Running I3 Window Manager on Ubuntu for Windows | Hacker News Reader

Running I3 Window Manager on Ubuntu for Windows

brianketelsen.com

234 pointsbketelsen168 comments

At first I was excited by bash for Windows but I am still not switching. You know why? Malware. Ransomware. I have many layers of defense from various harm (OpenWRT router, uBlock being the two most important ones) but the biggest defense I have is that Windows programs simply do not run on Linux and the Linux market is not big enough to bother with.

And I know many of you will say, oh that's not a problem, it never happened to me -- I will say good for you. But I need my work computer to, well, work, constantly. Yes, fighting a broken Arch Linux after an update is bad but not as bad as fighting a downright malicious program.

Somewhat unrelated, but you should check out pi hole https://pi-hole.net . Ads / spyware traffic won't even enter your network. I still run uBlock, but it goes largely unused.

Pretty good idea -- since I am running OpenWRT already I could just use https://gist.github.com/teffalump/7227752

Actually, good call. I'll just make a cron job to get uBlock's lists and stick them in dnsmasq.

A lot of comments about Thunderbird here, despite the article saying "Save your apologist comments and what about Open Office/Geary/Thunderbird comments.". That means don't comment about it.

The interesting part of the article is not the part about why this guy uses Windows!

You missed the rest of the paragraph though: "If you’ve used them, you know that they’re not as nice as the applications available in macOS and Windows."

I used Thunderbird for about 10 years on my Mac laptop and every time I tried to switch to Apple Mail (or anything else) I quickly switched back. But the truth is, I have used Linux on my primary desktop PC for about 15 years now and can honestly say that it is a very pleasant experience.

I would agree that for a long time OpenOffice had compatibility issues (often no worse than trying to open an Office document on a Mac) but those days are long gone.

As a software developer and general techie, I believe that Free Software is important for my profession and for the public at large. For me, even if Linux was less convenient (which it is not - today anyway...it was more challenging, say, a decade ago) I would use it because I have serious concerns some of how Apple and Microsoft treat developers and the Free Software movement.

Haven't Mozilla gave up on Thunderbird though?

There's always Icedove, which gets updates from Debian.

Debian isn't doing any independent development on icedove, are they? I think if thunderbird development stops so will icedove's.

https://wiki.debian.org/Icedove#The_future_of_Icedove

Not yet. They're still in the process of moving it to a community run project.

> I would agree that for a long time OpenOffice had compatibility issues (often no worse than trying to open an Office document on a Mac) but those days are long gone.

Downloaded a .docx template from Hubspot recently, LibreOffice could not even begin to open it correctly, the layout was screwed up all over the place.

Using this template probably saved us 20 hours of work. So the only reasonable solution here was to set up a Windows VM, sign up for Office, and use Word to edit the template.

It's very frustrating when people say things like "those days are long gone" and dismiss issues like this as mere "inconveniences" when they are not and we, while being devoted Linux users, are still facing these challenges.

Yep. LibreOffice works... except when it doesn't. Similarly, getting Ubuntu 16's AMD drivers to work well is a clusterfuck and a half.

Linux fits 99% of my use cases, and the other 1% is unbelievably frustrating.

Drivers are hard on windows too. As a non-dotnet developer windows is frustrating with 99% of use cases too.

Bought a new laptoo with AMD APU and Radeon Graphics.Installed Ubuntu 16.04. Even though I'm using the default open source driver, there doesn't seem to be any issues for general use. Had to struggle to get the wifi driver working properly though.

So yeah, I agree with you on the 99%-1% part.

What's really infuriating is that I seem to be the only one with this issue. Dual-monitor setup, computer will completely freeze and refuse to boot if I disconnect a monitor. It will hang half the time that I start up. Opening any graphically intensive app (VLC, games, Youtube videos, opening up the Dash, etc) will cause massive tearing. And there is nothing on the Internet about it.

I'm staying on 15.10 until they come out with something better.

I think people wouldn't comment on it if the author didin't decide to be obnoxious condescending dick about it.

Turn the indexing off in Thunderbird and it is still quite a usable email client for me and I have recently done a bit of a tour of the alternatives. It hits the sweet spot for me. Mutt is awesome but I have to deal with too much html email.

I pretty much run the same stack for email/editor/docs on every platform. For the most part Windows, OSX and Linux are interchangeable for me which is a nice place to be. I just find Linux gets in the way a lot less for my purposes.

