New Distros Coming to Bash/WSL via Windows Store • Hacker News Board

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

#251

Post by dredmorbius » Sat, May 13, 2017, 2:05 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #175

dredmorbius wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's nothing you can't already do with VMs, and avoiding vendor lock-in.

Actually it is different. The difference might not matter in some cases, and in other cases it will. Running on a VM means running on emulated devices, running in a Userland host means running on native devices. WSL is to windows as Wine is to Linux. A really trivial example is the buffer cache. On a Linux kernel it will take big chunks of memory to buffer disk blocks that it has read and dirtied. When run in a VM it…

I'm not arguing that VMs vs API compatibility layers aren't different, but that the specific testbed case you'd mentioned of emulations on a single host is nothing novel.

A compatabilty layer generally takes away the kernel's role. Is that the case here?

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

#252

Post by ChuckMcM » Sat, May 13, 2017, 4:30 AM UTC

dredmorbius wrote: post #251

ChuckMcM wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually it is different. The difference might not matter in some cases, and in other cases it will. Running on a VM means running on emulated devices, running in a Userland host means running on native devices. WSL is to windows as Wine is to Linux. A really trivial example is the buffer cache. On a Linux kernel it will take big chunks of memory to buffer disk blocks that it has read and dirtied. When run in a VM it…

I'm not arguing that VMs vs API compatibility layers aren't different, but that the specific testbed case you'd mentioned of emulations on a single host is nothing novel. A compatabilty layer generally takes away the kernel's role. Is that the case here?

Generally packages are concerned about interactions in 'user land' and the package manager of the distro. By not carrying around multiple copies of the kernel and its internal data structures this compatibility layer provides a better solution (in terms of resource utilization) for working with several different distributions on a single system than the VM approach does.

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

#253

Post by dredmorbius » Mon, May 15, 2017, 1:18 AM UTC

ChuckMcM wrote: post #252

dredmorbius wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not arguing that VMs vs API compatibility layers aren't different, but that the specific testbed case you'd mentioned of emulations on a single host is nothing novel. A compatabilty layer generally takes away the kernel's role. Is that the case here?

Generally packages are concerned about interactions in 'user land' and the package manager of the distro. By not carrying around multiple copies of the kernel and its internal data structures this compatibility layer provides a better solution (in terms of resource utilization) for working with several different distributions on a single system than the VM approach does.

Sure, but that is something you can already do in a chroot jail.

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

#254

Post by posguy » Mon, May 22, 2017, 7:47 AM UTC

s3bast0m wrote: post #248

posguy wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Debian/Arch are both fairly lively, if you want something battle hardend you'll use SLES like Walmart, Kroger, Fred Meyers, Vons, uses. The desktop is in stasis though, and iOS as a platform is unlikely to grow massively over the next few years. Android is frankly another rotting cesspool of Google's making. Where Microsoft & Apple are able to provide years of updates to every model of phone their software runs on (w…

It's easy to keep devices updated when you reset your platform 3 times (WP7 - WP8 - W10P - WOA)

Sure, but even 2014 phones like the Lumia 830, 929, et all got upgraded to W10P, Microsoft has made much more of an effort than Google to support 3 year old hardware.