Please MS just go to hell...

[bd139]

Not totally. They’re getting rid of VBA and VSTO though. Which is a good thing if you’ve ever worked with them. I built a fairly large commercial document templating system on top of VSTO and it was horrible.

To be fair they have to get rid of COM going forwards as it’s not platform portable.

[PKTKS]

Not totally. They’re getting rid of VBA and VSTO though. Which is a good thing if you’ve ever worked with them. I built a fairly large commercial document templating system on top of VSTO and it was horrible.

To be fair they have to get rid of COM going forwards as it’s not platform portable.

It looks like they are steadily preparing to get rid of their crappy Windooozee itself

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsoft-CBL-Mariner-1.0

Somewhere in short time windoozze goonies will have to sign in their cloud to pay for the use of open source free source in MS style.. paying them..

It looks like so..  so WSL financed with the Wayland layer makes all sense
... in porting their already done API to the new environment

alas nothing in their portfolio is "portable" unless paying them

Paul

[bd139]

I’m not allergic to paying for stuff. Most of us aren’t.

[PKTKS]

I’m not allergic to paying for stuff. Most of us aren’t.

For sure.. me too.

Unless they are charging me for something that is already "free" ...

And deliberated locked by their known methods..

That is something that bugs me

Paul 

[bd139]

People are compensated for work. You compensate them by paying for stuff.

Even free stuff isn’t free. Someone converted their surplus time or income into altruism.

There’s nothing to be pissed about. Other than if you’re annoyed that you might have to pay for someone’s work.

There are no open source lawn mowing services 

[PKTKS]

People are compensated for work. You compensate them by paying for stuff.

Even free stuff isn’t free. Someone converted their surplus time or income into altruism.

There’s nothing to be pissed about. Other than if you’re annoyed that you might have to pay for someone’s work.

There are no open source lawn mowing services 

For sure..   I see the point..
But not the case here.

BLENDER Foundation seems to be doing the proper thing.

Can not say that in MS case in which "taking" open source is just privatizing other people work without paying the original developers.. in that case  the point is other.

Privatizing  open source into MS buz is not the same as paying developers.
The case is MS making money at the expense of other people work

I doubt they will pay developers.. they will just takeover what they can use for their own will without benefit for others..  usual thing of MS

Very different point
Paul

[bd139]

The thing you are missing is that the vast majority of open source contributions are coming from people at companies doing paid work. Red hat is a good one. They own pretty much the entire Linux and Gnome core development people.

I’ve fixed over 50 bugs in open source projects in my usual line of work. I’ve been bouncing a Chromium bug around this week already.

People do contribute.

Might want to check Microsoft’s GitHub repo list as well and the licenses in there.  This is always a good starting point: https://github.com/dotnet/core

[PKTKS]

The thing you are missing is that the vast majority of open source contributions are coming from people at companies doing paid work. Red hat is a good one. They own pretty much the entire Linux and Gnome core development people.
..

I am aware of that...   but the days of RH being an opensource contributor
are *LONG* gone.

I have used RH a LOT from the good old days late 90s.
Ditched that when they became totally a oriented business
nothing wrong about that but their business suit only themselves..

Today we just can not associate RH to opensource.
Same thing to Canonical - it is a business.

Their solutions are totally biased and diverted to their own goals.

True they contribute.. but that is collateral imposed by  GPL/LGPL.
If possible make no mistake about it they would not contribute and do just buz.

Both are examples of privatizing opensource
nevertheless they started as something else..

Nothing wrong having bread and butter
but let's not mix the points

Paul

[PKTKS]

Might want to check Microsoft’s GitHub repo list as well and the licenses in there.  This is always a good starting point: https://github.com/dotnet/core

This sort of corporate thing scares the shits out...
They are obviously paving the way to the digital landlord top..

Having total control over projects and now a proprietary (althoug "open" kernel)..
Expect to see subverted fragmented and sabotaged things for *NIX itself.

Make no mistake . MS is a sick business - it is not about bread and butter.

Paul

[bd139]

Meh I pay money for problems to fuck off. It's working pretty well for that.

[SiliconWizard]

Next office version will run on Linux. They’re already working on it. In fact the next version is a superset of their web applications.

MS getting too interested in Linux does scare me a little though, I must say.

[bd139]

I wouldn't worry. They aren't really making much headroom on it and that's not what they want to do. 

All Microsoft want to do is to get you to use Azure and Office 365 as they are the only profitable (and decent) parts of their enterprise left at this point. To do that they need to move to an everything everywhere model and push open development platforms out and sell you their APIs and consumer applications for them. They have more Linux nodes on Azure than they do Windows as an example.

If you look at the professional software development side of things as well, bar a bunch of legacy and specialist win32 based companies, no one cares about their platform any more so the focus is either dedicated applications per platform, portable apps (wx, qt, electron etc) and service based (web apps/hybrid model). Purely by chance they actually produce a reasonable component for that and leverage it: TypeScript leveraged by VScode. And of course Azure for hosting service based applications. And C# which is really not a bad language for a lot of application domains.

So they hope you will use Windows to develop Linux software to run on Azure. Hope being the word. I develop Python and Go software using VScode that runs on AWS 

[SiliconWizard]

I wouldn't worry. They aren't really making much headroom on it and that's not what they want to do. 

Hope you're right. But the real reason not too worry, at least for now, is that Linux still weighs nothing as a 'desktop' OS. But if it ever grows (which, I admit, is not very likely, although each new Windows version now tends to help this happen...), MS will be very aggressive. As I said earlier, the fact Android is now leading the overall market for OSs (of course due to mobile devices) is making them extremely nervous.