Every platform has advantages and a slightly different mix of applications that make it suit some users more than others. I can certainly understand swapping between a Mac and Windows for iOS and Windows development or games and back to Linux for web/server stuff. But being stuck on a particular platform because of an email client would bother me.

I think it is great that this stuff is running on Windows but it bothers me that people feel they are trapped on Windows because of their email client. That seems so dated.

Well it's finally the year of the Linux Desktop.

Actually, I feel like this is the one instance where saying "GNU" instead of Linux is completely accurate, since WSL is not even running the Linux kernel but GNU userland tools...

I wonder what Stallman would have to say about that? We've come around full circle to GNU/NT.

If I'm not mistaken, the view is,

a) don't want to provide nice tools to windows users because then they'll no longer have the need to switch to a libre system

b) do want to provide nice tools to windows users because then they'll get a taste of how liberating freedom is

obviously there is a balance there, and I think GNU/NT might be a bit too far into entrenching-the-user for his tastes, though I can't speak for him obviously.

It seems there is no political note on his site for the announcement of ubuntu-on-windows.

Richard calls it "GNU/kWindows" (like GNU/kFreeBSD); I wrote an article with his input a while back:

https://mikegerwitz.com/2016/04/GNU-kWindows

I think Gnudows is a pretty catchy portmanteau.

It's not running the Linux kernel, but it's implementing Linux kernel interfaces. Microsoft may ship a lot of GNU software now but presumably the same interfaces could be used to run alternatives like busybox and uclibc. This keeps the naming debates interesting, I suppose.

Initially I read this as "Running 13 Window Managers on Ubuntu for Windows", which piqued my interest as possibly the most Linux thing I can imagine doing.

Still, exciting times.

I'm one of those weird people that uses free software even if it isn't better. The quality of the software is beside the point.

If you're not using the best functional tool for the job, the only person you are hurting is you.

Sometimes I use software when people aren't paying me. I even write software sometimes when people aren't paying me. So there isn't always a "Job" involved.

In any case, while free software might hurt me short term, proprietary software is guaranteed to hurt me long term.

I do not agree. The best tool for the job is the one I am most comfortable using. If microsoft makes me uncomfortable (they remind me of an abusive spouse in their actions), then even if their software has some fancy features that may help productivity, it is not the best tool for me to do my job. I don't even consider it as an option.

Another thought: when people complain about the state of Linux email clients, what is so good about the Windows alternatives? Office productivity suites, I get it. But email clients all suck. Mutt's mantra is so true, at least they're honest about sucking less.

I believe Linux is a 100% of the time platform because the choice (again, user choice) to run minimal terminal apps means like less than average 50% memory utilization for Thunderbird, which I love, with a web browser GUI and background full text indexing all damn day.

Outlook is just as crappy.

Don't write off Outlook without a second thought. It's big with loads of features, yes - but that's what's good about it.

If all you need to do is plain text email, sure, Mutt is fine. If you deal with a large amount of email, calendar appointments, tasks, contacts, etc, in a professional role, nothing beats Outlook.

There's a reason it's so popular.

unfortunatly Outlook 2013-2016 is pretty akward (resources) but I like Outlook 2010. Still I don't use it

I've never had an installation of Outlook that stayed stable and usable for more than about six months. It doesn't help that you have other parts of Office that stick their grubby fingers in your address books, calendars, and mail files and do their best to scramble things up.

I don't know what you're doing with it, but I've used Outlook for 2 multinational companies for 4+ years each, had several GB of mails for each (probably hundreds of thousands of email per account, most of them automated), and the worst parts of it were a bug with password resets (it keps asking for my password for about a week after quarterly resets) and the slowness of filter sync with Exchange.

As you can see, those were nuisances. Otherwise, it was pretty much rock solid.

Several versions, ran them under XP and Windows 7.

Lync/Skype for Business tends to play havoc with Outlook data files, I've found.

I get around 400 mails per day and over several years Outlook has not failed. Exchange environment.

The issue is, that Outlook sends crappy emails in the default setting. And since nobody changes those everybody is sending crappy emails. Also, we are talking about email. Maybe it is good for an address book, calendar, tasks, etc. pp. But as an email client it is awful, also because it is as complicated as mutt but actually less powerful.

