Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

https://boxofcables.dev/cbl-delridge-is-dead-long-live-cbl-mariner/

by pengwinhayden • 4 years ago

163 228 4 years ago

boxofcables.dev

yellowapple2• 4 years ago

The Devil's rummaging through his closet for some mittens.

taftster2• 4 years ago

This comment made me LOL. Thank you, that's pretty funny.

I was curious if this was a saying I'd never heard of or if you just came up with it. Seems you just came up with this?

What's amazing is that Google already has this HN post indexed and you're already the first hit for the phrase. And even weirder, Google says that they (currently) indexed it 56 minutes ago, when HN reports you posted it 23 minutes ago. Google is now apparently predicting the future 33 minutes in advance.

https://www.google.com/search?q=The+Devil%27s+rummaging+thro...

cipherboy• 4 years ago

Wouldn't that just be because OP's comment appeared on the article, which was posted ~1h ago, and the Google result link is to the article, not the comment directly, hence has the earlier timestamp?

thaumasiotes2• 4 years ago

even weirder, Google says that they (currently) indexed it 56 minutes ago, when HN reports you posted it 23 minutes ago. Google is now apparently predicting the future 33 minutes in advance.

One interpretation is that Google is lying about the indexing time.

But it seems more likely in this case that they're reporting the indexing time of the page they link to ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33458756 ), rather than the indexing time of the comment you're responding to ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33459157 , which can only have been indexed half an hour ago).

In other words, they updated their cache of the page content without refreshing the indexing timestamp.

gerdesj2• 4 years ago

Get a grip old chap and think through the old saw: "... when Hell freezes over", meaning [it] will never happen. There are plenty of riffs on that meme, including devilish hand protection strategies.

Google is a boring old replayer of trite old stuff and quite right too - that's what it does! I suspect it also reads HN on a tight loop - many of the locals there are also from this parish.

I suspect even the eye of Sauron doom scrolls HN ...

yellowapple2• 4 years ago

I was curious if this was a saying I'd never heard of or if you just came up with it. Seems you just came up with this?

It's just a variation on similar sayings like "the devil's putting on ice skates".

denkmoon2• 4 years ago

The article says Delridge is Debian based but appears to be using RPMs? Never seen that. I would have thought the primary advantage of being Debian based is the large repository of packages?

compsciphd• 4 years ago

it says delridge (old) was debian based. Mariner (new) is rpm based (but not a rhel derivative)

zxspectrum19822• 4 years ago

You can install RPMs on Debian but most probably you will run into filesystem-level conflicts with DEB packages. But if you are rebuilding your own Debian-based distro, nothing prevents you from packaging everything into RPMs instead of DEBs and that's see. Not that I see the point of that, though.

saghm2• 4 years ago

From what I understand, most of the package-level tools (dpkg, rpm, etc.) will technically work on any Linux system; you just wouldn't be able to share dependency management with whatever the native package management system is, so as mentioned elsewhere in the thread, dealing with file conflicts would be one annoying issue. I think using the repository-level tooling (apt, yum/dnf, etc.) on distros they're not the default on might be harder to do, although I wouldn't be surprised if it also fell into the "technically possible but probably not worth the effort" bucket.

loeg2• 4 years ago

Yeah but Debian’s package repository is all deb based. It would be difficult to translate precisely into RPM - they have different tooling and semantics.

mistrial9• 4 years ago

actually you can (badly) use RPM content in Debian; the tooling to do that has been around for a very long time

https://wiki.debian.org/RPM

aeturnum• 4 years ago

Microsoft Linux

Man, what a time to be alive! Who would have thought it.

Edit: who's extending, embracing and extinguishing now?!

CoastalCoder• 4 years ago

Edit: who's extending, embracing and extinguishing now?!

Still an open question, I'd say.

0xbadcafebee2• 4 years ago

Yeah, we're just now reaching the embracing. First Windows+WSL becomes the ideal dev environment, then Linux apps run natively without WSL, and then... why run a Linux kernel? After that they'll have their sights on the real prize: being the dominant browser again.

shadowfox• 4 years ago

It is not like the first time they tried a Unix. Xenix was a thing in the past.

squarefoot• 4 years ago

Still Microsoft, although after a change of tactics. They don't want to kill Linux anymore, but something even more dangerous: controlling it by making their one the accepted corporate standard ("Nobody was ever fired for using MS Linux", etc).

