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Comment by anthonybsd | Hacker News Reader

I'm a long time OS X user. Macbook Pro as my work laptop and Windows 10 at home as a gaming/browsing desktop. Had Windows 8/7/Vista/XP/2000 as my home desktops prior to that, I actually dig building them. I don't get the drama. Yes, for vast majority of the users Windows 10 is pretty fungible for OS X. What do the majority of people do? That's right, launch the browser, maybe open Outlook. Would I use one for work given a choice? Nah, cygwin just doesn't cut it for me as a substitute for having a real UNIX underneath, especially since 50% of my work day is in terminal. Could I pull it off if I was forced to? Probably. It'd take awhile to set up all my keyboard shortcuts a la Quicksilver, find a substitute for Spotlight, sort out all the editors and such, but it's doable. Nothing is so critical these days as to be a complete show stopper. Just pick what works for you and stop having buyers remorse.

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> cygwin just doesn't cut it for me as a substitute for having a real UNIX underneath

Windows 10 has WSL, which replaces cygwin. It's a wonderful compromise which lets me can execute unmodified ELF binaries on Windows 10. Realistically, this means I can install almost anything via apt, do bulk file management using scripts, use native linux rsync binaries for backups, etc.

WSL is a great idea and I think Microsoft is onto something super cool with WSL, but after a week of serious use I found that it was not a viable replacement for cygwin. The major problem with WSL right now is that you can't effectively edit files in both Windows and WSL. For me this was very limiting because I could not interact with a git repo via WSL and then also open the files from that repo with a Windows IDE. In cygwin this would be no problem though.

can you sync/cache the repository twice, once in windows and once in WSL?

I don't know how long ago you used it but that's exactly what I'm doing right now. The files just have to be on the Windows file system. I edit with Visual Studio Code and use WSL (Ubuntu) to manage the repo.

I would be curious to know more about how you are doing this. Maybe Microsoft fixed this since I last used WSL, but if they didn't then you may be sitting on a ticking time bomb, see: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/11/17/do-n...

> I would be curious to know more about how you are doing this. Maybe Microsoft fixed this since I last used WSL, but if they didn't then you may be sitting on a ticking time bomb, see: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/11/17/do-n....

From linked post: Note: Your "Linux files" are any of the files and folders under %localappdata%\lxss - which is where the Linux filesystem - distro and your own files - are stored on your drive

It does say later on that storing files on windows filesystem and accessing it via /mnt/c is ok

I'm not the person you replied to, but I use WSL regularly on the Windows machines I interact with (and have been since it launched via the Insiders program). As others mentioned, the key is keeping all of your files in the Windows filesystem (/mnt/c in WSL).

When I set up a new machine, the first thing I do after installing WSL is to remove all directories from my home folder on the WSL filesystem, then symlink the directories in my home folder on the Windows filesystem. This way I can avoid accidetally saving files within the WSL filesystem, but don't have to prepend all paths with /mnt/c/Users/me (almost all my work occurs within my home directory).

There were a couple of very minor hiccups in its early days, but for the last year I haven't had any issues with it at all and it certainly makes developing on Windows a whole lot more convenient.

It also has powershell, where everything has help and examples, the naming is consistent, and it neatly separates content from presentation so you pipe to 'select' and 'where' and don't scrape with regexs all the time. WSL is great if you don't want to learn anything but you can happily do everything you need in the powershell / Terminus.

The combination of Virtualbox and Vagrant is very powerful. It ends up being my daily driver for anything I require as far as Linux environments are concerned.

I have been told that the combination of Docker and Windows 10 / Hyper-V is mature enough to invest serious time and effort into learning it. But I haven't done this yet.

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