My biggest complained about Outlook is actually a bug in their HTML engine. From Outlook 14:

> font-family:"Calibri","sans-serif";

What's the issue here? Simple, if Calibri isn't there, my browser looks for a font called "sans-serif" and doesn't use the default sans-serif font, the result the email is presented in a serif font. Correctly, it should look like this:

> font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;

I know this is nit-picking but for me it is annoying.

This is baffling. How could something as important as font rendering not be fixed?

Probably because everyone at MS uses MS products and they all have calibri installed...

Equally baffling is that quotes, which should simply demarcate regions within which special characters are ignored, have special semantic meaning to a CSS parser.

That narrative, however, isn't one for which we can blame Microsoft.

I don't agree, one is a string, the other is a symbol: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbol_(programming)

They don't have special semantic meaning to CSS the spec. Quotes are needed[0] only if the <family-name> value has whitespace in it.

0: https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/CSS/font-family#Va...

They have special meaning since "generic family names (...) must not be quoted".

Going from one job using a "startup-y" Gmail company account to another job using a "corporate-y" Outlook solution was a tough transition. Outlook has loads of features, but the UI simplicity (relatively speaking) of Gmail makes most of them unnecessary in the first place, plus it was a little less frustrating to use. Meanwhile, Gmail still had calendar events, reminders, google drive integration, etc. in ways that seem on-par with features in Outlook.

Disclaimer: I'm not a PM/executive who has to juggle meetings and communication all day, so maybe I just ask less of email.

Edit: clarity

Well, that's your opinion. Support that garbage like I do at work, and your opinion will change.

Again, popular does not mean good to me. That is the point. I have seen Outlook peg processors and waste disk IO with all those features.

I hate cloud services, but they keep such things minimal and some of us pray for mandates of no-fat client email, even to spite myself, because of Outlook and Thunderbird users.

> I hate cloud services, but they keep such things minimal

Have you tried Google's Inbox on an underpowered Linux box? It's horrendously slow, in my experience. Gmail is fine though. Some web based software is really good, but others can definitely be a CPU hog.

I use emacs with notmuch for my email. I have never found anything better, and yes I've used Outlook.

Searching with notmuch is blazing fast and works better than gmail search.

HTML email is handled by w3m. The new "eww" would probably work also but I haven't tried that yet.

It's possible to send HTML email by writing in org-mode markup, but I haven't done that either. If people can inflict their HTML email on me, they can deal with my plain-text replies.

I view Outlook as the Emacs of e-mail. But the unfortunate part of Outlook in my experience is that between jobs my Outlook configuration is completely non-portable by design it appears (I have to reconfigure each time I switched to another company).

Assuming you're an employee, this is a feature. Your old employer probably doesn't want you taking your email with you, and rightly so - and your new employer very likely doesn't want you bringing your old email with you, for exactly the same reason. So... there you go. What's the problem?

I suggest embracing this rather than worrying about it.

It is about the configuration of Outlook, not about the email if I understood that correctly.

Right - but why would you care? You get a PC, and it has Outlook, and it's set up to work with their system. Then you leave/they sack you. You get a new job. They give you a different PC. It has Outlook... and it's set up to work with their system. Rinse and repeat.

You miss the point. By config she means whether to display html mail as html, whether to display images from external sources, her language (for spell checking), her preferred set of fonts etc

OK - but if you've just changed job, the overhead of this will get lost in the noise. And this even assumes that these decisions are rightly to be left up to the employee, and not decided by the company. (E.g., HTML email display and/or displaying remote images may be a security risk, and so it could be banned entirely. It's not unusual to mandate fonts and signature for public-facing correspondence. And so on.)

But there are a lot of things which are extremely annoying in the default settings. For example in localised versions of Outlook, replys don't get "RE" in the subject line but, e.g. in the German version "AW". Also other behaviours which makes using Outlook really painfull. (Which I can't remember because I didn't use for a while now)

Yeah, I usualy turn displaying remote images off too.

Also, are there really companies who forces a certain font for emails? That is risky since you can't know if the other side supports that font.

For signature, there are even legal requirements which information needs to be provided.

My Outlook deals with AW and RE transparently, to the point where I don't even see any of them when in conversation mode. What's the specific problem you have with it?

Maybe she doesn't want her non outlook using friends to have to wonder what AW means?

On my first day in a new job I want to get through set up as soon as possible so that I can actually start to get stuck into some deliverables. I don't want to spend 30 minutes faffing with my email client.

