Thursday, October 11, 2018

Prediction: Windows 11 = Microsoft Linux

Wow!  I cannot believe where we are now!  They now admit there are MORE Linux VMs in Azure than anything else.  Previous estimates were "nearly half" and some said 80%.  Azure itself runs on Linux (as do most hypervisors, phones, IoT, etc.).

Of course, Microsoft has added the really nice WSL allowing you to run the bash shell and even Linux under Windows (making native calls).   This, while cool, was not really that interesting to me - until I saw the results!  The back and forth cross platform/pollination has resulted in Powershell Core!  It runs on Linux and Windows.  This makes administering Azure from Linux MUCH easier.  And, even better, Microsoft has released Visual Studio Code for Linux.  Both of these run great under Slackware Linux (I used the tarball).  They have binaries for Debian or RedHat distros.

I've never been one for a IDE, after moving from emacs to vi 17 years ago, but I have to admit - this is probably worth learning.  It has a really slick plugin for Git.  It has plugins for most languages (I've added a bunch) - even Perl!  (It took me a lot of scrolling, but I finally found it!)  I'm excited about Microsoft for the first time since 1995 (that was *really* short lived!)

People are always bugging me - switch from Perl to Python.  I've dabbled with Python.  If I were starting today, I'd definitely go that way.  But now, I need to get things done and everything you can do in Python you can do in Perl and vice-versa - so what's the point?  BUT, Powershell is a different story!  With Powershell, I have 10's of thousands of comandlets (reminds me a bit of Perl modules) that give me easy access to Windows .Net objects that allow me to do VERY POWERFUL THINGS.  I've been playing around with it for years and I really appreciate what it can do!  Now, I can do it from my Linux command line whilst operating against VMs in the Azure cloud.  This truly is an amazing time in IT.  I am so glad Microsoft is finally working with us instead of against us!  I can't wait to see where this is heading!