Hacker News Reader

Comment by penpapersw | Hacker News Reader

> "you cannot currently use WSL to run persistent Linux services, daemons, jobs, etc. as background tasks."

Still, this has me wondering if that's the ultimate goal here. Is Microsoft trying to position Windows 10 as a high quality Linux server in the long-term?

View on HN

I only see value for Windows as a desktop OS, and I think the intent of WSL is improving the dev experience on Windows.

If you need a high quality Linux server, why not just run Linux?

For the same reason people use OS X to actually develop applications that will actually run on GNU/Linux.

So you're saying develop on Windows Server and deploy on Linux? Why not develop on desktop Windows?

No, develop on Windows and deploy on Windows Server with the new POSIX subsystem.

I don't know why you are being down voted. I switched to OSX to get the sweet NIX underbelly years ago and while not everyone* uses OSX for linux deployments... many, many developers do.

Because a lot of enterprises running Linux are running some kind of "enterprise Linux" e.g. Red Hat, Ubuntu Advantage, SUSE Linux Enterprise, where purchasing an "enterprise Linux" allows for support contracts etc.

If you imagine WSL for Windows Server not as competition for CentOS and Debian, but as competition for "enterprise Linux", then you can have a compelling sales case for enterprises which are already heavily invested in Microsoft, i.e. with extensive Active Directory and Office 365 deployments. Why purchase two support contracts, one from Microsoft and one from Enterpise Linux Vendor X, when you can buy just one support contract from Microsoft and still run everything you need?

As far as I know, WSL is "Ubuntu on Windows", so wouldn't this be a conflict of interest? Maybe they would simply work out a deal to pay a royalty to Canonical or something. Wouldn't that be poetic.

I think it would be really interesting if MS competed in that space. But 'nix sysadmins don't want to worry about maintaining a Windows instance concurrently with their server instances (assuming the only facilities they need are what 'nix provides). Microsoft having Windows attached to their Linux distribution is a net negative, in my opinion.

Edit: Formatting

I came here to wonder the same. Is the key word in this sentence "cannot" or "currently"?

Do they to force win32 to continue to be a viable server platform, by forever restricting reliable Linux daemons, or do they eventually want to allow Windows to be a viable Linux server?

They want it to be a viable POSIX server.

The majority of web applications use languages with runtimes that hide any Linux specific features.

Given that the majority of enterprises allow only for Windows desktops, and won't pay for OS X machines, this is an appealing path to Ruby, Python, Erlang, Java, .NET Core, ... server based applications on azure cloud deployments.

I doubt they want POSIX ever again.

They want 'me too' POSIX-enough Developer workloads right up to the Deploy phase, where they have are building cushy, hard-to-evade on-ramp to Azure.

Your argument is confusing... Can I deploy my Django app on Azure? If the answer is yes, what exactly, is "me too" about that?

Does your current code generation pipeline rely on a GNU, BSD or Microsoft Userland?

How about Libraries, Compiler or Runtime?

'Me too' is in MSFT providing a "Super Runtime" in the form of WSL.

If your app doesn't require Microsoft's kernel or user space functions, why should your team?

this is not the first time microsoft has done this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Services_for_UNIX

one could even argue they are somewhere between the embrace and extend phase.

> one could even argue they are somewhere between the embrace and extend phase.

I see it more as grasping at straws to stay relevant. The Ballmer-era FUD campaign was mostly a failure (and bad PR). "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em".

Agreed. At this point it's like trying to "extinguish" the world's deserts or oceans :)

With Pichai they're steering more towards a service-oriented company. Linux clearly has a place in their vision. You can see this also in their offerings on Azure.

Microsoft is a large company. In recent years, many *NIX developers joined them. Although I don't have statistics.

Gone are the days where its funny or righteous to bash Microsoft on /. heck gone is /.

Its also not only Microsoft; its Wintel at a whole. Desktop market lost a lot of its relative relevance. Intel is also having trouble with ARM platform [1]. That's not only desktop market. ARM's onto the server market as well.

I'm not really backing the above up with sources and numbers though so take it with a grain of salt.

[1] https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/12/02/intel-corp...

the service oriented One Microsoft vision was Ballmer's last major contribution before walking out the door.

https://genius.com/Steve-ballmer-one-microsoft-annotated

Nadella (Pichai is google) is executing the roadmap Ballmer laid.

Ouch, I'm sorry I mixed them up and thanks for the reference on Ballmer's last minute change of course

It's a risky move to embrace your competitor's platform. Once this tech matures will people prefer SSH to RDS/WinRM? Will people write software for IIS or will they use WSL to deploy their Apache/Nginx config? When enterprisey software starts shipping with a WSL requirement will admins decide to move to Linux where their software is a 1st class citizen?

Why would you choose to be Windows native when its much easier to go cross platform starting with Linux?

My company is windows based. The IT department run a bunch of VM's running Linux. But it is always treated as a black box appliance. The admin expertise is still heavily based on the windows stack. I think this tech will make it easier to deploy those sort of appliances on Windows, without needing much Linux admin ability. Windows will compete at a higher level with deployment systems rather than the OS itself.

I think the idea is that right now, MS doesn't have much of a choice. Like it or not (and I doubt MS likes it), the server world runs on UNIX/Linux, and out of the four "mainstream" OSs (Windows/Mac /GNU+Linux/Chromebooks+Linux), it's the only one without a UNIXlike back, so while MS is fine on the desktop, they'll have long term problems if developers move to Mac or Linux and the community will see alternatives to Windows.

But in the end, it's not as if Windows is Open Source, and there's no guarantee that WSL will exist in it's current shape forever.

This is actually the whole EEE strategy. You embrace it, as a monopoly you can push your copy over any other, then you "extend" and improve it (so there'll be code which will only work on WSL) and then ... You won.

That's something I look forward to. Does anyone know of a solution of reliable SFTP on windows? By SFTP I mean copy-over-ssh as opposed to FTP with TLS. So I guess I'm asking for a standard sshd running as a windows service.

Ubuntu on WSL lets you run sshd. You can get to your Windows file system at /mnt/c/.

We're doing a port of OpenSSH to Win32 right now that includes the SFTP server and client that ships as part of OpenSSH: https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/releases

Key configuration is a little tricky right now, but we've got some helper scripts (eventually to be released as a module on the PowerShell Gallery) that it a little easier:

[1] https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/Security-pr...

[2] https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH/wiki/OpenSSH-uti...

Try WinSSHD, https://www.bitvise.com/winsshd , i've been using it for years and been happy with it.

My guess, some of the Linux tooling will be easily ported or usable with Windows out of the box scenario is what they may be chasing.

Especially many tools out there for DevOps have *nix first flavor to them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com