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Old July 17th 20, 05:47 AM posted to alt.windows7.general,alt.comp.os.windows-10,comp.sys.intel,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips
VanguardLH[_2_]
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Default Linux founder tells Intel to stop inventing 'magic instructions' and 'start fixing real problems'

T wrote:

Folks will leave Windows when enough of they applications they need
are ported over. M$ rules the universe when it comes to applications
and some outer ring of hell when it comes to quality and security.


I think "catch 'em early" works better. School have and still do train
students on Windows. Chromebooks have penetrated schools more then
Linux. Users that, by choice, switch to Linux sometime later in their
lives are doing so due to curiosity, training, job requirements, using
the best platform for a critical task, or enlarge their expertise.
That's why Linux penetration has only been about 2% of the consumer PC
market. There already is good penetration into commercial use.

When schools are predominatly training students in an OS then the market
penetration goes up. The students take with them what they learned.
Microsoft learned that long ago. So did Apple. With so many Linux
variants and only a few commercial vendors (e.g., Redhat), free is not a
sufficient reason for mass migration to Linux. Get a gradually larger
student population to take Linux expertise into their homes and
workplace. Capture the minds and hearts of future computer users. Is
Linux deployed in pre-college schools for getting students intimate with
that OS?

http://linuxfederation.com/linux-part-school-education
(Yeah, it's a blog, so no datestamp as typical of blogs.)

https://opensource.com/article/18/3/...orward-schools

For well-rounded computer eduction, students should really be exposed to
multiple operating systems. Learn 'em, and let 'em choose.

However, businesses and even schools need support from the OS vendor.
Free doesn't include technical support. Those institutions don't look
firstly at the cost of a license. They look for support and its cost.
Not having robust support is costly. In-house training still has costs
and adds delay to acquire expertise. Like buying a printer, you figure
the Cost of Ownership is in the rate of use of the consumables (paper,
ink), and lastly consider the cost of the printer. The cost of OS
licenses is never discussed when we plan deployment of hosts, and
supporting them. The loss of use for a critical business app or suite
due to lack of support far exceeds free versus paid OS or software.
Cobol programmers are in high demand ($75K/year average base pay),
because colleges stopped teaching it long ago, so there aren't many
Cobol programmers around after attribtion of old farts that have retired
died off. Same for Fortran nowadays ($80K/year average base salary).
Companies are willing to pay for the expertise that is hard to find.
They couldn't give a gnat's fart about the costs for Cobol compiler
licenses. Losing a critical business program due to no support costs
way more, maybe even cause the company's demise.

I have a sneaking suspicion that Microsoft is planning a migration to a
Linux/Windows hybrid kernel with a Windows GUI. After all, Windows NT,
and up, which had an NT-based kernel still carried along the familiar
desktop GUI from the 9x/DOS frankenjob GUI. First it was Linux in their
Azure cloud service. Then they began releasing apps for Android and
Linux. They rolled in a Linux compatibility layer (Windows Subsystem
for Linux, or WSL, but no Linux kernel code) to run Linux binary
executables. Rolling in subsystems into Windows isn't new. NTFS is a
file subsystem, as are FAT, exFAT, and CDFS. WSL v2 was announced May
2019 which moved to a real Linux kernel (as a subset of Hyper-V
features). In 2016, WSL only provided an Ubuntu image. the Fall
Creators Update in Oct 2017 move to SUSE images. With WSL v2 in May
2019, Linux support moved to a Hyper-V VM-based backend instead of the
system-call adaption (compatibility) layer. We've been familiar with
VMMs (Virtual Machine Managers) using virtual machines running guest
OSes on Windows (or visa versa on Linux) for a long time. Microsoft
decided to use the Hyper-V VMM. They wanted a kernel-mode model instead
of user-mode solutions. Because of the extremely high adoption of
Windows versus Linux, there has been concern that WSL could be a way for
Microsoft to "embrace, extend, and extinguish Linux".

At first, WSL was available only for Pro and Enterprise editions of
Windows 10 x64. On July 2019, they granted its used on Home editions.
I run optionalfeatures.exe (run with admin permissionsto effect
changes), scroll down, and WSL is listed. I haven't yet played with
WSL, so it's currently disabled.

https://betanews.com/2018/03/06/debian-linux-windows/

"I am of the opinion that if you want to run an operating system based
on that open source kernel, then you should just do so natively -- not
on top of Windows."

Well, that is not accurate. Hyper-V (a native hypervisor) is a VMM but
it does *NOT* run in user-mode to manage VMs. It is a kernel-mode
service. Probably because the Linux images are represented as "apps" in
Microsoft's store is why that author thinks it is an app running atop of
Windows.

"Hyper-V implements isolation of virtual machines in terms of a
partition."

That's not a portion of an HDD or SDD where sectors are allocated in a
group for use by an OS or data. That's a hypervisor partition. IBM
mainframes 30+ years ago used similar hypervisors with OS isolation
partitions. I was helping the sysadmin migrate to a new version of VSE,
MVS, or VM by installing and configuring the new version of the OS in a
different partition that was not accessible to the users. When we were
ready, and late at night when the users were gone and after announcing
the switch (because any users connected to the OS version in the old
partition would get disconnected), we swapped which was the primary OS
partition. The users came in and found a new version of the OS was
ready. If there was a problem, we could switch back to the old OS
partition.

OS partition (Hyper-V) hierarchy
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikiped...px-Hyper-V.png

Yes, every hypervisor is itself an OS, but the working Windows image and
Linux image are not "running atop Windows". Users aren't using the
Hyper-V OS for their work. They're using the VM of Windows managed by
Hyper-V. Well, that's how it works for the server version. Only admins
go into the Hyper-V OS to configure it. That's a distant memory since I
haven't looked at Hyper-V for years.