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Comment by blibble | Hacker News Reader

finally I can remove the win32 specific code from all the open source software I maintain

not sure that was what Microsoft was going for though...

My theory of what they are going for is to migrate server devs from Macbooks running BSD Terminal.app to cheaper Windows laptops running WSL terminals. Once you have migrated away from Mac, getting your server code to run on Windows natively becomes a lot easier and more attractive.

The question of why you would want to run your server code on Windows (aside from supporting legacy .NET apps) remains. Those same sysadmins can overwrite Windows with a BSD or Linux on those cheap laptops.

Because some of us prefer Windows to Linux on the desktop.

My point was that I don't see the sense in the strategy laid out by grandparent, because I don't see a compelling reason to run Windows on servers (I say this as a former Windows sysadmin (as recently as this year, not 2005)).

He said server devs, which I assume means people who develop stuff that runs on a (nix) server.

corysama, I agree. Windows was really lacking in any type of native unix connectivity. No native ssh, sftp support is a big one. You can get free third party programs for that, but nothing beats opening a terminal and having all of it, especially if that's what you are accustomed to.

I really love the new shell in Windows. I'm so glad they broke away from their old mindset.

Unless you're going to force your users to install WSL up front(which is a pretty poor first contact) I think you might be better served by keeping it around.

Why? The Linux sub-system is the best part of Windows. He's doing them a favor.

Extra dependencies are rarely ever doing anyone a favour. Yet another thing to keep up to date, occupy disk space, memory...

That's a pretty flimsy case when it's bundled with the OS and the performance and memory cost is in their court to improve.

It seems to still be a feature hidden under Developer Mode thus not appropriate as a dependency for end users.

Maybe OP is talking about tools installed on his/her own system only?

WSL is not always available for corp Windows setups

You are misunderstanding the point of WSL. It's not about writing software with Linux that users will run with Windows. Rather, it's about writing software on Windows that users will run on Linux.

The target demographic is developers of Linux server software. A lot of those devs today run macOS

Oh no, I get that. The OP was making the assertion that open source doesn't need win32 portability.

That's a huge pain in the ass for those of us who work in things that are tied to win32(graphics, gamedev tools, etc) we happily contribute back but ripping out a working port just seems petty.

it's a maintenance cost

I have to maintain a separate build system for Windows, all the win32 specific code, and also test under Windows... and most of this requires a Windows license

if I can rip all of that out by outsourcing the compatibility testing to Microsoft: all the better, even if I have to add a line to the documentation requiring users to check a checkbox once in some control panel somewhere

Once you turn WSL would the actual user experience of those apps change?

Shouldn't you be happy that WSL will enable F/OSS devs to write cross-platform software much easier by not having to keep two sets of code?

Honestly, Windows users should be accomodated for as little as possible. I don't want to write my software once for 12 operating systems and once again for one. WSL is the only reason my software runs on their shitty OS at all.

If you're just looking to do open source for the fun of writing software then by all means ignore portability(which is a totally legit approach).

However if you're goal is to have an impact with your software then supporting win32 is a good bet since you're going to find an order of magnitude more users on win32. You'll also probably want iOS, Android and other platforms that aren't drop-in ports for POSIX if you want to provide a reasonable interface.

iOS and Android are largely POSIX-compatible. Windows is not as an intentional anticompetitive design choice. Now that WSL is mature, there's no reason to play into that nonense any further (though in my opinion there was never any reason to).

What is your product ? What software do you write ?

Many different kinds of open source software: https://github.com/SirCmpwn

Depends on your software - it doesn't get you integration with other Win32 apps or features, notably the GUI, since it's a separate subsystem. If your app is a database server, probably yes. If your app is a monitoring agent, definitely no.

(I'm curious if you've used it or you're just commenting based on the headline?)

> If your app is a database server, probably yes.

They explicitly don't support that. From the article:

> Linux distro's [sic] running atop WSL are for interactive user scenarios, NOT for running production workloads on Apache/nginx/MySQL/MongoDB/etc.

And the last time I checked, it's not suitable for services. The moment I closed the bash terminal, all the processes I had running through WSL terminated - including nginx and tomcat.

Ah, thanks. I've only played around with interactively but that makes sense.

It really seems like the primary use case is supporting Docker/OCI containers for local dev, so you can keep using a Windows desktop instead of switching to a Linux one.

For software intended for regular users, POSIX via WSL isn't a replacement to the Windows API.

In addition to the feature needing to be manually installed, developer-mode must be enabled. WSL leaving beta does not appear to change that.

If the feature was installed by default, and an X server was bundled, it would risk the Windows platform. WSL allows developers to be placated without affecting the business side of the platform.

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