The day they push some proprietary or oddly licensed technology to be integrated into their Linux is the day a thousands alerts should be raised into the community. Then will come software that runs only, or runs better, on their Linux. WSL was the first step: making something with both Microsoft and Linux in its name accepted by the community.

dotancohen• 4 years ago

  > The day they push some proprietary or oddly licensed technology to be integrated into their
  > Linux is the day a thousands alerts should be raised into the community.

EFI boot?

rnd0• 4 years ago

Still Microsoft

Here, here. I haven't seen anything yet that isn't straight out of the MS playbook on this.

__s2• 4 years ago

Mariner isn't being pushed for others, it's a way for Microsoft to mitigate risk of supply chain attacks in their services currently using other distros

RulerOf• 4 years ago

That sounds a lot like Oracle Linux, but nobody really cares.

bnjms• 4 years ago

Why doesn’t MS use Server Core? If they don’t why would anyone use Server at all? Is AD even worthwhile anymore for a new company?

encryptluks211• 4 years ago

Is AD even worthwhile anymore for a new company?

Probably but Samba already does AD so you don't need Microsoft to do it. I guess PolKit at some point may offer similar functionality as group policy.

EvanAnderson• 4 years ago

I’ve been meaning to get around to trying Samba’s AD emulation for several years now.

AD has been very solid in my experience. Samba has big shoes to fill in my mind. Is it really workable as an AD replacement for a real production AD environment today?

thedougd• 4 years ago

I don't think so. Start with Azure AD if you want the Microsoft system.

mianos• 4 years ago

Even though it is possible to run an AD with samba, it requires more than just clickety click on a bunch of boxes and MS AD is quite a large very functional product.

muststopmyths• 4 years ago

Microsoft seems to have basically given up on windows except for legacy support. I suppose satya’s master plan is to eventually compete with Amazon on the price of Linux VMs

gtirloni2• 4 years ago

That's not even remotely true.

skissane7• 4 years ago

On the contrary, they’ve been adding new features which bring it closer to POSIX in capabilities - for example, various Windows 10 builds introduced Unix domain sockets, a pseudoterminal API, proper UTF-8 support, POSIX file delete semantics, etc. The pain of porting software from Linux/macOS to Windows has been reduced (significantly for some types of apps) and here’s to hoping they reduce it even further.

closeparen2• 4 years ago

Windows Server has a vast ecosystem of skilled technicians, vendors, and MSPs who maintain the installation in the closet of every barber shop, high school, auto parts distributor, and dental clinic in North America. These institutions don't have & wouldn't be able to get the expertise to run their own Linux servers in the same way. That's what Windows Server is for. But as applications migrate to SaaS and the cloud, the operational capabilities of random small customers stop being relevant. Microsoft is trying to catch up to this with Azure, and Azure is embracing Linux, because that's how the internet-scale backend game is played.

Godel_unicode7• 4 years ago

You almost had it, until the very end. There are services in Azure that run on Linux, sure, but it’s not in danger of displacing Windows any time soon.

Those closet ADs will end up dirsync’d to AAD, and their inventory/CRM/etc app will be whichever SaaS figures that out fastest.

beoberha2• 4 years ago

The answer to this is “why not both”. I work on an Azure service and we use Server Core for our entire fleet. Most do.

skissane7• 4 years ago

How do Azure’s architects decide when to use Linux and when to use Server Core?

Someone1234• 4 years ago

I suspect Microsoft's vision is for you to use Azure AD with site-local Read Only Domain Controllers running headless on Server Core in case of internet or Azure AD outages. Server Core is more competition to headful Windows Server, rather than Linux in particular.

The only great argument for running Windows Server is Exchange and Active Directory (or IIS for legacy .Net Framework applications). That being said though, Exchange is so janky you're better off outsourcing that if at all possible.

