Guest post by Ryan, reprinted with permission from the original

I’m almost hesitant to even mention that this exists, because it’s a nasty thing that even Windows users wish they could uninstall.

But I’ve noticed a lot of (paid-for) chatter about Microsoft Edge on “Linux”.

Microsoft has been on a tear recently, paying off formerly respectable people and sites that I used to read to trumpet their “Linux” products, which are designed because they are good for Microsoft if you use them, not for you.

I have to say that Edge confuses me, however, because it’s missing the only feature in Windows that makes it worth opening. Soon, the Windows version will be the only way to force Internet Explorer’s engine to open in something and display corporate intranet hellscapes.

Other than that, I do have to struggle at who would want it.

"Microsoft has been on a tear recently, paying off formerly respectable people and sites that I used to read to trumpet their “Linux” products, which are designed because they are good for Microsoft if you use them, not for you."Much less dare install a DEB or RPM from the company that, when they packaged R, deleted /bin/sh and turned it into a symlink to bash on Debian (which not only isn’t what the operating system is expecting, as dash is the non-interactive shell for scripting in Debian, and Ubuntu, but will probably be replaced later by the OS again anyway!), and then began deleting files without checking the path of what it was deleting. Instead of figuring out what to do, they just stomp things that get in their way and perhaps corrupt the OS. I’d say it was definitely malicious, but it’s how they treat Windows itself.

At the time they did this, a few years ago, I hadn’t had any direct experience with Debian other than the time I installed 6.0 “Stretch” and didn’t like it much (now I’m using 11 Bullseye and think it’s good.), but I was familiar enough with Debian and Ubuntu style packaging to know what Microsoft was doing was not okay, by glancing at the scripts.

Microsoft is incompetent and evil alright, and I don’t know who would trust them enough to give them repository-level access to their computer so they can push random things like this out at you, along with anything else they feel like.

"Microsoft is incompetent and evil alright, and I don’t know who would trust them enough to give them repository-level access to their computer so they can push random things like this out at you, along with anything else they feel like."In a way, I almost do feel sorry for SJVN because I can only imagine what he’s going through as ZDNet collapses and he’s trying to get those last paychecks in, like many Microsoft shills are now that the company is on its way out but spamming the Web to try to distract, even as they drag his name through the mud hawking broken Microsoft products like WSL2.

Not quite as far gone as ZDNet, OMG Ubuntu! is turning into OMG! MSFT!.

Perhaps germane to the situation we find ourselves in today, consider what happened last time Microsoft “supported” UNIX with a web browser.

I was reading some statements from Steve Ballmer at the time Microsoft was doing Internet Explorer for UNIX.

"Now the kids are all using Chromebooks and Android phones, and they’re both Linux-based."He was speaking (in the late 1990s) about UNIX as if it was this dead thing that they had already slain and that Windows was the future, but they needed IE on every platform to kill Netscape with.

Now the kids are all using Chromebooks and Android phones, and they’re both Linux-based.

With Chromebooks you can install a complete Debian system in a lightweight container and cut your teeth on that in a consequence-free environment. If something horrible happens in the container, even if it’s your fault, you can wipe the container and start over and it does not matter aside from you have to lose the container. The OS itself is not corrupt.

Lenovo explains that you can do that, or install a GNU/Linux distribution that takes over the entire computer. The upside of this? If you’re doing it on a high end model, I suppose that you can get yourself a real computer, forget Chrome OS entirely, and end up using Coreboot firmware and bypassing the Intel/Microsoft cesspit for the PC, uEFI. While, at the same time, you still have a PC. (It would run x86 software because it has an x86 CPU).

"The IE for UNIX port actually was kind of interesting, in how terrible it was."I haven’t tried it. Maybe I will someday. I’d like to blow this Popsicle stand entirely. Not just get rid of Windows. This does not fill me with confidence.

The IE for UNIX port actually was kind of interesting, in how terrible it was.

I’m glad that guy on YouTube did that video.

He even loaded Outlook Express, which came for it. Both Internet Exploder and Lookout! Distress! behaved an awful lot like they did on Windows, at the time, apparently.

(I wonder if the UNIX port of Outlook Express also corrupted its mailbox constantly, like the Windows version….)

I thought it would just be like every other UNIX program where they built it for the version of Solaris or HP-UX that they wanted it to run on, statically linked a bunch of libraries, and it ran for a good long time.

In fact, that can be how GNU/Linux ELF binaries with static linking work today.

"I thought it would just be like every other UNIX program where they built it for the version of Solaris or HP-UX that they wanted it to run on, statically linked a bunch of libraries, and it ran for a good long time."However, IE for UNIX statically linked UNIX ports of Windows operating system bits, and if you patched Solaris a little bit here and there, IE wouldn’t run, and worse, might even cause Solaris itself to crash, as it eventually does in the video.

(In another attempt, it merely aborted, telling him that he had “too many operating system patches” and it wasn’t going to try to run. It has to be just the right amount of patched and not patched. Not patched too much, or too little, you know. Just the exact amount of patched Microsoft was using when they built it. How robust!)

To put that in perspective, Solaris was one of the most reliable operating systems of the time, and Microsoft managed to crash something that could run for months or years without trouble…..with IE.

How is that relevant now? They have a “Linux” web browser. I’m sure it’s absolutely great. 😉

Joey at OMG! MSFT! says so. 😉

We have literally dozens of web browsers for GNU/Linux that are either Free and Open Source, or at least won’t trash the entire OS and open a backdoor for Microsoft, who does disreputable partnerships with the NSA to put backdoors into everything they’ve built since at least Windows 98, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

They helped Donald Trump build the cages, and now they want on your computer after you already got rid of their stinking spyware operating system? Hard pass.

Which brings me to WSL2, Microsoft’s fake Linux product.

Whether it works very well or not (and the performance is much lower than bare metal GNU/Linux, but that’s outside the scope), running production workloads in WSL2 is a bad idea because you’re just exposing yourself to the well known instability and ransomware and other problems inherent to the bad design of the Windows system itself. Why do it?

Plus, if you use Windows the way Lenovo set it up, you’ll probably lose more data to Microsoft’s backdoored Bitlocker “encryption” going haywire all the time than you will to anything else. Why wait for ransomware?

But with Microsoft’s “Spam Spam Spam Spam!” vikings at ZDNet and OMG! MSFT! Joey, and others, you’d be forgiven for thinking that it may work out okay for you if you don’t work your way through the Googlebomb propaganda they’ve set up and remember what kind of crap Microsoft pushes on us. ⬆