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by breve29 days ago |
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upvoteby ThrowawayR229 days ago|
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He got less humble later on when momentum started building behind Linux. To quote Linus Torvalds from 2003: “Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.”
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upvoteby 27 days ago|
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deleted
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upvoteby dpoloncsak27 days ago|
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I mean, this whole thread is basically suggesting that 23 years later, improvements to Linux and self-sabotage by Microsoft are going to possibly destroy (or atleast, start to cause some bleeding) to Microsoft (in the gaming-market).

This isn't Linux looking to destroy MS, this is mostly Valve understanding the requirement for an OS that won't be able to become predatory to them and their business model in a single system update.

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upvoteby torginus26 days ago|
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Personally I used to be a Linux zealot back in the early 2000s, then I actually learned to program C++ and dove a bit into OS architecture... I realized why Linux on the desktop always sucked.. Not because of some dastardly conspiracy by Microsoft, but because of the very basic fact that server people and vendors held the developer purse strings and they drove the engineering decisions.

Let's take a simple example.. to send a network packet to a different machine, you just call into the Linux kernel, which dispatches your stuff directly to the network card, and you're done. Pretty simple. However if you want to send a message to your neighboring X11 window, you have to go into the kernel to do IPC, which then somehow dispatches your message to the server process, unblocks and schedules the message pump in X11, which finds your window, then once again you go back into the kernel... then your target process is scheduled, so on and so forth.

Wildly inefficient, yet Linux never got proper good IPC merged (until binder), low latency audio sucked, and none of this coordination logic or audio processing got in the kernel.

Why? Because servers don't need that stuff and some server engineer isn't going to know or care about your use case, you're just small fry, and none of the stuff you do is worth taking on technical risk or slowing down server workloads.

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upvoteby lmm26 days ago|
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The goal was to be able to patch and fix the systems I was using, and swap out bits and pieces as I wanted. And that seems to be less and less possible on Linux these days, as you have these tightly vertically-integrated stacks where everything depends on the latest version of everything else.
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upvoteby MisterTea27 days ago|
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We are so far removed from 1997 that this statement means nothing.

> the goals of Linux and Windows are simply so different.

So different that Windows muscle memory works on most main stream Linux UI's, Many (most?) Steam games run on Linux, and now we have Windows in the Linux kernel.

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upvoteby not2b27 days ago|
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Rather, several missing, useful APIs that were hard to emulate efficiently have been added. That's not "Windows in the Linux kernel".
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upvoteby MisterTea26 days ago|
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> several missing, useful APIs

Windows API's.

> That's not "Windows in the Linux kernel".

How is that not?

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upvoteby Pay0827 days ago|
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Does Windows muscle memory work? The vast majority of shortcuts are completely different for the casual user, and for the power user, there's no regedit or control panel and other such things.
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upvoteby nottorp27 days ago|
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> there's no regedit or control panel and other such things

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

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upvoteby Pay0827 days ago|
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Be that as it may, it means that the muscle memory (or more accurately, the mental model of the system) is gone. I've long held the belief that power users or knows-enough-to-be-dangerous users have a harder time switching for that exact reason.

A control panel (or cross-distro YaST) would be very welcome in the ecosystem I think.

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upvoteby delecti27 days ago|
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> muscle memory (or more accurately, the mental model of the system)

That's not "more accurately", that's just a completely different thing. When I'm on Mac, my muscle memory is thrown off. I'll be typing and my ctrl+s, alt+tab, win+4, ctrl+left* all cause wildly unpredictable (to me) things. I'm currently using Linux, and all of those things work how I expect (with a tiny asterisk on win+#). When I want a control panel, I press the windows button on my keyboard to open something functionally equivalent to the start menu, and open System Settings to get something functionally equivalent to the control panel.

I have no doubt that I could learn the deep differences between Windows and Mac over time, but the initial muscle memory causes me stress before I get to that point. When I switch to Linux I don't have that stress, and so I've been comfortably learning those differences.

* - save, switch to the previously in-focus window, switch to the 4th program on the taskbar, move the cursor one word to the left

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upvoteby stavros26 days ago|
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We weren't talking about whether the registry was better or worse, we were talking about how similar the two OSes were.
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upvoteby nottorp26 days ago|
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... in case of the registry, you were also talking about replacing a unix philosophy system (each application has its own standalone config file) with a windows like monolith (everything goes into the registry).

Tbh it's not even muscle memory, how often do you edit config files?

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upvoteby MisterTea26 days ago|
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Alt-Tab to cycle windows.
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upvoteby ranger_danger27 days ago|
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How do we "have Windows in the Linux kernel"?
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upvoteby ms_menardi27 days ago|
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Um... Are you referring to WSL? Wouldn't that be the linux kernel running under windows?
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upvoteby hparadiz27 days ago|
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WSL 1.0 was doing something like that. Doing syscall translation in real time. Eventually edge cases forced them to abandon that architecture and now it's just a VM.
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upvoteby Dylan1680726 days ago|
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Was it edge cases? I thought the main driver for WSL2 was better filesystem performance.
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