Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:
I still will never understand why it’s not called Linux Subsystem for Windows.
There’s a trademark for Linux so Microsoft can’t name a product starting with Linux.
So they can use Linux in the name, just not at the beginning? We’re so stupid. Can they do Windows Subsystem for Coke? Or Windows Subsystem for McDonald’s? Or Windows Subsystem for MacOs?
Good gravy.
I think trademark law has a strange history in the US
I’m sure it does, I was just being facetious.
Sorry, “gravy” is a registered trademark of Gravy, Inc.: https://trademarks.justia.com/854/89/gravy-85489026.html
I think this only applies to using the word “gravy” for payment services or a website referring to such a payment service. There was a prior trademark on the word for use with plush toy products.
Indeed, it’s why Apple could be trademarked as the name of an electronics company. But you can’t rock up to the trademark office and register “Pear” for a company selling pear-related products.
Yes, there are a bunch of trademarks on the word “gravy”, in different industries. I was going to link to that one you mentioned, because for some reason despite being plush toy products, the company holding it was Bob Evans. But it’s since been canceled, and the company name doesn’t appear on the page, so I chose an active trademark instead.
Disney presents Good Gravy®️
Good Gravy®️ Presentation for Disney
I mean I guess it makes some sense. Linux Subsystem for Windows to the uninitiated might sound like it “comes from the Linux brand”, whilst Windows Subsystem for Linux sounds more like its made by Windows.
Copyright is always stupid
This is trademark, not copyright
Yeah but they aren’t wrong
Not in the spirit of free software, if you ask me.
I got hung up on this before too but it’s apparently “Windows Subsystem for (using) Linux”
I think it is because Windows has many subsystems, it’s just that you don’t hear about most of them aside from WSL.
So it is referring to the particular Windows Subsystem (of which there are many) that can run or emulate Linux.
Wait, Windows still has POSIX subsystem or is it only listed for documentation reasons (it was there at least in old NT days)?
Maybe they just named it like the previous attempt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX
Don’t you think this is another Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish strategy from Microsoft?
That’s exactly what it is. Any time now you’ll see “the best way to run Linux: on windows” or similar.
Does Lemmy even know what EEE means anymore or are we regurgitating words we heard from some article now?
What’s it going to embrace and extend? WSL has existed for ages and is just a way to run Linux in a convenient container on top of Windows. That’s it. It’s not an attempt to “extenguish” Linux, literally just make the development experience on Windows less painful so people don’t switch to another OS. This has nothing to do with EEE.
Open sourcing it with a permissive license can only be a good thing, and again they’re doing it to be more appealing to devs and maybe get free bug fixes from the open source community. It isn’t some grand conspiracy. But of course this community will react to news of “proprietary blob is now open source” with pessimism.
Does Lemmy even know what EEE means anymore or are we regurgitating words we heard from some article now?
So either all people of lemmy don’t know shit (you are not included here - implied) or only your assumption is valid: Wrong sources.
What’s it going to embrace and extend?
It embraces the Linux ecosystem and DX on windows. Microsoft is extending the Linux kernel and other Linux projects.
WSL has existed for ages and is just a way to run Linux in a convenient container on top of Windows. That’s it.
To you, yes. Can you speak for any project? Is there not a single project where the userbase are consisting of WSL users with compatability issues? Did you research about it? If so, prompt sources.
It’s not an attempt to “extenguish” Linux, literally just make the development experience on Windows less painful so people don’t switch to another OS. This has nothing to do with EEE.
Trying to bundle the userbase in their subsystem is literally rendering a dedicated Linux machine obsolete. If all would stay there the rest of the distro community would extinguish.
Open sourcing it with a permissive license can only be a good thing,
Can it? Contributing substracts work hours from other projects. So “only be a good thing” is wrong. There are more perspectives then just yours.
and again they’re doing it to be more appealing to devs and maybe get free bug fixes from the open source community.
You got sources about their intentions? You just said it: They are conquering the labor market of personal devs.
It isn’t some grand conspiracy. But of course this community will react to news of “proprietary blob is now open source” with pessimism.
Did you already review the code? No concerns left? How about pulling private servers for data? Is everything mirrored onto their servers? Any binary blobs there? Tracking/monitoring? Is it safe in regards of privacy and security?
Hopefully you see that you ain’t holding all answers and opinions of the entire world. Cheers.
Careful now, you’re gonna be called a bootlicker for that lol. Everything Microsoft do is evil according to Lemmings.
