A lot of snarky comments here, but I've been using Ubuntu shell on Win 10 for the past few weeks and it's really fantastic. Way faster than a VM and much more compatible than cygwin or msys.
I have a simple bash script I run from time when new WSL versions come out, to see if that improved. It simply loops doing a silly `echo "foo" | grep "bar"` and increasing a counter until that counter reaches 1000. This 9 line script runs in a bit more than 10 seconds on my i7 laptop. In a Linux VM on that same laptop, that exact same script takes 1 second to run.
Now I absolutely love WSL, it makes things a lot easier in my life, but I have to run some extensive long-running bash scripts from time to time (don't ask), and the minute it takes me to spin up a Vagrant VM lets me finish this in about 15 minutes instead of more than 2 hours.
Even someone recommended an Electron alternative, on HN! the #1 Electron hater community.
Interesting.
IMHO, WSL is Microsoft's attempt to compete with Mac, not Linux, by adding a Unix-like environment to Windows. I already did that with Cygwin, more than a decade ago.
So it's purely horses-for-courses. If my career had been built up designing Linux solutions then my viewpoint would be the complete opposite. I really don't understand the hate that Windows gets. Yes, it's not open-source. Yes, it's controlled by a massive organisation. Yes, it can cost quite a lot if you want to develop on it... but you know what, a lot of people (and organisations) don't care. They happily run Windows because they always have, it comes with support options, and it kinda always works (within reason) for what they need to do with it.
Telling people to 'just run Linux' or 'Windows is Better!' is akin to pushing your religion or your choice of diet at everyone you meet. If are an atheist and have issues with organised religion, or if you are an omnivore and get irritated every time someone says 'I'm Vegan, you should be too!' then maybe, just maybe, it's time to rethink your position with regard to the OS wars.
--
P.S. The Amiga was better than the Atari ST, and the Commodore 64 pwned the ZX Spectrum. /s
> P.S. The Amiga was better than the Atari ST, and the Commodore 64 pwned the ZX Spectrum. /s
The ST was a much simpler and more elegant machine. The Amiga was much more powerful, but too video-centric.
The C64 had better graphics and sound than the Spectrum (and a much nicer palette), but the Atari 8-bit computers had the best graphics of that generation by far. It's actually fun (but not surprising) to notice the Amiga is more a descendant of the 8-bit Ataris and the ST looks a lot like a 32-bit C-64.
The reason why I switched to Linux for work is its focus on power users, e.g. great configurability or well thought-out command line applications, but not because it's close to unix.
Yeah, because it's an UNIX-like.
There is a bit of a contrarian culture here, lately. Some skepticism is healthy, but too much is toxic.
As a general optimist and hopeful, I like to try and find good where I can without being suckered by hocus or sly marketing.
Moving forward and growing outward should be a good thing, shouldn't it?
This is basically asking Microsoft to open source Windows.
> Will we ever see office for linux?
They already have Office for macOS, Android, and iOS. They also have SQL Server for Linux and .Net core. "Linux" isn't really a viable desktop operating system compared to the other operating systems mentioned.
> Why can't we get a proper POSIX layer for windows (like they used to offer)?
POSIX is dead. Linux compatibility is far more relevant to modern computing.
> "Linux" isn't really a viable desktop operating system compared to the other operating systems mentioned.
Well maybe if office and other applications were available it would be? That's the point.
> POSIX is dead. Linux compatibility is far more relevant to modern computing.
Uh, what about all those people running MacOS? homebrew etc are about running all that nice OSS on MacOS. Pretty much all that stuff will run on BSD/MacOS/Linux/*Nix due to POSIX compatibility.
Where are all the non-Microsoft applications for Linux? Where is Photoshop? What about the thousands of other software vendors?
> Uh, what about all those people running MacOS? homebrew etc are about running all that nice OSS on MacOS.
Getting Linux software ported to MacOS is and has been non-trivial. A lot of effort went into that and for the longest time Homebrew lagged behind. If you're on MacOS you're lucky it's a popular platform and people put in the effort.
I'm not really sure what you're arguing for here anyway -- why should Microsoft their own flavor of POSIX compatible UNIX (again) over building something compatible directly with the Linux kernel. What advantage is the former?
Citation needed.
And please don't quote that 5 years old statistic of a one time contribution.
I believe personally that there are great people working at MS (because I know one or two... so I'll just take a leap and assume in general) --
so it seems like a problem of reining in the beast.
Hell, Gates seems like a generally good person. It's the default nature of a corporation [read: monster] so large to consume as much as it can and become as powerful as it can. Such organizations are structured this way, and bend this way regardless, because of the framework they operate within. I hardly need to say this. MS started making some good ground recently, so maybe with further prodding and pressure, who knows. Everything you suggested sounds like easy wins for them. It's not like it would affect their core consumer base too much.
Ballmer on the other hand - both an idiot who stopped Microsoft doing much good for ten years, supported a stupid HR manager in her talent-scaring practices, and also helped give MS its bad reputation. Good job mate.
Corporations, any for-profit corporation, are all by their nature (if you can call it that) for the express purpose of making money in their raw functioning. It would take a purposeful, active measure to sway the actions a corporate body would take (or should take).
Not saying MS is an innocent party in the slightest.
You are right, but as you said, is good to have alternatives.
> It could be viewed as a way to subvert the Linux and OSS community.
Good, is healthy to have competition.
Honestly I think this attitude is much more common on HN than reddit
Post by woman.
Files in the Windows file system can easily be accessed from the Linux side (C: appears as /mnt/c), so I basically do everything shell-based in WSL Bash and at the same time can access files there with my Windows-based GUI tools. I've tried that before with VM setups, and sharing filesystem folders gave me way more trouble there. You can't access the linux filesystem with Windows tools, but I haven't really missed that, since I seldom touch files there directly, and if I do they are text files that are easily edited in vim.
It's pretty good, although you'll find the occasional program that won't run due to missing syscalls (or needs a special flag to be convinced to run) and I'd love if they shipped a working X setup.
More than, say, msys2? I haven't had any compatibility problems with it.