The real Emacs of email system is properly Lotus Notes.

Or Emacs, for that matter.

Evolution used to be awesome and fast.

Nowadays it carries a lot of dependencies.

Serious question, what's wrong with Thunderbird? I've used Eudora, Netscape Messenger, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook up to 2016, Mail, Gmail, Squirrel etc etc. I use Outlook where I _have_ to, but TB is a constant across all my systems. IMAP support is great, search is fast, I rely on Google to filter spam. Thunderbird is one of those apps that doesn't need extra work or new features, it just works.

It's slow, it takes a crapload of resources and it has a bunch of bugs I've never been able to fix. If I click the unified inbox on my laptop, I get a blank view, even though there are emails in the sub-mailboxes. This has been going on for years, and I haven't been able to fix it (short of deleting my profile).

For me, modern virtualization has gotten so good that it's my preferred solution. kvm, libvirt, virtio, and PCI passthrough et al have opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Currently still requires fairly specific hardware and kind of a pain to figure out how to make it work, but it's already very impressive.

This is still really cool though.

Thing is you can't run Windows natively that way, it has to be a guest operating system. Then you need multiple videocards to pass through, and the guest operating systems require custom drivers at that.

My preferred setup would be Windows native, with macOS (ha) and Linux guests running with GPU acceleration—preferably in a manner that doesn't necessitate multiple videocards.

Too bad Apple is hellbent on locking macOS to Apple hardware. I'd totally license it otherwise.

>you can't run Windows natively that way, it has to be a guest operating system. Then you need multiple videocards to pass through, and the guest operating systems require custom drivers at that.

I, for one, think that sounds excellent. For a workstation, I would much rather host everything on a simple Linux distro with focus on security and privacy, and keep Windows in VMs where I can manage it a little better. And the Windows Subsystem for Linux will run in there perfectly if I need it.

Also, multiple video cards are only necessary if your guest needs that GPU power. Considering that having 2 video cards these days is surprisingly common (Intel on-board + separate video card), I'm wondering about the feasibility of easily switching between shared video (eg. when your laptop is on battery) and separate GPU passthru (eg. when you're plugged into your epic 16-monitor setup).

I'd prefer Windows as a guest OS too, but not at the expense of losing native performance.

Granted, Windows makes for a fairly terrible host operating system when you have to reboot it frequently on account of updates.

Yeah, I'm writing this without having first-hand experience regarding the current performance of Windows 10 as a guest. Apparently VMWare has good support for it, but searching for reviews on the actual performance only turns up a bunch of confusing, outdated rants. I'll just have to try it myself when I get the chance.

For gaming performance on kvm most people say about 95% of native performance when passing the GPU.

Yeah unfortunately there seems to be some issues when it comes to deinitializing and reassigning GPUs without hardware reboot. It seems like the type of thing that will get better as time goes on though. Assuming of course there's incentive for GPU manufacturers.

My setup would be native Linux and on top Windows/macos.

Using Proxmox as your host os you get a ZFS root filesystem with ZFS compression, SSD cache, Snapshots. Then you install Windows and maybe try to figure out if you can run MacOS in KVM.

The idea would be to leave the host system rather clean, and maybe even add a Linux guest in Proxmox.

Then in the host you just install a minimal xserver (maybe with i3) and log into your virtual machines via Spice/VNC/RDP. (Maybe add Zerotier on all guest for easy networking)

This way you can get all the benefits of ZFS and use the Proxmox backup functionality and do not have to reboot your system.

At least this is my plan for a new workstation setup. :) Instead of Proxmox, OmniOS (Illumos) together with pkgsrc (for xserver) might be an option.

(Sorry for typos. On mobile )

Do you have any more info on this?

I have to do some work on a Linux VM, but also need Windows for Office and a few other apps.

But the Fedora VM is much slower than the native OS, even with a good SSD and plenty of Ram. I could care less about games / GPU, but the CPU / disk IO is just much slower. I use VMWare Workstation, so maybe that's my problem.

I haven't had any problems with macOS stability lately. Has anyone else experienced what the author describes?

Around me Windows 10 has crashed more than macOS. but Windows 10 is really stable too.

I had random freezes in 10.11.4, but it was fixed in 10.11.5.

My mac often (once in about two weeks) freezes after trying to unlock. It just shows the load indicator. Need a hard kill to 'fix'. Don't know how to fix it. Note: I never shut my iMac down.

