Microprose owns Falcon again. I don't think there's much official information yet, but Falcon does have a dedicated spot on their official Discord with the Falcon 5 developer chiming in now and then.
1. The Microprose brand has been resurrected focused on reviving classic 90s and 2000s sim type games. They gave an interview in PC Pilot magazine a while back confirming they were working on Falcon 5, which will be an F-16 and F-35 sim, sitting between War Thunder and DCS World on the realism scale.
2. Meanwhile the fans have modded Falcon 4.0 into a modern F-16 and F-15 simulator comparable in many ways to sims like DCS World: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wY4lHUJ1ft0
Modern Linux supports asynchronous I/O. It's debatable whether NT's lack of memory overcommitting is a superior choice. OS personalities have never been relevant outside of marketing and might even be technical debt at this point, as virtualization offers a more effective solution with significantly less complexity. Moreover, the Linux kernel maintains a stable ABI.
Much of the discussion surrounding NT's supposed superiority is outdated or superficial at best. Linux, on the other hand, offers several advantages that actually matters. It supports a wider variety of filesystems natively, with FUSE providing exceptional utility. Linux also accommodates more architectures and allows for more creative applications through features like User Mode Linux and the Linux Kernel Library. It also has a more robust debugging ecosystem thanks to its large community and open source nature. All of these things are possible because Linux isn't bound by a single company's commercial interests.
Also, is Microsoft putting as much effort into NT these days? I find it hard to believe they care about NT when they stopped caring about what runs on top of it, leading to articles like this one.
Not nearly to the depth and breth of NT. NT is async I/O throughout. Linux has a bunch of libs that ride on top of pretend async I/O with io_uring as a more recent bonus.
> It's debatable whether NT's lack of memory overcommitting is a superior choice.
NT won't randomly kill a process. That's the winning play.
> OS personalities have never been relevant outside of marketing
Until you've used them for non-marketing purposes, then they're invaluable. Personalities existed when virtualization didn't exist on x86.
> Moreover, the Linux kernel maintains a stable ABI.
The only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.
> It supports a wider variety of filesystems natively,
Most distros suggest ext4 out of the box. Sysadmins are going to deploy ZFS where it counts. Some might use XFS. Having access to a ton of file systems is great, but the usage outside of ext4 is going to be comparatively low. ext4 is the only FS I'd want to see as first-party on Windows as a data drive. But that would have been more important before persuasive networking.
> It also has a more robust debugging ecosystem thanks to its large community and open source nature.
This ignores the debugging tools on Win32 by a country mile.
> is Microsoft putting as much effort into NT these days
Yes. Even if you do the bare minimum investigative effort and follow the "what's new" for each version of Windows, you can see the kernel-level investment. Much of this is around security and isolation of kernel components. There is also Microsoft in talks (finally, again) with EDR vendors to isolate their solutions; hopefully game devs are next.
> leading to articles like this one.
This isn't an article. It's an uninformed blog post.
> Not nearly to the depth and breth of NT. NT is async I/O throughout. Linux has a bunch of libs that ride on top of pretend async I/O with io_uring as a more recent bonus.
Is this a purity thing or does it have practical implications?
> NT won't randomly kill a process. That's the winning play.
Every OS will have to when it runs out of resources. No overcommitting means it's less resource-efficient too, so things aren't that simple.
> Until you've used them for non-marketing purposes, then they're invaluable. Personalities existed when virtualization didn't exist on x86.
When have OS personalities ever been a commercial success? Every product that built on it went nowhere.
> The only stable ABI on Linux is Win32.
Containers and Flatpaks prove otherwise. Static binaries exist, too.
Also, if you're extending this Linux / Windows comparison to include the userland, then Windows is no match for Linux. Not when Microsoft is actively sabotaging Windows.
> Having access to a ton of file systems is great, but the usage outside of ext4 is going to be comparatively low.
What on earth? There's more use to filesystems than mounting it at root. Are you really claiming that OS personalities are useful, but being able to mount any filesystem is not? That's absurd.
Which doesn't mean much without an ecosystem of programs using WinFsp that's comparable to Linux. Moreover, the long-term development of WinFsp isn't guaranteed, and there remains the risk that Microsoft could introduce changes that might impede the functionality of third-party filesystems.
> It's an uninformed blog post.
Uninformed? While an official Windows-themed Linux distro doesn't make sense, the observation that Windows is declining and Microsoft no longer cares at all what users think is very much correct and obvious to anyone. The fact that Microsoft hasn't ceased development doesn't negate this fact.
