I grew up through some of the more interesting business practices Microsoft employed, and it's several attempts to harm the Linux ecosystem. I would love to see this move by Microsoft in a positive light, but can't help but be suspicious ? For now the possibilities it opens are great, however I wish I understood Microsoft's strategic view of this and how it might evolve over time for Linux.
Fun with the Windows Subsystem for Linux
21–30 of 99 posts
Re: Fun with the Windows Subsystem for Linux
#22lets cut to the chase, does tmux work on wsl?
tmux Works quite well.
WSL is still not the highest quality right now, but they explicitly say that it will be still a beta in Win10 RS1, and it's impressive the progress they managed to do during the few months of the Insider period it has been published. To be clear, it's already largely usable for its advertised purpose (dev) and maybe even more, if you feel adventurous. I guess in RS2 it will be quite solid.
Re: Fun with the Windows Subsystem for Linux
#23I'd rather a linux sub sys for windows -- gamers on linux would flock to it, wine sux. There's some nice windows apps, and niche things built only on windows -- but I've staying on Ubuntu most likely.
I don't think that's fair to Wine. It is tackling a huge problem space, without a specification or source to work with. They're reverse engineering vast swaths of Windows. I think Wine works remarkably well given the size and scope of the project, and the nature of Windows being a huge moving target.
Steam has so many games for Linux now, and a lot of that is due to Wine having advanced to the point where porting to Linux has become relatively trivial. Wine basically has allowed me to go years between reboots into Windows on my previous laptop; and I expect once I get Linux installed on my new laptop, I won't need to reboot into Windows again for another year or two or three. My favorite games are all working on Linux, mostly because of Wine (I don't run them explicitly under Wine, but a lot of the ports on Steam are using Wine behind the scenes).
Re: Fun with the Windows Subsystem for Linux
#24I'd rather a linux sub sys for windows -- gamers on linux would flock to it, wine sux. There's some nice windows apps, and niche things built only on windows -- but I've staying on Ubuntu most likely.
That's what WINE is, to the nearest approximation. Windows' ABI to userspace is at the dll layer and much larger than Linux. WINE tries to handle that, but falls short in some areas.
I used to run Star Craft II on a a GNU/Linux laptop using WINE. The box would get hot AF, but it ran. I always thought WINE was impressive.
Re: Fun with the Windows Subsystem for Linux
#25I grew up through some of the more interesting business practices Microsoft employed, and it's several attempts to harm the Linux ecosystem. I would love to see this move by Microsoft in a positive light, but can't help but be suspicious ? For now the possibilities it opens are great, however I wish I understood Microsoft's strategic view of this and how it might evolve over time for Linux.
MS is now a services business, they want to sell you their cloud. They can't do that if the linux ecosystem is shut out of Windows as it was before. Simply supporting Linux VMs is not enough, because long-term they still want to maintain some control on the OS market. So they open enough doors that you (or your corporate boss) will be enticed to consider their offerings and move to their cloud. You have some sweet cloud-management tool that runs on Linux? "You can now run it in the same way on Windows! Oh and with Windows in our cloud you also get all these other goodies..." - et voilà, locked back in.
Most "advanced" cloud services are built with the aim of locking you in (AWS, Oracle, Heroku, etc etc): easy to adopt and easy to extend, which means "hard to leave". Microsoft is no exception.
Re: Fun with the Windows Subsystem for Linux
#26I am really looking forward to this for my Surface Book. Historically I've loaded up a virtual machine running Linux, this was more complete and had fewer hiccups than a Cygwin type of setup for me. Of course it would be REALLY useful if they also support NFS for mounting stuff from my NAS appliance and a compositor (Wayland/X11/Etc.) that would allow things that create windows to work as well.
Re: Fun with the Windows Subsystem for Linux
#27I just got a new laptop, and as it doesn't have an optical drive and I couldn't find a USB flash drive in order to install Linux, I've kinda been stuck on Windows for a few days. I installed WSL a few days ago. Installation is a ridiculous process, and takes about 24 hours for the service to finally appear after you follow the steps to make it happen, which is not well-documented and just feels idiotic to a Linux use…
You are talking about enabling insider preview which takes around a day to kick in and offer you the update. Since bash on windows is not included on the stable "branch" you have to go through the hoops to get it. This has nothing to do with the feature itself, which takes even less to install than pulling the Ubuntu image off docker hub.
Re: Fun with the Windows Subsystem for Linux
#28lets cut to the chase, does tmux work on wsl?
Yep, works perfectly. Some terminal emulators on Windows suck up some command key combinations which might impede use of tmux or others that need those key combos, but that's usually configurable.
This is not a unique problem to Windows, btw. I use tmux with alt + tilde (`) as my modifier key, and most terminal emulators need config changes to allow this.
Re: Fun with the Windows Subsystem for Linux
#29ELI5: What does this mean to me, as a developer who's really familiar with (and prefers) Linux, but has to use Windows? What cool possibilities will this "Linux Subsystem For Windows" open up to me? What things will it specifically not open up to me?
I've been primarily a Linux user since 1995, and have been using Windows 10+WSL for the past week or so, since getting a new laptop. The only thing I can think of that it'll open up for you is if you want to develop for Windows, while still having Linux available to you. Whether that's for developing games (most of the good game development tools run only on Windows, even if they can deploy to Linux/Mac/Android), or…
I agree with everything you've said. I also have been using WSL for the past few months. I can run everything in it that I run on Linux and OS X, which is great. I can now officially run any major operating system and have my zsh and vim setup and ready to go in 10 minutes flat.
As for advantages Windows gives me over Linux, there are two.
1) Visual Studio. Even with all of its warts, it's a better debugging tool than anything linux or mac has to offer.
2) Gaming. Games on linux and OS X are catching up, but they're not there yet. I develop as well as play and Unity3D and Unreal Engine, not to mention the graphics drivers, just work better on windows.
Re: Fun with the Windows Subsystem for Linux
#30I grew up through some of the more interesting business practices Microsoft employed, and it's several attempts to harm the Linux ecosystem. I would love to see this move by Microsoft in a positive light, but can't help but be suspicious ? For now the possibilities it opens are great, however I wish I understood Microsoft's strategic view of this and how it might evolve over time for Linux.
This attitude seems pretty dated.
This microsoft are no longer the ridiculously dominant force they once were.
Linux is a core part of their cloud business now.
They have a new CEO, and a lot of time has passed.
They are actively trying to change a lot of their culture and approach to things.