Ask HN: Is anyone actually using Windows Subsystem for Linux? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is anyone actually using Windows Subsystem for Linux?

3 pointstarr113 comments

Trying to understand if this is actually a usable solution, and what scenarios? My main scenarios are nodejs / react / webpack and Rails / Postgres.

I have a 2014 MBP and thinking of upgrading to a windows laptop (since 2016 MBP dropped the escape key), but being able to do rails development easily is a requirement. I used to use an Ubuntu VM with Virtual Box and VIM / SSH on a previous windows box, but I find that clunky compared to Visual Studio Code in my MBP.

So far, both Rails and Webpack have broken in subtly weird ways every time I've tried. I was able to get my rails app working by installing Postgres and Elasticsearch on windows, and connecting. But it was slow and occasionally had weird issues.

Would love to know what others are doing here.

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Not mature yet.

- You actually need a workaround to listen to an address in node - os.networkInterfaces() returns an error: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37497914/node-http-server...

- You cannot run Docker (you can run it on Windows and use the docker client from the subsystem though)

- You cannot use Tensorflow with a GPU (many people keep their Windows install to use the GPU drivers)

- You need workarounds to use MongoDB: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38798593/windows-10-linux...

- There are a lot of issues: https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues

If you're really using your machine for work, you want a stable system, not a non-reproducible mess of workarounds.

I use it for Ruby at this point. Python and Node install and play well enough on Windows that I generally use them directly in Windows. Ruby on the other hand I primarily use for GitHub Pages/Jekyll work, and it is much easier to install and work with from the Bash on Ubuntu on Windows shell than directly in Windows.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is a much nicer alternative to a full VM and working directly from a folder from an NTFS drive is nearly seamless working with the same files in VS Code (in Bash cd to a /mnt/c/users/... or /mnt/d/repos/... folder), with the exception that watch support (such as jekyll serve --watch) isn't great but is improving.

(A welcome surprise to me is how fast my jekyll builds have been in this configuration, especially comparing to the native Windows installs I used to try to use.)

Not really what you are after but the first thing I do with a windows machine is to install cygwin to make it usable. It sports a nice terminal and then you can ssh from it.

Also I've developed a win32 program on windows and since I'm used to the UNIX way of doing things.

So why not. I wouldn't use it for a server if I've needed node.js I'd spin up an additional VPS.

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