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Microsoft Edit

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486 points ethanpil | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 00:07 UTC | HN request time: 2.399s | source
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masfoobar ◴[25 Jun 25 11:13 UTC] No.44375939[source]▶
About a month ago I heard Microsoft had their own Linux distribution to help Microsoft Windows users feel more at home. From memory, it was a rather simple GNOME setup. Nothing special.

I am surprised Micrsooft didnt use the opportunity to create a micrsoft specific Linux distro that replaces bash with powershell, or Edit with vim, nano and other choices as well as .NET and Visual Studio Code by developer installs.

Micrsoft could have used this as their default WSL install.

It may not have won the war against typical distro like Ubuntu or Debian but it could have gained a percentage and be a common choice for Windows users - and there are a lot of Windows users!

Microsoft cannot dominate the Linux kernel but it can gain control in userland. Imagine if they gained traction with their applications being installed by default in popular distributions.

This Microsoft Edit is available for Linux, like Powershell is and others. If they had played their cards right -- perhaps -- 10 years ago, their distribution could have been in the top 5 today, all because many windows users use it as their WSL.

Giant companies (like M$) can inject their fingerprints into my personal space. Now, we just need Micrsooft Edit to have Co-Pilot on by default...

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LionEgo ◴[25 Jun 25 13:09 UTC] No.44376906[source]▶
The reason why WSL is a thing is because developers in corps needed a way to run Linux. IT support and techs doesn't know anything about Linux typically and don't want to deal with supporting it. WSL fixes this problem.

Most developers don't want to use Linux at all. Many developers don't even really know how to user a terminal and rely on GUI tools.

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1. trelane ◴[25 Jun 25 15:13 UTC] No.44378281[source]▶
> Many developers don't even really know how to user a terminal and rely on GUI tools.

Fortunately, Linux users can also avail themselves of a graphical interface as well.

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2. LionEgo ◴[25 Jun 25 22:56 UTC] No.44382563[source]▶
Your snark at my comments is completely unwarranted.

I really shouldn't have to explain what follows. But I will.

Installing any dev tooling that is third party is done on the command line. Look up the instructions for installing Node LTS on Debian, or .NET, or Golang. You need to use the command line. Even on easier to use Distros they have the same procedure. Depending on the tooling you may need to set additional environment variables which are normally done in your .bashrc or similar.

What normally happens is people blindly copy and paste things into the terminal and don't read the documentation. This has been a problem on Linux since before Ubuntu was released. This isn't just limited to newbies either.

The state of GUIs BTW isn't great. Many of them look nice, and work reasonably well most of the time, *until they don't* e.g. If I double click a deb to install it, sometimes it will install. Other times it won't. So I don't even bother anymore and just use dpkg/apt. BTW it isn't any better with other distros. So I have to drop to the command line to fix the issue anyway.

So at some point you will need to learn bash, learn to read the man pages, and manually edit configuration file. It is unavoidable on Linux.