Microsoft's Linux love-in continues with SUSE support in SQL Server Microsoft has previewed its support for SUSE Linux Enterprise in its next version of SQL Server, and announced an early adopter programme. Released as part of Redmond's rapid preview model, the next version of SQL Server (v.Next) community technology preview (CTP) v1.2 is now available on both Windows and Linux, arriving with …
Paul Thurrott has been installing Linux this week with the admission "its Free, runs well on older (or newer) PC hardware, easy to evaluate on older PCs or in a VM".
Maybe the Microsoft Red X click to install and "purposely broken*" Windows 7 Update mechanism, has even got to him.
Microsoft Office on Linux is inevitable now, though not particularly needed, given Libre Office 5 has that sewn up for 99% of normal user use cases.
Microsoft don't produce MS SQL for Linux, without porting Microsoft Office too. The products that are succeeding best (outside the of Apple Ecosystem) are products like Dropbox, Spotify, that work across all platforms.
*his words not mine.
I had to look that guy up as I have never heard of him. He is clearly installing Linux today to advertise for Microsoft tomorrow.
BTW, why are you following streamers? Or better yet, why are you following Microsoft advertising streamers...can you even go lower? Get your act together.
IMHO MS understood on the server side, for many workloads, Windows Server is simply too expensive among the OS price itself and CALs, compared to Linux. And it won't be easy to move away from that price model.
Thus it's trying to limit damages porting some of the server application on Linux before their market share plummets - especially the database where the line between the high-end ones and the lower-end ones is not blurred for many users (unlike twenty years ago). MS needs to hold some of the bottom line hoping to move some users to the higher-end editions (which may still run on Windows only).
But on the desktop is still a different story, despite the best effort of alienating users made with Windows 10. Just look at the Surface line. It's clear MS has its own plan for desktop applications... which doesn't include Linux support, I'm afraid.
There's still a difference between "utilities" like Dopbox and Spotify, and heavyweight productivity apps.
And still, what LibreOffice/Linux lacks, is a valid groupware product. Until then, it will have an hard time to replace Office in the office... but the smaller ones.
There's still a difference between "utilities" like Dopbox and Spotify, and heavyweight productivity apps.
Even people like Spotify don't really care about Linux on the desktop. Take a look at these three links:
https://www.spotify.com/uk/download/windows/
https://www.spotify.com/uk/download/mac/
https://www.spotify.com/uk/download/linux/
The first two are nice and friendly. There's some pretty pictures, and it auto-starts a suitable download.
For Linux, you get four lines of what, to a non-technical user, will appear as meaningless gobbledygook. It's 2017, but to install the Linux client for a worldwide music streaming service, I have to run four text commands, including entering a 40 character hexadecimal key, and the best they can say about it is "Our aim is that it should work".
I'm not a fan of Windows 10, but it's easy to see why many people aren't switching to some penguin-based OS.
Dearest "Electron Sheep,"
There used to be a thing called DOS and now it may appear as Power Shell in what appears to be the only OS you know anything about. You might want to read up on that if you want to make your computer do something other than print docs and look at pr0n on the Intrawebs. Hint; even grandmas can paste in a command to a shell. Take the blue pill, and meet up with us in the real world sometime soon!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerShell
Between DOS and PowerShell there was (and it's still there), the Win32 console and its applications (and no, it's not DOS). And no, most grandmas can't copy and paste in a command shell - probably because they don't know what a command shell is.
There's a reason why it was GUI availability to propel the PC among the masses...
Electron Shepherd you really haven't a clue. Get your facts right at least.
How do I install Spotify on Linux Mint?
Click Menu (Bottom left like Windows Start), Click Software Manager from static left pane (Brown Box Icon)
Software Manager opens...
Type 'Spotify' into search box
Click 'Install'
Close Software Manager.
Under Sound & Video, click Spotify to open.
Enter Username and password, job done.
Forgetting one really *big* difference between MS and Linux:
> Software Manager opens...
---
Enter your password to perform administrative
tasks.
The application 'mintinstall' lets you modify essential parts
of your system.
Password: |_______________________|
---
> Type 'Spotify' into search box
> Click 'Install'
> Close Software Manager
There you go ...
Cheers,
"Forgetting one really *big* difference between MS and Linux:"
Apart from what you said, the other big difference is you don;t have to do a web search to find your app. You get 99.9% of apps from the distros repositories where there's a decent chance it's not a hacked version that's been trojanised from whatever site appears in a Google/Bing search (or even from a "reputable" download aggregator who packages apps with added browser tool-bars or who has "fake" download buttons that are adverts)
1) You have to know which hell of a name an app has into a repo. Which may not be what you believe it is. Often, if you have to Google anyway to find what you need to install
2) If it's Debian, you have good chance to get the version of two years before.
