Also, I'd be interested to see how this changes when we look at businesses. Windows has thrived historically by being the default for the enterprise, and I doubt that Mac has the same level of penetration there.
In my experience, it is far, far away from substituting the UNIX experience you get from macOS/Linux/*BSD
How is running a package install evil?
1) the terminal sucks.
2) WSL should be a service. Or at least we should be able to choose to have it always-on regardless of a terminal being open. We need to be able to have WSL start at boot.
(Now wondering if anyone has made some sort of WSL System Tray app)
For #1, this is a tremendous help: https://conemu.github.io It's the first thing I install on Windows. Comes with build-in profiles for bash/WSL, powershell, cmd, and Admin sessions of the latter two. Still not as good as iTerm or stock Terminal, but a massive improvement over cmd.exe.
#2: Totally agree, but I think things are moving this direction.
Sadly she didn't expand that much on her actual pain points but Bodil Stokke was not impressed a few weeks back: https://twitter.com/bodil/status/868925787038208001
> I guess if you're happy using plain bash and think Windows is already pretty performant, it must seem acceptable.
> But, seriously, even running lunix in a VM on a Windows host is a million times better than this. Back to my VirtualBox…
> I didn't even get as far as X this time, just trying to get my fish/tmux running in WSL on ConEmu had me feeling like I was being pranked.
[responding to a commenter]
> It runs just fine, but gl finding a terminal emulator that can keep up with my fish config... (well, tbf maybe Putty can, but I hate Putty.)
So the main limitation seems to be that the available terminal emulators are essentially unusable. Unixers live most of their life in or around term, not having a good one is a straight killer.
Given that I use it for both commit signing and SSH auth, the lack of GPG smartcard support would make WSL a pain to use at best compared to the Linux systems I typically use.
MacOS leaks unix through its pores: by separating cmd and ctrl is able to have emacs movements (^A, ^E, ^K, ^W, ^Y) in every Cocoa input field. Composability is also very possible from the get go thanks to tools like Automator and Services. Its terminal is top-tier†. This is the kind of little things that makes MacOS feel unix-y throughout. There are also lots of command line tools and documentation as man pages for purely darwin/MacOS stuff: it's not always perfect but the platform reaches out to plain being unix.
If you can make it so that running bash deeply feels like you're interacting with the currently running OS and that I can do everything from there using unix conventions (no calling an exe, no slash switch args, man pages... see this talk[0]) and not some segregated image below which there is an underlying OS, then you've won.
I mean, this needs to deeply feel native, embedded, not translating, layered. Hard to explain, but currently it feels like I'm talking through some Babelfish.
PS: crazy thought, but if MS can roll - no scratch that - if Windows can be its own "distro", kind of like FreeBSD base system, which changes with each major version and naturally updates, instead of (or in addition to) providing images of third party userlands that happen to run on a sort of segregated loopback mounted image, then you've won.
PPS: Oh, and ngrep doesn't work :D
PPPS: And please have a decent terminal from the get go.
† Damn, I love jumping back to those auto-marked prompt lines, being able to toggle mouse reporting, hiding/viewing the alternate screen, or showing the currently opened pwd or vim buffer in the titlebar through those escape sequences.
[0]: dotRB '13 - "It's a UNIX system, I know this!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qucn0QuXFhc&index=13&list=PL...
greg@gregcomp:~$ sbcl
WARNING:
Couldn't re-execute SBCL with proper personality flags (/proc isn't mounted? setuid?)
Trying to continue anyway.
This is SBCL 1.1.14.debian, an implementation of ANSI Common Lisp.
More information about SBCL is available at <http://www.sbcl.org/>.
SBCL is free software, provided as is, with absolutely no warranty.
It is mostly in the public domain; some portions are provided under
BSD-style licenses. See the CREDITS and COPYING files in the
distribution for more information.
Just curious. I'm a Mac user, so I haven't gotten the chance to try it yet. But I've got some coworkers on Windows, so I'm hopeful the subsystem will help relieve some frustration setting up developer environments.
There are some minor annoyances, but that is true with OSX too. In some ways, WSL is a more native unix experience, or at least a more native Linux experience.
I made the jump in November and never pick up my MBP anymore.
In what way is WSL a more native unix experience than a literal unix system?
> or at least a more native Linux experience.
