Microsoft published a guide on how to install Linux.

Yes, but people find this interesting because historically, Microsoft was actively trying to destroy Linux (look up Halloween documents) and even said that Linux is cancer.

Oh my god

"An expensive bootloader at that, but hey you already paid us when you bought your laptop thanks to our decades-old grip on the market, so we could not care less what you do next"

Grub

Oh my Bill

Thought that was what PXE boot was for

This has way more to do with Azure is their main product and they know what people want to run on the cloud runs on Linux workloads. They've seen their Kuberbetes numbers, they know where the money is

There's definitely an element of that, but imo their recent embrace of WSL and linux tooling for development is just to try and expand their market share in the software development space. Very few devs develop on windows unless they're game devs, C# devs or working on something else that requires windows/Microsoft tooling, everyone else is on Linux and macOS because windows is bad for developing software.

It's basically an admission that their tooling is bad, but it's fine because you can just run linux development tools on windows now, so please don't switch to Linux fully

Well, I don't think it's anti-monopoly evidence, but instead a way to intercept a popular search phrase and control the narrative.

You search for "how to download and install linux" in google, and the very top link is the Microsoft page. And the narrative is:
-I just want to get started: Oh, use WSL, that way you are using Windows really, and just a touch of Linux
-I need to use it for real: Oh, then use Azure, you can have us set up those scary Linux instances for you and Microsoft Terminal will hook you right up to those instances
-I really really want to use it: Ok, but remember, you'll lose access to Windows applications, so there are downsides, and also, we are going to make this hands down the scariest looking procedure of the three...

I don't think this is the reason. Windows is in no danger of being a monopoly

What does "quietly" even mean? Didn't take out ads in Times Square?

Also how is this bad?

Do people not know that Microsoft has their own Linux distro?

MS has been at Linux expos since 2004! They started working on SUSE in friggin 2006! I truly don't get the amount of bile and ignorance the Lemmy community has towards them, it's like half these folks are still on 2001-era slashdot, talking about FUD and Micro$oft.

Yeah, Microsoft has been a shit company making mediocre products its whole lifetime, but the amount of unhinged hatred here does not in any way match the present-day company's actions.

Great source, but it also shows they make 23% off office. Together with Windows, that's over 30% of their revenue.

Office doesn't work on Linux, so it really doesn't make financial sense to push Linux

Also, if you spend any amount of time around the Linux Kernel Mailing List, there's no shortage of microsoft.com email addresses involved and contributing here and there.

I would not be surprised if more than 50% of that is on Linux.

Depending how you count "on Linux" the over/under is closer to 90%.

I was about 90% reading this going wtf is this guy on?

You got me, I had my torch and pitchfork ready and my FOSS-themed chanting was growing louder...

You actually can use Active directory with linux

I could see that with Ubuntu since they are already throwing money and dev time to support it. Also DoD is already putting out automated STIGs for it.

They're having issues with step 3 on Linux

More like:

1 - embrace it in the cloud 2 - profit madly 3 - extend 4 - profit more

It makes me chuckle that people think Microsoft actually wants to extinguish Linux. I mean, the Windows division sees it as a competitor to be vanquished I guess. Over at Azure though, it is the golden goose.

Where I'm from, Triple E is something spread by mosquitoes.. something about it just attracts blood suckers I guess

Linux is omnipresent in serverspace, while Windows Server is used for AD and nothing else. I would say that the usual aproach is moot here.

How many years will you people keep parroting this? Show me the extinguish part already...

Wouldn't it happen by now considering how much MSFT/corporate influence Linux already has?

True. Dont trust that company. They may invest 1% of their money into WSL now, but its for making the "Linux" experience so good there literally is no reason for many anymore, to really switch.

Thank you.

Ways Lemmy is already feeling like modern reddit: Instead of link to an article, we get screenshot of a post with a screenshot of the article.

But depending on the software (looking at you Teams) they GAF which browser you use.

WSL has actually been part of Windows in one form or the other since the very first NT, initially because US state contracts required a "supports POSIX" checkbox and the implemented just enough to be able to tick that (and, consequently, it sucked), it's also why NTFS has a POSIX mode for filenames. It was definitely a very unloved stepchild during the Gates/Ballmer years, back when MS was pushing Windows servers. Nowadays they have their own Linux distro to do server stuff, the whole company strategy shifted, Windows isn't an anchor point, any more, their corporate support contracts are. In a sense they're trying to be SAP for small companies (for SAP values of "small". MS itself is a small company on the SAP scale). That is cloud-supported, which has some (but not gigantic) synergy with their gaming arm.

It comes with bing search pre configured for you so you don't have to look for the settings, we also hid them so you don't accidentally switch to duckduckgo because we believe Linux users shall experience the full potential of our services even out abroad on another OS

Install linux second and create a second boot partition. most distros will probe foreign os and add a grub chainloader entry from grub to windows boot partition. windows never lnows about the other boot partition

I don't think a guide is really needed to install Linux

I had a guide and it was still a big learning curve. Linus had a guide and he still bricked his machine trying to install Steam. Imagine your parents or grandparents being told without context to mount an ISO to a USB and set up their BIOS - for 90% of people there is no way in hell they're installing Linux without a guide unless they can double click an exe and have an install wizard do it for them.

The thing is, I don’t think a guide is really needed to install Linux. Most of it is pretty straight-forward. (The only tricky bit that comes to mind is making the USB that you’ve put your distro on bootable. That probably isn’t obvious; and it might not be obvious how to get your computer to boot from a USB anyway if you’ve never done it before.)

