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Ubuntu on Windows

blog.dustinkirkland.com

331–340 of 933 posts

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's be honest here. Does this change make some developers actually even consider to change their OS X/Linux Desktops to Windows? Yeah it is really cool thing that we can finally use windows cmd like the terminal on unix systems however: - What about lack of all the Linux/OS X GUI software? - What about lack of all the UNIX OS features? - What about all those billions and billions of Windows malware, viruses, adware…

For me, surprisingly yes. I had no interest in having Windows as my primary machine yesterday but now I would seriously consider it.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really hoping this allows me to compile LibreOffice on Windows. Perhaps if I worked out how to incorporate the WINE libraries it might make my life easier...

> I'm really hoping this allows me to compile LibreOffice on Windows. Is this not helpful? https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/BuildingOnWi... LibreOffice has official Windows builds, so I would expect that they can already build the software on Windows.

It means I need to install Visual Studio. Right now I'm only developing on Mac OS X and Linux. On top of this, every time Microsoft updates Visual Studio, things like firebird tend to break :(

I'd rather use a toolchain I know better. In fact, I'd love to use clang on Windows.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#333

> All of your Windows drives, like C: are mounted read/write directly under /mnt. Its the real deal lads, congratulation Microsoft.

MSYS2 mounts C:\ under /c/ and Cygwin under /cygdrive/c/ so what's the real deal?

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thinkpad T460s. I have the T450s and like it plenty. It's definitely up there with macbook build quality.

The T540p isn't though. I hate mine.

I have a ThinkPad Yoga and an older ThinkPad T520. Both are pretty awful machines. Plus I really don't trust Lenovo anymore.

If I were buying a Windows machine, the only one I would consider is the Microsoft Surface Book.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#335

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.

Wayland might be a cleaner api layer to integrate into the windows display subsystems.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#336

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.

Is that a big market segment, or do they hope that developers who work on Windows would be more likely to write Windows apps?

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's be honest here. Does this change make some developers actually even consider to change their OS X/Linux Desktops to Windows? Yeah it is really cool thing that we can finally use windows cmd like the terminal on unix systems however: - What about lack of all the Linux/OS X GUI software? - What about lack of all the UNIX OS features? - What about all those billions and billions of Windows malware, viruses, adware…

Data point: On Windows when you run 'npm install' on a react boilerplate/starter project chances are 50/50 that it will work out of the box. A year ago it was way worse. I thought heavily on switching to Mac for no other reason but 'npm install' success rate on Windows.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#338
post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Embrace, extend and extinguish. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

I'm not ruling EEE out, but this move feels more like "staunch the bleeding" to capture more developers and retain the ones they have. I'd love to read a leaked Powerpoint or memo that explains the long-term strategy here. I think this is a great move by Microsoft to be able to EXEC a competitor's binary files natively. But, I think it risks being an admission that Win32/64 syscalls and Windows file system semantics…

I'd love to read a leaked Powerpoint or memo that explains the long-term strategy here.

If MS's marketing department has half a brain at all, they will accidentally leak such a memo fairly soon.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Let's be honest here. Does this change make some developers actually even consider to change their OS X/Linux Desktops to Windows? Yeah it is really cool thing that we can finally use windows cmd like the terminal on unix systems however: - What about lack of all the Linux/OS X GUI software? - What about lack of all the UNIX OS features? - What about all those billions and billions of Windows malware, viruses, adware…

While I prefer to develop today on OS X...your post is nothing but FUD.

> What about lack of all the Linux/OS X GUI software?

Windows prolly has more GUI applications than both those OSes combined. That's not necessarily a good thing but it's not bad either. It just means there is a Win substitute for everything.

> What about lack of all the UNIX OS features?

Same answer as above.

> What about all those billions and billions of Windows malware, viruses, adware etc.

I download a lot of crap on my home Win computer and haven't had a virus once in the past 6 or 7 years. There are likely more Android viruses active now than Windows.

> What about all the spying and restrictions that Microsoft has integrated into the Windows?

If you don't give permission the action is not taken. Granted I am currently getting spammed to update my home computer from win 7 to 10 but it hasn't force installed on me. Likewise for automatic updates.

> What about the fact that OS X and Linux have always been at least decent from developers point of view but Windows has always had problems and then things like Vista and Win8 happen.

Which is what this new initiative is trying to fix.

Don't get me wrong. I love my osx for dev and my *nix boxes for servers. But if I can get one machine/OS for desktop development of nix and windows without having to run silly emulators or switch between VMs then I'm sold.

Re: Ubuntu on Windows

#340
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I expect they implemented a subsystem for Linux at the syscall level - i.e. they implemented the Linux kernel's interface at the ABI level. No headers would need to intermingle with open source; compile on Linux, run on Windows.

From the screenshots, it seems there is a full kernel in there - e.g. you have /proc/cpuinfo, and it identifies as Linux 3.4.0. If they just implemented all Linux syscalls on top of NT, that would replace a Linux kernel. There would be no Linux kernel running on top. But in that case they would also need to emulate stuff like /proc. (This is the "reverse Wine" scenario.) So I personally think it is either: - There is…

Speaking from experience working on the LX brand (the Linux emulation layer for Joyent SmartOS), we would not have gotten very far with our emulation layer if we did not also faithfully emulate quite a lot of /proc. For example:

    $ grep DESC /etc/lsb-release
    DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS"
    $ uname -a
    Linux kappa 3.13.0 BrandZ virtual linux x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
    $ wc -l /proc/cpuinfo
    608 /proc/cpuinfo
    $ /native/usr/bin/uname -a
    SunOS kappa 5.11 joyent_20160204T173314Z i86pc i386 i86pc
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