It keeps smelling a lot like embrace-extend-exterminate to me, and I keep not trusting WSL and advise people to use native Linux instead.
If they didn't embrance linux style tooling, they get told that they're anti-open source and that Macs will always be a better development environment when you're targeting Linux servers.
If they do embrance Linux style tooling, they get told it's EEE all over again.
I've been following the development of WSL, Terminal and VS Code. It doesn't strike me that this is some corporate EEE style policy, more it's a directive to make Windows as developer friendly as possible.
There's quite possibly an ulterior motive here, but it's more "make deploying onto Azure the happy path" than anything else.
WSL+VS Code+Terminal+Docker for Windows+Github == more business running their workloads on Azure == more money for Microsoft.
When you use the proprietary DirectX extension in WSL, you're not developing for Linux anymore, you're developing for WSL, a proprietary package. And now that you're reliant on DirectX/WSL/Windows, what cloud provider are you going to pick? You see, the Azure Advantage (TM) is that only Microsoft knows how to run DirectX on Linux effectively, because only Microsoft can inspect and modify the code. The Azure Advantage (TM) is that only Microsoft has the proprietary rights for Windows, so Microsoft can charge their competitors anything they want while offering it on Azure at a (relatively) affordable price.
Also, they have acquired Github, and they are slowly pushing towards the entire development/discussion to be moved to Github (In the guise of making it easier for people to contribute to Linux), from the current method of using the Emails for discussions and submitting patches.
When you consider everything, and don't just go by localized observations, you might get a better picture of the old EEE in the new bottle.
On the other hand, supporting VS Code, Terminal, WSL2 makes them money by helping boost their cloud services, so it makes sense to spend money in those areas.
That doesn't feel nefarious to me, just business.
As a linux user I'm immensely happy that I can use the same shell-scripts and applications on windows machines as I do on linux. And that I can just SSH into it (and use the same tools, SSHing into powershell doesn't help much if you don't know or use powershell for anything else). It makes coexisting so much more comfortable.
This isn't just making deploying to Azure the happy path. This is ensuring that a generation of software in the Linux environment only works on Windows' WSL.
If you're not doing native development on Windows 'cause you want cross-platform support, you won't use DirectX specific pieces...
Wouldn't developers just write native Windows ML apps then?
The DirectX integration is going to bring over that support to Windows.
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/announcing-cuda-on-windows...
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/wp-content/uploads/si...
From https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directx-heart-linux/
I'm not even sure where mesa comes in. Can you elaborate where you got your info?
It makes zero sense to consume D3D12 and DirectML under WSL directly from user applications since that prevents your app from being deployed on the real linux. There also won't be any SDK or headers released by Microsoft so you'll have to manually load functions from .so.
> It makes zero sense to consume D3D12 and DirectML under WSL directly from user applications since that prevents your app from being deployed on the real linux.
That's the whole point, people will do it because it's convenient, and Microsoft is counting on the fact that it prevents your app from being deployed on "real Linux". DirectX is already quite a popular API on a popular OS and actually pretty good on technical merit alone. It may very well be a sensible trade-off for a project or developer to move to DirectX, but it will be a loss for the Linux ecosystem.
> There also won't be any SDK or headers released by Microsoft so you'll have to manually load functions from .so.
The .so files are compiled from the same source code, the article doesn't go into a lot of detail but I suspect existing DirectX tooling will be updated for Linux targets. Either way, normal developers will have access to the same tooling and documentation as the developers for TensorFlow and similar ML frameworks you already claimed will talk to D3D12 or DirectML (unless you're claiming that Microsoft will give special tools to the open source TensorFlow project or something).
WSL does not give you the non-intrusiveness, better performance, security, and privacy of a native Linux distro installation.
I can't begin to imagine if Microsoft starts creating an entire Linux development suite of apps that 'requires' the presence of WSL and Windows installed.
At the moment though, this brings Linux and the entire Linux software ecosystem, a pretty good desktop experience, all of the Windows hardware/software ecosystem, and very good integration between the two environments.
It's sort of everything that OS X/MacOS used to be with respect to a great GUI + nix CLI. But Apple has given about as much attention to the nix side of the software as I give the sewage lines that run under my house.
With a Windows GUI and a CLI that is one of several distros. You get the benefits of the enormous hardware support Windows provides, but all of the opensource software the open source community provides.
Who knows what the long-term strategy is, but it's suddenly made Windows useful as a development platform again, right when Apple has started taking their eyes off the ball and has been ignoring the *nix side of their platform for years.
Not if driver developers say "we don't need to support Linux anymore, everyone uses WSL2 anyway".
Disagree. The success of linux has been driven by open source enthusiasm, not corporate backing, so I doubt its demise will come from a corporation.
And the momentum of OEMs offering linux out of the box (Dell, Lenovo, System76, Pinebook) seems to be growing, not shrinking.
Linux is winning. Have some more optimism, my friends.
EDIT: OK downvoters, so what's the most popular operating system that has Linux on it? pretty sure now it is Windows.
It depends what you call “Linux” obviously, but android runs on top of a [forked] Linux Kernel.
- Android-x86: 8,352,565 Downloads
- RemixOS: 4,623,342 Downloads
- Phoenix OS: 180,898 Downloads
- Openthos: 166,697 Downloads
I will see in the future lots of tutorials, guides, software, company support, etc covering not just your regular Linux but also WSL, since it's much easier to access rather than installing yet another Linux distro directly on hardware just to try Linux software.
My point was that you can't claim the 100 million+ Windows userbase as being the largest Linux distribution, because almost none of those people (proportionally) are actually using WSL.
I don't think we have the usage numbers for WSL. I don't think we have the usage numbers for Linux desktop either. I personally would be surprised if WSL was the largest Linux distro, but either way it's not a claim one can make because we don't have the numbers.
It has achieved Linux on the Windows desktop without dual booting, all unified, download whatever distro you want.
Open source is in at the moment but it might not be in the future (especially if we go all in on the cloud)
If Microsoft does anything people don’t like with WSL, people can move back to another Linux distribution, the cost is almost zero to move back to a Debian or Ubuntu.