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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

I'll be interested in hearing from anyone who uses this and finds it offers them more than they are currently getting from cygwin or VMware+Linux VM. I realize it's a very different beast from cygwin - an entire User Mode Linux environment, as opposed to being able to download windows versions of the Linux Environment, but, on a day to day basis, It will be interesting to see what people do differently, and why they would use WSL as opposed to just running a Linux VM on their workstation if cygwin isn't sufficient.

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I'm using it on my tablet instead of previously using a VMWare image and msys+mingw+cygwin.

The main advantage over a VM is no resource partitioning: on a 4GB RAM tablet with 64GB eMMC, you can't allocate more than 2GB RAM to a VM without trouble, and putting 20GB of disk aside for it is also a pain., and much improved power efficiency (even an idle VM drastically reduces battery life, while Ubuntu for Windows doesn't).

Compared to Cygwin: a lot more packages are available, a lot more just works out of the box, and you can painlessly use online tutorials for Linux, which often assume Ubuntu and don't consider Cygwin a target platform.

since you are already up and running may I ask what friends have been asking me? Can you apt-get install zsh ?

Doesn't look like zsh is fully working yet:

root@localhost:~# zsh compaudit:105: wait failed: invalid argument compdef:95: wait failed: invalid argument localhost# exit zsh: you have running jobs. localhost#

Will have to try again after the next build.

Have you tried it in another terminal emulator (like mintty) or an X session (using a X running on Windows or a VNC X server)?

Ask away. I don't have the tablet with me, but I can answer what I know so far.

I haven't tried zsh, but I'm pretty sure you can install it. I installed a bunch of applications, including using third party repos and ppa's. I don't see why zsh would not work.

Perhaps zsh uses some unsupported escape sequences (for instance, screen doesn't seem to work), but you can readily work around that by using another terminal in windows (mintty) or launching a VNC server from Linux and a VNC client to your localhost I assume.

The reason that zsh gives the errors reported earlier in this sub-thread will be different to the reason that screen doesn't work.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11417227

It's readily apparent from the error messages earlier in this sub-thread that the zsh problem isn't to do with escape sequences. And of course the screen problem (at least the one known so far) is not escape sequences, either.

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11416392

I couldn't get zsh to work (same errors as tallanvor) but other shells did work, like fish with oh-my-fish. I had to run bash in ConEmu to be able to display some unicode characters (those used by powerline themes/fonts) - http://i.imgur.com/JT8Zi5j.png

One serious advantage to WLS over a VM, is you don't have yet another layer of NAT at play... That's the biggest one to come to mind... you also don't have a fully linux system spun up to work on a few tasks in a bash prompt.

Don't get me wrong, I've been fine using a "remote" VM machine locally for linux, and a lot of my work the past few years has been that way (CIFS in the VM, to run a gui editor on the desktop), but to be able to run closer to native is a good thing imho... hopefully it stays well supported.

My potential use case: run the IDE on the host (Windows UI is fast, font rendering is great), but use git, etc. from the Linux command line (to get file permissions, etc. right).

Install git (the real git from https://git-scm.com/, not a fancy GUI) and use the git bash shell today. It runs msys and has a full set of Linux utilities like ls, etc.

The powershell extensions in Git Shell (not git bash) are also fantastic and less clunky (doesn't feel like mingw). Comes bundled with github for Windows.

I've been doing that for a while, I setup Samba in the VM, and map a drive in the windows host... Works pretty well.

I would love to see how it compares to a Linux VM for tasks that involve a lot of shelling out to run other tools.

The native Windows versions of git and CMake can be awfully slow [1].

[1]: https://gist.github.com/jibsen/7ebeddde3bc2bfd421b96ae53a824...

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