This reminded me of Ubuntu's bug #1: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1 We would have the ultimate case of "It's not a bug, it's a feature!"

Yes, buying Ubuntu would make sense for severeal reasons:

- They seem to be comfortable shipping that as the default WSL for a few years and this would allow them to integrate even deeper. - Ubuntu is one of the main systems people use in cloud based environments; including Microsoft's own Azure where it and other linux distros are more popular than Windows Server. Taking control of Ubuntu would allow them to take full control of that stack. The goal here would be to offer an alternative to the likes of Oracle and IBM for enterprises and make sure Azure retains its competitive edge over cloud platforms offered by those two. IBM just bought Red Hat; and Oracle ships its own Red Hat derivative. - On premise "cloud" is becoming a big deal. Owning Ubuntu, which is a player in that space too, would enable MS to make Azure on premise a better product.

The Desktop application market at this point is mostly split between creative tools and developer tools. MS is big into the latter and most of that targets Linux already. Creative tools are basically Adobe and similar companies. Most of those target Apple and MS. Finally there's office, which mostly already works in a browser. I doubt they are in a hurry to produce a Linux desktop version. It's a lot of work for basically no big return on investment. They already struggle with keeping the OSX version relevant.

Finally, there are games. PC Games are big drivers for MS Windows sales. It's what keeps home owners buying windows computers with the windows license. While in decline for years, that's still a lot of money for MS. Without gaming, they'd have been bleeding more users to Apple and Linux for years. Of course XBox is still Windows based. I'd say this is the main thing that is keeping Windows Desktop alive. So, I don't see them walking from that any time soon. They might however, transition X Box to a subscription based streaming service at some point. Various companies are already piloting solutions for this (Google, Amazon, NVidia). Linux might make sense here but it would require tight integration with hardware and software. I'd say forget about MS even attempting to support that at the level they currently support Windows. But, I wouldn't discount it for a future iteration of XBox though.

For that matter, given their game studio acquisition, it might behoove them to make efforts to improve WINE, DXVK and Proton support, considering various efforts for game streaming systems afaik mostly linux backed.

Given the anti-trust focus on large tech firms at the moment it seems unlikely, at least in the short term. Windows has a huge market share in desktop (~80% from a quick search) and very substantial share in laptops (~40%) and I can't imagine they want to make any moves (e.g. buying out a competitor) that might lead a regulator to believe they're flexing a dominant market position to their advantage.

Can you clarify where you are getting your stats I had a very hard time digging up an OS market share breakdown for just laptops but intuitively it seems like it ought to be relatively similar to the desktop market share save for the addition of chromebooks.

Agreed, outside of developers and the wealthy (overlap) I would be surprised of non-chromeos laptops are even 50% apple.

I think historically apple has maintained approximately a 10% market share plus or minus 3 points with a higher share for the US and collegiate market.

ChromeOS is supposedly 6% of the desktop market share according to stat counter that I believe confusingly includes desktop/laptop under the same grouping. I'm guessing that about nobody is running chromeOS on a desktop so a reasonable guess is that their share of the laptop market is could easily be 10ish percent.

This would leave windows with somewhere between 70% and 80%

Aside, I've considered using a ChromiumOS for older desktops as a refurb option a few times, and for the likes of my mother in-law who likes desktop form factor, but needs something more "safe" than a typical desktop.

But they are not really competing against Ubuntu in the Laptop market.

Much rather against apple and chromebooks and they cannot buy them. So I doubt they do not buy cannonical because of fear of regulators.

To be honest, that's what a Windows HyperVM is. Microsoft tried to do this the other way around (reimplement the Linux kernel in windows), which is a much smaller and easier task, with WSL1, and then threw that away and just used a VM for WSL2.

This is absolutely possible. It would be (rightly) seen with so much trepidation though: "please trust us we promise we'll never turn evil / back into 90s Microsoft" just wouldn't be enough for a direct core competitor acquisition like this.

I'm not sure they can. When they sold Xenix to SCO, part of the agreement was that they would never compete in the Unix space.

Never is a long time, especially with thirty years of hindsight.

Microsoft was already one of the companies that considered buying Red Hat but turned them down: https://www.businessinsider.com/red-hat-deal-talks-with-amaz...

Red Hat and its enterprise focus would have been a better fit than the much, much smaller Canonical, so there's no reason to believe that MS would consider buying Canonical.

I've been waiting for the headline that Microsoft is buying Docker. It's tightly integrated with WSL 2, VS Code, and Azure.

If it came down to it, I think it's more likely Google would buy them and/or they get split and the core absorbed into CNCF.

Is the point of Wine not to avoid giving Microsoft money?

I think the point of wine is to have a Windows "runtime" that is open source and works on linux.

But I would gladly pay Microsoft to have a wine like thing that supports a broader range of software better, because I prefer Linux to Windows.

I dont mind Windows but being able to simply run Windows apps in a consistent way on Linux would really make my life much easier. The only downside would be the driver situation still sucks on Linux depending on GPU or other peripheral hardware but thats another fight for another day. Hell even being able to run the official Office binary on Linux would be great, course its been a rumor that might happen but theres plenty of software targetting Win32 that is useful.

Wine is the inverse effort of WSL. Both are trying to integrate the best of the other operating system. WSL -> Give Windows users a good modern web app development experience. Wine -> Give Linux users Office and games. To that end, both have their measure of success, and shortcomings. As someone who ran Linux on the desktop for 19 years, I tried every incarnation of Wine I could get my hands on. In the end, I just always kept a Windows partition for playing games.

