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Windows for Linux Nerds

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Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#251

Post by tkubacki »

romanovcode wrote: post #244
tkubacki wrote: post #73

WSL is waste of time if you work with docker - Linux desktop experience (not laptop) is just good enough these days (and future seems even brighter since Ubuntu goes back to Gnome)

Docker works pretty great with Windows nowadays using Hyper-V. Because of that your point can be reversed: If you work with Docker there is no point in switching from Windows to Linux.

Windows works ok as virtual box/vmware guest as well. I spent few years as .net Dev this way and was more than happy with this solution. You need beefy machine though.

Not using windows as primary OS limits risk related to viruses, malware. Also moving to new hardware is just copy vm files (windows provision for Dev used to take a lot of time)

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#252

Post by chewyland »

blunte wrote: post #116

Want to _really_ impress us, Microsoft? Give us a Windows Subsystem for Linux. I chose a maxxed out Dell XPS15 laptop with Windows 10 to replace my 3 year old rMBP with the (foolish) expectation that it could replace my Mac. Apple had lost sight of what mattered to developers, and I was angry. But now, 2 months later, here I continue developing and existing on my old rMBP. Bash in Windows is incredibly slow on some a…

I dumped the MacOS partition on my MacBook and have been running 10 along with the Linux Subsystem without the slightest hiccup for ages.

Visual Studio for big things, Code for my little Raspberry Pi projects and Office 365 for everything else.

I've never had an issue, not even a tieeeeeny tiny one...zero.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#253

Post by userbinator »

theossuary wrote: post #99
jstarks wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry that we don't provide a way to access the Linux portion of the file system directly from Windows yet. It's annoying, and we are working to improve it. For many use cases it suffices to symlink a Windows directory (e.g. /mnt/c/Users/myuser) into your WSL $HOME directory somewhere and do your source work, builds, etc. in that path. This breaks down if you need certain features that aren't supported on these f…

I think OP was being needlessly rude, it really isn't that painful. And to claim that network filesystems work seemlessly is laughable in my opinion. Though they are right, it does break the continuity a Linux subsystem in Windows could provide. It blows my mind that Windows engineers are building (and keeping up-to-date) an entire Linux compatible subsystem. That's a huge investment​, and a pile of hairy legacy code…

Network filesystems are not perfect but they sure try very hard in a far more challenging environment than two subsystems on the same machine to give a "unified" access to the filesystem.

It blows my mind that Windows engineers are building (and keeping up-to-date) an entire Linux compatible subsystem. That's a huge investment​, and a pile of hairy legacy code if the project should ever die.

Considering that multiple efforts by others[1][2][3][4][5], some of them working alone, have gotten quite far in running Linux binaries on Windows without any of the deep knowledge of Windows internals that Microsoft would have, maybe it's not all that huge of an investment... then again, the edge-cases are the hard part and MS does tend to like overcomplicating things.

[1] https://github.com/wishstudio/flinux

[2] https://cowlark.com/lbw/

[3] https://github.com/hackpascal/line-is-not-emulator

[4] http://wezfurlong.org/blog/2004/jan/linux-on-windows/

[5] https://0xef.wordpress.com/2012/11/17/emulate-linux-system-c...

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#254

Post by lisnake »

jadbox wrote: post #147

i3 is simply amazing. I'd give up my Windows Desktop in an instant if I could use i3 to start Window apps within the manager.

Since you can start windows apps from WSL console, I bet something can be hacked to launch them from i3, though i haven't tried myself

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#255

Post by thomasz »

neves wrote: post #83
userbinator wrote: post #69

If you need to access files in VolFS, you can use bash.exe to copy them somewhere under /mnt/c, use Windows to do whatever on it, then use bash.exe to copy them back when you are done. IMHO this is the worst-designed(?) part of the whole WSL. Copying files back and forth is the antithesis of a "seamless Windows and Linux experience", to put it mildly. From that perspective it's no better than running an isolated VM.…

Me too. It was one of the reasons I came back to windows, but it proved useless. Sure I've just discovered it after having a corrupted filesystem. I dreamed to edit a movie in a video editor, pass a filter using ffmpeg, but can't even edit a file in notepad and run it in Python. VMs or remote access are still the best solution for development. Even cygwin and using setup.exe to edit files are better.

Huh? You just have to be careful not to use the linux filesystem from windows. It's hidden under %localappdata%\lxss anywax.

Editing test.py in your Desktop and then running it with python /mnt/c/Users/Neves/Desktop/test.py should work fine. I honestly do not understand your problem here. If you need to access a file from windows and linux, it must be in the windows fs. That's it.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#256

Post by cube2222 »

blunte wrote: post #116

Want to _really_ impress us, Microsoft? Give us a Windows Subsystem for Linux. I chose a maxxed out Dell XPS15 laptop with Windows 10 to replace my 3 year old rMBP with the (foolish) expectation that it could replace my Mac. Apple had lost sight of what mattered to developers, and I was angry. But now, 2 months later, here I continue developing and existing on my old rMBP. Bash in Windows is incredibly slow on some a…

Try to use docker for Windows. Hyperv is extremely performant. In my day to day work I'm using Windows, but I'm constantly using a mixture of WSL and docker. I set up things like Cassandra, MySQL, debugging sessions, nginx using docker. For small Unix tools/launching my applications I use WSL. For other small tools I use powershell.