I've never had Win10 crash on me, nor have I macOS. On the application front though, I have found the Win programs I use crash or hang far less often than their macOS counterparts.

From the post:

but I do daily development on an Arch linux desktop sitting next to my MacBook Pro

I have a similar set up, both at home and at work, where I use a MacBook for Office, Omni{Focus,Graffle}, etc., but SSH into a Linux machine for serious development word. My reasons are two-fold. First of all, many OS X's command-line tools are behind the times and buggy. For instance, grep segfaults on trivial usages such as[1]:

    % echo i860  | grep --color -e i860 -e i86

Or returns incorrect results for even trivial expressions:

    % echo "1234 1234 1234" | egrep -o "^...."
    1234
     123
    4 12

Since I use UNIX command-line tools such as grep daily, I cannot have them fail (yes, I know, get GNU grep from Homebrew). Secondly, Mac hardware is very weak these days, even the Mac Pro is years behind. At the same time, you can get a similarly spec'ed machine on eBay for a couple of hundred of Euros. Plug a card to use CUDA, etc.

[1] http://blog.loadzero.com/blog/tracking-down-a-segfault-in-gr...

I don't have many real stability problems (kernel panics), but there are oddball bugs everywhere. E.g. Mail.app likes to redownload all my e-mail when I quit and open it.

author here - would love advice or tips on how to get dbus running so settings work well and other WMs work like Gnome.

Nice work. A few days ago I tried xfce4 with little luck, although xfce4-terminal + Xming get me pretty much everything I need. Windows ConHost.exe is a pretty poor terminal (specifically in terms of fonts and colors) but hopefully things will get better in time.

Regarding Dbus, I haven't had time to try this out yet: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4ea4w4/fyi_you_c...

hey thanks! I'll give this a shot, might make GNOME start up now.

As someone who has only briefly worked on Windows since the early 2000s, when I moved to Debian and then Ubuntu (and, then, using Cygwin to make things comfy), what is the compelling reason to adopt it?

Both Mac ans Linux offer very good developer experiences, with hosts of cross-platform tooling and environments that are closer to the server that will most likely run your application. I understand that Windows is essential when you write code that runs on Windows, but, apart from that, what are the advantages over macOS and a more traditional Unix-like environment?

Having used Windows extensively up until Vista (at which point I switched to Ubuntu), none. It's a more solid OS than Ubuntu (in that the UI doesn't sometimes have weird corruption bugs and is more responsive), but development is a nightmare.

Development is split into two camps, Windows-centric and UNIX-centric. Trying to develop one on the other is a disaster, so let that inform your choice. As a consumer OS, I have a much easier time installing Ubuntu on my parents'/friends' computers, as it's easier to get used to and doesn't have as many viruses.

I work on Windows. I can say that Thunderbird is far better that Outlook.

I have the opposite experience.

I agree, I've tried both and whilst neither are the fastest programs in the universe, Outlook 2016 has been better than Thunderbird from a performance standpoint. Thunderbird was so slow, I went back to Outlook.

There’s something about “translating system calls” that just makes me wary. It’s the kind of thing that could be proven to work for some common cases while failing in mysterious ways for others (not to mention being hard to debug).

Generally, there is a gap between what’s documented, what was thought to be true, and what is. At some point they will produce behavior that just doesn’t match what compiled code expects. For how many libraries, applications and combinations thereof will they deal with this?

And then there’s maintenance. This is a scary kind of layer to be responsible for; future Microsoft employees will have a hard time doing anything to this layer without risking new misbehavior so we have to trust that they either know what they’re doing or that they won’t touch anything.

I’m not saying that they weren’t clever to try this, or that there isn’t a way to pull this off successfully. I do think the odds are against them though. Or maybe, I just missed something about their implementation that makes this a lot less risky than it seems to be.

This isn't meant for productions, so a rare failure scenario shouldn't be catastrophic. Also Windows is inherently designed for such usecase, so maybe it has some reliable process for same.

Bryan Cantrill has a wonderful talk about exactly this in Illumos that I recommend at every opportunity https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hgN8pCMLI2U

Err, I meant https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TrfD3pC0VSs

How did the author miss out on using Cmder? It's better the ConEmu and probably the best terminal for Windows today.

Well, actually, Cmder is just a distribution around ConEmu. But I agree that it is quite acceptable.

author here - I searched and asked Windows using friends for recommendations.

