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Comment by vermilingua | Hacker News Reader

A MS dev writing a blog on building MS’ own distro of Linux on his _Macbook_ must have Ballmer sweating bullets.

Fortunately, nobody has to care what Ballmer thinks anymore.

IMO he, even moreso than BillG, was the animus behind the insanely cultish POV that MSFT had for a long, long time. As recently as 2009, working there led otherwise smart people to say really dumb things for, I guess, political reasons.

I'm in the project management space. We have a product that compliments Project Server, and early on we did lots of joint deals with MSFT's Proj Server unit. Even well after the introduction of the iPhone -- which, for most phone makers, was a serious wakeup call about what you could do with a phone -- they acted like it was a personal insult every time they saw a professional associate using something other than Windows Mobile. "Get one of these! It's just as good!"

Keep in mind that, in 2009, WinMo was a complete dumpster fire. App availability was awkward (no built-in stores yet), but there were MONSTROUS gaps in capability in the devices out of the box. For example, the native mail client couldn't do IMAP. But sure, it's "just as good".

iPods -- which were really ubiquitous -- set them off, too. And if you mentioned having a PlayStation, they'd want to know why you didn't have an XBox instead. They had "amnesty barrels" you could throw away your non-MSFT tech in. It was really, really, really goofy and rah-rah and honestly creepy.

You notice how, today, MSFT actually understands they're part of a diverse computing landscape? Sharepoint actually works on non-MSFT browsers, for example. Office 365 runs like a champ in pretty much ANY decent browser, on any platform. I can run a real iOS build of Office on my iPad, and the Mac version is really great.

ALL OF THIS is post-Ballmer.

> ALL OF THIS is post-Ballmer.

All of this is post losing the top position. It not possible to infer that the behavior won't be the same if the get to the top again.

Ballmer was forced out of MS 8 years ago, doubt he cares. And anyway, IIRC, it would've been Sinofsky and co. trying to squash anything that threatened the Windows division's power.

Sinofsky and co. are also to blame for Longhorn sabotage of using .NET, and most likely trying to bring Midori stuff into Windows.

Now Project Reunion, sorry Windows 11, is trying to fix the path started with Windows 8.

Longhorn sabotage, Midori, Project Reunion? Could you give a bit more background for those of us like me who aren't up to date with Microsoft internal projects and politics?

To fully get where I am coming from, you have to go back to when .NET was released.

.NET was supposed to be the great reunification of VB, C++ and COM runtimes, then also got a Java touch into the mix and .NET happenend (initially was known as Ext-VOS).

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-gb/archive/blogs/dsyme/more-c-...

Hence why CLR is just like WASM + GC if you prefer a modern comparisasion.

If you go back into web archives, when Visual Studio.NET was released, it was going to be .NET everywhere, across the whole stack.

However a big management mistake happened, .NET was part of DevTools business unit, while C++ was kept under WinDev, up until Satya started to change the culture, it has been pretty much WinDev vs DevTools.

So Managed DirectX comes, eventually gets killed, XNA and Silverlight take over Windows Phone 7, get killed by WinRT and DirectXTK and so on.

Going back to the originally statement, if you Google for why Longhorn did not work out, you will find many .NET blaming.

https://hackernoon.com/what-really-happened-with-vista-4ca7f...

Yet Android, ChromeOS, Midori are examples of what happens when actually everyone works into the same direction bringing an OS into production.

Joe Duffy does some remarks on his two talks, where he hints at why it was a failure to fight Windows culture

"Systems Programming in C# " - https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi...

"Safe Systems Software and the Future of Computing" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuD7SCqHB7k

Note that for some time the Asian Bing nodes were actually running on top of Midori as production test.

A big decision of Vista, was to replicate the .NET design using COM instead (hello WinDev), hence why all major modern Windows APIs are now COM based.

Windows 8 doubled down on that by introducing WinRT, with AOT compiled .NET and C++/CX using COM as the future Windows runtime, this was a point of friction, as .NET Native isn't 100% compatible with regular .NET, and many C++ devs desliked C++/CX extensions (later C++/WinRT replaced C++/CX, but that is another story).

So to sort out all the adoption chaos, Project Reunion was born, which is basically merging the COM improvments brought by WinRT and app sandbox into Win32, and forgeting the split ever happened.

Even Reunion has had a couple of hicups, it started as XAML islands, it became eventually clear that that alone wouldn't do it, thus Project Reunion.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2020/05/19/develo...

And now a year later, it was renamed as Windows App SDK.

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2021/06/24/what-w...

Note that many System C# features now live in C# 7 and later versions, and were also in the basis of C++ Core Guidelines.

Also note an example of the internal competition with the pleothora of GUIs being done now, Forms, WPF, WinUI, MAUI, Blazor, React Native for Windows.

Maybe if all divisions worked more together in Longhorn, the project would actually happened and Vista wouldn't have been needed, nor the strong emphasis on COM that it started.

Thanks for the context. It's very frustrating as a .NET developer that infighting set back .NET GUI development by 10 years. There's still no supported way to use DirectX from .NET. All the new GUI tech is moving in the right direction but is unfinished to the point that still only WPF and WinForms can meet my requirements. I really wanted to ditch WPF since the DirectX 11 -> DirectX 9 (WPF) interop is so hacky.

Unfortunately we are better off with community efforts, the DirectX team is really deep into C++ mindset and nothing else, no wonder it belongs to WinDev side.

https://github.com/microsoft/WindowsAppSDK/issues/14#issueco...

what was wrong with Midori? I wasn't on the team but I played around with it, and thought that the architecture was absolutely beautiful. It's a tragedy that it wasn't open-source. I understand that there wasn't much appetite towards "replacing Windows" when we were losing ground fast to mobile, but it's a loss to the academic community at least.

