Every time someone ships successful code that's hard to port to Windows the world becomes a better place.
Until your boss tells you to port your so-far Linux-only code to Windows, and you run that struggle.
Signed, someone who spent the past year or so porting Linux code to Windows and macOS because the business direction changed and the company saw what was the money-maker.
P.S. Not the parent commenter, because I just realised they, too, had a paragraph beginning with 'signed, ...'
I.e. - I have tried WSLg (running GUI apps in WSL) but disabled it all together, as after running xclock and couple of things like that to ensure it works, I couldn't find any interest in running GUI apps on Linux.
I can somewhat imagine need for work purposes, if you are falling into some webdev area and need to run some tests against local browser, but that's different from my POV.
Deep interaction with Linux filesystem and kernel behaviour; we've done some intercepting and trampolining Linux syscalls in run-time, and tying it all up to cloud storage APIs.
We had to fundamentally re-architect some of our code to support macOS and Windows.
The technical requirement of installing WSL before installing our software was already a non-starter, since most Windows users expect one installer or zip to do-it-all. WSL2 isn't (yet) like a C/C++/DirectX redistributable which can be plugged in as a dependency to a given program. Additionally our program is expected to work natively with Windows paradigms.
More critically, we work with high-performance filesystems. The performance impact of files going a round-trip through the Linux Plan9 driver, then through a Linux kernel context switch, into the kernel, and down into Hyper-V, and then up back through the Windows Plan9 driver was completely unacceptable. It was deemed worthwhile to rewrite targeting Windows natively. And even then it was only a partial rewrite: we ended up using MinGW because we had too much of a direct dependency on the pthread API.
If you only support WSL then you don’t support Windows, imho.
In the end it is just part of the OS and a bunch of extra userspace programs. I mean nobody complains about the Windows Subsystem for Win32.
But yeah, you can just use a non-MS GNU/Windows implementation instead, do you like that better?
Is it possible though? Is it possible to have isolated WSLs (per programm)?
Maybe. But my experience is that there is very little “program code” and it’s mostly “library code”.
And if you did have a program that required WSL and you followed the UNIX model of bash chaining programs then you’re now mandating the “meta program” be run under WSL.
I treat WSL as a hacky workaround for dealing with bad citizens. It’s not a desirable target environment. It exists as a gap stop until someone does it right. YMMV.
Sorry I am confused, what does that refer to?
> you’re now mandating the “meta program” be run under WSL
As long as bash and the tools are in path, can't you run any program normally?
> WSL as a hacky workaround for dealing with bad citizens
Yes, but some parts are out of scope for C and you need to target the OS. Also f.e. passing around file descriptors and sockets are convenient.
This has bitten me once when I was doing a distro upgrade and windows just killed the WSL vm midway.
My background is video games. Which is well known to be a Windows-first environment. I currently work on robotics. The vast majority of robotics ecosystem code is Unix only.
You know what is extremely useful for teleoperation? Virtual reality. You know what platform doesn’t have a way to do VR currently? Linux. Womp womp sad trombone. Mistakes were made.
It’s really easy and not hard to write crossplatform code. My experience is that Linux devs are by far the most resistant to this. It’s very annoying.
Should you care about Windows? I certainly think so. Linux still doesn’t have a good debugger (no, gdb/lldb) aren’t good. Quite frankly every Linux dev would be more productive if they supported Windows where debuggers exist and are decent. So really they’re just shooting themselves in the foot. IMHO.
However, there is an important difference between the sanctions on Russia and the strategy of the pro-Linux "activist" that started this thread: namely, Windows is so heavily entrenched in the niche of enterprise IT that there is no significant chance of Linux's replacing it in that niche with the result that there is no realistic chance of a positive effect of this activism that might cancel out the negative effect you describe. So, I am tentatively in agreement with you.