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What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

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Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#61

Post by masklinn »

ldev wrote: post #39
fragmede wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're asking why Microsoft's advice is to format and reinstall, well, consider who it's coming from.

Because you can upgrade from windows 3.11 all the way to 10, good luck with ubuntu. Yeah, I see your point.

> Because you can upgrade from windows 3.11 all the way to 10

That has never ever worked for me until the 7 -> 10 upgrade: 95 -> 98, 98 -> 2k, 2k -> XP and XP -> 7 all failed miserably and required installing from scratch.

And even 7 -> 10 failed without any helpful information= the first few times I tried it (unlike OSX where I've been upgrading and migrating the same system for more than 10 years across multiple machines and versions).

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#62

Post by badminton1 »

ghshephard wrote: post #58
badminton1 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My remarks were directed at the product being discussed ("Bash on Windows"), a name that I think is incorrect for objective reasons. You can agree or disagree, but the comment was technical in nature, not trolling. People do not use "Bash on Windows" just for the sake of using Bash (the shell), they use it to access GNU/Linux software through the WSL ABI.

I'm wondering if you are misguided here - and what Microsoft is working on right now is "Bash on Windows" - I.E. The console environment that people want to interact with when writing quick scripts, connecting to remote servers, maybe running a little bit of a local web instance. Speaking for myself, personally - if I want to run GNU/Linux software through the Linux ABI - I'm not going to be doing it on WSL - I'll do…

Bash is merely a Unix shell, one of many. What you describe is the GNU/Linux userland.

They are working on people being able to execute unmodified Linux binaries on Windows machines through an Application Binary Interface that implements the Linux system calls and translates them into Windows system calls, among other things... and doing it in the most transparent way possible (not requiring specific builds of each software, like Cygwin).

This is the inverse operation of what WINE does.

No need to rush to downvote a comment that is actually correct.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#63

Post by pmontra »

badminton1 wrote: post #55
pmontra wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also remember the standardization process of OOXML. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization_of_Office_Open... I also think their current strategy could be the one you describe. We're at the Embrace phase. It's not sure that Extend will follow but I wonder what it could look like. Maybe it will be something convenient you can do in Linux only if you're running it inside WSL. Given how Linux is used it should b…

They might have switched business models. Microsoft's revenue from patents collected from companies such as Samsung and HTC is like $1 billion.

I'm not saying that those money are peanuts but it doesn't compare to what they were doing (are?) with software licenses. Maybe they plan to cannibalize the desktop with subscription services and Azure.

I see things they could do with a WSL+Azure integration but I don't want to give them the idea :-) Anyway, they are collectively smarter than me (and more focused on their businesses) so they'll already thought about that for sure. That's why I'm somewhat worried.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#64

Post by BrandiATMuhkuh »

I have switched to WSL pretty exactly a month ago after using solely Ubuntu for about 6 years. So far it works like a charm. The only small problem i have had was the network interface problem with nodejs (which should be solved with the new WSL). But that can be circumvented by simply running node.exe instead. The reason for the switch was: windows in great for everything UI, bash is great for everything development.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#65

Post by rawfan »

NickGerleman wrote: post #24
finchisko wrote: post #17

>Upgrade In-Place ...though this may not result in an optimal instance. Wondering why such a disclaimer? Ubuntu apt upgrades are reliable. Or is it related to WSL? Anyway good job WSL team.

I've definitely had issues doing an upgrade on a real Ubuntu installation. Years ago I needed to update a more or less clean install of Ubuntu Desktop. It managed to completely break Gnome somehow (This was before Unity). I'm guessing things are better now and that the server distribution is better for this but I could see complications happening.

After 15 years with Ubuntu, I've only ever seen problems when people switched default Ubuntu packages with their own (back in the day it was often beryl, compiz or drivers).

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#66

Post by oblio »

laumars wrote: post #42
barrkel wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cygwin isn't terrible; it's much better than mingw for the simple reason that it provides an environment much closer to POSIX. Its biggest problem is forking speed. I don't think it has a second big problem; the next biggest is the crashes you get if you do partial updates and don't rebaseall. Cygwin enabled me to stick with Windows since 2003 or so, and have the same environment on Windows, Linux and OS X. The comma…

Opinions are bound to differ so I do appreciate your point. I personally found Cygwin a nightmare to install, a nightmare to maintain, and a crash prone on every system I used it on since XP. While you're right that MinGW is only a subset, it did address the issues I raised with Cygwin which made it a better default environment for me most of the time; falling back to Cygwin on those occasions MinGW couldn't fulfil.…

I've also been using Cygwin for 10 years now. It's a bit annoying to install and update it, but it's far from a nightmare :)

Just run the setup.exe, click through the 5-10 pages and that's about it.

To update package, just run the setup.exe, click through the 5-10 pages and that's about it :)

Or use this: https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg (I haven't needed so far, but I've read good reviews about it)

Regarding "crash prone", it used to be a bit unstable in the early days of XP, but almost all of them were due to failed updates. And that's where you needed to know a bit of magic, the "rebaseall" thing mentioned by barrkel. I haven't had to do that in a long time.

It's a lot more solid that people think it is. I wouldn't run production servers with it (even though I know folks that do...), but for desktop use it's quite robust.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#67

Post by rawfan »

ldev wrote: post #39
fragmede wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're asking why Microsoft's advice is to format and reinstall, well, consider who it's coming from.

Because you can upgrade from windows 3.11 all the way to 10, good luck with ubuntu. Yeah, I see your point.

I have actual machines that I was able to flawlessly upgrade from 4.10 to 17.04. Can't say that about Windows. Though I did actually know what I shouldn't mess with if I want the upgrade to go through (or fix before).

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#68

Post by mathw »

dcw303 wrote: post #14

The inotify implementation looks very promising! Editing source files in a Windows-native IDE and having changes picked up by, say, node.js is a great workflow. I'm yet to try it out, but I wonder if the problems with editing files in the linux filesystem[0] is going to be an issue with this? [0]: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/11/17/do-n...

It's all fine if the files you're sharing are in the Windows filesystem. If they're in the Linux filesystem the same restrictions still apply.

Re: What’s New in Bash/WSL and Windows Console

#70

Post by _wmd »

ygra wrote: post #31

Wasn't mouse support in the console for decades as well? At least it has worked in Far for ages. Or is just the integration with Linux console applications new?

The console only recently (<2 years I think) learned to speak ANSI/xterm-ish escapes, Linux mouse support requires quite a few of those and doubtlessly the model differs sufficiently from however the NT console API mouse worked to require effort to support
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