around it.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by ForHackernews on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:32PM (#22595789)
Since when has technical superiority ever determined which product wins in the marketplace?

The Linux kernel is ubiquitous and free-as-in-beer, so it might win out. Android has already shown how you can build a proprietary userland on top of it.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by pjmlp on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:34PM (#22595825)
And how fragmentation on Linux profits OEMs, each with their own little distribution, not giving anything back.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by dnautics on Monday March 16, 2020 @04:19PM (#22597169)
> Since when has technical superiority ever determined which product wins in the marketplace?

Good point.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by adamc on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:00PM (#22595374)
Very unlikely, as it would mess with backwards compatibility and cause unhappiness of users and IT departments. Microsoft still makes money selling Office and other products there.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by phoe-krk on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:10PM (#22595512)
Microsoft doesn't need to care about backwards compatibility anymore, now that Wine exists precisely to have compatibility with Windows software (including software that even modern Windows itself no longer wants to run).
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:30PM (#22596590)
> now that Wine exists

Wine is 26 years old.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by phoe-krk on Monday March 16, 2020 @04:23PM (#22597223)
Agreed, could have worded it better. Now that Wine is good enough to run most of Windows software and backed by Valve via its Proton initiative.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by ralphie02 on Monday March 16, 2020 @10:51PM (#22601115)
Hasn't Wine been good enough for at least 10+ years? Furthermore, how does being backed by Valve actually be of any significant value? I've heard of this argument for a couple of years now and I'm still not convinced (not that I follow Wine development that closely).
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @09:07AM (#22604497)
> Hasn't Wine been good enough for at least 10+ years?

Depends on what you mean by "good enough". Wine is an incredible project that has achieved amazing successes, but it still falls short in a lot of ways.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by ralphie02 on Tuesday March 17, 2020 @12:20PM (#22606507)
This is exactly what I'm getting at.

I personally don't use Wine but I've encountered people online in the last 10+ years that use the argument that it's "good enough" for people to fully switch to Linux. Realistically, I don't think Wine actually convinced more than a handful of users to abandon Windows

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by AnIdiotOnTheNet on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:28PM (#22596563)
If Windows goes away, personal computing basically dies with it. Everything will be locked-down walled-garden webshit, or community-built-jank FOSS desktops that really want to be like the locked-down walled-gaden webshit experience but will say it is for the user's own good.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by zip1234 on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:09PM (#22595506)
Microsoft seems to be happily improving their OS and non-cloud products as well. They are a big enough company that they can be competitive in both.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by Rapzid on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:01PM (#22596188)
Microsoft has 7.5X the market cap of Oracle; why on earth would they want to be like Oracle?
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by 2OEH8eoCRo0 on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:59PM (#22595367)
How dare they gain market share by putting out products that people want!
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by geofft on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:52PM (#22595295)
Doesn't that require actually extending and extinguishing, though?

WSL1 was a proprietary reimplementation of the Linux system call ABI as an NT subsystem. WSL2 is actual Linux running in a VM. That seems to be moving in exactly the opposite direction.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by banachtarski on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:35PM (#22595828)
Exactly. There are so many things different about today's MSFT. Another example is Linux support on Azure. People love their tin foil hats though.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by kingbirdy on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:51PM (#22595271)
How would MS possibly extinguish linux?
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by msla on Monday March 16, 2020 @04:52PM (#22597596)
They can't. That's why I hate people using that chestnut in relation to Linux: It doesn't work for two reasons which stick out at me.

Reason one is because Linux is GPL'd, Microsoft can't extend Linux without giving its extensions back to the community.

Reason two is because Linux is already established in multiple realms, so Microsoft can't bully its way into dominance. Microsoft has a respectable presence in server rooms, but it isn't absolutely dominant by a long shot. Microsoft probably has something going on in the embedded/hobbyist SBC space, but there's no path for them to dominate there. And, FWIW, Linux owns the supercomputer world. I also can't see IBM falling over itself to put Windows on mainframes.

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by kristofferR on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:01PM (#22595389)
Ballmer would have suggested chemotherapy.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by Sammi on Monday March 16, 2020 @03:15PM (#22596383)
Open Source copyright licenses exists exactly to make the extinguish part impossible. MS cannot put the genie back in the bottle when it puts out open source software.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by tomnipotent on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:42PM (#22595938)
Can you give any examples in the last 10-15 years?
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by Rainymood on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:50PM (#22595263)
Currently in the embrace phase ...
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by pjmlp on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:33PM (#22595809)
Actually it is a return to their roots, given Xenix.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by svnpenn on Monday March 16, 2020 @01:59PM (#22595370)
Um, no you didn't. It only works with windows 10

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-install

Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by efdee on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:05PM (#22595445)
Windows 10 runs on older machines just fine.
Re:NPM Is Joining GitHub by banachtarski on Monday March 16, 2020 @02:33PM (#22595803)
Thanks you saved me a snarky comment