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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

#41

Post by dingo_bat »

majewsky wrote: post #23
killjoywashere wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bingo. I just hate it.

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

#42

Post by ams6110 »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #26
killjoywashere wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I was running X11 apps (mostly xemacs) in Cygwin on Windows XP nearly a decade ago.

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

#43

Post by nxc18 »

dingo_bat wrote: post #40
nxc18 wrote: 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…

If sockets are not available how do programs access the network?

Its special UNIX sockets. Actual TCP/IP sockets work fine. The workarounds for UNIX sockets not working typically involve switching to use TCP/IP sockets instead.

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

#45

Post by flukus »

dingo_bat wrote: post #39
flukus wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux gaming has been improving rapidly lately, in another year I doubt windows will be necessary.

Biggest overstatement. Linux gaming, though becoming more possible, is nowhere near gaming on windows. Forget game availability, even most GPUs are not properly supported on most Linuxes.

> even most GPUs are not properly supported on most Linuxes

This situation is rapidly changing too with ATI and intels OSS GPU drivers.

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

#46

Post by snuxoll »

chrisper wrote: post #34
snuxoll wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I kind of want to have a development environment in Linux. I also like to game, so for that Windows (in non-vm) is better. So that's why I tried to go with WSL in the first place. But Virtualbox seamless is a nice middle ground between the two OS and I don't have to worry about things that haven't been implemented in WSL.

That's the reason behind using a remote interpreter, unless there is some other benefit to running your IDE in the same OS as your code I'm missing. Your IDE stays on whatever system you want to use, your code gets executed in your VM.

99% of the time I'm working natively in Fedora when I'm working on code these days (unless I have to do .Net or other MS stuff, Windows goes in a VM for that) - but before I could make that switch I ran PyCharm/IntelliJ/etc. on Windows and just had a headless Fedora or CentOS VM that PyCharm ran my code in.

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

#47

Post by badminton1 »

int_handler wrote: post #31

Cool experiment, but holy Tour de France coding style Batman: https://github.com/NathanCastle/BootShellCredentialProvider/...

In flowchart decision points, it's clearer to make "yes" co-linear and "no" orthogonal.

Likewise I prefer to structure cyclomatic complexity like this by doing something like

   if not 
      return
   else if not 
      return
Rather than

    if 
        if 
            if 
                ...

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

#48

Post by killjoywashere »

majewsky wrote: post #23
killjoywashere wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wow, it hadn't occurred to me they would that systematically unsupportive. Even in the military a lot of devs use Mac or Linux for their work laptop.

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

#49

Post by killjoywashere »

nxc18 wrote: post #14
interfixus wrote: post #11

Run your Tesla on a petrol engine. Whatever is the bleedin' point?

Its just a fun little project. The idea is to make you question what it means to be a Linux desktop. Here we have very convincing (running authentic binaries!) Linux DEs, but there's no Linux.

What a great purpose! GNU/Windows indeed!

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

#50

Post by mtdewcmu »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #26
killjoywashere wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Cygwin is slow at things like process creation, I think, which made shell scripts slow. Plus, cygwin was its own environment that required some porting, or, at least, recompiling to get apps to work. The new Linux subsystem runs Linux binaries at something like full speed (to the extent that I've played with it).
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