Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice
github.com
github.com
I kid; I kid. Looks fun.
I installed it for my family members ( not at all knowledgeable people in terms of computers etc ) and they all have gotten along with it very well.
But yes, elementary does the "good defaults are impirtant" very well.
Personally I use i3 90% of the time and use many KDE applications. KDiff, Dolphin and Gwenview are my go to for me, well that and ranger the console file manager.
I'm glad to see this work getting done.. and I hope in means native docker for linux and windows containers native... though, I also have no interest in running windows containers either... it would be nice to see the option. Not sure if this effort will bear fruit to such extent in Azure, but I can't help but think if it reaches compatible enough for docker linux containers, that Azure will get a very compelling docker story.
Are you by any chance a fan of minimalism?
Windows desktop by default comes with almost no features at all – be it about window management, file management, network connectivity (shares) or anything else. Personally I find using a plain Windows desktop an exercise in frustration for that.
And yes, I'm a bit of a fan of minimalism. I find that managing the apps I use the most, and navigating between open app instances to be easier in windows than anything else... the windows taskbar + start are great, though I prefer the win7 start over win10's, and didn't like win8's at all *(used classic shell).
I don't like the "rest" of windows as much as mac, but the base desktop is imho great... if windows integrated a common/shared menu like mac and unity, it'd be about the only thing I'd like to see added/changed.
I'd also love to see something closer to iterm2 ported to windows and linux... most of the alternatives I've used aren't as good imho. I use conemu in windows, and haven't found a console I really like in linux yet.
Unfortunately for projects related to WSL, which ultimately challenge some of the 'defaults' people expect, there is a tension between the name that is accurate and one that people will understand. For example, people are so tied to the notion that Ubuntu is a Linux distribution that calling it anything else would be confusing, despite the reality that Ubuntu is an operating system that just happens to have Linux as a kernel most of the time.
But Virtualbox seamless is a nice middle ground between the two OS and I don't have to worry about things that haven't been implemented in WSL.
This situation is rapidly changing too with ATI and intels OSS GPU drivers.
Intel drivers are Ok though.
http://phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Hwsurvey-Febr...
Even if we generously agree that it's correct, how much has steam grown? A 0.05% drop could still be more total users than the previous month.
When I open Steam it opens in the Store view in the main window, and the promotions pop-up also appears with sales and promo info. Great, except that 90% of the time the main store page and the pop-up are pushing Windows only games. I game on an iMac and occasionally on a Linux laptop. I have never bought a Windows only game. I send survey info to Valve.
If Linux (and Mac) gaming is to grow Valve need to try harder to get the games into my field of vision. It's silly that I click on the details button of the promo pop-up for a whole series of games only to scroll through the list and mutter "windoes only" to myself repeatedly. It simply is not content aimed at me at all, and they know who I am and the platform I am using.
99% of the time I'm working natively in Fedora when I'm working on code these days (unless I have to do .Net or other MS stuff, Windows goes in a VM for that) - but before I could make that switch I ran PyCharm/IntelliJ/etc. on Windows and just had a headless Fedora or CentOS VM that PyCharm ran my code in.
Were you not able to use it at all or just not with Gala WM?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/05/sourc...
https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/4n3e1s/the_state_...
[2] Not literal, putty has a setting to allow X just like ssh does.
In terms of performance once they are up and running, things are actually pretty decent. The biggest bottleneck appears to be I/O, which is kind of a problem for everything WSL. That part makes installing a gig+ desktop package frustrating as it takes way longer than it should.
The funny thing is the types of issues I get with WSL are also had by people using actual Linux. And there's no compositing.
Final answer: Full Linux DEs run as well on Windows today as they ran on Linux in 2007.
Issue here: https://github.com/NathanCastle/BootShellCredentialProvider/...
Likewise I prefer to structure cyclomatic complexity like this by doing something like
if not <condition 1>
return
else if not <condition 2>
return
<logic>
if <condition1>
if <condition2>
if <condition 3>
...This coding style is standard practice for Win32 API development.
HRESULT hr;
hr = DoFoo();
if (!SUCCESS(hr))
{
goto exit;
}
hr = DoBar();
if (!(SUCCESS(hr))
{
goto cleanup_foo;
}
hr = DoBar();
if (!(SUCCESS(hr))
{
goto cleanup_bar;
}
hr = DoBaz();
if (SUCCESS(hr))
{
CleanupBaz();
}
cleanup_bar:
CleaupBar();
cleanup_foo:
CleanupFoo();
exit:
return hr;Why not? You just initialize them all to NULL (or INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE etc, as appropriate). And then in your cleanup block, you check whether each was initialized, and clean it up. So long as you consistently do this in reverse order of their initialization, it works.
Do you have a public style guide that indicates this?
I worked at Microsoft, and while there are teams that (very unfortunately) went with this "diamond" style of error handling, code written in the CNF (Cutler Normal Form) style, such as the kernel code, use gotos and a central cleanup point at the end of the function, which is also the same style used by the Linux kernel: https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...
The "diamond" style hinders readability, especially when you have many levels of indentation). While it may be a practice adopted by many people, that is does not necessarily mean that it is good style. Even Steve McConnell's Code Complete, a book published by Microsoft Press, recommends early returns over deeply nested if statements for error handling: https://books.google.com/books?id=LpVCAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA764&ots...
Unfortunately, the Win32 API is full of technical debt, many of which cannot be repaid due to backwards compatibility reasons. Given it is likely most application code written against Win32 is in C++, the ideal approach would be to follow an object-oriented style and use destructors and RAII rather than cleanup functions, but that is not the world we live in.
The design of the Win32 API should not be used as guidelines for good coding practices or even API design. If you haven't already, I highly recommend reading "The Worst API Ever Made": https://mollyrocket.com/casey/stream_0029.html.
Do you need a license of Windows 10? (Read the article)
I think now it's hardware licensed in the case of a computer that was bought with Windows 10 on it. Then on re-installs you just get an iso of Windows 10, no key. So in this case if you didn't have Windows 10 to begin with...
<not found>
I disappoint! Why you no understand, this is the same ol' Microsoft?
(really I pressed Cmd-F)
Then it neatly integrates that into the standard Windows login.
In my mind, Microsoft developed WSL to try to keep developers: if you grew up on Linux but are now employed maintaining Windows servers, WSL gives you a way to get to your shell of choice and maybe you won't tell your boss to migrate from Azure to GCP or AWS.
There's a lot of stuff (notably a lot of hardware) that still doesn't work as advertised. Graphics cards being a big one. This fellow got graphical desktops running. Sounds like I/O is an issue, but it works.
I think it's the other way around. It's useful for people who develop for Linux, but their company issues Windows notebooks to employees because their internal IT infrastructure is AD+Exchange+etc.
IMO Cygwin did that well enough before WSL.
I "grew up on Linux" (starting back in the day when it came on a stack of floppies and nobody knew what it was) and I've always installed Cygwin on all Windows systems where I had admin privileges. It worked fairly well for command line stuff.
I look forward to the day when MingW and Cygwin can be replaced with the far nicer WSL alternative. It really is mostly seamless, and very fast.
Xming/VcXsrv seem to be working pretty well for me and I get to keep my windows desktop.
Whatever is the bleedin' point?