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Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

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Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#31

Post by shpongled »

azinman2 wrote: post #27
shpongled wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been using it every single day since it was announced. It's pretty nice. There are compatibility issues with some programs (mainly networking and a couple weird syscalls), but for 90+% of things, I've had no issues.

Why not just run Linux? Or use a Mac?

I run Linux at home on a laptop (arch), and had been dual booting my desktop for a while. Games, easy access to Office, and software compatibility issues for work software limit me primarily to windows. Plus I've been using Windows since '95. And with WSL, I don't need to dual boot anymore.

Never used a Mac, and never will. Don't see the point, everything is ridiculously overpriced. I build my own PC's

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#32

Post by wfunction »

OhSoHumble wrote: post #30
tyrw wrote: post #2

In my experience, emulators are never quite the same as the real deal. Has anyone used this, and if so how was it?

I had it break on me a while ago because there was no inode support and that's needed for hot-reloading of code when developing with web frameworks. I'd rather just use Linux and not be surprised by anything.

Would you mind elaborating a bit? What's the exact functionality that's required? Is it like notification support for file modification or something?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#33

Post by justabystander »

geofft wrote: post #8
blibble wrote: post #3

finally I can remove the win32 specific code from all the open source software I maintain not sure that was what Microsoft was going for though...

Depends on your software - it doesn't get you integration with other Win32 apps or features, notably the GUI, since it's a separate subsystem. If your app is a database server, probably yes. If your app is a monitoring agent, definitely no. (I'm curious if you've used it or you're just commenting based on the headline?)

> If your app is a database server, probably yes.

They explicitly don't support that. From the article:

> Linux distro's [sic] running atop WSL are for interactive user scenarios, NOT for running production workloads on Apache/nginx/MySQL/MongoDB/etc.

And the last time I checked, it's not suitable for services. The moment I closed the bash terminal, all the processes I had running through WSL terminated - including nginx and tomcat.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#34

Post by zbuttram »

eridius wrote: post #21
nikanj wrote: post #19

Can someone point to a decent X server for windows?

From the article: > NO current plans to support X/GUI apps, desktops, servers, etc. at this time

No plans to support specifically, but a surprising amount of things work simply due to their effort making the rest of it work.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#35

Post by ruricolist »

semaphoreP wrote: post #11
tyrw wrote: post #2

In my experience, emulators are never quite the same as the real deal. Has anyone used this, and if so how was it?

It works great for me. Like others have mentioned, it's not an emulator, so I don't feel sandboxed using it. The main downside is one of the caveats they mention: "Linux files are NOT accessible from Windows." Hopefully they can fix this in the future.

Since you have to uninstall and reinstall WSL to upgrade it, it makes more sense to store your files on the Windows file system and symlink them into your home directory.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#36

Post by wvenable »

tyrw wrote: post #9
therein wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not an emulator and the experience is pretty great for anything involving Linux as a workstation. Even though they say "NO current plans to support X/GUI apps, desktops, servers, etc. at this time", this is achievable by installing VcXsrv.

Perhaps emulator was a poor descriptor in this case -- I haven't used it. But it is running a subset of functionality non-natively, correct?

It's a pretty interesting design -- Microsoft created a new class of processes called pico processes; these are native processes run without the normal Win32 overhead and are managed by a special pico process driver. For WSL, the driver implements the Linux kernel API and process loading. Linux API calls are mapped to existing Windows APIs or implemented directly in the driver.

Everything else in the WSL is the regular Ubuntu user land. So all the processes are "native" and they make calls to a kernel that acts just like Linux.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#37

Post by justabystander »

semaphoreP wrote: post #23
shpongled wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

%AppData%\local\lxss\rootfs Have fun

I recall there were issues if you tried to modify those files in Windows. Maybe they've fixed that in recent updates, but my impression was that while I could see the files, I shouldn't be touching them.

Yes. Updates to those files didn't seem to be reflected in bash until I'd closed and reopened the terminal.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#38

Post by zbuttram »

wfunction wrote: post #32
OhSoHumble wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had it break on me a while ago because there was no inode support and that's needed for hot-reloading of code when developing with web frameworks. I'd rather just use Linux and not be surprised by anything.

Would you mind elaborating a bit? What's the exact functionality that's required? Is it like notification support for file modification or something?

Yep, but they fixed it already, fix rolled out with the last major Windows 10 update.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#39

Post by jaxn »

tyrw wrote: post #9
therein wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is not an emulator and the experience is pretty great for anything involving Linux as a workstation. Even though they say "NO current plans to support X/GUI apps, desktops, servers, etc. at this time", this is achievable by installing VcXsrv.

Perhaps emulator was a poor descriptor in this case -- I haven't used it. But it is running a subset of functionality non-natively, correct?

I don't know that I would call it a subset either. It's bash, all of it. And you compile for Linux, and it works.

I develop a rails app on Windows using WSL daily. Ruby runs in Linux and gems compile to Linux, not win32. So there is no weirdness compiling something like ImageMagic.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#40

Post by alexanderdmitri »

tyrw wrote: post #2

In my experience, emulators are never quite the same as the real deal. Has anyone used this, and if so how was it?

With the Creators Update there was major improvement. Here's how I'd put it:

I used to bring a picture of home with me on business trips, now the house just comes along more or less (there are the occasional plumbing issues on the road and it's jarring sometimes when I go outside and realize I'm in some weird neighborhood with maple syrup coating the sidewalks and immediately I'm getting hustled by some guy with his arm around my shoulders and people aren't walking anywhere, just standing there looking at me without blinking and even with the hustler spinning his yarn there's this eerie, heavy silence like a summer storm always on the horizon and I start to miss the fresh clean mountain air back home all the while trying to disengage myself from the hustler without starting too much of a conflict but when I step away my right shoe stays stuck on the sticky street and I stumble over and the hustler, before I've even hit the ground, he's already got his fingers around the wallet in my back pocket and still everyone just stands there watching as I smack pavement ... you know?).

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