Godel_unicode7• 4 years ago

Is SQL Server good on Linux now? Lot of LoB apps out there (that used to be spreadsheets) based on that.

mastax• 4 years ago

Imagine writing Linux From Scratch and someone from Microsoft reads it and uses it to make a Linux distribution that goes on to power dozens of that trillion-dollar company's products.

To be clear, I'm not saying that "you should be outraged," necessarily. It's just an interesting thing.

encryptluks211• 4 years ago

LFS wouldn't be the ideal disto to create a Linux distribution. It might be good to help train people how to make one but Yocto and other projects are better suited for creating a distro. The use of RPM though is IMO a bad choice and one that lets me know that it is very unlikely that this would ever become a major distro for Microsoft.

0xbadcafebee2• 4 years ago

Of all the Linux package managers (sans 'frontends/wrappers'), RPM is probably the least horrible.

gtirloni2• 4 years ago

The use of RPM though is IMO a bad choice and one that lets me know that it is very unlikely that this would ever become a major distro for Microsoft. reply

Interesting take. Care to elaborate?

josephg5• 4 years ago

Imagine being ok with trillion dollar companies using opensource code you wrote, for free.

Imagine if the people who work at those companies aren't your enemy. But instead are potential customers and potential collaborators, who see value in your work and want it to succeed.

Imagine if there was a good implementation of some idea, expressed as code. And we can all share and contribute to that single good implementation to avoid pointless work and avoid fragmentation. Imagine people from all across the world contributing both financially and via bug reports and pull requests to making that implementation succeed.

This fear of being exploited by big companies seems to motivate a lot of people in the free software world, and personally I find it pretty odious. Why shouldn't big businesses use my code? The better opensource companies (Google, new Microsoft, Facebook, etc) contribute back to the community in all sorts of ways; and I consider that a net positive on the world.

I've seen this fear show up for decades in all sorts of contexts, and I think I disagree with it every time. For example:

- A few years ago I was involved in a big argument over the licence for OpenStreetMaps. There were essentially two camps: the "Oh no what if (big evil corp) uses our community mapping data to make their map better" camp, who wanted a restrictive anti-company license. And people like me who just wanted to give a gift of mapping data to the world.

- This is the gap between GNU GPL (especially GPL3) and BSD/MIT licenses.

As an opensource maintainer, I do have a problem with people who work at big companies expecting me to volunteer my time responding to issues on github. I'd like big companies who file issues to contribute financially in exchange for my attention.

But if they don't pay, I'm more than happy for them to use my code. I made it for everyone. I'd really like it if fewer people needed to reinvent the wheel for silly licensing reasons.

anonymoushn9• 4 years ago

PRs to improve zstd's embarrassingly slow decoder require you to assign your firstborn to Zuck and new Microsoft is selling me a subscription to use my laundered open source code to generate autocomplete suggestions in their closed-source IDE that pegs 2 cores and needs 4 gigs of memory (on the remote machine only) to edit 50k text files over ssh

thrown_223• 4 years ago

Imagine if the people who work at those companies aren't your enemy. But instead are potential customers and potential collaborators, who see value in your work and want it to succeed.

Yes, but we'd have to imagine it isn't microsoft doing it.

You'd think people would learn the dozenth time it happens, but no, here we are again with copilot and VS Studio Code.

LeFantome2• 4 years ago

I agree.

Being ok with big company participation gets you Linux and / or FreeBSD. Not being ok with it gets you HURD.

I am ok with it.

kasabali• 4 years ago

This is the gap between GNU GPL (especially GPL3) and BSD/MIT licenses

This is completely false. See https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#NoMilitary

I'd like to license my code under the GPL, but I'd also like to make it clear that it can't be used for military and/or commercial uses. Can I do this?
No, because those two goals contradict each other. The GNU GPL is designed specifically to prevent the addition of further restrictions. GPLv3 allows a very limited set of them, in section 7, but any other added restriction can be removed by the user.
More generally, a license that limits who can use a program, or for what, is not a free software license.

dTal3• 4 years ago

Why shouldn't big businesses use my code? The better opensource companies (Google, new Microsoft, Facebook, etc) contribute back to the community in all sorts of ways; and I consider that a net positive on the world.

