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Comment by bluejekyll | Hacker News Reader

Not really except on the broadest definition of Linux, where Linux is ~= Unix. Linux is a kernel. GNU is the Unix environment which they are getting to explore, more specifically with the Ubuntu OS mgmt tools.

Now what I don't get, and I'm not trolling here, is why would you want this? Isn't a VM a better option?

I assume people using Windows want to because of the UI, not the kernel. Whereas people generally choose Linux/Gnu/Unix for the kernel and OS environment, not the UI. With Ubuntu on Windows you get part of what people have wanted, and arguable the most important part people want.

Will people really want a Windows kernel, with Ubuntu/GNU OS tools, and Unity? I suspect most would still want the Windows UI.

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> Now what I don't get, and I'm not trolling here, is why would you want this? Isn't a VM a better option?

If this is indeed close to native performance, you wouldn't get anywhere close to that with a VM. I could be oblivious to some optimization techniques but Linux VM's on Windows have always performed drastically worse than native.

In my experience it's quite the opposite for some workloads: Linux FS and process spawning speeds are typically way faster than Windows one (with or without WSL), so much that even when in a VM with dozen of % of overhead, it is still faster than running on Windows for some workloads (just cold open a random man page under WSL, compared to a VM, and you will understand how much Windows lag behind Linux in some areas -- next you can try to build a big program: same result: Windows is really slow)

Now this does not render WSL useless; launch time for any random small tool is better with WSL than booting a complete VM, the memory is not partitioned, integration with the Windows Drive FS is slightly better, etc. But tons of use cases are better covered by a VM -- and with a huge margin.

> just cold open a random man page under WSL, compared to a VM, and you will understand how much Windows lag behind Linux in some areas -- next you can try to build a big program: same result: Windows is really slow)

Mate, the thing isn't even released yet and you're bashing it (excuse the pun) for taking too long to open up a man page? Give me a break.

After it's actually released and the performance gets better then it is of course going to trump running a whole VM and to suggest otherwise is just FUD, IMO.

RS1 is mostly frozen.

I think Win10 is quite good, and that WSL is quite good given its age, and will be extremely useful for a lot of things.

Still, if you try some workloads, WSL is way slower than a Linux VM. I don't expect it to change for the release. I don't even expect it to change for the 2 years to come. Sill, of course, I could be wrong.

But even so; I insist: WSL is actually quite impressive.

Unity is not particularly valuable, but X itself is.

Suppose you're developing a cross-platform GUI application (hypothetically, its name could be "Visual Studio Code" or something like that...), and your main development environment is Windows. Now you can build and test it on Linux as part of your regular workflow, without having to sync code etc.

Heck, you could even make it so that launching the project (from a Windows IDE) would do a Linux build, and launch the resulting binary.

>Isn't a VM a better option?

Please explain how it is better.

They've implemented the ABI/syscalls in the kernel allowing for direct execution of unmodified ELF64 binaries.

If you're going for a full Linux/GNU/Ubuntu/Unity stack, the only thing this cuts out is Linux, making his a Windows/GNU/Ubuntu/Unity stack. I know they've replicated the system calls, but they won't perform or always operate identically to a Linux kernel.

Which is why I asked about where people thought Unity on Windows would make sense. Because a VM will most likely generally give a better experience.

If you restrict yourself to bash and standard Unix tools, you'll end up with a similar experience to macOS and terminal (or my preference iTerm2)

> but they won't perform or always operate identically to a Linux kernel.

Why does the implementation have to be identical? How would that even be possible, unless they violate the GPL. I don't get your point.

> Because a VM will most likely generally give a better experience.

Again, please explain WHY it would give a better experience. What do you see lacking?

I am fairly certain this is a "syupid programmer trick" kind of thing. I don'tinagine anyone seruously using Unity within windows

I will ditch my Xubuntu VM the moment this seems viable and I find a way to turn off Win10's spyware.

VMware has basically abandoned Workstation, and the gfx performance is terrible. A native X server on Windows talking to the Linux subsystem seems like it might be decent.

And if this means somehow I can end up using more XMonad...

It is a good stress test of the implementation

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