[bd139]

Linux on the desktop will never be a thing so I wouldn’t worry. I said that in 1998 and have been right for 23 years so far 

Android is interesting. It’s a delivery platform for apps they can leverage a subscription for. The ability to run android apps on windows will be turned off within 2 years of releasing windows 11 I guarantee. It’s not useful.

[james_s]

Linux on a desktop may not ever be mainstream, but quite a few of us have been making it work. My mom has been using Linux exclusively for about 5 years now, I use it on everything other than my main daily driver laptop. As long as it exists and runs the software I need I don't care if it's mainstream or not.

[bd139]

I like to keep my stuff in a format that my non technical family can access should I cop it without having to pay someone to work it out.  That means mainstream platforms for me.

I had to do some digital archaeology with my father and mother and that was bad enough (Mac and windows respectively)

[james_s]

Ubuntu is pretty much mainstream, if a person can figure out how to use Windows or Mac then they can figure out how to use that. A lot of my family is going to have to pay someone to work on their computer no matter what OS is on it if something breaks so it doesn't really matter. I also keep backups of my important stuff on external drives and occasionally a DVD-R, any OS can be used to access that. 

[PKTKS]

Ubuntu is pretty much mainstream, if a person can figure out how to use Windows or Mac then they can figure out how to use that. A lot of my family is going to have to pay someone to work on their computer no matter what OS is on it if something breaks so it doesn't really matter. I also keep backups of my important stuff on external drives and occasionally a DVD-R, any OS can be used to access that.

Once upon a time I used to "think" that debian and/or RH and/or SuSE..
and or ...  fill yourself..  would be mainstream.

Then.. obviously "the desktop"  metaphor  brought me back to the land where GPU vendors and hardware fabs are integrated into a cash flow network where they will not allow any other mainstream to reduce the rate of cash (flow)

In other words... if they can not launch a "new GPU" a "new MOBO" every 15 days requiring a "new OS" and new license.. well they just will not allow other landlord mainstream.

Now comes de facto the mainstream where the very same model will apply
Embrace (done) - Extend (fully done) - Extinguish will soon be done ..

 https://linuxiac.com/microsoft-cbl-mariner-linux-1/


Expect the MUD where Wayland  compatible layer will implode XOrg
Vanishing all possible scenarios where a distro *not compatible* w/WSL
will exist ..

So why someone choose anything besides this aberration "MARINE" thing
running inside the bundled WSL thing?

Extinguish is soon on the horizon by imploding XOrg and taking over
*NIX "desktop" completely to the mains stream.

Welcome new Merdsoft Linux  on all hardware already bundled by vendors.

No need to have anything else.
*NIX and XOrg are already a complete obscure MUD ..
promoted by these things not *NIX and not anything else... 
just MerdSoft  *NIX

PS> try to compile the latest MUD on XOrg freedesktop.. see for yourself
what they have done from the inside..

Paul

[SiliconWizard]

Linux on the desktop will never be a thing so I wouldn’t worry. I said that in 1998 and have been right for 23 years so far 

Things have changed. Desktop Linux is increasingly usable these days, even for non-tech-savvy people. That may never be a significant market share, but I wouldn't be that confident thinking that MS will never care about it and will essentially leave Linux alone. That's what I'm a bit worried about. I have no certainty that in some point in the future, they won't try to make life miserable for people willing to use Linux. They already sort of tried with all this secure boot thing that could prevent people from booting Linux unless you disabled it. There are tons of ways that could make it very hard to run Linux on regular computers, probably always with the same excuse: security.

If you think being able to use free software tools, if you so wish, is guaranteed forever, well. I'm not all that sure myself anymore. And if that ever effectively gets compromised, MS probably won't be last to contribute.

They may not feel threatened by desktop Linux whatsoever at this point, but they certainly don't want to risk that. And they don't want people to have alternatives either. And even if it's still a small minority, it's becoming clear lately that a fraction of Windows users is actively looking for alternatives.

[bd139]

Sorry but general usability on latest gnome software is abysmal. Really awful. It’s a shit show.

They copied the bits of windows and bits of Mac and iOS that sort of looked about right and fucked it up. There is no consistency, quality or usability.

It’s worse than gnome 2 by a mile.

[coppice]

Sorry but general usability on latest gnome software is abysmal. Really awful. It’s a shit show.

They copied the bits of windows and bits of Mac and iOS that sort of looked about right and fucked it up. There is no consistency, quality or usability.

It’s worse than gnome 2 by a mile.

Its bound to get worse because so many people abandoned Gnome when 3 turned out to be such an ugly duckling. They aren't getting the feedback from real world users that a thriving platform gets. I realise that the Gnome 3 people are not the sort to welcome feedback, but if the users hadn't been able to flee to something better their voice would have become overwhealming by now.

[james_s]

I don't use Gnome, I've been using Mate for several years, haven't had many issues with it. Cinnamon is a good option for people who like the look and feel of Windows.

[SiliconWizard]

I don't use Gnome, I've been using Mate for several years, haven't had many issues with it. Cinnamon is a good option for people who like the look and feel of Windows.

Yes, and there are tons of others options.
I happen to use Gnome 3 on my laptop, I used not to like it much, but I've grown used to it. With a few extensions, it works fine. I probably wouldn't use that on my workstation for heavy use, but for a laptop and occasional use, that's fine. Otherwise, many options indeed. I'd probably try Mate or Cinnamon for workstation use, and also KDE. Doesn't seem too bad lately.

[Ed.Kloonk]

Derek shows how the latest Mint is set up to look and feel similar across 3 desktops. So that boring old argument about Gnome this and Gnome that is old hat.

[bd139]

Yeah it sucks three times now. Spend a few weeks on macOS and going to this feels like someone has cut your hands off.