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Comment by freestockoption | Hacker News Reader

I have a Mac at work. When I decided my personal Mac needed replacement, I decided to take a serious look at Windows. Ended up choosing Windows because I couldn't justify buying older generation hardware (at Apple prices). I made sure to buy locally so I could return it if I hated it.

I am impressed with Ubuntu on Windows. Some bugs, but overall I can see this working for me. Since I use Ubuntu in production, the Linux environment is closer to production than a Mac shell.

I have felt lately, though, that the Mac vs Windows vs Linux debate is getting less relevant with most things being in a web browser. The diminishing requirement for Windows around 5 years ago caused me to switch to Mac. And now back to Windows.

I can see myself buying a Mac again, though. Maybe even a Chromebook.

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Why not just use Ubuntu full time? I'm probably going to build a Linux desktop for my next home computer (Mac user for 10 years).

What is "Ubuntu on Windows"?

Are you using that new fangled Linux literally in Windows thing I heard of? How's that going?

He's probably referring to "Windows Subsystem for Linux" which is a compatibility layer for Windows 10 that allows you to run unmodified Ubuntu binaries. It is also called "Ubuntu on Windows" since the userspace part is based on Ubuntu [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux

[2] https://insights.ubuntu.com/2016/03/30/ubuntu-on-windows-the...

I use Linux Mint for most of my dev work, but thought I'd give the new Ubuntu subsystem on Windows a try yesterday side it came with the Windows 10 Anniversary update. It seems to work as advertised.

My only complaint thus far is that all the packages that you can get via apt-get seem really ancient. I had to go through hell building a lot of stuff myself to get anything remotely recent running.

After much pain, I finally got our product built and running, ran it then tried to connect to it and it core dumped. That's probably my fault I guess. I haven't dug into that yet, but there must be some platform difference I'm not aware of.

Anyway, it seems pretty stable in general although a little quirky. Having direct access between the Windows file system and the *nix side is pretty cool too.

I don't think I'll be switching to it full time but it is certainly interesting.

> all the packages that you can get via apt-get seem really ancient

I think this is an Ubuntu issue, even on stand-alone Ubuntu. I assume the subsystem lets you add PPAs like in vanilla Ubuntu?

It does, but for some reason it didn't seem to work. I was totally unable to install later versions of GCC, CMake or Node. Had to manually install from releases or build from source.

Maybe I screwed something up, but I really did try.

Actually I take that back. I did get GCC-6 installed via PPA. Not sure why the other ones had issues.

WSL Uses Ubuntu 14.04 with no plans to upgrade it soon. Some people have had success upgrading to 16.04, but I haven't run into enough recency issues to justify trying.

It still has a lot of rough edges, but they seem to be actively working on it, so I'm hopeful this leads to a virtuous cycle of more developers using it and more investment from Microsoft.

"Since I use Ubuntu in production, the Linux environment is closer to production than a Mac shell."

Docker

How do you run Ubuntu binaries on Mac by using Docker? As far as I know it's not a virtualization layer.

Docker on Mac runs in a VM, either by one of the traditional virtualisation solutions (Virtualbox, VMWare, Parallels) or via xhyve. The VM acts as a Docker server, so the client on the mac side just passes options to the Docker VM. See: https://docs.docker.com/engine/installation/mac/

Docker now also has a native Mac client that doesn't require docker-machine

Thanks both! I believe the native Mac announcement is what put me off track.

Which gets pretty bad the moment you need to use shared volumes.

What does "native" mean in this context? The Mac client still runs containers in a Linux VM.

Oooh yes, I love Docker. Right now, I do most of my dev work outside Docker (because I don't want to rebuild the image every time I change a file..unless there's a way?). I do use Docker at intervals to make sure everything still works.

The shell being closer to production was more for familiarity sake. For me, I used to think I was going to be Mac for a long time because "Mac has a bash shell." Windows has a bash shell. In practice, I mostly use the ssh command! :)

Oh and the console window in Windows is now resizable! That drove me crazy.

> because I don't want to rebuild the image every time I change a file..unless there's a way?

I believe the current strategy is to have a container that contains your full build environment, push your source files in by mounting a folder, and then use file watchers to automatically rebuild/rerun.

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