> far too many things don’t work in macOS that are required for modern Internet software development

It's been a few years since I've actively used Mac OS, but is this really true? Ancedotally it seems like a lot of Web developers still use Mac OS as their OS of choice.

Nope, it's not true, at least for what I do.

You can look around [1] to see what kinds of things are just a "brew install" away on macOS... an awful lot of unix-y goodness.

I have 61 things installed -- ansible, git, nvm, postgresql, the_silver_searcher, tmux...

Since I develop on Linux for work, I don't know offhand of anything that Linux has that I can't get for macOS (not saying there are no such things, but I can't think of any).

[1] http://braumeister.org

This is tangential but my primary interest is being able to natively ssh into a Windows machine.

I know options exist today but I would love to see native support and it's oh-so-close.

Would be great to be able to finally script things to copy stuff over to the Windows box such as LE certs.

It's getting there: https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH

The gnu binaries used in this article are the ones included in maboXterm and compiled for windows, nothing related to an abstraction layer between nt kernel and Ubuntu gnu bin builds as mentioned I suppose. Working great anyway.

At this point why not just have a Linux system on your local network and connect with VNC from Windows...? You can have a Linux environment to hack around in while getting to use all the "nice" Windows GUI apps.

VNC has never been near as fast as even Remote Desktop, and even that is pretty slow for anything more than basic administration. Maybe in a local lan it would work better, but I doubt considering it's slow even in a VM on a powerful workstation.

It's getting to the point where I'm thinking about using a Windows laptop and Linux desktop with a KVM switch, but then I'm not portable.

It's disappointing that i3 is constrained to one window. The ability to replace Microsoft's window manager with i3 and allow linux and windows apps to be nicely tiled together would be amazing.

X was never designed to work like that. I personally run Visual Studio Code (with a patched X lib to allow Electron to start without graphics acceleration) with the "local window manager" (i.e., Windows itself). Works great.

Okay I'll bite. Why are you running Linux vs∆ code in widnLaASaAAqaa@@@@£

(Sorry, I put my phone in my pocket and this apparently happened. Wish I could delete it, didn't even know it sent, not a fan of my tone, apologies.)

Because I want full integration with a Git CLI that uses the exact same plugins as I use in Linux. Git on Windows is a pain for me.

Now, it ain't tiling, but I once worked (not as the first guy, but took it over as a major project and the hell out of it) was one of the ports of Opebox-ish Windows managers (to be more accurate, really an Explorer replacement shell, not a Windows manager traditionally) to Windows XP to build very stripped down Windows kiosk machines with minimal UI and a lot of control, custom UI, and cool fun features.

http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php

God I miss this. It was way ahead of the time and I guess Microsoft got their UI act together, then lost it, and are trying to find it again.

As for tiling, the best you can do are these:

https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n

https://github.com/ZaneA/HackWM

The latter is by a budding Chicken Lisp; I found him and love a lot of what he does; not sure he is ready for prime-time.

Hey, HackWM author here, this might be a better link https://github.com/ZaneA/HashTWM :) Unfortunately it has been largely unmaintained by myself since the initial release, I occasionally pick it up for a day or two but I'm not using it actively anymore. Just happy that some people find a use for it!

Yeah I clearly saw it a long time ago.

As I said, stumbled upon your blog because of Chicken Lisp musings (dare I say chicken scratch)? Thanks for that, all very interesting.

When it comes to finding a decent terminal emulator for Windows: mintty is the terminal you get when you use Git Bash, right? Because in my experience it's better than ConEmu.

ConEmu makes a staggering number of off-by-one errors in putting characters on the screen when I ssh into a Linux machine and use tmux. Vertical separators end up jagged, things that are supposed to fit the width of the screen end up wrapping, my Vim status line says "IISUAL", and so on. But mintty gets tmux right.

i've noticed a lot of these same off-by-one errors in MobaXTerm, too.

I think the real trouble with Windows for many folks is not that we can't figure out how to convert linux kernel calls into NT kernel calls, but that we don't want to convert our linux kernel calls into NT kernel calls PLUS "telemetry" data sent to Redmond. Windows is explicitly non-free (in so many ways), and that's cool and all, but no thanks.

This is awesome stuff. If you fullscreened MobaXTerm and autohide the Windows taskbar then what are the problematic points vs running a linux/i3wm natively? Do certain keystrokes get intercepts by Windows regardless? You mention Firefox have you tried Chrome/Chromium in i3wm? Can you play a HTML5 youtube video?