Because free software is in a constant battle for relevance, and they will use your code to make their proprietary offerings strictly superior to the free ones. What do you think would happen if Autodesk were permitted to fork Blender into a paid product, extend it in all sorts of proprietary ways, and push it heavily through advertising campaigns and educational subsidies? Blender would die, is what.

noinsight• 4 years ago

No. Microsoft will buy Canonical for Ubuntu and that sweet, sweet developer mindshare. Ubuntu is the developer distro after all. Ubuntu will become Microsoft Linux.

jacooper3• 4 years ago

Is this really realistic ? Why would Microsoft get into the Linux Enterprise market?

thesuperbigfrog• 4 years ago

> Why would Microsoft get into the Linux Enterprise market?

Azure integration

denkmoon2• 4 years ago

Developers Developers Developers

Same reason they brought MSSQL to Linux.

encryptluks211• 4 years ago

Because the same reason they have already tried with WSL... They are losing too many developers.

brundolf• 4 years ago

Microsoft is no longer about Windows, it's about being wherever you are, especially if you're a developer

p_l• 4 years ago

Microsoft actually bought a Gentoo based distro in container space - Flatcar Linux (which is a direct continuation of CoreOS that was bought and killed by RedHat)

GoOnThenDoTell2• 4 years ago

Money. Cant have Azure without a lot of Linux

pjmlp2• 4 years ago

Because Azure is the new OS, and for better or worse, UNIX was won the server room wars, with Linux being the most used variant nowadays.

However with containers running directly on top of hypervisors and serverless, it is only a matter of time until the actuall OS of the server room is irrelevant.

Until then, Linux and BSD (which they also support) are business relevant.

aliqot2• 4 years ago

Ubuntu is the developer distro after all

I'd have assumed Arch and friends.

heywoodlh• 4 years ago

> Ubuntu is the developer distro after all
I'd have assumed Arch and friends.

I'm a huge Arch (and NixOS) user. But one of the things that I think is difficult about Arch in an enterprise is that by design it is difficult to standardize enterprise tooling around. Ubuntu, on the other hand, has a bunch of defaults that can be more reliably be predicted for in an enterprise.

I'm a security engineer and I've thought long and hard about why enterprise applications often lack Linux support -- it would be difficult to have something that works across the board (there are so many choices of desktop environments, notification daemons, network subsystems, etc.). If I were to write enterprise applications that targeted Linux I would probably target the default config of the current LTS release of Ubuntu (Gnome as the desktop environment, etc.).

I feel like Ubuntu is the desktop developer environment for the enterprise that is forward enough to support desktop Linux.

BeefWellington2• 4 years ago

My daily driver for dev work is Fedora. It gets a bad rap but I think it's superior to most other distros if you want a "work-focused" distribution with relatively little tinkering required.

IncRnd5• 4 years ago

The next version of Ubuntu after the purchase will contain MS Buntu, a female gnome in the shape of a paperclip who assists with all sorts of programming tasks - logging into hotmail, using copilot, signing up for github enterprise, and so forth.

oaiey• 4 years ago

Dissing because of clippy: fair game :)

anonymoushn9• 4 years ago

I have defaulted to Ubuntu for familiarity reasons, but recently I got to learn

- the procedure for upgrading to a newer release of ubuntu it you run sed as root to fix your sources.list, then you do-release-upgrade, but it doesn't work because it has an undocumented dependency on pciutils

- at this point i should be used to this pciutils thing since ~all software has undocumented dependencies on autoconf, automake, autotools, libtool, cmake, ninja, rust, python2, python3, calling the binary called python in your path and expecting it to be a particular version that is 2 or 3 but some stuff needs 2 and other stuff needs 3, perl, npm but not the latest npm, clang but not the clang in the repositories, gcc, nvm, ruby, lua but not the latest lua, bazel, make, openssl, libressl, libcrypto, a different version of libc that will break almost all software on your machine when you install it, a bunch of optional obscurely named C header packages that install the headers into folders that the build won't search for header files and that turn out not to be optional if you want the thing to work at all, and a hundred different javascript build automation and test automation tools that exist mainly to call each other

