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Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice

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Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice

#21
post #18
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a bit of a mixed bag. Just getting them set up tends to be pretty iffy; they tend to rely on lots of sockets, which I gather aren't actually implemented by WSL. In terms of performance once they are up and running, things are actually pretty decent. The biggest bottleneck appears to be I/O, which is kind of a problem for everything WSL. That part makes installing a gig+ desktop package frustrating as it takes way…

Yes. Sockets are available in Insider releases though but I/O still remains a pain.

Yes, but not everything. They do not implement everything 1:1 so not everything may work. For example, they implemented inotify, but they left away a few things and certain applications crash because they expect certain functionality.

Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice

#23
post #8

Can someone explain what this is for someone not really into the lingo here?

He's sort of running open source desktops on a Windows 10 kernel. But not really, there's an abstraction layer called WSL in between. There are some interesting effects though: you can touch test.txt in Bash and then open that file in Notepad without setting up any network shares, virtual machines, etc. In my mind, Microsoft developed WSL to try to keep developers: if you grew up on Linux but are now employed maintai…

> if you grew up on Linux but are now employed maintaining Windows servers

I think it's the other way around. It's useful for people who develop for Linux, but their company issues Windows notebooks to employees because their internal IT infrastructure is AD+Exchange+etc.

Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice

#26
post #8

Can someone explain what this is for someone not really into the lingo here?

He's sort of running open source desktops on a Windows 10 kernel. But not really, there's an abstraction layer called WSL in between. There are some interesting effects though: you can touch test.txt in Bash and then open that file in Notepad without setting up any network shares, virtual machines, etc. In my mind, Microsoft developed WSL to try to keep developers: if you grew up on Linux but are now employed maintai…

> In my mind, Microsoft developed WSL to try to keep developers: if you grew up on Linux but are now employed maintaining Windows servers, WSL gives you a way to get to your shell of choice

IMO Cygwin did that well enough before WSL.

I "grew up on Linux" (starting back in the day when it came on a stack of floppies and nobody knew what it was) and I've always installed Cygwin on all Windows systems where I had admin privileges. It worked fairly well for command line stuff.

Re: Show HN: Boot Windows 10 Directly into Linux Desktop of Choice

#28

I was experimenting running stuff like PyCharm, VS Code, Sublime etc. in WSl through X11 Forwarding. Eventually I gave up and just run it properly in VirtualBox with seamless mode.

FYI, for PyCharm a remote interpreter is probably an easier solution as long as you aren't needing your app to draw anything on an X11 window.
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