Well that's rather obvious given OSX is not any more a linux system than Illumos or DragonflyBSD.
Pretty much no one hosts web applications on OSX, and you still run into the odd library that you have to fiddle with to get running right on OSX. Brew always felt a little hacky to me, or at least not fully part of the OSX ecosystem.
So, in that way, WSL has a leg up.
- Great price / performance
- Great Linux/BSD compatibility
- Improved ergonomics
- A station at which one can habituate him/herself to working :-)
- Greatly improved attention at meetings if in-person meetings are a thing (modulo note-taking, which I prefer to do sparsely and on paper anyway).
The main reasons seem to be your first three. If you haven't looked recently take a look at what you can get for your $$$ in the desktop world. You can build insane performance beasts for the cost of a good laptop. I mean ludicrously fast and huge-- things like stripe+mirror RAID SSDs right on the PCI bus, 16+ 3ghz+ cores, a GPU-based parallel supercomputer, and loads of RAM. It's tempting and would be doubly so if I were doing deep learning or anything similarly demanding.
The Galaxy S8 also has a dock that snaps Android into desktop mode. I've seen it and it's definitely a usable base desktop, but in the above scenario it works great as a full screen remote access terminal for your big beefy desktop. The gear (sans monitor) will fit into a backpack.
I feel like we're on the verge of something.
MacOS has telemetry too but it's much more limited and honestly I trust Apple's security more than Microsoft's. Mac telemetry can also be disabled relatively easily and as near as I can tell without much consequence outside iCloud stuff. On Windows as near as I can tell turning this stuff off is pulling teeth.
For those who follow the "but I have nothing to hide" line -- just replace privacy with security. Leaking that much data is also a security nightmare. My company is pretty high on the paranoia scale due to what we do, so we worry about that. So that adds a pragmatic professional reason along with the personal ones. No I do not want to spray fragments of secret keys, passwords, network I/O info, and confidential company info into the Microsoft cloud.
Of course I hear rumors out of Apple that they're experimenting with ARM Macs that are app store only. I could care less if they swap X64 for ARM as long as it's an ARM64 core that performs well enough, but if they also turn MacOS into iOS with a big screen I will be forced to switch. Note that these rumors are unsubstantiated and refer to test hardware. It's entirely possible that internal test hardware and test OS images are locked to an internal app store but that the final product will be different. They might do this just for trade secret security-- every app could have embedded stuff to try to catch leakers etc.
Given the fact that it's all a black box, you're taking on pure faith that it only collects what Microsoft says it collects (and that those assurances remain valid after every single update).
I'm not sure I trust Microsoft that much. And I mean that in the general sense of not giving ultimate trust to any amoral corporate entity with a poor history.
"Seatbelts are getting overplayed. I'm not going to bother anymore. Everyone's dying in car wrecks."
"Hey bro this STD thing is getting overplayed. Why do people keep telling me to wear a condom? This is getting old."
Security is always a concern-- any time you update software on any platform (Linux included) you're putting a certain amount of faith in developers that they're being honest and haven't borked things badly. But there is a difference between the risk of something breaking and the knowledge that the vendor is almost "grey hat" and wants to spy on you as much as they can get away with.
Now imagine if Facebook made an OS. That would be downright comical.
Perhaps you should explain why you want to switch away from Mac, since MacOS is probably that best platform that satisfies both of your criteria.
It sounds like there are some deeper reasons for switching.
Speaking for myself, I switched away from Macs to Windows a few years ago because I saw a very expensive "soldered-on-everything" future with the Macbook Pros (damn, I loved the expandability of the old Unibodies) and a very bad customer service experience with a product (early 2011 15" MBP) that should have been recalled before mine turned into a brick (they didn't publicly address the issue until months after I was forced to get a new laptop).
If I didn't have the well-known problem with 2011 MBPs, I probably would have sucked up the price premium and bought a new MBP in spite of how expensive it is to max out an MBP.
1) Difficult to get NVIDIA GPUs running on Mac (you can use an eGPU, but it sucks). 2) Expandability & performance. It sucks getting gouged for storage. 3) Cost. Macs have always been more expensive, but they seem to have got way more expensive.
1 is most of it. I do machine learning as part of my job, and it's frustrating not being able to run anything locally.
Dell XPS DE? https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2017/01/dells-latest-xps-13-...
Or Purism? https://puri.sm/products/