- snap will just install broken package updates for you and is incapable of undoing this operation by design

- systemd-resolved will randomly just start taking 250+ms to return cached DNS entries so if you call connect() many times per second you need a much bigger threadpool than you may have expected (and this is maybe an architectural change to your software if your previous threadpool size for connect() offloding was 1 or if you were naively calling connect() on your thread where you do actual work)

- if you thought you knew how to set the open file limit for a user, systemd has rearranged your furniture and by the way this operation now requires you to reboot your computer

so i'm not sure ubuntu has been a great fit, but i'm also not switching to anything else

chao-• 4 years ago

snap will just install broken package updates for you and is incapable of undoing this operation by design

I no longer recommend Ubuntu for this reason to people looking to get into Linux for the first time for developer-adjacent reasons. My recommendation is now Mint or Pop_OS, as they are effectively Ubuntu without Snap.

Edit: I am not blindly against snap, or against its idea outright. I understand what it is for, and if it delivered on that without issue, I would welcome it. My avoidance of Ubuntu is due to having to repeatedly (and increasingly) help Linux newbies through problems, where lately all of those problems have wound up being based in snap.

e12e• 4 years ago

the procedure for upgrading to a newer release of ubuntu it you run sed as root to fix your sources.list, then you do-release-upgrade

Are you talking about upgrading an lts release to the next dot.1 lts release, without dodgy third party apt-sources enabled?

bitwize3• 4 years ago

Makes me think of Eric S. Raymond's erotic fanfic: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8764

If this is going to be a desktop offering from Microsoft, I think it will be for remote cloud and potentially WSL2 use only. The future of desktop Linux is a VM under Windows.

encryptluks211• 4 years ago

I fully disagree with this. WSL has only from my perspective gave Linux Desktop a bad name due to many poor choices and performance. It has gotten better, but you still need someway to deploy Windows and Windows deployment automation sucks and is bloated. Why would a user want to run a lightweight desktop inside a legacy spyware one?

Godel_unicode7• 4 years ago

Because Windows is super easy for the vast majority of people to use and desktop Linux isn’t.

Windows deployment isn’t bloated, it just has a ton of actual functionality that real users want and that doesn’t come for free. The UX for the admin is also super nice, with tons of online articles and communities with people who are willing to help you do what you’re trying to do, as opposed to tell you why what you want is bad.

CoolCold2• 4 years ago

Some people like me, don't need much except basic shell/terminal from Linux and WSL suits very well here.

genjii931• 4 years ago

Or better yet, a Windows VM under Linux.

noptd• 4 years ago

The future of desktop Linux is a VM under Windows

If Microsoft has their way, you mean.

bitwize3• 4 years ago

Microsoft already has their way. Any time you boot an alternate OS, it's only because Microsoft deigns to allow it. They're the CA for Secure Boot, and at any time they can forbid disabling Secure Boot in order to qualify for Windows.

kitotik• 4 years ago

The future of desktop Linux is a VM under Windows.

Is there really any demand for this though? What Linux gui apps exist that windows users want/need? Enough that Microsoft sees an addressable market large enough to get roi?

The inverse seems to have way more practical use cases that could actually drive revenue - games and legacy business applications (as mentioned in the esr prose).

smackeyacky• 4 years ago

I got quite excited when I heard about wslG and rushed to install it.

Never used it since. I did have the Linux version of dBeaver installed that way but there is little/no difference just running the native Windows install for that.

The only use I can really think of is doing cross-platform GUI development, but even then MS will say "hey look, native Linux windowing support in WSL" and also "Not yours, no linux version of MAUI for .NET"

Kind of a mixed message.

galaxyLogic• 4 years ago

Windows now runs Android apps. Isn't Android some kind of a Linux too?

tim--• 4 years ago

I thought Microsoft Linux was already shipping in November 2003! https://web.archive.org/web/20190529203637/http://www.mslinu...

