EEE was more effective when Microsoft was completely dominant, but it's clearly still effective even when that dominance has diminished.

This move, for instance, will cause Linux users to depend on a proprietary, closed-source API entirely controlled by Microsoft. It's very bad for Linux and very good for Microsoft. It's a lever of Microsoft control, extended into the rival Linux system. Very easy to see how it effectively fragments the Linux ecosystem and allows Microsoft to forcibly pull users who come to depend on DirectX from Linux to Windows by manipulating this lever - reducing Linux support in the future, etc.

This is classic EEE, and the only way you can dismiss it is if you believe their PR, as apparently you do:

> they are no longer the 500 pound gorilla in the room, they're the "hey, fellow kids" oldtimer trying to fit in and get in on a piece of the action.

As the other comment explained, they are still a huge gorilla in spaces that are absolutely vital to Linux: server, desktop, and laptop.

Linux as we know it lives or dies on the server and desktop / laptop markets. Yes, Android is technically based on the Linux kernel, but it builds an entirely different ecosystem on top of it. The Linux ecosystem is only on the server and PC - exactly where Microsoft is competing.

Finally, the availability of this proprietary API will reduce the incentive for hardware companies like Nvidia to allow development of direct Linux support (drivers etc) for their products - which is what Linux really needs in order to survive, let alone prosper.

No reasonable person at Microsoft considers Linux to be a threat on the desktop/laptop. No reasonable person at Microsoft considers Windows Server to be a threat to Linux on the server.

The on-premises infrastructure market has been and is projected to continue shrinking in favor of cloud spend.

Googling around one can find reports with names like "IDC Worldwide Operating Systems and Subsystems Market Shares report" that show how prevalent Linux is vs. Windows Server even in Enterprise IT.

I agree with your general sentiment, but just wanted to note that high-end embedded systems are also a very Linux-heavy domain. Even though from hardware side it might look similar to the mobile space (ARMs everywhere etc.) it is actually a completely different world.

Said of a company which owns a market-shaping player in every layer of the stack: OS, directory, database, applications, development languages, source code repository, and the second-biggest cloud to host it all in. Given that mobile and web involve about half of that list, I fail to see how they're some sort of non-player, trying to play "catchup" to the rest of the world now.

Perhaps in some countries, definitely not everywhere. At my university, there is only a single Mac across 40 or so laptops.

> because it compiles iOS apps

I doubt students buy Macs for that. iPhones are not nearly as popular outside the US.

> and it's a *nix

Students don’t care about its UNIX certification. Most don’t even know what that is when they start their undergrad.

> it easily runs most of the same tools as a linux webserver

No, it does not. Many important dev tools are not available, not even through brew.

> That's what WSL is about, trying to win back developers

Globally, the majority of developers are on Windows/Linux, not macOS.

> They're trying to make it feasible to target a linux webserver

I’d bet this is about avoiding Linux becoming the major platform for ML/DS/AI, rather than anything about macOS.

So in other words, what you're saying is they are Embracing this FOSS linux-based developer workflow...

And you could almost say they're Extending the linux kernel to support DX12 on WSL...

Am I missing something?

It's not so hard to imagine picking up a legacy project at some point in the future, and pretty much having to develop it on Windows and deploy to Azure because of some WSL-specific dependencies baked into the framework it's built on.

That's just one scenario, but the point is why would you expect that they wouldn't leverage their market-share to disadvantage competitors if they ever got into position to do so? Just because they aren't in that position now doesn't mean we shouldn't be put off by the fact that they're building those levers to fragment the ecosystem now.

So if you want a machine that can play games and run a Linux dev toolchain, that would require a Windows install. If you can incentivize folks who may never have installed Windows to do so, and keep them there as the only place they can both play games and use their preferred dev environment, then you've extinguished that portion of the desktop linux install base.

EDIT: Also I absolutely love the "I don't think Microsoft thinks so either." Microsoft is a for-profit corporation who's eyeing a way to get users who traditionally avoid them to come to their platform and stay there. They aren't some benevolent font of cool tech, they're trying to sell you products.

Microsoft is taking steps to embrace desktop Linux, we've seen that with WSL. Instead of ditching Windows for a different/better dev platform, just keep using Windows.

They are extending their own desktop Linux by adding the capability to use DX12 in Linux, so long as it's run on Windows. Note that they are not adding this capability to a straight Ubuntu install, let alone any other distribution.