It's been awhile since I installed a Linux distro...Have some of them improved guidance related to allocating disk space on install? I remember that was one of the parts that I wasn't entirely confident I'd handled properly the last few times I did so. Something something swap, something /, and the like.

You're so right! I feel like I always need to try two programs and I am never doing it often enough to actually remember which works.

And after trying Linux inside windows and then inside a VM and realising it runs like shit, they'll be convinced windows is better, but they've been deceived.

I, too, have had the audacity to say WSL is useful on this community and it was also met with down votes. Purists hating and gate keeping, and then they wonder why Linux isn't more popular.

Windows 10+ is a great development machine

If doing Windows development, I agree. WSL is a nice "I would like to have a Linux-like environment without losing Windows or running a full-blown VM" measure. This idea has existed for a long time with things like Cygwin, but at the end of the day, a natively-ran Linux distro will be considerably better for many development stacks than WSL.

Yea anyone who says wsl is good is a windows user and shouldn't try to administer Linux systems.

If you are going to use Linux on windows just use virtualbox

Pretty sure the exact opposite has been happening (vaguely gestures at everything)

It makes sense for Microsoft to support Linux though...

They tried their hardest to kill Linux under Steve Ballmer but now they're moving (or in reality have moved) to a model where Xbox and cloud are their main income-generating industries. The former is unrelated to Windows/Linux and the latter is frankly more dependant on Linux than it is on Windows - Microsoft have been supportive of Linux through Azure for years now and it doesn't exactly make sense for them to be developing two different operating systems, so it's not far fetched to imagine they'll drop DOS NT as a backend for windows entirely in the future and move to a Linux backend, with Windows just being a closed source DM with tracking etc added on.

This covers embrace & extend, but I don't think the extinguish part makes sense - sure they may add features the FOSS community disagree with, but at worst we're in a similar position to where we are now with things being released separately for Linux and Windows

I'm not sure they'll succeed in extinguishing linux. But I do get the worry, especially with WSL.

What I am more worried about is them potentially extinguishing git via their control of github. In particular, with their github cli tool and such >.<

honestly it's a great ad for windows. i've been running debian exclusively for years, and even when i got my new laptop last year, i found dualbooting to be too difficult to set up, so i ended up getting an OEM restore stick from lenovo, then just nuking everything and installing ubuntu (back on debian now). if their guide is useful, i will instal windows and finally be able to play MTG Arena again (and a thousand other games)

Thanks, that's one of my pet peeves, posting a screenshot of a post without a link to the source.

if you can't beat them join'm!
lol

FOSS ftw✌️

It has completely changed my workflow on my work computer and kept me from going insane since my company only allows windows. Having the separate VM I can still use all native Linux tooling and docker-ce is great.

True, for some uses.

If you only need command line use, it's fine. I personally strongly prefer the environment in, say, Linux distribution running Plasma, but if you are fine with Windows applications, then fine.

If you need GUI Linux... WSLG can kind of sort of get you there, but it sucks. So if you live with any Linux GUI application for significant periods of time, then you'll want to strangle WSLg and it's weird behaviors. VcXsrv can help on this front.

If you are like me and find dnf+flathub an appealing strategy for installation and update of software, you like Plasma desktop management, then Linux 'for real' is the way to go.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish is still the name of the game.

Doubt it

Which is one of the things that people seem to forget about with Microsoft when they think that them pushing Linux is some nefarious plot to kill Linux and get everyone on Windows. At this point, it's like 12% of their total revenue. Not insignificant, but they're likely going to see far more growth pushing products related to Azure, which most instances are going to be running some sort of Linux VMs.

Microsoft saw the writing on the wall a while ago, and knows that the desktop and even embedded environment is a small slice of the computing pie. They would obviously still prefer to own 100% of that, but they also saw that there's a finite number of users and devices that'll use Windows, while there's effectively an infinite number of things that people can put on their cloud services. Even if it has to be a "competing" OS, they're making a shitton of money regardless.

Whenever someone asks "what distro should I choose?", link them to this:
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/linux/install#step-2---choose-a-linux-distribution

So Linux is an end state utopia of software? Never thought Ballmer was based

I mean, to be fair, that article is over 20 years old by now.

but the Linux crowd, in the world of Prez Steve, are communists.

But it's kinda true though, at least in spirit? Red Hat obviously not though.

It's not that long ago when Steve Ballmer said "Linux is cancer".

Oh wait, that was 22 years ago.

Pretty insane seeing the market dominant OS telling people how to install another OS lol

They've been moving this way for years. SQL server, .net core and powershell all run on linux and are a much bigger deal.

10 minutes ago this was unthinkable lol, I'm shocked at reading this!!

Windows OS is one of the biggest misses in the company's history. The money lost on Zune pales in comparison to the missed opportunities of making NT the go-to dev platform.

People like Mac OS better. The most popular user OS in the world is Android. Cloud is Linux. Microsoft knows they have to play nice because they are so far behind there's no point in competing how they used to.

Well, it's making them plenty of money, but they pretty much get that money no matter what (from the device manufacturers when they sell hardware, and from businesses afraid to have their software entitlement coupled to the accident of their hardware).

Now it's a game of using that guaranteed footprint to bolster the recurring revenue services (OneDrive, Office, Azure). They still get the money for however the copy got there, but also use the copy to launch folks into recurring revenue options.

Except that if the rumors are true, they plan to move to a subscription model for Windows. If they do that, then I'll be done with Windows completely, and rely on Lutris/Steam (Wine/Proton) for all my gaming needs. I run Windows for nothing else.

don't use mbr, it's dead like legacy bios

..and a end.

Its called EEE

well windows is the reason why some laptops don't have s3 sleep anymore