Microsoft and Canonical

Just read: Canonical | Microsoft Go-To-Market. I think this is a sad day that Canonical has decided to work with Microsoft (.NET). The Microsoft CEO once called Linux a cancer (see: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-once-called-linux-a-cancer-and-that-was-a-big-mistake/) and now Canonical has decide to partner up with the devil.

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Hello Drc, and everyone reading this post,

Microsoft is a very large company, with a long history. So changing the corporate culture in such a work place is going to take time - no matter in which direction they might want to change.

To the best of my knowledge, Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical all work with Microsoft at the "technical" level. This cooperation has been going on for some years now. It is concentrated on the (invisible) server-world; normal users still see Microsoft products on their computers.

Who benefits the most in the long term, and at what cost, is something that only the future will show.

I would prefer the worlds computing at all levels to be done with FLOSS, but we are not there yet.

As rms once said, "It's better to use a little free software than none at all". What we can contribute is to continue to educate all those who are willing to listen to our arguments in favour of freedom. :penguin: :slightly_smiling_face:

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Calling Linux a cancer is literally the least of the harm MS has done to the FOSS community. "Sticks and stones" etc.
Compared to the damage inflicting GNOME3 on the world has caused, an episode of name calling by a spoiled child is, well, as material as an episode of name calling by a spoiled child. :slight_smile:

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Microsoft and Canonical have been working together for a very long time, probably at least 10 years. When Microsoft launched Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10, Ubuntu was a launch partner.

I see Windows Subsystem for Linux as a good thing, although admittedly I've never used it, since I got off the Microsoft Bus when Windows 8 came out.

But I suspect having a Ubuntu "flavor" on Windows will be a lot easier to get new users into trying OSS and making them setup a dual boot system or install Linux on their old PC (where performance will pretty much always look bad compared to Windows on their new machine). CygWin is great, and I used it quite a lot when I was forced to run Windows at work, but it is definitely not for first time potential uses of OSS.

Where things are headed into the toilet is exemplified by the "Windows Registry Envy" of "dconf editor" and the binary blob startup system of systemd.

Microsoft was losing the all important developers to Linux, this was a way to get them back. I don't think Microsoft cares about Linux desktop users. Still I would rather see them stay out of Linux.

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Unfortunately Visual Studio for Linux seems to be being embraced by Ubuntu and other distributions. I've used it for a trivial ESP32 project because that is what the "how-to" paged used, Seems bloated as hell. I like choices, but this seems to be a away to get people away from truely open source tools.