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Ubuntu on Windows

blog.dustinkirkland.com

301–310 of 933 posts

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dell's Inspiron line is my go-to for portable workstations. Run Linux straight on them, or if GNOME/KDE aren't your cup of tea just run Windows and put your distro of choice in a VM (I just run Fedora on everything but my gaming PC, personally). I'm personally using a Dell XPS 13 (2014), soldered in RAM, but I did buy an ultraportable and 8GB is more than sufficient to do my all my personal work on. Work supplied me…

I don't have hands on experience, but Dell XPS 15 looks like an interesting option for thoaw looking for Windows laptop that is close to 15" Macbook Pro (quad core, sleek etc).

I have the XPS 15. It is almost identical to a Macbook Pro. Build quality is really awesome. Super super happy with it. The new one with the infinity edge screen is super friggin' sexy, and will absolutely be my next computer. I know a bunch of other devs on the XPS 15 as well, also very happy (we run Ubuntu, but I'm sure it's even better in Windows).

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#304
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can windows 10 apt-get install/run most/all the x/gtk base apps apt-get build from source those apps. ? If so, I will consider switch.

No. No GUI applications (currently, and no announced future support... and I wouldn't bank on them doing it).

If GUI applications run X, any X server on ayn architecture which supports the X11 protocol will work.

Check out XMing.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think M$ is targeting more developers with *NIX background on the desktop side rather than Linux apps on server. So a bash support with uniform CLI is the end-game.

Yea, I think they are going after developers who use OS X because it is UNIXy. Smart move given how en vogue Apple laptops have become for developers these days.

>Yea, I think they are going after developers who use OS X because it is UNIXy

It's a bit more than UNIXy, (the proper term is Unix-like), it literally is UNIX. It meets the UNIX 03 specifications.

Also, the motivations for these move predate the rise in popularity of Apple. For years, one of the biggest complaints about Windows was the lack of a good command line interface. There was the legacy CMD.EXE, which provided support for DOS commands and batch files, and PowerShell, which people either love or hate. The reality, however, is that overwhelmingly, the combination of bash/zsh and coreutils, binutils, util-linux, etc. won out a long time ago. Most schools use a flavor of Linux (maybe Solaris) for teaching Computer Science (and related disciplines), so many people who have formal training are used to those. Those people tend to teach other people to use them, etc.

Some people bemoan the fact that the CLI never evolved past its UNIX origins, but the reality is these tools work just fine. There's never been a reason to evolve them.

http://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3612.htm

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#306
post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can windows 10 apt-get install/run most/all the x/gtk base apps apt-get build from source those apps. ? If so, I will consider switch.

No. No GUI applications (currently, and no announced future support... and I wouldn't bank on them doing it).

Fortunately X11 is "network transparent" and there's X11 servers for windows. It shouldn't actually be that hard to make this work (though the perf will probably be pretty bad in a naive implementation).

At very worst you could SSH to localhost and X11-forward to the same host -- but you can optimize that.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#307

How does it differ from CoLinux from 2004? http://www.colinux.org

It isn't. This idea has been tried many, many times before. (Most recently, midipix.) It always fails, because a subsystem-isolated program is too isolated from the rest of the system.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#308
post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a practical level, this doesn't change anything for games. Anyone writing games for Linux is already using cross-platform tech like SDL or OpenGL or Allegro, or one of the many increasingly popular high-level engines. Well, I guess it'll be easier to port roguelikes which use ncurses.

Non-trivial audio is still difficult to do cross-platform. You can load songs in SDL, but it's not suitable for writing something like a tracker. There's a library coming through libsoundio that looks promising for cross-platform, but it's still early days - I haven't been able to get it to compile yet.

OpenAL.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. No GUI applications (currently, and no announced future support... and I wouldn't bank on them doing it).

Fortunately X11 is "network transparent" and there's X11 servers for windows. It shouldn't actually be that hard to make this work (though the perf will probably be pretty bad in a naive implementation). At very worst you could SSH to localhost and X11-forward to the same host -- but you can optimize that.

Nope, XMing works perfectly if you export the display to localhost (the default) and it's really fast, it even has GL support with MESA , with hardware acceleration.
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