Comments by "Lawrence D’Oliveiro" (@lawrencedoliveiro9104) on "11 Documents Showing Microsoft Tried To Destroy Linux" video.

  1. 6:30 I like this bit from “Halloween II”: An important attribute to note which has led to volume drivers is the ease with which you can write drivers for linux, and the relatively powerful debugging infrastructure that linux has. Finding and installing the DDK, and trying to hook up the kernel debugger and do any sort of interaction with user-mode without tearing the NT system to bits is much more challenging than writing the simple device-drivers for linux. Any idiot could write a driver in 2 days with a book like "Linux Device Drivers" — there is no such thing as a 2-day device-driver for NT This tells you why Linux has better hardware support than Windows.
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  2. 16:26 One hilarious ad I remember from this time is made up to look like a newspaper, “The Highly Reliable Times”. The “headline” was the London Stock Exchange choosing Windows NT over Linux to run their trading system. Not long after this, there was a massive failure of said system, which cost traders millions. Microsoft tried to blame it on some kind of “network issue”. Soon after that, the Windows NT system was ripped out in favour of ... a Linux-based one.
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  3. Yes, Windows source code has been leaked, I think more than once. And yes, it is just as embarrassing as you might think it is. There was some include file where the exact number of spaces on a particular line had to be kept unchanged, otherwise the build script would break. There was a comment that said “we are morons” next to it.
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  4. The whole concept of tying the GUI inextricably into the OS kernel is one that should have been left behind in the 1990s.
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  5.  @MegaLokopo  Make it a modular, replaceable layer, like Linux does. That way you have your choice of GUIs, or even no GUI at all.
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  6.  @MegaLokopo  Windows 10 “IoT Edition” was a hilariously crippled version of Windows 10 that was useless without a regular PC running full Windows 10. Compare that to Linux running on the same Raspberry π, which fully self-hosts its own development and deployment stack.
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  7. Imagine if just 100 Adobe users were to pool the money they would have given that company and use it to sponsor some work on some open-source project that they would like to see improved -- what a difference that could make.
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  8.  @harriet-x.x  Like the infamous “NSAKEY”? It was a back door, but it was for the company itself, not for any spooks. The name was obviously an embarrassingly bad joke.
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  9.  @catayloprince4772  ISO 29500 defines “transitional” versus “strict” compliance. Here we are, getting on to 2 decades later, and Microsoft is still stuck on “transitional”, and nobody dares to use “strict” for fear of breaking compatibility with something.
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  10.  @catayloprince4772  The LibreOffice native format is ODF, a.k.a. ISO 26300. Much simpler to understand and easier to implement correctly.
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  11. Microsoft’s server business is declining. Linux has already won there.
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  12. Visual Studio is really useless for anything other than Windows-specific development. As for “Microsoft Office”, its official name is “Microsoft 365” now. Except it has never yet managed 365 days of continuous uptime.
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  13.  @SkyFly19853  It already has. Look at their ongoing development plans for on-prem Windows Server versus the cloud version, and you will see what I mean.
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  14. Multiple desktops were actually invented in the early 1990s as part of CDE (“Common Desktop Environment”), part of the OSF/1 initiative between a bunch of Unix vendors (basically, everybody except AT&T and Sun). So yeah, it was a *nix thing, and still works best on *nix OSes.
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  15.  @SkyFly19853  In case you didn’t realize, they are slowing development of on-prem Windows Server to concentrate more on the cloud version. Basically, they are conceding the on-prem market to Linux. Trouble is, the cloud is already dominated by Linux--and that is also true of Microsoft’s cloud. So all in all, the future of Windows Server does not look bright.
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  16.  @SkyFly19853  That’s for Bing search. Which is just reinforcing the trend away from Windows itself.
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  17.  @MegaLokopo  You were the one who brought it up. In any case, Windows 10 IoT Edition is irrelevant to the issue of a replaceable GUI layer.
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  18.  @steven631764  What’s happening is Windows is bringing in less and less revenue, while the cost of maintaining its increasingly complex and buggy code keeps going up and up.
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  19.  @MegaLokopo  I made a relevant comparison. You didn’t like that? Maybe you have some personal stake in Windows IoT, and it made you feel embarrassed? You know what you can do.
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  20. Microsoft’s attempt to stem the haemorrhage of developers away from the Windows platform. Too little, too late.
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  21. Sherlock Holmes’s older brother.
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  22. Funnily enough, Al’s Geek Lab did a feature on Xenix just a few days ago.
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  23.  @MegaLokopo  Maybe you shouldn’t have mentioned Windows 10 IoT in this context, then.
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  24.  @JohnDlugosz  It was true. That gave a performance boost on the hardware back then. Unix systems, with the X11 server as a user process, were at a disadvantage. But those days are over. Hardware is now much more powerful than in the 1990s. Linux can manage GUIs just as responsive, still with the X11 server (or Wayland compositor) running as a user process. And it maintains the advantage of modularity.
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  25.  @yanlucasdf  Making proprietary software cross-platform is very expensive and difficult.
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  26.  @SkyFly19853  Bing is way behind Google. And Google is sufficiently spooked to be trying AI-aided search itself. It could throw the search market wide open again--the opposite of a monopoly.
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  27.  @tadeuszmarin5704  From what I was told, “Windows CE” was not based on the Windows NT kernel at all--it was an entirely separate development, now abandoned. It was probably designed from the beginning to have very limited functionality anyway.
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