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New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

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Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#211

Post by monkmartinez »

derefr wrote: post #187
monkmartinez wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want to repair and upgrade my computer. I suspect there are many people like me that would like the option to upgrade components on my laptop as well. I used to be able to do that with a MBP (2012-ish), now I can't... The WSL is compelling and to be honest, one of the main reasons I switched to OSX was the command line. Now, I can have a command line and not have to run VM's for 3d stuff, games, and more. Pretty co…

That's a personal desire. The context here was corporate buying and depreciation. Why would a corporation want to repair its computers, any more than it would want to repair e.g. its office furniture?

How many large corporations buy macs for everyone in the company? Serious question... I have no idea. My hunch says; Not many.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#212

Post by quickben »

Lazare wrote: post #165
arca_vorago wrote: post #147

If anyone trusts microsoft right now after the past year or two worth of things we've learned I highly doubt their dedication to a free and open source vision of the future. I actually have a hard time beleiving some of these comments are even organic... (web and server devs are going to migrate to windows!). What world do these people live in? It's like people live in fantasy land and have forgotten the 90's truth o…

Isn't it a bit ironic, given your concern with 90s-era Microsoft practices... ...that your comment is basically just FUD? I'm not saying your wrong! But your comment is, clearly, intended to make people feel fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Microsoft, the Windows platform, what MS may choose to do in the future, etc. And you don't have any particular factual claims to back it up (classic FUD tactic), just an appeal…

"given your concern with 90s-era Microsoft practices..."

We'll, I must say I preferred them actually.

- the close button on my upgrade prompts didn't mean yes.

- clippy didn't send my files keystrokes and speech online on its own

- candy crush saga equivalents didn't just install on their own

- applications that I installed weren't deleted by the OS

- the computer didn't restart on its own because of updates, closing all ssh sessions and killing processes with days of work.

- etc.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#213

Post by ralish »

quickben wrote: post #207
bitwize wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you want this, when the NT kernel is so much better architected than any extant Unix except for perhaps Solaris?

POSIX is a standard. Windows has yet to provide a consistent way how to obtain the OS version across releases. Then we can maybe talk about standardizing apps communications.

Uh, that may not be the best example. Are you aware of a reliable way to retrieve the OS version across all POSIX OSs? Because if you are, I would love to hear it.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#214

Post by beagle3 »

Lazare wrote: post #165
arca_vorago wrote: post #147

If anyone trusts microsoft right now after the past year or two worth of things we've learned I highly doubt their dedication to a free and open source vision of the future. I actually have a hard time beleiving some of these comments are even organic... (web and server devs are going to migrate to windows!). What world do these people live in? It's like people live in fantasy land and have forgotten the 90's truth o…

Isn't it a bit ironic, given your concern with 90s-era Microsoft practices... ...that your comment is basically just FUD? I'm not saying your wrong! But your comment is, clearly, intended to make people feel fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Microsoft, the Windows platform, what MS may choose to do in the future, etc. And you don't have any particular factual claims to back it up (classic FUD tactic), just an appeal…

Some of OPs comment is hyperbolic, but I think

> Microsoft has shown they are only interested in controlling the user, and not in giving the user control.

Is very well supported by their recent we'll-do-everything-possible to get Win10 on people's machines, force upgrades, forced (and ultra comprehensive, but mostly secretive until a month ago) telemetry.

> We live in a very different world. I'm not saying MS wouldn't abuse their power if they could, but you know...what power?

They have spent the last year and a half abusing their power of Win7 updates to force people into Win10, which takes away the power that people had to resist the Win7->Win10 upgrade. If you missed that, we truly do live in different worlds.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#215

Post by cthalupa »

electricEmu wrote: post #32
gigatexal wrote: post #17

They can do this all they want but no amount of linux in windows is going to get me back to using it on my main home desktop. I have no choice at work (an all MS stack: c# and sqlserver) but yeah I'll just stick to VMs, docker, or linux on bare-metal. I get the latest kernels, the ability to run anything in the nix ecosystem without arbitrary drawbacks. *Arbitrary is harsh, they did a lot of heavy lifting to get Wind…

I didn't realize staying on the bleeding edge kernels was such a performance boost, that it's worth shying away from an entire ecosystem. It sounds a bit elitist. Alternatively, when I use Windows now I'll get both PowerShell and a full Unix environment. For my development work so far, none of those arbitrary drawbacks have stopped WSFL from being a champ. On the plus side, I don't constantly have to edit configurati…

Well, there's a variety of reasons that being on new kernels (or a linux kernel at all)

Things like bpf if you're doing performance profiling Ready access to PMCs (The Intel PMC stuff is a pain in the ass to get working in Windows, because you have to build a signed driver for MSR access) without paying the $900 for vTune Access to perf

