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Comment by sureshv | Hacker News Reader

The change from Windows server licenses to the cloud (Azure) forced this upon Microsoft.

And a majority of Azure runs on Linux, and the major selling points for Windows now is it runs Linux and works with Kubernetes/Docker. Containers still run poorly compared to Linux though and mounting volumes is mostly broken from anything but PowerShell.

> and the major selling points for Windows now is it runs Linux and works with Kubernetes/Docker.

The major selling point for Windows is that it comes preinstalled on the Dell/HP/Lenovo computers our muggles buy. For corporations, the ability to manage identities and lock down the machines from a central location is a killer. The main selling point of Windows for web developers is that it can do that and still run Office well.

As a developer, I'm unconvinced about the value of that second part though. And not convinced at all about the first one too because Macs are Linux-like enough and Linux machines, well, are Linux machines (even when they come with Windows, installing Debian, Ubuntu or Fedora is a zero-effort thing).

The major selling point for Windows is MS Office (even the Mac version is not complete), Visual Studio and Windows-only games in Steam. if only GNU/Linux would became an officially supported platform for full and up-to-date versions of MS Office, VisualStutio, Adobe Photoshop/Illustrator and best-selling games then Windows would be forced into a fair competition which would be fairly hard for it to win.

Visual Studio is great if you develop for Windows and less than useless if you don't. The vast majority of humankind does not need the full feature set of Office (most, in fact, would be quite happy with Google's or Microsoft's web based counterparts). As a developer, I don't need Photoshop or Illustrator - I can get away with Inkscape and Gimp - even when I work on a Mac, where the Adobe apps are available.

As for games... Well... Just buy a gaming rig or a PlayStation. I don't want games on my work computer.

I'm impressed how quickly they jumped on board and started working on support though. OSX is supposedly the developers environment of choice these days; where is Apple on native docker support?

You mean Docker running under a native hypervisor (Docker already supports Hyperkit), or a Docker machine running something other than Linux?

Docker is so dependant on Linux that any attempt to write a native containerisation for another OS would mean starting from scratch. And the licensing of both Windows and MacOS would make it a non-starter.

This is the only way I could get Docker volumes to work correctly with WSL, and it only works about half the time:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/virtualization/2017/12/0...

Microsoft already has a version of docker that runs Windows on host and guest

Windows Server Containers are a ground up build of containers, not a port of Docker. You don’t even need Docker to manage them.

Yes. But there is a port of docker to manage them so people who insist on using only docker can continue to do so without having to risk learning a new technology.

Docker on windows host runs in a virtualbox running linux last time i checked.

There are two different editions. The more popular runs a Linux kernel in a spun up HyperV instance, but the Windows-only solution has images built off of Windows Nano Server instead of Linux. Their docker images/apps are incompatible.

Ah ok, but HyperV is not available on Windows Home editions :( Do you know if it's possible to run Docker with high performance on Windows Home?

No, docker toolbox is broken. The best option right now is to upgrade to pro or dual boot.

HyperV is outstanding and I don't regret paying for the Pro upgrade to get it.

This, although I wish running a desktop guest Dev environment were a better experience :| The new enhanced session Linux turned out to be pretty lackluster.

There is native Docker support for running Windows containers, either using Hyper-V on Windows 10 or natively without any virtualization on Windows server.

Technically a native OSX Docker port is possible, although with some limitations (no bind mounts is going to make it a bit weird). There is not really much call for it, as it is not a server OS.

Do you have a source for the majority of of azure running on Linux? Would be very interested to see this.

https://www.zdnet.com/google-amp/article/linux-now-dominates...

"Today, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's executive vice president of the cloud and enterprise group, said in an interview, "it's about half now, but it varies on the day because a lot of these workloads are elastic, but sometimes slightly over half of Azure VMs are Linux." Microsoft later clarified, "about half Azure VMs are Linux.""

So Linux running on Azure, not Azure running on Linux?

I think they meant majority of azure clients (i.e., people running vms on azure) running linux, not that azure itself runs on linux. Linux was above 40% sometime last year in azure stats, and I think it crossed 50% sometime recently.

Outside of a forklift migration, why would you run a Windows Server VM?

This is the only article I could find doing a quick search:

https://www.wired.com/2015/09/microsoft-using-linux-run-clou...

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-showcases-t...

However, I could have swore I read semi-recently that Azure itself was primarily running on Linux, but I could be wrong here in some regards.

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