Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows for Linux Nerds

blog.jessfraz.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

321–330 of 393 posts

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#321

Post by makmanalp »

tda wrote: post #154
mwcampbell wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. I wonder if Microsoft will eventually use their Linux emulation to accomplish the same thing that motivated Joyent to work on LX-branded zones, namely running Linux-based Docker containers in production on a non-Linux server OS (Windows in this case) without any VM overhead.

I believe this is already the case with hyper-v, is it not?

I thought hyper-v would be more for the case of full-blown emulation (I'm creating a soft-CPU and hardware, a la VMWare) versus this is more like linux emulation - I have some windows software that can parse and run ELF binaries, and some layer that converts calls to the linux kernel into windows kernel stuff.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#322

Post by koffiezet »

nickjj wrote: post #260

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-linu…

Vagrant with virtualbox or hyperv seems like the better choice tbh.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#323

Post by rhinoceraptor »

detaro wrote: post #110
rhinoceraptor wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try mving a directory under /mnt/c from WSL. It won't work.

I have never encountered a file or directory there that I couldn't manipulate, can you give a specific example? The limitation I know is that you are not supposed to touch the subdirectory that contains the Linux' filesystem root with windows tools, because that'll mess up some kind of hidden metadata.

I have a git checkout that exhibits this behavior but now I can't replicate it. If I clone another copy, I can mv directories but the file permissions are exactly the same.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#324

Post by Eridrus »

aleksei wrote: post #187
Eridrus wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a corp-maintained Linux laptop; Chrome does not get along with the graphics drivers and will freak out and start flashing white every hour or so. My (corp-maintained) Linux desktop locks up under heavy load for every few days, usually recovers though. The person who sits next to me has it worse though. And this is with standardized corp-bought hardware. Any year now though.

Not an issue with Linux though, you just have incompetent tech maintenance.

Windows seems to run fine even with incompetent maintenance.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#325

Post by latencyloser »

discordance wrote: post #229
latencyloser wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in a similar predicament to OP. I prefer Linux in most cases, it's what I'm used to. But I need or would vastly prefer one or the other depending on what I'm doing. A VM is fine for just checking outlook..or using Skype for chat and things like that. But the second I need to use an IDE for Windows development, it's too slow to bear. Having better interchangeability between these two would make my life significant…

How is the attitude/atmosphere internally at Microsoft towards people using a competing OS (Mac or Linux). Does the group working on Windows OS feel alienated at all?

In my experience, pretty positive. I see Macs around campus frequently. In my team, people mostly use Windows, so there's definitely no alienation there. However, when people notice I mostly use Linux, I usually receive a chuckle for not using Windows--either out of irony or since we are highly encouraged to dogfood everything here. But that's usually the last I hear of it, so I don't think anyone sees anything wrong with it.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#326

Post by rbanffy »

Jaruzel wrote: post #259
rbanffy wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

What would be, from your point-of-view, the key advantages of working on Windows?

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

The ST was a much simpler and more elegant machine. The Amiga was much more powerful, but too video-centric.

The C64 had better graphics and sound than the Spectrum (and a much nicer palette), but the Atari 8-bit computers had the best graphics of that generation by far. It's actually fun (but not surprising) to notice the Amiga is more a descendant of the 8-bit Ataris and the ST looks a lot like a 32-bit C-64.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#327

Post by Adamantcheese »

oAlbe wrote: post #308
teekert wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope Skype dies (though I also still depend in it). I'm currently trying to get our project on Teams which works much nicer (it's MS' Slack clone). Wouldn't hurt to have that on Linux as well indeed although Slack work perfectly on Linux.

If Skype dies we basically have no alternative. Sure, you got Slack, Hangouts, Teams (as you mention), the new Atlassian thing etc. but that's mainly for group efforts or for a company setting. Skype isn't used just by businesses. I mainly use Skype for videocalls with friends and family, usually one-on-one, and for that we have zero replacements. Slack is just not a thing for this use case, same for all the other co…

Discord is coming out with video chat, it looks promising.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#328

Post by agumonkey »

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.…

it's clearly listed under "- pain points" with "still in its beginnings" so be gentle.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#329

Post by cacarr »

teekert wrote: post #303
oAlbe wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Skype. We need a Skype alternative that works on Linux and it's not an electron app. Hangouts/appear.in and web.skype.com simply don't work the same way and don't have the same quality.

I hope Skype dies (though I also still depend in it). I'm currently trying to get our project on Teams which works much nicer (it's MS' Slack clone). Wouldn't hurt to have that on Linux as well indeed although Slack work perfectly on Linux.

Isn't Skype pretty much Snapchat these days?

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#330

Post by AshleyGrant »

unabridged wrote: post #121
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 know this probably goes well beyond the scope of your department but here is my wishlist that would convince me to buy windows: 1. Support for ZFS (and future open source filesystems as they appear) 2. The ability to control every service running, and good honest descriptions of what each service does. The ability to control all the servers my computer is connecting to and a transparent view of the information they…

#3 is already available, and always has been. I personally create a non-MS local account when I first install the OS, and then convert it to my MS account to get the features I want from that. I do this to make sure my user account has the name I want it to have.
Post reply on HN