Live data from Hacker News

Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

201–210 of 231 posts

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#201
post #166

Barely related, but what's with the whole "Creators Update"/"Fall Creators Update" thing? It's not "Creator's Update," so I guess it's supposed to be targetting "Content Creators," right? But looking at the changes in these updates, I'm really not sure what's been added for any sort of content creator. Windows Movie Maker hasn't turned into Premiere, Paint hasn't turned into Photoshop, etc. So where the fuck does the…

Yeah, at the time I could still understand them calling the original Creators Update that way, just to have some marketing buzzword to throw at people, but "Fall Creators Update" is really just the dumbest thing I've seen in a while.

Not only is its meaning just as nonexistent as the first time around, it also just seems like something that some guy thought up on the spot in a meeting, after remembering that he was still supposed to ask the marketing department about that.

It's not in any way a remarkable name and it's going to be confusing to many people as well as to search engines, making troubleshooting any issues with it unnecessarily hard.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#204
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t there a way to get a free beta version? I got an image once for Virtual Box.

Why would you want to? Windows is for corporates putting spreadsheets in front of coin counters. For everything else there is Linux (or FreeBSD), which is probably why Micro$oft is porting SQL server to it.

The 90s called, they want your comment back.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed, some advantages I can think of with Linux. * Containers (LXC, systemd-nspawn, Docker, etc. and native virtualization with QEMU/KVM), Apple doesn't even come close here. * Use the WM/DE of your choice. * Superior package management (pacman, apt, dnf, flatpak, etc). * Use the distro of your choice. * Use the latest GNU software unlike some crippled bash version like in Mac. * Decide if you want bleeding edge or…

Most of that is supported on Windows * Docker is supported and it will get better. Nano server supports it otb. * Chocolatey is a great package manager. Others also exist. * You can use most GNU tools. * You can use any hardware you want * Performance is good on Windows * Freedom, i.e. FOSS is ubiquitous on Windows too (not as much as on Linux for sure tho). * Privacy and security is good on Windows 10. Linux desktop…

Honest question

Did they solve long file/path name issue? Remember Windows 7 slow FS with large file count and npm/js breaking everything due to long, nested paths.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me it's all about power management: Sleep and hibernate still manage to break periodically. Higher battery consumption unless I'm willing to break out powertop and tweak endlessly. Meanwhile, the dev I do is all cross-platform Java and scripting. WSL provides a useful unix-like environment when I need it. And when it really matters I break out a VM.

Sleep and hibernate have never broken for me on various ThinkPads, what hardware and distro are you using? These days tlp gives power management on Linux a good set of defaults. Powertop tweaking should not be necessary as long as you use a distro that supports tlp.

Sleep and hibernate have never broken for me on various ThinkPads, what hardware and distro are you using?

Happened right around the switch to systemd with Debian Sid on my old T410, which by that point was probably 5 years old. IIRC, the system would resume from sleep or hibernate but the console would not recover properly, so you had to force a VT switch to get the video to reinitialize. Just a huge PITA.

I agree, it had been stable for some time up to that point, but when it broken again, that was the last straw for me, and as a consequence I've stuck with Windows 10 on my Carbon.

These days tlp gives power management on Linux a good set of defaults. Powertop tweaking should not be necessary as long as you use a distro that supports tlp.

Could be. But I'm happy with Windows 10 on my Carbon and have no intention of switching.

It used to be that Linux was on balance the better choice for my use case, being more stable (as in, fewer crashes) and more transparent, with a superior dev experience. Yes, it was always a platform for tweakers... things never seemed to consistently work quite right (hell, back around 2010, it was a miracle if sleep or hibernate worked at all). But since you could open up the hood and mess around, I was willing to live with that given the benefits. As a result, for 20 years Linux was the operating system I ran on every piece of hardware I owned. I even built a 3-tuner MythTV backend and two front-end systems for my home back when I still had cable... you can't imagine all the tweaking!

But over the years the gap has closed considerably.

Windows has become substantially faster and more stable, and tools like WSL have made it a much nicer dev platform. Linux is still far more transparent, obviously, but the stability of Windows 10 means that just doesn't matter that much.

Meanwhile, with Linux, in my experience the need to continuously tweak and deal with random breakages continues to be a fact of life, while distros have become far less transparent through the switch to systemd, making tweaking and fixing things substantially harder (trying to diagnose those issues I described earlier was basically impossible).

As a result, Linux simply doesn't offer enough value for me, at this point, to motivate the hassle.

Of course, as always, YMMV. Some people have a higher threshold for this stuff (certainly I used to be a lot more willing to put up with Linux's idiosyncrasies), and different hardware, distros, etc, perform differently. So I'm not going to claim my experiences are universal. But they are my experiences.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're just looking to do open source for the fun of writing software then by all means ignore portability(which is a totally legit approach). However if you're goal is to have an impact with your software then supporting win32 is a good bet since you're going to find an order of magnitude more users on win32. You'll also probably want iOS, Android and other platforms that aren't drop-in ports for POSIX if you wan…

iOS and Android are largely POSIX-compatible. Windows is not as an intentional anticompetitive design choice. Now that WSL is mature, there's no reason to play into that nonense any further (though in my opinion there was never any reason to).

What is your product ? What software do you write ?
Post reply on HN