You’re 100% right though. People on here regurgitate catchphrases and terms that they heard other people in their echo chamber use without understanding what they mean, and because the person who they heard using it also didn’t know what they meant, it’s just a comedy of incorrect usage of terms.
It’s amazing that people still don’t understand Microsoft’s goals despite them being very open and telling everyone over and over and over - they want to be the defacto solutions on everything, so their stuff needs to run on everything. They will start releasing all of their stuff on linux eventually, because even if only 1% of people use Linux, Microsoft want them using Microsoft services.
I think it’s an attempt to keep people on their platform who need easy access to a unix-like shell. Linux has it and so does mac os. Windows didn’t until they introduced wsl.
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I had to move back to those a few times instead of using WSL during the early days. There were quite a few growing pains.
Fixed it fully by installing Linux.
Ye, and cygwin, mingw and msys are terrible compared to wsl
has, they still work great and keep me sane
MSYS2 is my current choice for GNU/Windows
I think it’s more embrace. They have to compete against so many more entities now.
This is my thought, they’ve all but lost the battle for cloud servers and they’d rather the developers computers were Windows. WSL allows that.
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Yeah but imagine if they could collect licence fees after every AWS server as well.
The world is not enough for these companies.
My client is spending waaaaaaay more money on Microsoft Online than it ever used to on software licenses. Every single user in the business is costing 🇦🇺$30 per month alone just for their Office suite. That’s before you get to the Azure stuff. Some hosted apps cost over 🇦🇺$1k/month to host in Azure.
Before you go too strongly after Microsoft for charging so much, this is cheaper than what we used to pay for running our own SharePoint, Exchange etc farms as well as the infrastructure required to host websites/database etc. All that has been outsourced to Microsoft Online and saves significant money.
Microsoft is doing very well out of its own cloud fees and can cope with AWS, Google and all the smaller private cloud operations getting some of that action.
I know they are doing very well, trust me, I’ve seen the inside of the beast. It’s not Microsoft either, any megacorp will talk to you in terms of how much they lost by not fully monopolising a market segment.
And that is my point, not that they don’t make insane amounts of money, but that it will never be enough.
they’ve all but lost the battle for cloud servers
Azure is enormous, what are you talking about?
I meant running windows on them, its enormous and its all linux servers. I know you can run windows but it’ll be a tiny fraction.
Microsoft don’t care what you run on azure, just that you’re using azure. In fact running Linux on azure instead of Windows benefits them because it’s more lightweight so their hardware stretches further.
Poorly. WSL is awesome but it’s I/O performance is not at a level which will make developers on bigger projects happy.
I think you’re probably right. Microsoft seems less invested in winning an operating system battle at this point. They’re positioning services and abstractions that care less about the end device’s operating system, more so that they’re at least on that device.
I wouldn’t be surprised we see Microsoft “embrace” Proton and Wine in the next 5 to 10 years as it’s far easier to let “the community” predominantly handle supporting legacy Windows versions that have to handle it themselves.
They can’t suddenly lose that entire OS revenue machine however and would need to transition. But I doubt that Redmond are naive to the disruption Wine and Proton are having and how technical users are starting to jump ship.
Xbox is transitioning to “release on everything”, so their upcoming games will all work on proton (apart from COD etc that have anti-cheat, although wouldn’t surprise me if they make that linux compatible eventually). Microsoft would rather you subscribe to game pass to play their games on Linux than not subscribe to game pass and not give them any money. It wouldn’t surprise me if they eventually released a Linux Xbox app.
Normally I would say yes, but WSL is so incredibly necessary for a developer that it might be legit.
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It’s not necessary. I’m a full stack developer and I only use it for docker, which isn’t even necessary as you can use docker without it.
It’s kind of the opposite in my mind, WSL is (was) Microsoft capitulating to the fact that Linux is not going away, same with Azure. WSL is mostly for companies. Some companies have a huge contract with Microsoft and manage all laptops with it. Then they grow big enough that they can’t ignore Linux because they have people who need to work on Linux. WSL is the way Microsoft keeps their clients, because otherwise they move to Apple based IT.
EEE would have been investing in PowerShell, PuTTY, or similar.
What do you mean azure was a capitulation to? The Internet?
Docker doesn’t exist in a usable state on Windows, so its an attempt to allow management of servers using Windows, as Windows Server fades away from usage entirely.
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No real reason to extinguish here, Microsoft is a services company and can offer those services on Windows and Linux.
I’d wager you’re more likely to see an official compatibility layer on Linux supported by Microsoft before you see them move to extinguish.
