Microsoft Gives Unexpected Tutorial on How To Install Linux
'Hell freezes over and pigs fly south to their winter feeding grounds. Microsoft has published guidance on how to download and install Linux.
From a report:
The Seattle-area proprietary OS vendor has published a helpful guide entitled "How to download and install Linux," inspiring reactions from incredulity to amusement. In the humble opinion of The Reg FOSS Desk, it really isn't bad at all. Microsoft suggests four alternative installation methods: using Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, using a local VM, using a cloud VM, or on bare metal. It almost feels cruel to criticize it, but it seems that this really amounts to two methods. WSL version 2 is a VM. It's right there in the screenshots, where it says: Installing: Virtual Machine Platform Virtual Machine Platform has been installed. So the choices boil down to either on the metal, or in a VM. That leaves only the question of what kind of VM: the built-in one, an add-on VM, or a cloud VM. Perhaps the subtext of the article is something more subtle. Could it be a tacit admission that you might need a free-of-charge OS for your PC? The Windows 10 upgrade program that began back in 2015 was meant to end a year later. In fact, it didn't. We described a documented workaround in 2016, but the free upgrades continued to work, even in 2020. Which? magazine reported it was still working in July 2023.' -- source: https://linux.slashdot.org/story/23/10/11/1521249 Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, Hamilton, NZ Mobile +64 22 190 2375 https://www.cs.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
On Thu, 12 Oct 2023 09:13:14 +1300, Peter Reutemann quoted:
'>From a report: ...'
The linked article <https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/11/microsoft_documents_installing_linux/> itself has some useful further references. For example, the original Windows NT architecture had provision for alternative userland “personalities”: Win32 itself was one of these, and there was also a POSIX subsystem, though it seemed more of a box-ticking exercise than anything really worth using <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BOeku3hDzrM>. However, the original version of Windows Services for Linux, WSL1, was *not* implemented as such a “personality”. Nor was its precursor, “Project Astoria”, which was intended as a way to run Android apps on Windows. Why not? And why did it have to be abandoned, in favour of WSL2, which brought an actual Linux kernel into Windows? Seems the reason is that the core Windows kernel simply isn’t versatile enough to emulate all the nuances of the Linux kernel API. This in spite of the fact that the API is fully documented (along with all the relevant error codes, unlike, say, Win32), and you even have source code you can refer to! This rather quaint item <https://jmmv.dev/2020/11/wsl-lost-potential.html> mourns the “lost opportunity” that might have been, had WSL1 progressed to the point where Windows and Linux processes could run side by side and be managed by the same tools, and where you could have used Linux admin tools to manage Windows services. But really, that was never possible.
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Peter Reutemann