> Every OS will have to when it runs out of resources. No overcommitting means it's less resource-efficient too, so things aren't that simple.
NT does memory overcommit...
> When have OS personalities ever been a commercial success? Every product that built on it went nowhere.
Xceed made money off of it. Yes, every product has a shelf life. Just like every commercial Unix. They were successful at what they did until a replacement came along.
> Also, if you're extending this Linux / Windows comparison to include the userland, then Windows is no match for Linux. Not when Microsoft is actively sabotaging Windows.
You're not saying anything, here. "No match" how, exactly?
> There's more use to filesystems than mounting it at root. Are you really claiming that OS personalities are useful, but being able to mount any filesystem is not? That's absurd.
Absurd, how? Is mounting HFS /really/ that critical to your day-to-day?
> Which doesn't mean much without an ecosystem of programs using WinFsp that's comparable to Linux.
Movin' those goal posts!
> Uninformed? While an official Windows-themed Linux distro doesn't make sense,
You uh... did read the post, right? That's what the entire thing was about!
It's possible during setup though I'm not sure how supported it is. Not sure why you'd really want to, writes are much slower than NTFS in general due to journaling.
For the same reason I want btrfs or ZFS on Linux; cheap snapshots so if something breaks I can easily restore to a safe point.
A large part of my complaints about Windows Update have come because it can brick your machine, System Restore doesn’t work, and so you’re stuck spending a weekend trying to back up and fix stuff.
When I ran Ubuntu with ZFS on root, I had it so that I every time apt was run, it took a snapshot. This came in handy when my WiFi driver got borked during an update; I was able to restore from a previous point, it took like ten minutes.
ReFS doesn't give you any more rollback capability than NTFS in that sense. ReFS supports file level snapshots, not volume.
And on a client machine, it's of much less importance overall (to you, it may be super important and I don't want to discount that). And on the server side, that's why we have n+2 failovers. No single machine of importance should ever be a point of failure... I realize that's not always reality but it's more or less Microsoft's position; after all, why sell one Windows Server license when you can sell 3!
I mean, I think backups and snapshots that actually work is something that most people would benefit from?
There are few pieces of software that are more universally disliked than Windows Update, and while I cannot speak for everyone the main reason I hate it so much is because it's often automatic and I've had it make my computer unbootable multiple times (and it's actually a big reason I ditched Windows completely like sixteen years ago).
If there were full filesystem snapshots and a utility to fully restore from those snapshots, I think a lot of people would be more willing to do the updates. It wouldn't be hard for users that have any tech skills at all; do what NixOS does [1] and on boot allow the user to choose an earlier snapshot to boot from if anything gets toasted.
Windows does have System Restore, but as far as I can tell that never has fixed anyone's problems at any point in time, along with the "Automatic Repair Tools" which has become a running joke in my family.
It just bothers me, because the FOSS community has solved this, a long time ago no less. Back in 2012, I used btrfs + Snapper whenever I would install a "risky" driver like a GPU or Wi-Fi chip, or whenever I did an update. When I did break my video display, restoring from the snapshot took like ten minutes, I'm able to get back into my system and fix the issue, without having to do any major surgery to the internals of Linux. I've never tried it with FreeBSD and ZFS but I suspect it's a similar process.
Microsoft is a trillion dollar corporation, they have a higher market cap than the entire GDP of NYC and Singapore combined. Why exactly can't they just augment ReFS and copy Snapper or Time Machine (with APFS)? They have infinite funds, they have access to Dave Cutler and until about a year ago Leslie Lamport, they already have a CoW filesystem and they could easily afford a license to any version of ZFS if ReFS wasn't up to the task.
[1] I know NixOS isn't doing filesystem interface, but the overall principle is the same in this instance.
NTFS getting corrupted by the tiniest errors would be one reason to use ReFS
Using it for the OS partition is not very well supported right now though (for a consumer), installing etc. works fine, but DISM doesn't support ReFS so adding features generally doesn't work
Can't recall the last time I saw a corrupt NTFS volume... even when using Storage Spaces. I'm sure it's happened to someone given Windows is in use by billions of machines, but NTFS becoming corrupt can't be all that common.
Besides, ReFS doesn't do data journaling by default.
There are performance penalties for moving drivers out of the kernel/ring 0. For some things, that matters (network, graphics), for others it doesn't, like printers.
And Microsoft has made the least stable of the drivers a recoverable fault, at least.
And btw, Falcon 5.0 is in development :-)
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