Microsoft Is Bringing Defender Advanced Threat Protection to Linux Next Year

Tsing

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It's been nearly five years since Microsoft admitted its love for Linux, and the company's stance hasn't changed. During this week's Ignite Conference, Corporate Vice President Rob Lefferts revealed that Defender Advanced Threat Protection would be coming to Linux systems in 2020. This is a response feature that complements Windows Defender, which managed to score top honors just a few months ago from AV Test, one of Germany's top research institutes for IT security.

Application Guard is also coming to all Office 365 documents. Previously, this security feature was only available in Edge and allowed users to safely open a webpage in an isolated virtual machine to protect them from malware. Now, users who open Office 365 apps, like Word or Excel, will have the same protection.
 
Well I installed Linux Mint on a B450 iTX MSI motherboard, AMD 2700, Vega FE and my mouth dropped open in how fast it installed, all drivers installed automatically for everything, everything worked right off the bat. Blue tooth, Wifi, network, did not have to load drivers for the Vega FE, ran Steam games with great benchmark scores. Then was utterly surprised that the non-Bluetooth Klipsch version of speakers I had, Linuxmint connected via blue tooth and I played music across the house to them. Nothing else see's these speakers in having Bluetooth but there it was.

Anyways all previous run throughs with Linux ended up with me deleting and moving on -> this time so far is an utter different experience. If Valve continues with improving game compatibility (Ran Doom 2016, Rise Of the Tomb Raider, other games - no issues so far) then I could easily just move to Linux and save on all the subscription fees that I've built up with software.
 
noko said:
Well I installed Linux Mint on a B450 iTX MSI motherboard, AMD 2700, Vega FE and my mouth dropped open in how fast it installed, all drivers installed automatically for everything, everything worked right off the bat. Blue tooth, Wifi, network, did not have to load drivers for the Vega FE, ran Steam games with great benchmark scores. Then was utterly surprised that the non-Bluetooth Klipsch version of speakers I had, Linuxmint connected via blue tooth and I played music across the house to them. Nothing else see's these speakers in having Bluetooth but there it was.

Anyways all previous run throughs with Linux ended up with me deleting and moving on -> this time so far is an utter different experience. If Valve continues with improving game compatibility (Ran Doom 2016, Rise Of the Tomb Raider, other games - no issues so far) then I could easily just move to Linux and save on all the subscription fees that I've built up with software.
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I've been saying this for years and no one ever believes me.

These days, installing Linux is much easier and faster than installing Windows.
 
Oh yeah, because installing Microsoft products on their Linux machines is exactly what every Linux user secretly wants to do.
 
Dan_D said:
Oh yeah, because installing Microsoft products on their Linux machines is exactly what every Linux user secretly wants to do.
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It's definitely not anywhere near the top of my list of things to do with my Linux boxen but I think this is another signal on what direction MS is moving.

We've seen what a dumpster fire Win10 has been off and on with what seems like absolutely no QA teams. We've also seen very little in the way of innovation from MS on the desktop front and the current direction of the company has little or nothing to do with the desktop realm.

This looks to be another move towards the eventual abandonment of the Windows operating system. Slowly but surely MS has been moving more and more towards Linux. I think this is nothing more than another test of MS getting their software working on Linux as well as small scale testing of reception to MS software on Linux. I do believe the eventual move will be for MS to effectively abandon the Windows OS and move to a Linux base with MS's own Windows branded desktop environment. I expect MS to move the majority of their software to Linux while selling the MS proprietary software. It would massively cut down on resources in those divisions because there would be no more need to directly develop and maintain OSes; just the proprietary MS software run on top of Linux.

Take into account MS's failure and effective abandonment of making a replacement filesystem for NTFS and it makes more sense. There are plenty of better filesystems working perfectly well on Linux so it would be one more failure MS could permanently abandon.

No, this idea is definitely not an original by me. I remember reading a post which mentioned some of this and my initial reaction was disbelief. However, the more I thought about it and looked at what MS has been doing over the last few years the less unbelievable the idea appeared and the more likely it became.
 
SmokeRngs said:
I expect MS to move the majority of their software to Linux while selling the MS proprietary software.
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Hmm, maybe. I think it has more to do with the deprioritizing Windows moreso than trying to necessarily move everything to Linux. I think Windows is a long way from dead though, as the desktop isn't going away anytime soon.

As many of us who run Linux on a desktop, that's an extremely low number of overall PCs. Linux is a clear leader in the server and datacenter space though, as well as embedded and IoT devices. I wouldn't be surprised if, on a per-device level (not per-desktop level), if Linux and linux-based kernels wouldn't vastly outstrip every other OS out there. So maybe... but I think it has more to do with just an overall push to diversify and support a larger market - including those where Windows just isn't able to gain market penetration. After all, how long is it going to be before you ~need~ to run some sort of protection on your TV, your Router, your DVR, your Phone, etc.

The push to Azure and cloud services probably plays no small part in this either. Cloud is just another phase, it's not like we didn't already run through centralized computing. It will eventually shift back to localized, seems to be one of those wax and wane things that we are just going to oscillate around rather than ever finding a happy medium.
 
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