Proton may be your saviour*

*unless the games you play are online games with Anti-Cheat.

Given the hype, I almost want to reinstall Linux to try it out, and see what all the fuss is about.

And it's funny you bring up anti-cheat, because my biggest success using Wine was Battlefield 2, which actually ran more smoothly on my machine under Linux than Windows, but then I tried to get online, and learned a harsh lesson.

As someone who has invested time and energy into setting up Wine, I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how painless it is to set up a Steam game with Proton. That is to say, you click 'install' as if you were installing a Native game and then when you click 'Play Game' it shows you a quick warning that Steam will be using a compatibility tool and then will boot up without any more fuss.

The caveat is largely that not all games are solved by this [0], and the official Valve whitelist needs to be turned off in settings to use it for all games, but even with these it's still a marked improvement in Quality of Life and barrier to entry for running Windows games on Linux.

I'd give it a go if you have time/inclination. I can recommend it as someone who is now Linux only as a result of this.

[0] - www.protondb.com

I've also run Linux for a long time, and have used Wine since before 1.0 to run some games, with very mixed results. Overall, the same experience for years - most games would have some issues, and many simply wouldn't run, so I kept Windows for gaming.

Proton was a dramatic change for me. A few clicks to enable Proton for a particular game, and then it just seamlessly runs and works. Granted, not all games do (check ProtonDB) but all the games I've wanted to play for the last couple of years have worked. I'd say Proton is the most significant thing to ever happen for Linux gaming support, and it did more for me overnight than many years of trying with Wine.

Modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat are mostly broken, some popular ones like Rainbow Six Siege are impossible to play. But if you mostly play other games, give Proton a try.

My use for it is to run the occasional app that requires Windows without accepting a EULA which permits spyware on my machine.

They are strict about their distance to Microsoft to avoid copyright law cases. They want to make sure it is a blackbox reimplementation and no internal knowledge came in.

Aside from that they are a an open source project, working on a open/libre alternative. Some people in the project certainly have issues with Microsoft, others don't.

No, free software is about freedom not money.

Not anymore. Anyone can install Windows for free (You will have the watermark).

AFAIK main revenue for MS is Azure and Office360, not Windows.

If you were right this wouldn’t be a store page:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/b/windows

Windows 10 Home starts at $130, Pro is $200, and the business licenses start at $300. Given how much of Windows market share comes from business use, it’d be surprising they weren’t making a lot of money there. Since they’re a public company it’s easy to confirm that, yes, selling the most popular operating system in the world is profitable:

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/earnings/FY-2020-Q2...

He is right though, watermarked w10 has no time limit, and comes with what seems only a few limitations, like inability to customize the taskbar location, for example.

I would imagine they make a fair chunk of change from OEM Windows licenses?

This was pretty much always true. I remember the old versions just needed a serial. A single serial number that could be used any number of times worked just fine. Here in Iran, retailers sold Windows CDs with the same serial number printed on the covers.

Even when Windows detected that the license was fake, it basically didn't do anything. Some occasional messaging and a black background was the worst of it. I figure Microsoft understood that pressure on not-rich home users would just beef up its competition.

Non-activated Windows is limited. You cannot even enter the appearance features in the settings application when in such a state.

You can use it, sure. But between the watermark that is always on top and lack of being able to customize the OS I wouldn't want to use "free windows".

>What I would love to see is Microsoft create something Wine

Isn't Wine more like a hack?

Why would you want to have something like that when there's .NET Core? isn't it doing to solve problems that Wine tries to challenge once it supports crossplatform GUI? (so basically once MAUI is released)

* I'm not talking about Avalonia GUI framework which already exists and is crossplatform.

> Isn't Wine more like a hack?

Not more so than Windows.

> Why would you want to have something like that when there's .NET Core? isn't it doing to solve problems that Wine tries to challenge once it supports crossplatform GUI?

No. .NET Core and Wine does not solve the same problem.

> Why would you want to have something like that when there's .NET Core?

.NET Core only allows you to run applications written for .NET, which isn't most applications.

And in comparison, Wine does not try to be a .NET Common Language Runtime (CLR).

dotnet core does not now and probably will never support WinForms or WPF (edit: in a cross platform way that tools like WINE can offer)

It’s a very nice tool, but the two dominant and old GUI frameworks for windows require win32 api for a bunch of stuff the last time i looked and there’s no getting away from it.

"The Real" WPF maybe not, but when it comes to XAML based, then there's: https://avaloniaui.net/

it is "A cross platform XAML Framework for .NET Framework, .NET Core and Mono."

So that is in a realm of possibility.

The "supports" thing is the other way around: Of course .net core would support them on other platforms, but Winforms and WPF don't support other platforms than Windows (Winforms because it's tightly coupled to Win32 [AFAIK] and WPF because it's mostly built on DirectX [AFAIK]).

That said: (AFAIK) Both run on Wine in some versions.

.NET 6 will include a cross platform UI library based on Mono's implementation of WinForms IIRC.

MAUI is basically Microsoft consolidating Xamarin fully into .NET and might consolidate things from their own UI frameworks as well.

.NET Core does support both WinForms and WPF, but only on Windows (with no plans for other OS). Maybe that's what you meant and I just misunderstood? Regardlessly it used to be the case that .NET Core didn't support those GUI frameworks even on Windows, so it's a bit confusing.

yes that’s right. i’ll edit.