Thanks for writing it up, interesting stuff! - An i3 user

I hadn't found any keystrokes that were masked by windows, but most of what I do is ALT+something, I use ALT as my meta key in i3.

Am ... am I falling in love with Windows?

Well, time to see if I can get StumpWM running on it, for more hipster cred. (Partly joking, partly serious.)

> Am ... am I falling in love with Windows?

Spend some time with it again. You'll learn to hate it just as much as you did the first time around. For me, it's because of a single factor: BSOD caused by shitty geforce drivers. I used to think the linux geforce drivers were shit because it was a neglected platform. Now I know the truth: windows geforce drivers are full of pain and tears as well. I don't see any of the same issues on OS X.

Except that graphics drivers on OSX are slower than their Windows or Linux counterparts.

There is a lot of problem with Windows, GPU driver quality is not one of them.

The specific case of terrible video drivers might have been slightly better these days (because part of it has been moved to user mode, so crashing it just means your screen flashes and weird for a second).

Spending more time with it can let you find _different_ things to hate, of course. In general, all software suck.

> because part of it has been moved to user mode, so crashing it just means your screen flashes and weird for a second

You mean on Linux, right? Because in Windows 10, going full screen in a youtube video on an external screen routinely causes my entire system to crash (BSOD, error dump, restart).

I'm on windows 10 with a shitty "optimus" enabled laptop. The NVidia drivers routinely crash (typically when viewing a heavy webGL enabled page) and windows 10 just flashes at me and throws up a notification saying my graphics drivers have crashed but it helpfully restarted the drivers for me.

Perhaps you have a different issue? Maybe a hardware failure? Windows 10 should not be BSODing for a graphics driver failure

Are video drivers just guaranteed to be shitty in all cases?

I can't use Ubuntu 16.04 because Radeon drivers cause constant, infuriating tearing on my screen and the computer hangs on startup every other time I boot up. fglrx isn't much better, but it's at least stable.

You know, I don't know. Nvidia and Radeon GPUs are complicated pieces of hardware and, from what I understand, the drivers have more than a decade of development cruft built up. Contrast that with Intel graphics chips. I don't know if Intel's graphics chips are simpler or if their software devs are that much better or if they just haven't been around long enough to develop as much cruft. What I do know is I've never had an issue with an Intel video driver. But, an Intel GPU isn't going to let me play Doom 2016 on the highest settings either.

dyed in the wool...

fixed, thanks.

I wonder if someone will get xmonad working?

A lot of alarms ringing in my mind, as a long time Linux and i3 user and developer.

1. You ran i3 as a proof of concept now but going long term you ll face dozens of issues when you want to make it useful. The same is true for everything you ll install through Ubuntu for Windows..

2. Windows mail clients are totally wrong, slow and they are not only hazardous to people using but also to receivers of emails. Outlook users don't know how to put subjects, respond and distort the format and conversation all the time. (Long time outlook user here)

3. Desktop productivity tools are long history. No reason why someone would use ms office anymore.

4. Windows for Ubuntu is doomed to be a second class citizen, and if it by chance becomes a first class citizen then why would someone need the Windows overhead and complexity? (How can I apt-get remove windows)

I congratulate MS devs taking HN seriously recently but windows in 2016 is obsolete..

oh dear. I'd have to suggest here that you're projecting your own use cases and assuming that they have a universality that they really don't.

Desktop productivity tools are history... no, no they're not, MS office sells millions of copies for a reason.

Windows mail clients are wrong. They're not the same as unix mail clients for sure, but who gets to dictate whether that's right or wrong? Personally I think all mail clients that allow HTML are wrong, but I understand that I'm in a minority there.

I'd suggest that Windows has many advantages over linux on the desktop. The hardware support is better, there's a better range of desktop apps available for people who like desktop apps (including games of course).

Personally I'm looking forward to ubuntu on windows. there's a load of areas where I prefer working in a linux/unix like environment (e.g. anything command-line based where linux is far superior to Windows (although Windows is getting better in that regard)), and I hope that this will let me get the best of both worlds, whilst avoiding the overhead of running a VM.

> Desktop productivity tools are long history

You should take a walk in an administration building. IE6 and MS Office are still in use. "For security reasons".

