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Comment by WWLink | Hacker News Reader

I am also pretty happy with WSL, but I'm even happier that I was able to get a mac at work lol.

Although I admit, sometimes the BSD toolchain poses some rather hilarious speedbumps. At that point WSL can be smoother? Weird.

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I switched from Mac to WSL last year and yes, in some ways it is smoother. Having for example apt-get on top of the NT kernel is better than Homebrew on Darwin. It's worse in other ways that are slowly getting fixed, such as the sad state of terminal emulators on Windows. At least one thing will probably always be better on Mac: Settings/Defaults system with Plist files vs. Windows settings and the Registry. But to me that doesn't justify the lack of good laptop hardware choices anymore - PC laptops are so much better nowadays.

> Having for example apt-get on top of the NT kernel is better than Homebrew on Darwin

Can you go into more detail about why that's the case — package selection, versioning policies, etc.? The main thing I've typically found is testing version-matched deployments and Docker has made me care about that a lot less.

Sure, we're heavily docker based too, but for development toolchain it's really valuable to have such a well supported package manager as apt. It's not just about package availability but community support - you have the same tooling locally that is widely used server side, so lots more documentation exists for it. Same goes for Linux userland vs. BSD.

So, why don't people just install native Linux in VMware or something instead of keep fighting with the host OS?

It's not easy for most... In the past I'd run a headless linux in a VM, do a network mount to my host environment, to edit local and run in the VM over SSH. It works, but setup is a pain.

Do you mean as a personal pain when you're not used to setting up a Linux environment?

If the IT department prepared a pre setup image, all you need to do is boot it up.

I mean setting up file sharing and getting the mounts working properly inside/outside the container so you can use a GUI editor on the actual desktop, while running programs in the VM... it's not something easily setup ahead of time.

Just install coreutils, findutils, and gnu-sed from Homebrew. Your muscle memory will thank you.

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