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Comment by tw1984 | Hacker News Reader

tw1984

I first heard it back in the days when I was still on 56kbps modem and Clinton was facing his impeachment trial.

After so many years especially after the success of linux + wine, I don't think anyone needs a Windows NT clone. I know they share code/knowledge, there is just no practical reason to have a full clone of the NT kernel.

I'd further argue that Microsoft should stop developing its windows OS kernel altogether, running wsl2 on top of a boring windows kernel is never the solution. They should build Windows on top of the Linux kernel, I mean let Windows be a good Linux Window Manager.

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> I'd further argue that Microsoft should stop developing its windows OS kernel altogether, running wsl2 on top of a boring windows kernel is never the solution. They should build Windows on top of the Linux kernel, I mean let Windows be a good Linux Window Manager.

Well Windows 11 is now already the best Linux Desktop distro with WSL2.

No need to further complicate it with the rube goldberg contraption that the Linux desktop ecosystem brings.

> Well Windows 11 is now already the best Linux Desktop distro with WSL2.

You'd have a hard time convincing anyone. WSL2 is just a glorified Linux VM on top of a terrible OS.

It doesn’t feel that way. For me it’s all of apt-get and Linux binaries with the hardware support of Windows.

Unless you want to, well, use hardware. I've had a hellish time trying to do USB device development through WSL.

I'll never understand the name - "Windows Subsystem for Linux" sounds like a way to run Windows on Linux, not the other way around.

> Because we don't own the trademark for Linux and so can't lead our product name with it. Try Windows' Subsystem for Linux instead

https://twitter.com/richturn_ms/status/981916165969625088

Windows is based on kernel + NT subsystems, such as console and Win32. There used to be a Unix subsystem too. That's why it's called like that. "Windows subsystem for X" makes sense only with historical context.

It's still not very clear why it started out this way. After all, Subsystem for X, with Windows implied, would have worked too.

Yep. It could have been the other way of course. If it was LSW, I wonder, would people ask the same question? We'll never know, until they decide to do another renaming op.

Marketing.

The best black box, utterly proprietary, spyware Linux distro.

How so? I’m considering switching to a Windows laptop for the first time in 10 years of doing development on MacOS. Mainly because I’m into machine learning/ neural network these days and everyone around me keep saying buy a laptop with CUDAs support

MacOS does not have NVIDIA CUDA:

https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-cuda-toolkit-11_6_0-deve...

Could you use this instead?

https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/

Is that as slow as it used to be on Windows 10? In my experience it didn't compare at all to a native Linux distro.

ReactOS.iso size: 106 MB. Did not feel slow to me. YMMV.

Win10.iso size: 5.6 GB. Updates are many GBs.

Linux is fastest speed optimized OS anyway.

Ah I think I wasn't clear in my message... I was speaking about the performance of WSL on Windows 10 compared to a native Windows system. The only time I tried ReactOS in a VM I didn't feel it was slow either.

> let Windows be a good Linux Window Manager.

Which would be coming full circle back to the days when Windows was a good (for the time) DOS window manager.

There are bits and pieces that were (are?) better architected - I'm always a fan of biodiversity in the field.

From what I've seen, XNU/NT/Linux/BSD diversity has, despite all their frustrations, been a net benefit.

Yes. Windows could be a better wine than wine.

Worth noting that already did this to support SQL Server on Linux [1].

[1]: https://threedots.ovh/slides/Drawbridge.pdf

Wine is the better Windows as Microsoft's Windows.

What's that mean? Is it 150% compatible with Windows apps?

If you consider 16 bit apps, yes.

I know this is HN, but come on, how many 16 bit programs do people use nowadays?

I still use "MIDISoft Recording Session" to edit midi files. Seriously ancient software there, and it's having some compatibility problems (related to moving the mouse cursor) under OTVDM + Windows 10.

It doesn't have to be 16 bit software, many 32 bit programs used 16 bit installers.

I had one, many years ago. Just re-zip and forget. )

>150% compatible with Windows apps

Math....

From https://reactos.org/faq/

"What are the differences between Windows and ReactOS?

There are mainly two. Firstly ReactOS is open source. Secondly ReactOS is Free. Also Windows (especially the newer versions) are known to monitor all your activity by default. So if you’re concerned about your privacy or just don’t want to share any personal info, we promise (and you can check our source code) that we don’t track any of your data."

That is very nice!

Fortunately you don’t get to dictate what others spend their free time on.

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