Will they lobby for laws that prohibit Linux or make it difficult to install? What actions might they take in the future?
Work with hardware and software vendors to break linux compatibility.
They’ve been busy doing that for the past 20+ years. It’s been an annoyance, but not really a deterrent.
They cannot do that to every manufacturer, as most of countries are incentivized to not dependent on American or any foreign product.
I can see China or European manufacturer will slowly move from Windows. At least China already learning the hard way from Android-Huawei relationship.
Which in the precise moment when Linux is a serious threat is not possible since there is no assurance that the hardware vendors would accept, given they now have an alternative.
Some people including me maybe dont want Linux to become popular.
Can we please have something in this world that isnt ruined by the general population? They already ruined the internet -
What is this argument
Elitism and gatekeeping.
Not at all. More like not wanting to see some corporate entity start to turn it into another monetized trash heap that’s enshittified to be sold to the masses in bloated and corrupt form. There’s a legitimate argument for remaining the way it is.
bingo
I think they’re saying they like Linux as it is and they don’t want it to go mainstream. Like when your favorite band gets popular and suddenly tickets cost 10x as much. So Linux will soon cost 10x its current price of free, and nobody will be able to afford it.
I mean there’s still gonna be weird linux distros where they can hide xD
Scientists really would prefer Linux to stay in the nerd realm.
Hear me out on this one “Microsoft Linux”
That’s just neutered Ubuntu container
Yes exactly. Embrace and extinguish has always been Microsoft’s strategy. They’ll release their own distribution and either make it slower and more complicated than Windows, so that everyone thinks Windows is the better OS, or they’ll make it a cloud OS like Chrome, requiring recurring payments to use Office 365 and everything else.
I see this as the most likely outcome as well. It’s the preferred route, seen all of the place lately. Want to privatize a public service? Cripple the public service enough to “prove it doesn’t work” to convince people privatization is the best option. I suspect most people would switch to Microsoft Linux over something “tech” sounding like Debian or Ubuntu. When the trial of their slowed down and crashy “Linux” comes to an end, Microsoft will offer an easy solution to switch back to Windows.
Already exists as a VM option on azure
Emulation should always be Linux emulating Windows. Windows emulating Linux is just weird.
It’s a Linux distro that’s called Azure Linux and it looks like it’s based on Fedora if the length of package attribution is anything to go by.
Its not emulation, it’s a Microsoft distro
Two things, I was under the impression that Azure can emulate a lot of different Linux distro. Second, I thought the hypervisor ran on cut down version of Windows server.
VMs aren’t emulation. Its a full OS running on virtual hardware. Also, yes, azure offers several distros, not just Microsoft’s.
The OS of the bare metal host shouldn’t matter much, if at all, to the guest. If you have a philosophical issue with the hypervisor running under windows I doubt you’d be using azure to begin with.
That makes sense. Thanks.
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Make a version of Office that works on Linux natively.
That works on their version of linux.
Why? Office is such shit.
It is (unfortunately) their primary foothold into the market. Microsoft also knows this which is why some many other projects at Microsoft have been killed and absorbed by the Microsoft office team. They have a cannabalistic corporate culture. Its clear that at Microsoft the only threat to Microsoft… Is Microsoft… No one else on the radar registers.
pays even more to hardware manufacturers to add windows by default, and make drivers windows only.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7lI2fyyleY&pp=ygUVZmx5dGVjaCBMaW51eCB3aW5kb3dz
spoiler
It’s an Apil fools video. Not real
Linux has been becoming a “serious threat” for 20+ years now. I’ll wait.
Don’t get me wrong I like Linux a lot. But if you step back and look objectively, it has a lot of issues trying to grow outside the hobby/enthusiast community for the desktop.
I think that linux has a couple of things that might help it grow outside its traditional niche that it hasn’t in the past. Proton has been a major step forward in to the gaming scene. A lot of people are very unhappy about windows 11. The EU in particular is also investing in ways to get out from under American techs thumb due to the geopolitical landscape.
I don’t have too high expectations personally but who knows.
Cry maybe
Well there is the 9/11 change that may be happening soon: https://techrights.org/n/2025/08/26/The_UEFI_9_11_Part_I_Introduction_to_Impending_Catastrophe_Micr.shtml
Its possible a LOT of linux machines wont work after this date.
Hopefully people who use SecureBoot have plans in place
I just disabled SecureBoot on my end.