It even shipped with GUILT - Microsoft's Graphical User Interface command-Line Technology /s

anyfoo• 4 years ago

I do miss the time when whimsical stuff like that was commonplace. Even if it wasn't always original or super funny, some of it was, and it was nice that the Internet was a place for those things.

midoridensha• 4 years ago

The internet was a lot more fun 20 years ago. Not quite as useful for daily life, but definitely much more fun, and less depressing.

_carbyau_• 4 years ago

Is this is a direct attack on Red Hat?

MS Linux including MS Support! But install your favourite RPMs...

gotschi_• 4 years ago

This reads really bad.

Maybe I‘m spoiled with proper linux posts but MS totally shines though with that. Yuck!

dullcrisp• 4 years ago

How does CBL-Mariner running atop the user’s distribution in WSL work? Is the userland managed by the user’s distro or by this one?

easton3• 4 years ago

It’s used as the “system distro” for running support services and stuff before/between when distros are loaded. The distro userland sits on top of the VM running CBL-mariner (and I’m almost certain that when you run multiple wsl distros they are all in one VM, though that may be wrong).

Of interest, the CBL-Mariner ”system distro” is where the X server is for WSLg. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/microsoft/wslg/main/docs/W...

NGRhodes• 4 years ago

and I’m almost certain that when you run multiple wsl distros they are all in one VM, though that may be wrong

Yes, they run as containers.

From https://github.com/MicrosoftDocs/WSL/issues/1573#issuecommen...:

WSL distributions (instances) are not VMs. They are best described as "containers" running inside the WSL2 VM. Each WSL2 distribution/instance has its own isolated:

PID namespace Mount namespace User namespace (I believe) Cgroup namespace (And probably) IPC and UTS namespaces WSLg System Distribution (Windows 11 only) init process However, they all share the parent VM's:

Network namespace Device tree (other than /dev/pts) CPU/Kernel/Memory/Swap (obviously) /init binary (and some other binaries that are injected in)

tmountain• 4 years ago

I think this was a Slashdot April Fool’s about 20 years ago.

sslayer• 4 years ago

Extend,Embrace,Extinguish

IncRnd5• 4 years ago

I think you meant Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis...

IncRnd5• 4 years ago

Read it and weep, err laugh actually! [1]

  With Microsoft Linux Enterprise Edition, you can create
  scalable multi-tier applications using our new Graphical
  User Interface command-Line Technology (GUILT)?. Extend
  your productivity with optimized support for Internet
  Active-XWindows? Technology and built-in Internet Xplorer
  web browser.

  ... 

  Hot Topics 
  Microsoft Invades Cuba
  Microsoft Monkey Colony on Mars
  MS Linux to have Start Button
  MS Linux Faces Competition

[1] http://www.mslinux.org/

IncRnd5• 4 years ago

CBL-Mariner from Microsoft: the only linux distro to build on Ubuntu but work with RPM packages.

naikrovek5• 4 years ago

it's not built on Ubuntu.

IncRnd5• 4 years ago

I did not say based or built on ubuntu. I said that it builds on Ubuntu, which it does and has for many people.

walterbell3• 4 years ago

Microsoft employs primary maintainers of the Linux kernel (gregkh) and systemd (Lennart Poettering), among other Linux contributors.

(correction: gregkh works for Linux Foundation, Sasha Levin works for MS).

Azure Sphere OS for embedded is based on the Linux kernel, https://static.sched.com/hosted_files/ossna19/91/Crossover_E...

There's also their NOS for merchant silicon whitebox networking, https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/press-release/software...

SONiC is an open source network operating system (NOS) based on Linux that runs on over 100 different switches from multiple vendors and ASICs.. members including Alibaba, Broadcom, Dell, Google, Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA.. Microsoft founded SONiC.. as open source so the entire networking ecosystem would grow stronger. SONiC already runs on millions of ports in the networks of cloud scalers, enterprises, and fintechs.