💯
Surprisingly few seem to understand the difference between 90s Microsoft and Satya’s Microsoft. Under Satya Microsoft have completely transformed into a services company who aim to have their services run everywhere on absolutely everything. MS services on Linux is coming. Some people still can’t believe that Xbox games are releasing on PlayStation despite it being telegraphed for years.
EEE isn’t a thing they want to do anymore. They want to embrace every platform so they can dominate that market too - not by extending and extinguishing, but by being a one stop shop that no one else can match.
That was 30 years ago, you’re going to have to move on one day.
It could be another Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish strategy from Microsoft, because if the increase in Linux user share leads to an increase in malware, most of those users aren’t experts.
So there will be an increase in antivirus software for Linux, but that will also lead to DRM in Linux, and Linux may become what I swore to destroy. While BSD distributions, Redox OS, and other systems take over to become the new Linux as it was in its beginnings.
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long obsolete dos text editor
It’s a full rewrite in Rust, with no direct relation to the old program.
I wish people would let the EEE meme die. It’s not the 90’s anymore grandpa. Parroting the same pointless meme without applying critical thinking gets old.
Are you suggesting an alternative motive for Microsoft that does beyond profit?
What does that have to do with the price of tea in China? Maybe don’t just toss around non sequiturs.
The profit is getting nerds on the internet to fix bugs in wsl for free
I know there’s a lot of hate for Microsoft on Lemmy, but WSL is one of the best parts of Windows. It’s really powerful and well integrated to Windows. Since I still can’t leave for pure Linux install, I’m glad for WSL.
Funny that the Linux is best part of Windows lmao
Doubly ironic since Win32 is the only stable ABI on Linux.
I don’t think that is true any more but it is funny
Microsoft hate is justified.
WSL made windows tolerable in the time I had to use a windows machine for work.
macOS is still the better choice for corp approved work, integrates decently with IT systems and is a “real” unix system underneath.
Linux on a corporate desktop is mostly about how well you know the IT guys and do they trust you. And of course the software stack.
IT just said no for WSL “ask your manager”
My manager barely knows how to read his email
and doesn’t understand why I want 3rd screen
Just buy a single 45" curved one then.
He doesn’t like that my cubicle computer would not be all the others
Linux on a corporate desktop is mostly about how well you know the IT guys and do they trust you. And of course the software stack.
I would say it depends more on the commitment of the IT admins to support and manage a fleet of Linux workstations. There are Linux “Active Directory” servers, configuration provisioning tools, ways to centrally and automatically rollout updates, etc. It really depends on if the IT guys invest the same amount of effort to support them or not.
2000 people, 3k+ devices and one dude wants a Linux laptop.
Not happening 😀
But it did work in a smaller company of around 30 people, mostly because the IT guy was a Linux user too
Well I worked for a while at a large international corporation that maintained (and AFAIK is still continuing) a managed Linux system, which worked well enough. And there where a lot more people, especially the people that were the most productive, interested in it.
Sure that might have just been a nice island inside the larger company, but the people there were the internal consultants, which often had to pull other projects out of the gutter.
If you over your specialists ways to use the tools they need, you will improve the whole company.
Easy fix, install proxmox and run corpo-os in that as well as a proper desktop os. Just need to max out the ram on the shitbox thet give you and now you can switch almost seemlessly
The only Windows PC I use is my work computer.
GPO blocked WSL.
I can’t even escape to a command line with the right flavour of slashes between directories. For eight hours a day, all hope is lost.
Only solution is to write your own
WSL is EEE
Fair play to Microsoft here. Hopefully we see some pull requests from non-ms employees and a better wsl experience for us all
What kind of axe do you need?
one of those pointy glass hammers should do it
for breaking windows
Great! With this source code out, I can finally complete the port to Linux. I call it WSL24L, aka “Windows Subsystem For Linux 2, For Linux”
Do you name every FOSS project? This is uncannily close to what an actual open source project would be called, including the logic behind it.
Nah, needs more recursion. The ‘W’ in “WSL” stands for “WSL”
This is for WSL2, not for WSL1. WSL2 is just a VM, not a big deal it it’s open-sourced. WSL1 is superior to WSL2 in every way. BTW, WSL2 is not a continuation of WSL1, they are being developed in parallel. I still try to use WSL1 whenever possible. For Linux specific features, like systemd dependancy and mounting file systems, I’d use full-featured VM instead of WSL2.
I thought WSL2 had a few specific advantages over WSL1, something about disk writes and/or Docker? But yeah, WSL1 was such a cool concept. My understanding is they implemented all the syscalls and API in it so it’s basically native.
