WSL has been integrated into Windows for a while now. The days you’re referring to are in the past.

A lot changed after Satya Nadella took the helm. The modern .NET platform is really quite nice, and MS does a lot of FOSS open source work.

Obviously it’s good to be sceptical, they’re a large corporation and all they want is money, they’re not our friends. They’re just not as draconian as they were in the 90s and the 00s.

and their OS is becoming an AD + 365 sub selling machine

Your assertions are not supported by industry analysis.

While this years survey is closed, the results haven’t been published. In last year’s survey, MacOS slightly edged out Linux, moving to second place.

Why is windows bad for development? Outside of specific languages or IDEs which suck for Windows, why would windows be bad for development?

Start your pc, start the IDE and type away. Docker runs in windows so running databases, redis, rabbitmq, elastic or whatever is not an issue.

They just got through the US, EU, and UK courts regarding the Activision/Blizz acquisition. In which they gave up some streaming rights to Ubisoft to appease concerns ragarding game pass monopoly. It’s probably on their mind.

Not bad, just ironic

Maybe their Linux distro will use bing.

And they’ll bake in ads to the desktop.

Microsoft contributes to Linux and other open source projects in many ways, including financially. The cynical among us believe it’s for the same reason Google contributes to Mozilla. Legally it’s harder to prove you’re an evil monopoly if you financially support your competition. Microsoft’s involvement in Linux only became noteworthy after their 2001 Antitrust suit.

The hatred literally stems purely from Windows 10 and 11.

They are products engineered so expertly to frustrate you in such a distasteful way it’s downright offensive to anyone who has used any other operating system. It’s genuinely a marvel of human engineering.

I got radicalized by Slashdot. But I don’t regret it.

It’s a huge portion and an important technology Linux or not - doesn’t hurt to learn somethin new especially when it’s helpful

Indeed, it’s to contain the “Linuxification” of the developer community.

Before WSL, any developer dealing with backend development almost had to install Linux to have a vaguely decent development environment to align with what they get to use on the servers. While they were dragged into that world by their requirements, they may find that the packaging and window management is actually pretty cool. There reluctance to venture out of the Windows world transforms into acceptance and perhaps even liking it.

Now with WSL, those Windows desktop users say “I just need to click a distribution in the Microsoft Store and I’m golden and don’t have to deal with that scary Linux world I don’t know yet.”.

I’ve repeatedly have people notice I’m running a Linux desktop when I’m presenting and off hand say “you know you can just run Linux under Windows, you don’t have to endure Linux anymore”. They seem to think I’m absurd for actually preferring Linux when I can get away with it.

I think they are all in on wsl

Old habits die hard

For all two people who genuinely use edge on Linux, it’s still a more private experience than Windows. Regardless, more power to them

I wouldn’t count on it… From Microsoft’s point of view, dual booting works as long as you install Windows first - which probably suits them just fine.

I prefer having Windows safely tucked away on a virtual machine where it can’t hurt anything.

I personally haven’t seen windows do that in many many years (last time I saw it happen was with windows XP, though I haven’t ran dual-boot system with every windows since then, just some).

In my dual-Linux setup though, one keeps trying to get over the other in every minor update.

Doubt it

windows hasn’t overwritten my uefi settings on major update in 3ish years

You have to install Windows first, then your Linux distro.

Doing that has solved all my problems with Windows being a douche

Those are (made up) problems that might arise after you’ve already installed it; and I doubt Microsoft’s guide says much about them.

I agree; but please take my comment in the context of Microsoft’s guide - which doesn’t tell users how to do any of things that you’ve mentioned. My point is that the underlying purpose of the guide is not so much about how to install linux, but how you might try linux while still keeping Windows.

I did a Mint install a few weeks ago, and I’d say that if you want to preserve some existing OS (i.e. dual boot), then it isn’t super easy. You have to tell it what new partitions you want - and therefore you have to know something about what partitions you should have. The good news is that you don’t actually need any swap or home partition. You can just put it all on one partition - but I don’t think it’s obvious what to do.

On the other hand, if you aren’t trying to preserve something you already have, you can tell the installer to just go with all the defaults, and then you don’t have to know anything about it.

Note: Microsoft’s guide doesn’t mention any of that detail. It basically just says to follow the instructions of the installer.

WSL may be fine for a Windows user to get some access to Linux, however for me it misses the vast majority of what I value in a desktop distribution -Better Window managers. This is subjective, but with Windows you are stuck with Microsoft implementation, and if you might like a tiling window manager, or Plasma workspaces better, well you need to run something other than Windows or OSX.

-Better networking. I can do all kinds of stuff with networking. Niche relative to most folks, but the Windows networking stack is awfully inflexible and frustrating after doing a lot of complex networking tasks in Linux

-More understanding and control over the “background” pieces. With Windows doing nothing a lot is happening and it’s not really clear what is happening where. With Linux, it can be daunting like Windows, but the pieces can be inspected more easily and things are more obvious.

-Easier “repair”. If Windows can’t fix itself, then it’s really hard to recover from a lot of scenarios. Generally speaking a Linux system has to be pretty far gone

-Easier license wrangling. Am I allowed to run another copy of Windows? Can I run a VM of it or does it have to be baremetal? Is it tied to the system I bought with it preloaded, or is it bound to my microsoft account? With most Linux distributions, this is a lot easier, the answer is “sure you can run it”.

-Better package management. If I use flatpak, dnf, apt, zypper, or snap, I can pretty much find any software I want to run and by virtue of installing in that way, it also gets updated. Microsoft has added winget, which is a step in the right direction, but the default ‘update’ flow for a lazy user still ignores all winget content, and many applications ignore all that and push their own self-updater, which is maddening.

The biggest concern, like this thread has, is that WSL sets the tone for “ok, you have enough Linux to do what you need from the comfort of the ‘obviously’ better Microsoft ecosystem” and causes people to not consider actually trying it for real.

I’m by no means a purest but I’ve found WSL… More annoying than using Linux as is. Network oddities, random programs not functioning and just generally subpar as is.