There's really no way to do performance engineering on Bash/WSL

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#216

Post by beagle3 »

derefr wrote: post #179
arca_vorago wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Isn't it a bit ironic, given your concern with 90s-era Microsoft practices that your comment is basically just FUD? Apologies for not taking the time to sit down and list all the ways MS has been bad for the FOSS world and the user. For someone who references the halloween documents and the hn userbase in general I think most of this should be mostly obvious and not need specific hand-holding. As for your accusatio…

> As for your accusation of fud, fud by defnition is about false or disinformation in combination with the appeal to fear. By what definition? FUD is literally just the words "Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt." Nothing about those words requires the thing being referred to to be false or disinformation . Less pedantically, propaganda/astroturfing doesn't need to be a lie or an exaggeration or anything of the sort, to ser…

> what about the current Microsoft—without reference to history, without knowledge of history—do you fear?

Win10 and how it was shoved hard down everyone's throat -- and how it had taken upgrade liberties away from the vast majority, while adding unstoppable telemetry.

Is 18 months too much history for a 40 year old company?

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#217

Post by cthalupa »

JadeNB wrote: post #154
akacase wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html

It's not clear if it's the intended result, but that link (for me, and quite unexpectedly) redirects to an Imgur picture of a testicle in a teacup, which is a little funny but which one might not intend to display.

It seems to be a redirect based on the referring URL. Copy and paste it to get to the actual site

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#218

Post by beagle3 »

apardoe-MSFT wrote: post #174
apardoe-MSFT wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone who works at Microsoft (and has for 15 years.) These cartoons are brilliant--especially the org charts for different companies--but things actually are changing at Microsoft. Some divisions change faster than others. And some old reputations are very hard to shake. But Microsoft isn't the company it used to be. There are other companies filling that role now. Example: Even though all you ever hear abou…

Thanks for the downvotes! But seriously, do you honestly think that Microsoft is spying on your more than Google, Facebook, or Amazon? And do you think your Mac OS doesn't have the exact same sort of telemetry (or more!) that Windows has? The 90's are over.

But what about whataboutism?

While this may change at any operating system update (It did for Win7 in a supposedly "security" update), my Mac seems to want to talk to Apple only to get AppStore updates, whereas Windows machines in my office want to talk to a lot of servers at Microsoft, and do so with hard coded IPs, and weird process names. Can you point to an Apple equivalent of this list? https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/micro...

My browser has a strict policy that tells Google, Facebook and Amazon exactly what I allow it to; that sometimes causes things to malfunction, and I can live with that. Can you tell me how to do that with Win10?

Oh, and, no, Fedora, Arch and even with Ubuntu's worst blunder in this respect, do not spy on me even 1:10000 as Microsoft does.

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#219

Post by soulbadguy »

posguy wrote: post #148
corysama wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm betting this is the real end-goal of WSL. MacBooks were once expensive, but high-quality, grab-and-go unixy development machines. Now, they're mostly just expensive. When WSL matures, any commodity laptop will be a cheap, decent quality, grab-and-go unixy dev machine. It'll probably be easier and more reliable than installing Ubuntu directly! At that point, web and server devs will migrate en mass from Mac to Win…

Huh? MacBooks are unlikely to disappear, companies love how slowly they depreciate (and are easily sellable), while it is by far the most optimized unix system out there. Pound for pound, a MacBook will last longer while doing more than a Windows or Linux laptop, despite Microsoft's and Linus's efforts to rectify this. Why would anyone pick Windows over Debian for development if their target is a Linux boxen in a ser…

> Pound for pound, a MacBook will last longer while doing more than a Windows or Linux laptop, despite Microsoft's and Linus's efforts to rectify this.

There is no "Windows or linux laptop". There is a bunch of different brands with varying degree of quality. Macbook lasting more than a dell or an acer, maybe. More than a thinkpad or a surface ? Much less so.

And of course you forget about the desktops...Companies are still using a non negligible amount of those.

> Why would anyone pick Windows over Debian for development if their target is a Linux boxen in a server farm somewhere?

For the same reason people use a macbook, or virtualize linux (vmware) instead of native installation : Better hardware support, better battery life, better support from your enterprise IT etc... etc...

> The tooling is third rate, the WSL (which is a horrible name btw) has thousands of bugs by Microsoft's own admission, and this is after years of MS laboring to get WSL into its current state.

The thing was available about a years ago, why so much hate? I played with it and to be honest, as developer it already has 90 % of everything i need...

For all their fault and mistakes , one thing that the new Microsoft does really well is to adapt to the new development realities and propose simple and pragmatic solution : VS code , typescripts and now WSL...

Re: New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store

#220

Post by devrandomguy »

akacase wrote: post #107
devrandomguy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is jwz?

https://www.jwz.org/gruntle/rbarip.html

It is really too bad that we can't have things like this in our society. That looks like it would have been a very healthy way to deal with stress and frustration, especially in an otherwise restrained environment like work.

Thank you for that bit of history.

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