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

Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

anandtech.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 80 posts

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#71

Post by harrygeez »

pritambaral wrote: post #47
jchw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL is not for developing Windows applications, it's a full Linux ABI-compatible subsystem. The intent is to run Linux-based operating systems and tools unmodified. It's mostly just to make life easier for people developing on platforms like Ruby on Rails where Unix has better support. WSL feels no more dangerous than Wine.

> WSL feels no more dangerous than Wine. Wine is not really a fair comparison against WSL, especially when it comes to comparing 'potential to extinguish the embraced'. Wine has nowhere near the amount and quality of resources (both human and IP) available to WSL.

Put it this way. People who want to use Linux will keep using Linux and are very unlikely to switch. Microsoft obviously wants a piece of that Apple cake where people want a polished and consumer grade OS with a unix-y environment to write code.

This is likely a response to the fact that today's web OSS dev tools are first class UNIX Cli programs

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#72

Post by btschaegg »

megaman22 wrote: post #20
pbowyer wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's already so complicated to run even git / vagrant on a windows machine, that I'm wondering how are people developing with it. I find Git fine, but the Vagrant/Virtualbox ecosystem... I dread every Windows update because something will break the setup, and that will be a day lost to figuring out which version of every component I need in order for my Virtual Machines to boot/build. I would pay money for somethin…

Run VMs in Hyper-V. That just works

I could find many ways to describe HyperV, but "just works" would definitely not be a phrase I'd use.

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#73

Post by btschaegg »

da_chicken wrote: post #4
grewil2 wrote: post #3

Shouldn't it be called Windows Subsystem for GNU? There's a boatload of GNU-tools in there, but does it include a Linux kernel too?

> Shouldn't it be called Windows Subsystem for GNU? No, that's a separate module that requires the Windows Subsystem for Pedants.

I'm just waiting for the rms rant demanding that it be called GNU/Windows. :) Then again, I guess rms cares much more about the non-free nature of Windows...

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#74

Post by extralego »

zmix wrote: post #69
hirsin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What isolated machine? Open up WSL, run "CMD.exe notepad", then top. You'll see the instance of notepad running, and then you can go kill it with taskmanager. People still seem to think it's a VM when it's not - the pid in the Linux system is the same pid in Windows, it just hits a different part of the kernel.

You are right, I was assuming, it'd be running in a VM. At least, that was what was being said, when this project got introduced to me a while ago. I still don't sympathize and would prefer Microsoft putting other efforts, than this, into making Windows more POSIX aware/compatible.

Maybe that will still happen? Getting this bridge built on new bedrock would make the transition more optional, so the vast amounts of different user types can switch as they please.

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#75

Post by ape4 »

hirsin wrote: post #38
zmix wrote: post #23

Wouldn't it have been better for Microsoft to support https://midipix.org , which would have resulted in more finegrained POSIX support for Windows, rather than installing an isolated machine, that runs seperate?

What isolated machine? Open up WSL, run "CMD.exe notepad", then top. You'll see the instance of notepad running, and then you can go kill it with taskmanager. People still seem to think it's a VM when it's not - the pid in the Linux system is the same pid in Windows, it just hits a different part of the kernel.

What does just "notepad.exe" do?

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#76

Post by hirsin »

ape4 wrote: post #75
hirsin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What isolated machine? Open up WSL, run "CMD.exe notepad", then top. You'll see the instance of notepad running, and then you can go kill it with taskmanager. People still seem to think it's a VM when it's not - the pid in the Linux system is the same pid in Windows, it just hits a different part of the kernel.

What does just "notepad.exe" do?

It will also launch notepad.

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#77

Post by hirsin »

zmix wrote: post #69
hirsin wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What isolated machine? Open up WSL, run "CMD.exe notepad", then top. You'll see the instance of notepad running, and then you can go kill it with taskmanager. People still seem to think it's a VM when it's not - the pid in the Linux system is the same pid in Windows, it just hits a different part of the kernel.

You are right, I was assuming, it'd be running in a VM. At least, that was what was being said, when this project got introduced to me a while ago. I still don't sympathize and would prefer Microsoft putting other efforts, than this, into making Windows more POSIX aware/compatible.

Yeah, when it was first released no one wanted to believe it was kernel level compat.

Curious - what would you prefer to see Windows do to make it more POSIX compatible beyond the current work of making it actually POSIX compatible? I mean, you can use any package manager you like to install any Linux application - it's literally POSIX compatible.

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#78

Post by jjeaff »

tybit wrote: post #33
frankohn wrote: post #8

I advice people to not use WSL. It seems to me that this is the first step of their well-known embrace, extend, extinguish microsoft's strategy. They are now embracing the gnu/linux way of working like the packaging tools, the command line with the shells, the easy of having a compiler and developer tools, etc etc. At the same time they don't let you create from WSL standard Windows application that you can redistrib…

Why would they want to embrace, extend and extinguish Linux when nowadays the competition is no longer Linux but AWS, Google etc?

Even AWS and gcp offer windows instances.

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#79

Post by tatersolid »

btschaegg wrote: post #72
megaman22 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Run VMs in Hyper-V. That just works

I could find many ways to describe HyperV, but "just works" would definitely not be a phrase I'd use.

In comparison with VirtualBox, Hyper-V “just works”

Re: Command Line and Windows Subsystem for Linux – The Windows 10 April Update

#80

Post by tatersolid »

maxyme wrote: post #22
Scarbutt wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

bloated system and the updates are very heavy Really though, they asume everyone has a 100Mbps and a SSD, every new update is like a new install of windows, glad I don't have to use it.

On one of my old computers with a i7 Sandy Bridge but a 7200rpm hard drive the update took 2 hours

I’ve had do-release-upgrade take 4+ hours on spinning rust.

It’s like Canonical thinks we all are made of money have recent supercomputers with SSDs!

Post reply on HN