4khilles• 4 years ago

Do you have a source on Microsoft employing GKH? First time I've heard of it.

walterbell3• 4 years ago

Apologies, I mixed up gregkh (Linux Foundation) with Sasha Levin (Microsoft), https://www.openwall.com/lists/oss-security/2019/06/26/2

DirectX on Linux, https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/19/742

thrown_223• 4 years ago

systemd (Lennart Poettering)

I see they are still going strong on the embrace, extend extinguish strategy.

coldacid• 4 years ago

To be fair, systemd started when Poettering was at Red Hat. He was EEEing Linux even before he was at Microsoft :^)

Kukumber2• 4 years ago

It's very sad how linux ended up being eaten alive, rotten deep inside

Devuan [1] or freebsd it is for me until an alternative emerges

[1] https://www.devuan.org/

happymellon4• 4 years ago

How is Linux "rotten"?

aitchnyu• 4 years ago

10+ years ago, a MS dev inserted a hex constant B16B00B5 into the linux kernel and caused a fight.

MonkeyClub2• 4 years ago

True story: https://www.wired.com/2012/07/b16b00b5/amp

jamincan• 4 years ago

It looks like Sasha Levin works for Google as of 2021. https://www.linkedin.com/in/sasha-levin-9861662

sylware• 4 years ago

I recall when novell bought suse, since everybody was considering novell as basically a proxy of msft (maybe a member of the blackrock/vanguard galaxy), it was presumed than suse gnu/linux was basically msft gnu linux.

desktopninja2• 4 years ago

Lindows!!! Anyone remember that catchy song "Lindows Rocks" from the 2000s?

pjmlp2• 4 years ago

No, but I remember the ill fated distribution.

desktopninja2• 4 years ago

https://youtu.be/QSdRTOh2jeA

tinglymintyfrsh• 4 years ago

"MS Linux: Shipping in November 2003!"

https://web.archive.org/web/20050204084517/http://www.mslinu...

;)

account422• 4 years ago

Does that come with Linux Genuine Advantage™?

http://www.linuxgenuineadvantage.org/

dis-sys• 4 years ago

do they use bash and vim as the default shell & editor?

DeathArrow• 4 years ago

While there is no official GUI desktop, there are some interesting GNOME packages landing in the repository

Since it's likely that some developers at Microsoft have some prior experience with Windows development, I wonder if they find Gnome and GTK philosophy more close to Windows programming experience than KDE, QT etc. I also wonder if we will see a GTK backed for .NET MAUI.

rcarmo3• 4 years ago

I have zero to do with Mariner, but I would just like to point out that nobody seems to have actually read the distro docs. I see it as a way to have end-to-end supply chain management for critical components that are used across multiple MS workloads, and not as something directly targeted at customers, so all the conspiracy theories in this HN thread are incredibly amusing.

Everyone’s free to use it, though. The entire thing is up on GitHub someplace (on mobile, so can’t dig out the repo easily), but some assembly might be required for your use case.

As an anecdote, when I was playing around with it (built a VM, some containers, etc.) I also moved my personal laptop to Fedora because I realized I was out of touch with modern RPM-based distros.

bayindirh8• 4 years ago

so all the conspiracy theories in this HN thread are incredibly amusing.

Microsoft may be just doing something for their needs, and putting in the open like a good citizen of the FOSS world, but the older people who remembers whatever happened back in the day have all their rights to be paranoid about MS.

"Eh, this is the old Microsoft, today's one is different" is just a sentence. They still don't (and probably never will) inspire confidence when it comes to Linux and FOSS.

We see what they have done with GitHub, for a start.

rcarmo3• 4 years ago

Well, I have been in the industry for over a quarter of a century (at least) and joined Microsoft around the time Satya presented his “MS Loves Linux” slide, and those people would be amazed at the internal culture around OSS contributions. But having worked at several tech companies and with direct insight into a few others, I’m used to cognitive dissonance between outside views and reality.

(It was a little annoying to get vaguely threatening, but overtly insulting e-mails at my taoofmac.com address the first couple of months, though. Oh, and I’m a Mac user, too. Try to factor that in …)

tssva2• 4 years ago

We see what they have done with GitHub, for a start.

Provide free hosting for countless FOSS projects?

phendrenad2• 4 years ago

I must be the only one in the world not intrigued and excited by an incredibly boring server distro, barely different from Debian, that happens to be made by the Microsoft cloud Linux server department. Am I really missing something?

Is CBL-Mariner going to become Microsoft Linux?

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