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.
No surprise.
And all B. Gates can think of is more vaccines to kill mankind with.
Borking of grub.
Sounds like something Lewis Carroll would write.
I use Manjaro Linux with doesn’t use Secure Boot so my duel boots were/are OK well until Microsoft finds a way to screw it up
The best way is not to dual-boot, but to run Windows in a VM under Linux.
How does Windows perform under a VM under Linux? Can it do any heavy lifting?
Why even use Microsoft at all?
For a few games I can’t run on Linux
“Borking of grub.”
I heard Biden wanders through the White House at night muttering that phrase.
Borking of grub., Borking of grub., Borking of grub.
I love that Microsoft = Bill Gates to almost everyone. You know Gates hasn’t been associated with Microsoft for over 10 years, right?
It really depends on your hardware, I guess.
My workplace uses 5,000-6,000 Windows VMs for some serious work. But the hardware is quite beefy as well.
Because in the business world, Microsoft owns the desktop. Before retiring, I was an analytical chemist. ALL high-end chemical analysis instrumentation runs on top of Windows. Gas chromatograph, mass spectrometry, etc, etc.
Ny wife is also a chemist, and is still working from home part time. The proprietary data analysis software she uses runs on, guess what, Windows. Since I am her in-house hardware/software support that means that I run Windows as well.
Once she actually retires, all machines will become Linux the first week...
My games and photoshop and other windows only software do not run well under vm unfortunately. I dual boot into windows 7 and don’t allow windows down to connect to internet.
For those who don’t want to install and use Virtual Machine did you run across a solution to this MS Update problem? Other than risking the potential chaos of System Restore?
I use W7 and W10, and my older system doesn’t use Secure Boot, so this won’t affect me or my dual boots with Linux, but still, it just goes to show how Gates and Microsoft wants to dominate everything. I’m almost to the point where I will not even need Windows so when that time comes, I’ll be solely Linux. Forget Gates.
I bought a couple of new laptops and want to do just this. I’m officially done with Office too, forever. I need to come up to speed on Linux. It’s time.
Anyone know a good place to get educated about it in a more or less elegant fashion?
Believe it, or not, Most programs run FASTER running through VM on Linux. It even BOOTS in about 10% of the time it would a normal boot.. at least on my system.
Most of that is because Linux isn’t the resource hog Winblows is.
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