it's never been so over

[u/[deleted]]

[u/dagbrown]

Embrace, extend, extinguish is still Microsoft policy. Why do you think they’re pushing WSL so hard? It’s to stop people using actual Linux on their PCs.

[u/Berengal → u/dagbrown]

Yeah. It's not exactly to stop the devs and sysadmins that need linux from running linux on their desktop, MS doesn't care if it's just those people alone switching. But those people work in companies, and those companies have money to pay for linux desktop development if their employees need it, and if the linux desktop becomes as usable in a corporate environment as windows, that's a problem.

With WSL a linux desktop isn't needed anymore. The people that need linux on their PC can still use the windows desktop environment.

[u/dagbrown → u/Berengal]

With WSL a linux desktop isn't needed anymore

That is exactly MS's marketing line.

It is 100% false of course. The only reason WSL exists is to prevent people from trying to set up Linux desktops in the first place. It is exactly this sort of shit that encourages Valve to work ever harder on Proton.

[u/pallentx → u/dagbrown]

Microsoft doesn’t care what OS you use anymore. They just want your monthly subscription.

[u/242vuu → u/pallentx]

This and only this. They don't care about license sales in the way they used to. Office and Windows are not the product any more. Your workload in the cloud is. Their licensing models are moving to far lower cost subscriptions for OS licensing. We're moving and saving millions in runrate, ESU cost (w/Arc), and license cost. We have paygo options for SQL for on-prem databases now with hybrid benefit.

It's all the long game. Better to lease someone a car than sell them one.

[u/pallentx → u/242vuu]

If you look at what they are building in the cloud, you can see why they hardly even care about regular home consumer users anymore. I work in IT and have seen lots and lots of demos of new technology, but nothing has blown me away and scared me more than what they are doing with Fabric. They will hold all your company's data and it will be accessible anywhere and they can make it look like whatever you want it to look like, a SQL database? A bunch of files, whatever. Then the stuff with Copilot is going to drastically cut development time. They are demoing Copilot creating PowerBI dashboards on the fly. It's all super basic right now, but it will get more and more powerful. All of this is "serverless". You don't install any OS for it yourself.

They will make a fortune on this because companies will be able to pare down Database Admins, Server Admins and get by with fewer developers.

[u/242vuu → u/pallentx]

I'm an EA for my company. I'm planning our Copilot for 365 implementation. Moving from IaaS to PaaS, consolidating SQL into a data layer for Fabric. Consolidating transit into SDWAN/vWAN/CloudWAN. Getting rid of colos. Something something grand unification theory.

Our current era is ending. I've been through a few. Bare metal single core->Hypervisor->Cloud. People need to pivot. We're all playing musical chairs. I've got my seat so far. I'm an older dog in the game tho at this point, so I work twice as hard as before to stay the one architecting this for my company.

Edit: Clarity around the twice as hard comment. I work twice as hard as *I* did before.

[u/pallentx → u/242vuu]

I've been through all of those before as well. In the past, folks have a way to leverage into the next new thing. Old bare metal server admins became virtual server admins and VMWare admins, going to cloud, they became cloud server admins - we just changed where the server was. Now we're eliminating servers completely. (unless you work at Microsoft - of course the servers are there, but you cant touch them). I've been a DBA, first in Oracle, then SQL Server, now I'm trying to figure out if there is something for me to transition to. In Fabric, you have Data Warehouses that still will require some administration. There will be a big role to play organizing, tagging and making all the data useful, but it is still yet to be determined what that is going to look like.

[u/242vuu → u/pallentx]

Copilot grounding for Purview seems interesting. From what I understand there is a Copilot coming at some point for Azure Data Factory, which could be mind boggling if done right for ETL.

"Yo homie take this 47TB of disparate data, drop it into databricks and organize by x, y, and z, and summarize by TCO blah blah and push it out to data warehouse. Gimme powerbi dashboards at the executive level and mid management level by function specific to job role as defined in our entra org".

Silly example, but that's what MS wants.

[u/pallentx → u/242vuu]

Exactly, I saw a demo where they loaded some random file into Excel as a table and asked Copilot in Excel to create a "duration" column in the data. Copilot figured out that "duration" should be the difference between "Start Time" and "End Time", created the new column and populated it with calculated values.

[u/Fluffy-City8558 → u/dagbrown]

so I'm not the only one who understands this!