> unconditionally trust Microsoft
But the poster I was responding to was pretty clearly saying that we should:
> unconditionally distrust Microsoft
I've signed many antitrust petitions for them over the years. And they have won a fair amount of good will since Satya came on and pushed for cultural change, as well as a larger pivot towards cloud and open source.
So, you know. It's a mixed bag is my take.
Considering their "collaboration" with Canonical, it feels like Microsoft is paying Canonical in order to get help for strangling Linux desktop inside the Windows ecosystem, finally extinguishing desktop Linux installs once and for all.
As a payback they're leaving server space to Canonical, but port their software to work on Ubuntu, so they have a suitable "free" platform to monetize their software. Canonical can make boatloads of money by selling support, Landscape and similar services meanwhile.
I'm thankful to them for their Copilot shenanigans though, they kickstarted the motivation inside me to be even more serious about the services and software I use. I left GitHub, slowly moving away from Google services, etc.
I would say that if that is your perspective, then you probably didn't have a close up view of them and how they operated before and after. There's been a lot of spilled ink about it; I won't rehash it here.
> it feels like Microsoft is paying Canonical in order to get help for strangling Linux desktop inside the Windows ecosystem, finally extinguishing desktop Linux installs once and for all.
I expounded on this in another thread - Desktop Linux isn't likely to be something MSFT spends any amount of time concerning themselves with as competition. Realistically, it's not real competition and any harms done to it probably were borne out of callousness or ignorance rather than competitive spite. The competition is OSX and ChromeOS (which I would not consider 'Desktop Linux').
