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gigatexal

Leave it to Microsoft to finally figure out a way to get people and more importantly businesses to fund OSS work.

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Microsoft has really become "less evil" in the last couple of years.

* Getting linux on desktop. Check * Getting OSS contributors paid. Check

Unlike Google, it seems Microsoft (Satya) isn't just doing OSS for PR but he probably sincerely believes in it.

Thanks also to Hanselman who seemingly has been a major pro-OSS voice.

WSL is absolutely terrible and can't be taken seriously.

Maybe for your use case, but there are plenty of basic applications for which it works fine, if a little slow. The WSL2 implementation should make it fully competitive option for lightweight tasks like frontend web dev and introductory programming - if MS's figures on performance improvements are accurate.

WSL replacing Linux in the near future is, as you say, not a serious concern. But it being a viable alternative for a portion of the people who would normally use desktop Linux is quite realistic, I think. What say?

When it is released it will likely be as buggy as WSL is today. WSL is over 20x slower due to Microsoft's crappy filesystem. They are still using a custom kernel even though it is a VM now. I don't have high hopes about their terminal either.

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