To claim "Microsoft knows they can't Extinguish desktop Linux" is naive at best, and shill-like at worst. They don't need to completely eliminate desktop Linux for EEE to apply here. the "Extinguish" part comes naturally from fewer and fewer devs choosing an alternative to Windows.

Yes we are. I was talking about the motivation behind their action. And I think it's quite obvious that 'get businesses to use Azure over AWS' or 'get web developers to use Windows instead of Macs' is a much, much more likely motivation than 'Extinguish desktop Linux'. Why would they care about that? Desktop Linux is absolutely no threat to them, and there's no money to be made winning that fight more than they already have. Know what, I'll grant you that in their attempt to steal web devs over from MacOS, and getting a better user story for a web dev deploying Linux servers from Windows, they will probably also hurt desktop Linux - if nothing else, simply by creating another viable alternative for devs that isn't MacOS. But I can pretty much guarantee you that extinguishing desktop Linux is not their motivation - it simply makes no sense.

Presumably because we smart and they dumb. Or something, I don't know?

Personally, I think that their thirty years of experience and billions of dollars might make it possible for them to come up with a plan I wouldn't have thought of.

They don't have to kill Linux, and in fact, would not want that IMO, because then someone might bring another pesky antitrust suit against them. But if they can dent it in any way, they will.

For those who say Microsoft has changed, is a different company, is embracing open-source, etc.: if that truly is the case, wouldn't they release DirectX for all Linux distributions, not just theirs?

Microsoft is the dragon here. Even if it appears friendly you still don't cut a deal with it, or you become a pawn in its game.

The modern form of EEE is being platinum sponsor of the Linux Foundation and insert a CoC into the source tree.

Corporations don't want the "angry young OSS men" of the 1990s and early 2000s, who could be an actual threat.

Corporations want submissive, neutered and obedient developers.

Apple can be as hardheaded as Microsoft. I have several Apple machines and each of them was bought specifically for developing iOS apps, other uses appeared later. Apple can provide Swift for Windows and Linux, but they will never allow building iOS apps on non-Mac hardware.

First of all the market share of desktop versus mobile is roughly 43% for the desktop, 57% for mobiles and tablets. More importantly however is that the rise of mobiles has been sharp since 2009, but it's been stagnating since 2017 and this stagnation trend is clear. Mobile devices too are a commodity, their market isn't growing any bigger and people aren't replacing their phones as often. The market for the desktop did not shrink. It just reached saturation. And as it will become increasingly clear, mobiles have reached saturation too.

What devices do people use in companies to do their jobs? Laptops. Sometimes tablets, for drawing on them, although a piece of paper would do. Mobile devices have been and remain essential for communications, this meant phone calls in the past, nowadays it means WhatsApp, Slack, email, along with shitposting on Facebook/Instagram/Twitter, but that's about it.

> "webservers (where Linux is massively dominant)"

Sorry to disappoint you, but the market for web servers is actually small, unless you're Amazon and Microsoft realized at some point that selling Linux boxes on Azure is probably more lucrative than what they were doing. The web servers space was never Microsoft's so they had nothing to lose.

But the enterprise space is dominated by Microsoft, with their dominance only increasing. Exchange, Sharepoint, Office 365, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Azure DevOps, freaking Yammer, MS SQL, soon GitHub, their reach in the enterprise and their adoption, once you're familiar with the space, is actually quite scary.

I have to hand it to them, they became really good at marketing. Otherwise I can't explain this portrayal of them as being the underdog. Or the constant nagging messages I see about them having changed, due to them releasing VS Code or .NET Core.

No they haven't changed much. The tooling they make for developers has always been top notch and while .NET was proprietary, they standardized it and they never attacked Mono. Office has been available on Macs since 1989. And they no longer target Linux with patent threats of course, they target Android instead. Until they'll find some way to sell Android. They adopted Chromium, a master move since now they can cut some development costs and win back some users and sell them on Bing too. We'll probably see them windowfying Android too.

---

Note that I do enjoy several Microsoft products. But I'm always skeptical when hearing about their motivation. I don't understand what makes people cheer for these big companies, as if they are sports teams. Use their products for what they are and dump them as soon as you find something better.

I have to emphatically disagree there. Up until recently Windows didn't even have a decent terminal app. As a developer I tend to shy away from Windows precisely because the *Nix alternatives offer a better development experience, from cli to package management and more.

In fact Mac OS also didn't have any until OS X.

People should be much more concerned about EEE from Google, as we’ve been seeing more of all the time with Chrome.

Not only US government, but almost every government around the globe is using it. And on macOS, that's still the case.