I use Secure Boot on all my machines but I just use my own keys with Foxboron’s wonderful
sbctlutility instead of the hacky shim/MOK method most distributions use.Oh, neat! I had no idea something like this existed!
Hopefully!
Another funny thing is that there is speculation because firmware developers…many not actually be checking the dates at all in some cases. Cause that would mean extra work. So its very possible this date comes and goes, nothing happens to cheap devices.
That was based on conversations im seeing in other forums. Not sure honestly.
Either way, we will find out soon!
Fortunately I’m safe from that bc right after I assembled my current PC (even before moving the distro to it; yes, moving, not “installing”), I entered BIOS and disabled secure boot, IPM 2.0 and pretty much everything Spyware related. Only then I booted Clonezilla and extracted from the backup image. Since I had done the same on the old PC in BIOS, that means my Arch was never installed with SB and IPM active.
On top of that the last update of BIOS nearly broke it, so I flashed it back to the more stable version the motherboard came with. And since I have no intention to update BIOS, I’m safe from all that trouble.
Just my guess here, but…
The desktop/laptop sort of form factor is associated in people’s minds with unlocked bootloaders. People expect to be able to install Linux on them if they want to. Tablets, game systems, and other sorts of consumer electronics, not so much. I’m thinking Microsoft will do what it can to push hardware manufacturers and the software industry as a whole more in the direction of the kinds of devices that consumers already expect to be locked down like tablets or game systems that are “streaming” game systems. And that way, the bootloader will prevent folks from switching to Linux.
Honestly, ms won’t do anything.
unofficial statement out of Microsoft have Linux VMs overtaking the Windows VMs in Azure.
Why should they worry about losing a once off $1100 sale of a Server 2025 license when they can sell you a 2 CPU 8Gb ram Azure VM for $150 a month? Or $113/m commited for 3 years ($4000 total)
Embrace, extend, extinguish.
SQL Server runs on Linux. Azure supports Linux. The next step is to extend into their own distro, get everyone using it, then drop support for mainstream Linux.
Will it work? Maybe. They’ll have to make Microsoft Linux more attractive than Debian and Red Hat.
What do you think Ubuntu is? Microsoft’s touch in it is so obvious that only a fool would miss it.
systemd anyone?
/s
Where does LP work these days, anyway?
Their only chance there was the late 90s to early 2000s. MS is one company compared to the totality of mega corporations using Linux and MS also uses a lot of Linux. More money at play in the server market than the general desktop OS market. Linux is the server OS
The US government increasingly uses Linux. Other countries pick up Linux at a faster rate than the US. A higher percentage of people use MacOS today than 20 years ago
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it never ceases to be mind boggling that IT in most institutions are still so closely married to windows when it’s clear that the landscape has changed and it makes me suspect that they will be the last bastions of windows dominance.
Businesses live and die by if it broke don’t fix it.
They’re still a non insignificant number of businesses using Cobol applications.
i would put ruby in that category too since it now feels like a fad that i have never seen since. lol
Mostly die.
Active Directory is a hell of a drug, as is Group Policy
more like a cult when you bring up heresy like SIGNIFICANTLY better tools/methodology. ie ansible or IaC
… and unfortunately so is Share Point.
Oof, yeah, sharepoint is horrible
An official Microsoft Linux distro has existed for a while now: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_Linux
There’s more Linux than Windwoes VMs in Azure, I hear.
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Windows is only 12% of Microsoft’s revenue, and between Mac, Linux and ChromeOS, it really doesn’t have a monopoly anymore on desktop (about 70%). On top of that, desktop usage in general is decreasing, and is already less than 50% of all web traffic.
What I’m saying is that I think it’s safe to say something else will likely “kill” Windows long before Linux ever becomes a serious threat to it.
Windows is only 12% of Microsoft’s revenue
That may be true, but a lot of their profits build on that Windows monopoly. I wouldn’t be surprised if about 80% of their profits depend on Windows.
Do you have a source for that? This chart says otherwise:
Thanks for the chart. 👍
Tomato tomato.
I wrote profits, and from the chart you show, clearly above 50% of their revenue is from Windows and derived products.
Last I heard the profit margin for Windows and Office was around 90%, AFAIK by far the highest of the business. So I’m pretty sure that combined with Server products Search and the part of gaming that is on Windows, it will be very close to 80% of the profits.deleted by creator
