After Satya Nadella's arrival at Microsoft, the company began to adopt open source as part of its strategy.
After opening the code of some of its applications, the first fruit of this can be seen in the Windows Calculator app for Linux. Thanks to Uno Platform, the calculator application found in Windows 10 can now be easily installed in any distribution with Snap support.
The Windows calculator includes multiple modes including standard, scientific, graphing, programmer and data calculation. In addition to that we find tools for currency conversion, units of volume, length, mass and weight, temperature and energy.
How to install the Windows Calculator for Linux
To download the app you just have to go to the Snapstore and choose the architecture of your computer. The Calculator is only available in the beta channel and the developers warn that it may have bugs or change constantly.
Those who have Ubuntu or snapd installed, just run it:
snap install uno-calculator If you don't use Ubuntu or your Linux distribution doesn't come with Snap pre-installed, just access the Canonical website and follow the instructions to install it depending on your distro. The site offers help for those who have Debian, Fedora, Kubuntu, openSUSE, Linux Mint, Raspberry Pi OS and more.
In case you're wondering "what's so impressive about this if there are other better apps", well, this is more a proof of concept of how easy it is to port UWP applications to Linux thanks to .NET 5.0 .
A few months ago Microsoft confirmed that Windows 10 will allow running Linux applications with a graphical interface. The technology implemented hardware acceleration to solve performance problems. In addition, it announced that the operating system will offer direct access to your Linux files.
Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, stated long ago that the company was on the wrong side of history, referring to its commitment to open source. Steve Ballmer, a former Microsoft CEO who in 2001 said that Linux was a cancer, changed his position in 2016 on open source. Ballmer said he was right almost 20 years ago and that now the threat of Linux is a thing of the past, so he applauded the strategy of his successor, Satya Nadella.