thanks to ShadowAce for the ping!
Posted on 09/10/2024 3:50:11 AM PDT by ShadowAce
Last week it became clear to me that although Microsoft has “loved” Linux for more than a decade now, that love still doesn’t extend to the Linux desktop.
This realization came to me as I read news of a Windows security update that borked Grub, the open-source boot loader that’s used by most Linux distributions and which is used to load Windows in dual-boot situations.
After the Windows update was applied, an untold number of Windows’ dual booters were unable to boot Linux, but instead were served the scary and cryptic error message: “Something has gone seriously wrong.”
According to Ars Technica, the update — part of Microsoft’s monthly patch release — was intended to close a two-year-old vulnerability in Grub that hackers could exploit in order to bypass secure boot, which is an industry standard that isn’t required for Linux but which is required by Windows. Although the security bug has a severity rating of 8.6 out of 10, Microsoft ignored it for two years… until now.
The patch left dual-booters with Secure Boot enforced no longer able to boot into Linux, although conveniently for Microsoft, they could still boot into Windows. That latter point, for those of us whose experience with Linux runs back more than a decade, brought images of the time when it seemed like every day brought up a new way that Microsoft was trying to kill Linux.
If you’re less than 20 years old, then you’re probably too young to remember when Steve Ballmer was Redmond’s CEO and Linux users automatically considered Microsoft to be public enemy number one, because you would’ve been less than ten years old when Ballmer was replaced by Satya Nadella and things began to change at Microsoft. Until then, under both Ballmer and before that co-founder Bill Gates, Microsoft was actively at war with Linux and all things open source.
Ballmer, for example, is the guy who famously called Linux “a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.” In addition, under his leadership, the company ran ads that used Microsoft sponsored total-cost-of-ownership studies to prove it was far cheaper for companies to pay to use Windows than to run freely available Linux.
It was also Ballmer who constantly threatened that Microsoft might one day use its nuclear option and sue enterprises with data centers full of Linux servers out of existence for infringing on the more than two-hundred-and-something unnamed Microsoft patents that Redmond claimed Linux infringed. This was all part of Microsoft’s “embrace, extend, and extinguish” approach, to use the phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice discovered was used internally at Microsoft to describe its strategy against competitors that used open standards.
That warlike stance against Linux and open source changed almost immediately upon Ballmer’s leaving, when the now famous “Microsoft loves Linux” statement was about the first thing that came out of Sattya Nadella’s mouth when he took the company’s reins in 2014.
Nadella could say that and kinda, sorta mean it. He was made CEO because of his success leading Microsoft’s cloud efforts, which led to Azure becoming the place where most of Microsoft’s money is made. And because enterprise users of Azure are mostly firing up lots of instances of Linux and hardly any instances of Windows, Microsoft is now in the ironic position of making a lot more money selling Linux than it makes selling Windows.
It also makes Microsoft and Amazon Web Services the largest sellers of Linux on the planet… so yes, Microsoft loves Linux, as long as it’s running servers.
Microsoft continues to have plenty of reasons to discourage desktop use, however. Desktop Linux competes directly with Windows, and although Microsoft’s operating system is no longer the company’s biggest cash cow, it continues to put a lot of a lot of dollars into Redmond’s bank accounts. This puts Microsoft in the position of “loving” Linux the server operating system that runs in data centers and which it sells by the minute in Azure, while desktop Linux remains a threat.
This is pretty much the substance of the aha moment I had when reading about Microsoft’s unfortunate accident last week that conveniently only interfered with its customers ability to run desktop Linux. While I’ll concede that this borking of dual booted Linux wasn’t exactly intentional on Microsoft’s part, it’s also obvious that despite its claims to the contrary, the company didn’t bother to do proper testing to make sure its patch wouldn’t do harm to users who were dual booting Windows and Linux.
I’m also pretty sure that now that the damage is done, nobody in Redmond — other than perhaps a few overworked PR hacks — has lost sleep over the problems their little mistake caused for the small percentage of Windows users that also run Linux.
In truth, while Microsoft truly loves Linux running on it customers’ servers in the cloud, it would like nothing more than for Linux on the desktop to just disappear and quit threatening the near monopoly that Windows holds on desktop computing. As Bill Clinton might put it, when Microsoft says it loves Linux, it all depends on what your definition of “Linux” is.
“For a few games I can’t run on Linux”
Sorry to laugh... But that is like saying you can’t live without a lying cheating abusive wife because of that one good casserole she makes. lol
I would think any of the top 10-15 would be a good choice for someone learning.
My personal preference is a Red Hat/Fedora variant. I use Red Hat at work and find it easy to use and very powerful when you need that power.
However, a lot of people seem to like the Debian variants (Ubuntu, Mint, Pop!_OS, etc).
Frankly, if all you will be doing is surfing and email, it doesn't really matter which one you get, as the differences lurk beneath that browser surface.
LibreOffice is the leading Office replacement on Linux. I use it myself, and Office-using co-workers can't tell the difference.
Not sure if it Wil, do the same, but in vm, I was able to get photoshop up and running, but it changed some functions so ehow, functions I had come to rely on in photoshop. Some or most of it ran ok, but some things were different, and didn’t work well
I’ll check out that lutris though- sounds like it might fit the bill. I’d rather, much rather run photoshop from within Linux
Bless you sir.
Photoshop ran very smooth on my side..
After playing around with Lutris for a bit, it becomes second nature ;)
Thanks, I will give it a try.
thanks to ShadowAce for the ping!
Lutris sounds very similar to Steam for Linux minus the proprietary stuff.
But to say he has any control of Microsoft is disingenuous, at best.
I don’t agree with the man, his politics, or his influence, but Microsoft forged ahead without him for over a decade now. Everything they’re doing is not because of him.
Truth in advertising (unintentional)
Well more than a decade. How long did they use Linux file servers and web servers?
And that abortion they call "User Access Control" (UAC) is a ham-fisted attempt to implement the same level of easy, sophisticated file-level security *NIX has had since forever.
Remember WinNT, when the file system security was such crap that you could block user access to a directory, but if you knew the absolute path to any file in that directory, you still could copy/edit/delete it?
UAC was introduced in Vista (pardon my French) and four generations later, it's still as big a disaster in Win10. That's the biggest reason the only Windows in my house is Win10 Ameliorated. It was built without UAC (or Cortana, Guardian, authenticity verification, etc) in the installation media.
Wow. That was absolutely PERFECT. Great find!
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