I tried to use them, as I do most tools like that. On Windows I have always stuck with the MSYS environment that Git for Windows gives you. It’s easy enough to work with and has most everything I care about. Plus it’s easy to set up. With wsl it’s more like a separate thing, it wasn’t as easy to run in place. A lot of times I still used batch or powershell scripts so it wasn’t totally bash. Like Docker is easier to use from not bash in Windows because the syntax is so wonky.
But now I don’t use Windows at all.
I’ve recently started using windows again for work, after not touching it for like 15 years, msys2 makes it tolerable.
I’m a devops engineer, and my company won’t allow me to use WSL. Go figure.
MSYS2 is odd, I could never figure out how to set it up a sort from the one with Git. When I was more of a power user I used Cygwin. Babun is cool but unmaintained last I remember, and is just Cygwin with some enhancements.
As much shit as MS gets (and rightfully so) around 2019 they began turning their reputation around for dev stuff. They’ve lost all that good will though.
I could never figure out how to set it up a sort from the one with Git.
That’s because the one provided with git is a nerfed version of msys2. If you install msys2 as a standalone thing from their website, you get everything you need for a functional CLI on windows. Most importantly, you get a real package manager and decently populated repositories.
I had a typo. I meant “apart from the one with Git”
Uh… But that’s what it’s for? Like it’s it’s primary purpose…? They created it for devops…? What are they smoking?
Msys2 was not created for devops, I just happen to be a devops engineer who uses it. Their websites describes it as:
MSYS2 is a collection of tools and libraries providing you with an easy-to-use environment for building, installing and running native Windows software.
Because it makes software building, packaging and distributing as simple aand standardised as it is on Linux, it means they effectively have a very good CLI on their hands. On my work laptop, I now use WezTerm with fish shell and helix editor for my workflow, and live in the terminal. Would this be possible to do without msys2 or wsl? Yes, but it would be a huge pain.
It’s like telling a car mechanic to not use duct tape imo
I don’t follow
So besides the brownie points, im curious what having it open sourced will benefit. Not like you can fork it to run on a different OS. You can make some extensions but to do what? You can’t really tie it further in to the host OS unless you know of some undocumented Win32 APIs.
Maybe im just not thinking creatively enough.
im curious what having it open sourced will benefit
MS won’t have to pay their own people to work on it anymore.
Not like you can fork it to run on a different OS.
For WSL1? yep that’s effectively impossible.
WSL2 is effectively just a wrapper around the kernel virtualization support and a bundling format, as long as whatever image you run talks to the host properly (like any other virtualised OS would) it’d run.
does that mean we could build a wsl that provides the flatpak environment, so that we could get a one click install flatpak for windows?
Should be possible, as it’s a normal VM you can already install flatpak apps in said VM as normal, you’d just need a Windows side bit to invoke the install within WSL when you opened the flatpak bundle, and then something to add a start menu shortcut from the app inside the VM (Which I actually assume already exists, I never actually ran WSL2 when I was on Windows)
WSL2 now supports WSLg which allows you to run X11 (or other graphics packages) natively now.
Watch someone reverse the thing into turbocharged WINE
The entire thing is for running Linux software on Windows, it’s the complete opposite of Wine.
The infrastructure can be duplicated and studied tho. Would be cool if a little dreamy
Sure, but not useful for wine or Linux
I am legit excited to install WINE Subsystem for Linux
Or how about KDE on ReactOS on WSL?
The possibilities are endless
ReactOS has SUCH potential. I really wanna see it thrive.
Unfortunately building it was a disaster a few years ago, I should give it another go.
Why were you trying to build it? You can find both ““stable”” release and nightly builds on ReactOS website.
ReactOS 0.4.16 was just released, but I do recommend just getting a nightly build, unless it doesn’t work and you have enough patience to try out the regular version as well.
To try and contribute! :P gotta start somewhere
Also try out winegui.
Making WSL open source could actually lead to some useful contributions and better transparency overall ; and good for Linux tools?
sudo apt-get assorted -lettuce -cheese -onion
Thanks for the kek
but… you need to run it on microsoft, which isn’t open source…
Is this something to do with the three Es?
The 90s called, they want their joke back.
Pretend I’m an idiot (should be easy), and tell me what this all is up in here.
Means that now anyone can fork the project and make changes or iterate on it without needing to wait for Microsoft to fix things.
Fanks
Np! Also forgot to add, I haven’t checked the license but generally with proper open source projects (as in not just source available) it means that even if Microsoft tries to revert this at any point, having forks of this version and continuing to develop and distribute versions of it is A-OK