> Windows mail clients are totally wrong

All mail clients are totally wrong. I hate how everything is a web app right now, and I'd love a desktop mail client that worked well. I run Thunderbird now, but it's a beast, and mutt/pine/etc are rather unwieldy, even for a heavy cli user like me.

Do you still need to be in the windows fast lane preview for access to bash on windows? I want to try this but im a bit hesitant to run the earliest of beta software on my only productivity machine...

Yes. It is coming with the big windows update on 2nd August.

I'm on the slow ring and recently received it. They have a blog here which details each of their releases on each of the release "rings": https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/tag/windows-insi...

There is a tiling window manager for windows using auto hot key, so entirely native and works on previous versions of Windows too. I seem to have forgotten the name but it worked well when I tried it.

There seems to be a whole bunch: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/2rn775/best_tiled_...

Gentoo called it eleven years ago. http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/

Incredible. My fancy new Lenovo has gotten no use because they've made it impossible to install another operating system in it. I look forward to giving this a go.

Who have, Lenovo?

I have an Lenovo Thinkpad x220 running Ubuntu that I needed to set the BIOS to Legacy.

Weird. T430s in UEFI mode (with Secure Boot) has no problem with Fedora.

Weird, I didn't have to do anything to get my X250 to play nice with Debian

I had a x220 and it worked fine with Ubuntu in EFI-only mode. Same for my current x230. Probably boots 1 or 2 seconds faster because of that. But I never managed to get it working by doing the partitioning work myself (which I prefer because I don't like having everything in a huge partition), you have to format the whole drive and let Ubuntu do its thing.

Yeah. Yoga 900 ISK2, some BIOS problem that makes the hard drive not show up. No way to fix it except with a BIOS update that hasn't materialized.

It is rather trivial for Microsoft to implement support for Linux.

Also, if Windows source code was freely available there would be support for Windows applications on Linux.

There is support for Windows applications on Linux, no source code needed: https://www.winehq.org/

Yes.

My point was that it is trivial for Microsoft to implement support for an open system, compared to implementing support for a closed system such as Windows.

There would be better support for running Windows applications under Linux if Windows was an open system.

Still, even if everything Windows-based was open-source, you'd still have to build out the shim layers in front like Wine does, unless you wanted to deal with the extreme tedium of converting all the Win32, DirectX, etc, etc, calls over.

I'm on Windows and I use Thunderbird. What's the alternative?

Anyone knows when WSL is expected to arrive on non-insider versons?

2nd august with windows 10 anniversary update

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Did anyone try to use xmonad?

Can WLS run Wine?

Can Wine run WSL's bash.exe?

Is it turtles all the way down?

More like an operating system tower of babel!

There isn't a "WSL's bash.exe". WSL run Ubuntu binaries.

Save your FUD, I've been using computers for 16 years and I've never had this problem. Malware/Ransomware hit only if you go around the dark corners in search of porn/free stuff without knowing what you're downloading. Even then the built in Windows defender catches it.

I love Arch too but people like you are so die hard in their toxicity that any collaboration asking about Windows related stuff is impossible.

Many people who get ransomwared are naive victims of phishing emails, some of which are fairly convincing. There are usually some red flags if you're paying attention, but it only takes one mistake.

Did you create this account just to promote Microsoft products?

It certainly looks like it... how weird.

> Malware/Ransomware hit only if you go around the dark corners in search of porn/free stuff without knowing what you're downloading.

As a Windows user myself even I know that's simply not true. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10]

[1] http://www.neowin.net/news/crypto-ransomware-hits-major-webs...

[2] http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/04/adobe-flash-update...

[3] http://arstechnica.co.uk/security/2016/04/maisto-toymaker-we...

[4] https://labs.bromium.com/2014/02/21/the-wild-wild-web-youtub...

[5] http://www.neowin.net/news/nhs-website-sent-users-to-malware...

[6] http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/01/malware-attacks-thou...

[7] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/04/exclusive-ongoing-ma...

[8] http://www.pcworld.com/article/227352/attackers_use_google_i...

[9] https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/10/05/bing-image-black...

[10] https://medium.com/@networksecurity/oleoutlook-bypass-almost...

That's actually FUD in itself. I have known several people pick up infections from SourceForge which lets face it is not exactly a dark corner of the internet.

We've banned this account for serial trolling. Please stop making accounts to break the HN guidelines with.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12024411 and marked it off-topic.

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