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Comment by illuminati1911 | Hacker News Reader

illuminati1911

"Linux subsystem for Windows is really appealing." Have you actually tried it out?

I thought nobody anymore believed in this after the first versions came out and people actually had a chance to try it in action. There are endless amounts of bugs, unimplemented features, complications between 2 filesystems, permissions, applications etc.

When MS announced this I was pretty hopeful. Not that I would change my dev-computer from way superior macOS to Windows, but that when I'm at home gaming on my Windows PC and I get some cool idea, I could do some small development or create simple prototypes without changing from my desktop to my laptop. After trying it out for real I don't belive anymore this "linux" subsystem thingy is ever going to be anything more than niche PoC.

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I run a Windows 10 PC at work with the Linux Subsystem enabled. It has been a godsend. We are historically a C# shop, but have a new front-end web server in NodeJS. I continue to work on a PC because the NodeJS site consumes C# web services. I will sometimes work on the C# service and the node site at the same time and have the Node site point to my local builds of the C# services. Before, I used to use Vagrant, but it was extremely finicky and would break or corrupt randomly. While I know NodeJS runs on native windows, certain dependencies such as Couchbase have given me pain trying to get working. Now I do my NodeJS work running inside the Linux Subsystem. It's been extremely performant, and I always catch case sensitive bugs and other Linux issues that the Mac developers miss due to have a case insensitive file system.

Most binaries run really well. A lot of the stuff that didn't work in the first preview has since been fixed (like tmux, 24bit colors in bash etc.). Plus you can now call linux apps from windows with bash -c and call exes from bash which makes cross platform development amazing.

> Plus you can now call linux apps from windows with bash -c and call exes from bash which makes cross platform development amazing.

Unless you need to pass a directory path.

WSL is still in very early beta. It works amazingly well when you consider how early this project is.

Windows NT has done a good job supporting multiple APIs/subsystems in the past. Windows NT for example does a perfectly good job with the Win32 subsystem - software targeting Win32 for '95, '98, etc. still works on Windows 10, perfectly, despite being a totally different kernel.

What did you try and what bugs did you run into?

There's a reason you have to go out of your way to install it. It's nowhere near a final product.

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