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Comment by sdegutis | Hacker News Reader

When will WSL land? I'm teaching my children how to program and it would be handy to have more Linux tooling available.

You can get the beta Windows Subsystem for Linux right now by enabling Developer Mode on your computer and downloading it.

Right but I hear it's super crashy, I'm waiting until it's stable for my kids to use.

I have installed the usual stuff for python web development (lxml, pillow, django) without any crash. It's quite stable for python development

haven't managed to crash it yet. it seems stable for daily use.

I have nothing but bad things to say about bash on Windows. The windows insider program forces what seems like complete reinstalls on a regular basis, causing serious interruptions and long wait times to get back to ground zero.

I found opting into this program to be confusing, turning on the subsystem is classic windows obscurity, traversing multiple nested uis to check one single box. When you turn on the insider program it literally does nothing until you reboot it a couple of times. It gave zero indication that it was actually going to update my system and then bam, it starts reinstalling your os.

The subsystem itself has serious problems like being able to get a list of network interfaces which makes running a node server impossible.

https://wpdev.uservoice.com/forums/266908-command-prompt-con...

I can see why it hasn't made mainstream yet, to me it seems no where close to ready. Running a VM is still the way to go it seems on windows.

Most of those concerns are because you opted into the Insider program. WSL was included in the Anniversary Update, so you don't have to be an Insider to get it, now, and the instructions are straightforward (no OS updates or lengthy reboot cycles involved.)

Thanks, just installed it, and it's working! Well, at least vim and less and ls are. But yeah, way cool stuff :) Thanks for the tip!

If WSL is able to deliver a real, honest-to-goodness linux experience, it will get me out of OSX and back onto windows. OSX becomes less compelling every release and the only thing that keeps me here is the *nix development environment.

Same. Especially since El Capitan I've had nothing but trouble with SIP (System Integrity Protection), both in working with OpenVPN (due to unsigned interface .kexts) and even in simple stuff such as trying to pip install something that overwrites an already existing library outside of a virtual environment.

I'm root, it's my system, I know what I'm doing, Apple! If I have to install Ubuntu on VirtualBox to get a controllable UNIX system back I might aswell do it on my ThinkPad with Windows 10, which as a bonus has a decent keyboard, upgradeable RAM and hot-swappable battery.

I would have thought it was still fairly straightforward to put in a bootmenu to select from OSX, Windows, or Linux upon bootup. Especially if you prepared the disk in advance.

I only worked on one Mac, and I couldn't get as much done without my DOS/Windows & Linux tools, but this was a good solution for me.

I'm root, it's my system, I know what I'm doing, Apple!

Why can't you just disable SIP? Is that too much to ask? Seems easier than switching to Windows.

The beta just landed this week, August 2nd 2016, with the Windows 10 Anniversary update. Some older computers aren't offered the update immediately, but you can download the update or a full ISO for a clean install which contains the update.

Installation went off without a hitch and the essentials all work perfectly (things like sed, grep, awk, wget, curl, etc.) as did installing some basic packages like git and sqlite with apt-get.

It hasn't crashed on me yet, but I've only used it very lightly to test those few things that I mentioned. I'm going to withhold judgement until it's out of beta but so far it looks stellar.

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