Politcal feuds if you read between the lines of statements like "The project included novel “cultural” approaches too, being 100% developers and very code-focused, looking more like the Microsoft of today and hopefully tomorrow, than it did the Microsoft of 8 years ago when the project began.".

Joe Duffy has similar remarks on his posts and post morten sessions done about the project.

Some extra insight here: https://twitter.com/funcOfJoe/status/1121963970661715968

Many people at Microsoft use Macs. It’s not a big deal.

Meanwhile no one at Apple is using windows unless they have to for very specific software.

That's unfortunately their loss in my opinion. Windows has a pretty awesome development story, far better than Apple's authoritarian hold on what software can be run and distributed for that platform.

Moreover, gaming is great on Windows, and always has been, and WSL2 is extremely slick.

> Apple's authoritarian hold on what software can be run and distributed for that platform

What does that mean? I've never needed Apple's permission to run any software on macOS.

Unless you go out out of your way to disable code signing using the terminal & a root account, macOS will only run code signed by an Apple issued certificate [1]. It will also phone home [2] every time a binary is ran for the first time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gatekeeper_(macOS)

[2] https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/391399

You can literally just right click and press 'open'. Might not be obvious to the layman, but you don't need to do a whole code signing bypass song and dance.

Big Sur has made this intentionally more tedious [1]. You apparently have to right click, click open, close the dialogue and then open it again in order to actually get the option to approve the application.

[1] https://disable-gatekeeper.github.io/

I'd say this is a good thing.

If you can't even figure out how to bypass it, then you probably shouldn't.

I can't edit my comment so I'll just put this here: what is up with HN heavily downvoting factual, useful information? It seems something from the past 1-1.5y or so and it infuriates me to no end.

In aggregate, HN hates Apple. It's that simple, really.

In aggregate, HN loves/hates all of {GOOG, APPL, NFLX, TSLA, MS}.

Except for FB, everyone actually seems to hate them.

I had an overnight update install itself on my sole Windows machine the other night. When it rebooted it refused to let me use my own computer until I obtained direct permission from Microsoft giving them my email address. Once I was past that lock it told me "the computer is all yours now" as if it hadn't been earlier.

Does Apple completely deny your use of your own hardware like this until you submit? Asking because I have been used to Linux as a daily driver for over 20 years and haven't used Apple since Jobs banned clones.

1. You can disable auto updates

2. I've never entered an email for using Windows 10, they do try to hide it but you can set up an offline account.

> I had an overnight update install itself on my sole Windows machine the other night. When it rebooted it refused to let me use my own computer until I obtained direct permission from Microsoft giving them my email address.

This is not something that Windows does. Ever.

What do you mean by "obtained direct permission from Microsoft giving them my email address"? You're clearly not talking about logging into a Microsoft account so I'm struggling to understand what you're referring to.

Doesn’t Apple provide a system preference option to disable gatekeeper completely (set to running signed applications by default, and it also allows you to limit apps to App Store only).

The system preference option is no longer visible in recent releases of macOS – it can only be enabled via the terminal.

IOW, yes, you can disable it.

Right click -> Open -> Open

That's not needing Apple's permission; that's me giving my permission.

Actually, they had an outage when Catalina was released because Macs phone home before starting 3rd party software.

https://9to5mac.com/2020/11/15/apple-explains-addresses-mac-...

During the past three years I went from being my workplace's Windows hater to ditching Linux in my personal machines in favor of Win + WSL2.

Why did you ditch Linux for WSL2?

WSL2 is slick, but the process of getting on Windows Insider Program and updating Windows to the right version is quite clunky.

You no longer have to be a member of the Windows Insider Program. There's a simplified installation method if you are, but if you're not, you can install WSL2 manually.

You realize there’s no issue with development internally for Apple products at Apple on macOS, right?

And generally if you work at Apple you actually like/prefer/love Apple products?

Gaming is, in fact, the only reason to have Windows installed on any computer. Even though Wine and Proton are impressive projects, I'm somewhat pessimistic about their ability to completely replace Windows.

I won't be sad if I'm wrong there.

Right now, it's a bit like using Firefox instead of Chrome. They both render the website but some devs exploit Chrome only tech that Firefox hasn't yet implemented workarounds for and those won't work.

If you're ok with that, you can officially replace windows with Linux.

>far better than Apple's authoritarian hold on what software can be run and distributed for that platform.

No such hold exists on MacOS. You're confusing it with iOS.

Windows is better for gaming, but that doesn't matter to everybody.

I was forced to use a Mac, wehen I worked at Apple. Absolutely horrible piece of hardware. Keys sucked, touch bar useless. Had to carry around an external keyboard. Luckily I could bring my own external keyboard, which meade it somewhat bearable.

I use Linux everyday with an apple keyboard. The way we train our mussle memory and how it becomes our reality is fascinating.

He's probably talking about the butterfly key keyboards build into Macbooks that were notoriously bad in the mid-late teens.

The external keyboards were never so bad.

They also write a lot of software for the Mac...

An Azure MS dev .. for running on their VMware vSphere 7 home lab.

This dev sure is not only looking at their in-house toolset. I'd say that that is a good thing.

> A MS dev writing a blog on building MS’ own distro of Linux on his _Macbook_ must have Ballmer sweating bullets.

Not to mention throwing chairs.

Ballmer just became the 9th person in the "$100Bn net worth club" - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ballmer+%24100bn&ia=web

he's probably fine with everything.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6TBOfiGWM8

Why would Ballmer care? He hasn't worked at Microsoft in a decade.

Who's Ballmer?

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