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

Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

blogs.msdn.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 231 posts

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#51

Post by geofft »

justabystander wrote: post #33
geofft wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

Ah, thanks. I've only played around with interactively but that makes sense.

It really seems like the primary use case is supporting Docker/OCI containers for local dev, so you can keep using a Windows desktop instead of switching to a Linux one.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#52

Post by corysama »

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...

My theory of what they are going for is to migrate server devs from Macbooks running BSD Terminal.app to cheaper Windows laptops running WSL terminals. Once you have migrated away from Mac, getting your server code to run on Windows natively becomes a lot easier and more attractive.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#53

Post by nikanj »

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

Yes, I know Microsoft doesn't have an X server. This is why I asked if people could recommend a 3rd party one.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#54

Post by untog »

43224gg252 wrote: post #44
vvanders wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless you're going to force your users to install WSL up front(which is a pretty poor first contact) I think you might be better served by keeping it around.

Why? The Linux sub-system is the best part of Windows. He's doing them a favor.

Extra dependencies are rarely ever doing anyone a favour. Yet another thing to keep up to date, occupy disk space, memory...

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#55

Post by wentoodeep »

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've been using this for back-end dev since 14.04 distro (lastest update is xenial). Quite stable and very fast, no emulator or vm come close to WSL. Best gift from MS to devs after VS.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#57

Post by sayelt »

dijit wrote: post #49

Great news, this will hopefully allow our developers to make code on Linux since they've been forbidden from running VMs and it's extra overhead. I hope Visual Studio gets good integration here because it truly is a first class IDE and it's hard for me to tempt our windows developers away based on that fact combined with the "We don't support linux on desktops" and "No VMS" attitude of my company.

Sheesh, your company sounds like a crappy place to work.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#58

Post by moomin »

dijit wrote: post #49

Great news, this will hopefully allow our developers to make code on Linux since they've been forbidden from running VMs and it's extra overhead. I hope Visual Studio gets good integration here because it truly is a first class IDE and it's hard for me to tempt our windows developers away based on that fact combined with the "We don't support linux on desktops" and "No VMS" attitude of my company.

I'd like that too. The main thing holding it back is the file interop. If a windows program creates a file in a Linux directory bash literally can't see it. I've worked around this by putting my real work in Windows directories and symlinking then into my WSL home, but I can see this biting me at some point in the future.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta

#59

Post by SwellJoe »

frozenport wrote: post #4

Does anybody use this?

I used it when I first got my current laptop because Linux couldn't work the video properly (it could either do 800x600 resolution stably, or do 4k and freeze every few minutes). It was nice enough. I switched back to Linux as soon as the drivers got good enough and haven't looked back, but I was pleasantly surprised by how nice development has gotten on Windows in recent years. If I weren't building systems management tools that kinda need the system to be "real", I could see Windows+WSL being a great combo for people building multi-platform applications.
Post reply on HN