3) Even if it's not Debian, you may need to add yourself the application own repository if you need some more recent version - if there is a repository. If you're lucky you can download a package at least, if you're not you have to compile it yourself (and you have to get all the dependencies too).
4) Not all applications are in a repository. Commercial ones are available through downloads anyway. And yes, there are commercial Linux applications also. Not everybody uses Linux just because you don't have to pay.
Hacked version of Windows applications are the right penalty for those who prefer to download from dodgy site illegal copies. Honest people never had issues.
That's great. Spotify should probably put those instructions on their Linux page. When I tried it, on Mint 17.3 x64 (not the latest, I realise, but I happened to have a VM with it installed for other reasons), I was offered two choices, spotify-client-0.9.17, which appears to be v0.9.17 (natch), and spotify-client:i386, which appears to be v1.0.9.4. Personally, I don't think it's obvious which one to install. I probably don't want the i386 one, since I'm on a 64 bit OS, but it's the later version, so probably I do. There's some usability work to do there, I feel.
But the bigger problem that I see is that while life is good for those using Mint, do those instructions you supplied work for openSUSE? For Fedora? For Ubuntu?
For Windows and Mac, you get one file, that you double-click to install. The current Windows client seems to be v1.0.45, so the Mint distros are a bit behind the times. If there was a single file that you could download direct from the Spotify web site, that would
a) remove the problem of "is this the real thing or not?" that is always a concern when downloading from a link found via a search engine, regardless of operating system.
b) guarantee it was the latest version, without relying on the repo maintainers to keep it updated.
So, a serious question, which is a serious question, even though I'm aware it will look like Linux-trolling, and I'm hoping that someone who develops for the Linux platform, rather than just uses it, can answer. Why is the method different for Linux? What is the advantage in not simply supplying a packaged install that people can download direct from spotify.com?
"So, a serious question, which is a serious question, even though I'm aware it will look like Linux-trolling, and I'm hoping that someone who develops for the Linux platform, rather than just uses it, can answer. Why is the method different for Linux? What is the advantage in not simply supplying a packaged install that people can download direct from spotify.com?"
The primary misconception there is that in the terms you asked, "There ain;t no such thing as Linux".
There's a number of core Linux "distros" which have their own app installer methods, almost invariably with a "one click" GUI wrapper app. Other distros are based on the core ones and usually use the app installer the parent uses, maybe with tweaks and the vast majority of what a user need to install can be fetched and installed through that standardised installer.
What is still little surprising is that you often have to manually add other repositories to your installer to be able to use it to get "non-standard" apps. I really have no idea why the various Linux distros and their installers don't include other, eg commercial, repositories as standard. In some cases, it's idealogical, but most users don't care about that.
It seems to me that it really should not be all that hard to build/rebuild the various app installers GUI apps to be easily extensible via the usual update system such that, eg spotify can submit the installer code and location of the app, it gets approved and added, similar to the way the ports system works in FreeBSD.
No, I'm quite capable of copying and pasting.
But, at the same time, I realise that not everyone is, or even wants to. Some people want to just install some software and get on with other things. The Spotify approach doesn't seem to make it as easy as it could be.
By the way, will the copying and pasting work for all current distros, or is the approach different for say, Fedora or SUSE?
What are the world's certified Microsoft dependent fanbois going to say/do about this? OK if their background is SQL Server they're hopefully safe enough - after a bit of re-indoctrination from "Linux is a cancer" to "Linux is really useful", their potential market may actually increase?
There are also lots of Microsoft Certified this that and the other who surely must be struggling with the reality that there is a world outside Window boxes, and some customers quite like it.
So is SQL Server only compatible with SUSE? In which, someone seems to be misunderstanding how Linux is supposed to work...
With the way everything is going, I wouldn't be surprised to if a new operating system comes out in a couple years to throw off the bullshit that Linux is becoming, just like Linux rebelling against the various Unixes from the days of yore (And how Unix itself was to rebel against Multics / TOPS / etc.).
The cracks are already starting to show with the massive division that systemd has caused and some distros now balking and refusing to install on systems with less than 20 GB of disk, a multi-core chip, and 2 GB RAM. It wasn't too long that I was running a Linux distro on a Pentium-2 laptop with 256 MB of RAM and a 10 gig disk with plenty of resources to spare even when running a full Desktop Environment and a full office suite. What the hell happened to software in the last decade?
"So is SQL Server only compatible with SUSE? In which, someone seems to be misunderstanding how Linux is supposed to work..."
It's probably Micro-shaft trying to pick "winners and losers". Was RHEL even considered?
(it'd be JUST LIKE MICRO-SHAFT to do something like that, yeah)
Micro-shaft - a synonym for 'angler fish'
(looks like MS has docs on RHEL running SQL Server - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sql/linux/sql-server-linux-setup-red-hat )
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