Ubuntu on Windows 10

[Rockin Robbins]

One blog I read frequently is OMG Ubuntu, a frankly Linux promotional and information blog. So I was minding my own business, reading the blog and came across this:

Why You Shouldn't Panic About the Microsoft Linux Lovefest

Now you must keep in mind that this is only for running Linux command line background infastructure in Windows so that Windows can operate on the increasingly Linux-based Internet server landscape. The article puts it that Microsoft will "provide first-class support for the open-source command line tools that developers love, from python to apt to vim, natively on the Windows desktop."

However, to my mind, this blogger is being very naive about Microsoft's newly minted non-evil status. And this comes from the fact that this user single-boots Ubuntu in his daily life. He hasn't had to struggle with Microsoft's increasingly thuggish bludgeoning of user preferences and settings and its spyware orientation. He hasn't had to witness the transformation of an operating system from a program that helps the user run the software a user installs on his machine to a program whose primary function is serving advertising while it collects and allows Microsoft to sell your personal information at no benefit to yourself.

It's fascinating to read his take: Linux has won--Microsoft has surrendered to the open source revolution. He goes so far as to say "However perturbing it may feel right now, Ubuntu on Windows 10 actually an endorsement of open-source ethic. It’s Microsoft saying “you got it right, we got it wrong.”

This lives along side another article by another author who was shocked at actually seeing another person in the a cafe he uses for WI-FI access actually using Ubuntu on his laptop. There's a reason for that. Microsoft has been knocking itself out to bully hardware manufacturers, bamboozle its users and refusing to allow Windows users to even read data from a Linux formatted flash drive. They have dedicated an amazing amount of effort to pushing Linux into oblivion.

So I can't connect those two dots. They are mutually exclusive zeitgeists. In my mind that means that one of the viewpoints is wrong, and my personal experience points to the article linked above as the odd man out.

Still, a fascinating look at what happens when you live in a sterilized environment. You lose your resistance to infection.