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Windows for Linux Nerds

blog.jessfraz.com

341–350 of 393 posts

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#341
post #150
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Losing on desktop. Yeah, any decade now. There is of course a constituency of Linux Nerds primed to move to Windows: people who want to develop software for Linux servers but don't want to run Linux on the desktop. Many of those people are using OS X, which is POSIX enough to run some Linux software unmodified. WSL is a way to target those people, who may be being left behind by Apple's changing strategy in laptops (…

Yeah, that's me in a nutshell. My employer recently sent everyone new hardware and I was initially bummed about getting the just-before-Touch-Bar MBP. Then I saw how gimmicky and awful Touch Bar was for the "lucky" colleague stuck with it. I'm typing this on a five year old MBA that isn't quite up to scratch for work anymore. If Apple would take this case, stick updated hardware and a Retina display in it, I'd buy it…

I think the touchbar is a very cool idea, but I don't understand why they put it on their pro machines. Who uses function keys? Pro users. Who would benefit most from the touchbar? Consumers.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#342

how is WSL any different to WISE ? (a better explination of WISE than I could ever come up with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11072143 ) it sounds like microsoft up to its old tricks, "look its really easy to develop for windows now you have done that, well now we have dropped that so guess your going to have to only develop for windows now"

WSL uses the "real" userland of the distro of your choice. If you are running Ubuntu on it, you are using the same .debs and ELF binaries inside those .debs that "real" Ubuntu is using. If for whatever reason the Windows team decided to "cut bait" and kill WSL, you can quickly spin up an Ubuntu VM or reimage to Ubuntu and continue to be productive.

If there is an opportunity for a Trojan horse here, it's for Linux developers to encourage young geeks to install Ubuntu from the Windows Store and start learning Linux commands in WSL and maybe from there eventually baby step to running Linux full time. (That said, it's not like having BSD terminals available in macOS has encouraged a lot of people to move out of macOS and directly to Linux. Still seems to trend the opposite direction, if the laptops at developer conferences are any indication.)

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#343
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…

>Want to _really_ impress us, Microsoft? Give us a Windows Subsystem for Linux.

What makes you think that's even possible? WSL works because the NT kernel was built with POSIX compliance out of the gate and they've been able to translate some of the functionality. The Linux kernel wasn't built with Windows compatibility out of the gate.

Do you honestly believe that Linus would accept core kernel changes for the sole purpose of supporting Windows on Linux? It would NEVER. HAPPEN.

>I didn't document all my activities, so I can't point to which thing was slow.

I hate these vague "it was slow, I promise, just can't tell you what". If you can't tell us specifically what was slow, it's worse than anecdotal evidence. I do all of the things you listed there and the only thing that's ever been remotely slow is Git on extremely large repo's - which they're aware of an actively working ot fix.

>It works fine, sometimes, for a few things. Then it goes nuts. Wipe and reinstall (remove the Dell bloatware) and it's better.

What specifically "goes nuts"? I've got a laptop and desktop that have been running Windows 10 since launch and they work just as well as my Mac does. I've never re-installed any of them, and never had them "go nuts". That story reads like someone who last used Windows98 and thinks it still applies.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#344
post #216
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

because there's no apt-get. Installing software is a pain.

apt-cyg: https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg

> Because I got dragged into a time-consuming and unpleasant law suit involving apt-cyg, I am very unlikely to put more time and effort into it anytime soon, even though I won. I write open source software because I enjoy it, not so I can get involved in meaningless conflicts.

https://github.com/transcode-open/apt-cyg/blob/master/status...

I looked but I couldn't find any details.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#345
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.

I don't work at Microsoft, I just like that the Windows works more than I do Linux. I use Linux because that is what we release on so I guess I don't fall under "Linux Nerd"

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sorry, but can you please share any recipes for mixing WSL and Docker, or you just meant that you use one or another on project-to-project basis (not together)? I know I can do basic commands (even building images with `docker -H 127.0.0.1 build -t foo .` works), but I failed to find any way to share WSL filesystem with the containers (`docker run -v $(pwd):/foo ...`).

Well, let's say my project's in C:\Development\Projects\MyAmazingProject

I can open bash there (WSL), or start a container

docker run -v C:\Development\Projects\MyAmazingProject:/mnt/project --net=host -it ubuntu bash

Though i usually do this only when I need to debug something. (WSL can't spawn additional threads, which breaks for example Delve, the Go debugger)

Need to connect to a cassandra db? docker run -it cassandra cqlsh mycassandraaddress

Docker compose works well too. And because WSL has unified network interfaces with windows, I can easily start a process in WSL and access a DB which I've run in docker.

I use docker from PowerShell, just saying.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#347
post #343
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…

>Want to _really_ impress us, Microsoft? Give us a Windows Subsystem for Linux. What makes you think that's even possible? WSL works because the NT kernel was built with POSIX compliance out of the gate and they've been able to translate some of the functionality. The Linux kernel wasn't built with Windows compatibility out of the gate. Do you honestly believe that Linus would accept core kernel changes for the sole…

> Do you honestly believe that Linus would accept core kernel changes for the sole purpose of supporting Windows on Linux? It would NEVER. HAPPEN.

Kinda off-topic, but, isn't Linus basically a Microsoft here? Does it matter if Linux's forkable and open-source, if nobody ever forks it to do what the community wants instead of what Linus wants? (e.g. stable kernel ABI, Windows support, etc)

> I've got a laptop and desktop that have been running Windows 10 since launch and they work just as well as my Mac does. I've never re-installed any of them, and never had them "go nuts". That story reads like someone who last used Windows98 and thinks it still applies.

I agree so much with this... last time I installed Windows, it was Windows 7 in 2013, haven't touched it since then, and it works perfectly. Of course it requires a bit of maintenance, but what doesn't after so many years.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#348
post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

by dual booting and using Linux for your hardcore development your basically ceding that Windows sucks at this. I agree honestly it's sad that Windows is not POSIX compliant, why can't I run bash, GIT, ssh, and a decent package manager on Windows? that will be it's downfall because the hardcore devs are all on Linux and OS X

Hardcore graphics programming devs are on Windows.

Those doing games, yes. Those of us doing movies are mostly on Linux. Lots of sci-viz folks are also on Linux.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#349
post #287
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 keep reading stuff like this about Apple losing sight of what matters to developers...but I don’t really know what the big deal is. Aside from a frustrating lack of RAM on the latest MBP, everything seems to be just as good as it was before to me. And even the RAM issue can be solved for me by just not using too much horribly inefficient (electron) software at the same time.

I've heard removing the function/ESC keys for that emoji BS was pretty controversial.

Re: Windows for Linux Nerds

#350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say you pin can pin it down mostly to those reasons: * Do you have active snapshots (vssadmin list shadows)? Halves random writes to disk in the worst case. * Do you have USN journaling enabled (fsutil usn queryjournal c:)? Adds extra IO to meta-data operations. * NTFS/FAT is optimized for fast directory listing speed so modifying files also modifies directory entries. Nothing one can do about that (except being…

Regarding the last point. Windows Defender will normally be active by default on Windows 10 unless you go out of your way to turn it off.

It's not like editing a value in the registry is "going out of your way", it's almost standard Windows practice by now.
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