my understanding is that within microsoft there are different factions competing with each other for i don't know what, dominance maybe. it kind of makes sense since microsoft has several different strong products that can stand on their own (unlike google whose main income is from advertising so really all google products subsume to that), and some of these factions may well genuinely love FOSS.

They're FOSS friendly because they don't have a choice.

They have to support linux on Azure, so they're all in. Meaning they're joining boards and steering committees, becoming platinum level donors, and buying github that hosts a lot of open projects.

You may enjoy these org charts:

https://web.archive.org/web/20110701051217/http://www.bonker...

> Were they ever different tho?

According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and Gates. Yet, I was never convinced by the "but they embrace open source now" argument:

* their financing of SCO in the "Linux is illegal" ridiculous attempt to discredit their competition that took over a decade

* the contempt for their users in various ways, from gray patterns with local vs MS accounts to ads in the start menu and other spyware with settings that reset after random upgrades to "defaults" convenient only for MS

* if they profess so much love for Linux and spend so much on kernel development (actually, that's mostly for Hyper-V etc.), why they don't do one simple thing and recognize Linux as a Desktop OS that you can install along Windows? Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems. Linux doesn't have this problem and will recognize an existing Windows installation and will even add it to its boot menu.

Plus one million other tricks they played that shows the changes are just superficial.

*

> According to many people on HN, they changed completely, and they have nothing to do with the old epoch of Ballmer and Gates.

Yeah right. Why is there spam on my windows 10 start menu?

> Instead, in 2023 you have to still install Windows first to avoid problems.

You do? Got a new Linux desktop. I'll eventually put Windows on it. I was planning on installing it on a separate SSD just in case. Will that destroy my Linux install? Should I unscrew and remove the Linux SSD to install Windows?

In my experience the worst it does is setting itself to boot automatically. It won't mess with secureboot keys or anything. In my case, I removed the pc's default ones and installed my own and signed ms's key with mine. It works fine.

> In my experience the worst it does is setting itself to boot automatically.

In UEFI? If I have the OSes on separate physical disks I'm planning to use the bios to select what boots.

There's still a "default", at least on my PC.

But yeah, using the uefi works fine to choose between windows and linux, even if you only have a single /efi partition (I use efistub for linux, not a dedicated bootloader).

If you add custom boot options, they won't be removed after a windows install, it only adds itself to the list and sets itself as the first in line. Afterwards, it doesn't seem to touch that anymore, but YMMV with "big" updates.

I had OSes on separate disks. Win7 and Arch, used UEFI to choose who to boot.

Updated to Win10 and it somehow completely broke Linux boot. I could choose on UEFI to boot Linux but it wouldn't work. Eventually I gave up and reinstalled Linux

I have rEFInd installed on window's EFI partition, and it boots either windows or linux (on separate drive though). It's been like that since skylake came out, and I never had issues with it.

As long as you're not installing linux bootloader in the same EFI partition, it's not going to cause any issues. If you're using MBR, then you should probably stop doing it.

The whole stack of .NET Core, WSL 1/2, Windows Terminal, and Visual Studio Code has been an effort to keep Windows relevant as a development environment for web apps. Nothing more. It was desperation, but well done. Given their history, I'm quite sure that many people in their ranks pinched their noses at being forced into these moves, but the PR department did fine work in spinning this as a "kinder, gentler" Microsoft. The people who haven't been around since the 90's took the bait, but organizations don't change like that. Old timers are still there (looking at you, Brad Smith), and people who have left have invariably been replaced by similar people. That's how hiring works.