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Comment by kevin_thibedeau | Hacker News Reader

If Windows was so bereft of design flaws why couldn't they provide a superior terminal experience without inventing WSL?

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Because Powershell dev is opinionated -- necessarily so -- and to appeal to Linux devs you need a way to make a Linux command line available. I had mine built to run Arch Linux and Fish terminal. It worked pretty well, but compared to a raw Linux machine it is slow.

They did. PowerShell.

WSL is for the folks that buy macOS instead of supporting Linux OEMs, because they couldn't care less and are happy witb whatever POSIX CLI they can get.

WSL is a godsend for Linux-inclined devs operating corporate laptops where Windows is mandated and filled with counterintrusion software up the wazoo.

Those corps also have Linux versions of the same software.

I would never work for a company where I have to use a "corporate Windows" laptop. If management does not understand developer needs, working there is likely to be not pleasant in many aspects.

They understand the needs of Windows developers.

Even a Windows developer cannot use a typical locked-down enterprise PC. For many tasks you would need admin rights. I guess typically Windows developers solve in such company solve that by having 2 PCs. One official office PC and then one R&D PC which is not under control of corporate IT (depending on the company officially connected to non-intranet network zone or just completely secret form corporate IT).

Of course for really hairy driver work you want to have a separate machine regardless of the OS. But for the last 15 years I have managed to do Linux development with having root access and still not breaking the office side of work. Although if you usea dd to write system images for embedded systems many times a day you are playing a bit with fire. Thought for a long time I should patch dd so it wouldn't overwrite anything bigger than 64GB. But nowadays we mostly have better firmware update methods, so dd is used rarely and my patch still unwritten...

WSL is not superior, just another interface to do the job. And why not do the job on Windows while using known commands?

because you cannot impress other scholars saying "I use Arch, btw", job is for grown ups!

Windows terminal is amazing, you can have a tabbed terminal with powershell, powershell 7, linux flavors, shell replacements, cygwin, cloud provider connections and much more.

In windows terminal, I use powershell for vmware vsphere administration and linux for ssh. The only main issue I have is ubuntu 22.04 gives ssh key errors with redhat servers. I have a redhat wsl for ssh ive been using.

I was a cygwin terminal user for decades. (work laptops are always locked down windows).

With linux in windows terminal, i've stopped using cygwin. I still sometimes use mobaterm (cygwin based), but even mobaterm allows tabbed environments like windows terminal. It even imports them. Also cygwin ssh works with redhat servers without ssh key issues.

How about docker support on Windows? Does it still require Hyper-V?

That’s one of the biggest hurdles preventing Windows to become a dev environment at my work.

I haven't installed docker in vmware linux os, but you can set nested acceleration, so it should work fine.

I can get WSL2 to work in Win11 vm in vmware, so it should work fine.

Any specific case on how Hyper-V is an issue with Docker support as you see it?

Assuming you are talking about Docker containers with Linux, not containers with Windows, it's pretty well integrated even with WSL2 (on some news I've checked, from mid 2019 https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/docker-deskto... ) which is Hyper-V based and doesn't stand in your way.

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