It took some time getting use to it, but now I actually do feel like in an utopia. No pain for the last 3-4 months or so. You do have to get proficient with docker though for this to work.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#257

Post by tobylane »

monkmartinez wrote: post #182
Moto7451 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NGINX, Postgres, MySQL, Postfix, etc all work just fine as OS X services and Linux Services. The format of the init script is different but that is true between Linux and BSD or even various Linux distributions. None the less, the concept of running your services on OS X holds fast. WSL's init however, is not a full implementation. To run a Linux service/daemon you have to resort to bootstrapping something from the W…

None of it is the same thing, outside of linux, if you are being honest. You can't run a macOS script in web production. period. end of story. So with all platforms, sans linux proper, we resort to funny business to get things working locally and then do it different when it comes time to deploy. What are we doing? Just use linux... or MSFT/.net as it were. The funny thing in all of this is that Apple have nothing to…

If you're using Nginx, MySQL etc for software and Bash3, Python etc for scripting then there's not linux or Apple specific.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#258

Post by ageofwant »

santoshalper wrote: post #6
bactrian wrote: post #2

This post was interesting in a morbid way but you can count the Linux nerds that want leave the open world of Linux for Microsoft very easily. They all work at Microsoft. Microsoft is losing on mobile, desktop, servers, and IoT. Their entire ecosystem is a technological deadend. If you're a Linux Nerd, you should probably keep using Linux if you care about having a good career going forward.

Linux still sucks shit on the Desktop. I try it every year, and every year it sucks very slightly less. It goes beyond drivers and application compatibility, Linux distros are ugly and the people making them have no taste. The Desktop/Laptop market is not nearly as important as it used to be, but within that space, Microsoft's dominance is about as strong as ever. Apple might have been able to take a dent out of it i…

The only place where Windows still somewhat matters is on corporate desktops. And this is for content consumers, or producers in very narrow silos, those generating Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. In every other aspect Linux is the superior tool.

Personally I use Arch and i3, my desktop is riced to the point that is comfortable for me. I can stand up a new desktop in 10m after a clean arch install. I can replicate my full dev environment on any linode, droplet or aws machine in less than 5m at no cost.

It amazes me that people can call themselves 'productive' using microsoft systems. Every time I land on a windows box I feel like I'm in some ancient broken world.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#259

Post by Jaruzel »

rbanffy wrote: post #195
thinkxl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More snarky than usual, i don't know why. "why not just" or "just use" kind of comments that you see more in reddit. Even someone recommended an Electron alternative, on HN! the #1 Electron hater community. Interesting.

It's not snark, or feeling threatened. It's just that lots of people (me included) fail to see the point of running Windows at all (unless you are developing for Windows, in which case it's foolish not to). If you want a Linux experience, use Linux. If you want polished applications and a Unix experience, get a Mac. Windows has somewhat polished apps (with very lax UI consistency rules), a convoluted overall experien…

I am not a pro-developer, but I do enjoy programming and all its associated activities and by trade I'm a Windows Enterprise Architect, as such I need to run Windows as my primary machine(s), but looking a the list of VMs I have running on my Hyper-V servers, I have an equal smattering of Windows Servers and Linux Servers.

So it's purely horses-for-courses. If my career had been built up designing Linux solutions then my viewpoint would be the complete opposite. I really don't understand the hate that Windows gets. Yes, it's not open-source. Yes, it's controlled by a massive organisation. Yes, it can cost quite a lot if you want to develop on it... but you know what, a lot of people (and organisations) don't care. They happily run Windows because they always have, it comes with support options, and it kinda always works (within reason) for what they need to do with it.

Telling people to 'just run Linux' or 'Windows is Better!' is akin to pushing your religion or your choice of diet at everyone you meet. If are an atheist and have issues with organised religion, or if you are an omnivore and get irritated every time someone says 'I'm Vegan, you should be too!' then maybe, just maybe, it's time to rethink your position with regard to the OS wars.

--

P.S. The Amiga was better than the Atari ST, and the Commodore 64 pwned the ZX Spectrum. /s

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#260

Post by nickjj »

I tried WSL a few times but for real world every day development it's just not usable at all. The file mount performance is crippling slow. A Rails app takes 30+ seconds to see changes vs nearly instant on native Linux.

If anyone is interested in running Linux on Windows in a way that's suitable for full time development then check out this screencast / blog post: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/create-an-awesome-linux-devel...

I've been using this set up for many years.

The pros of the above method are:

- It's free

- It's as fast as native Linux

- It's actually Linux from end to end

- You get independent floating Linux windows (graphical apps work)

- You can still run your Windows apps

- Works flawlessly with dual monitors

- No need to dual boot

- Takes about 15-20 minutes to set up your first time

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