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The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

blogs.windows.com

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Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#761

Post by modo_mario »

sertraline wrote: post #341
1oooqooq wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think everyone tried that. gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point. i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again. then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again. then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again. now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file…

It always infuriates me when people say Windows is all about games. Techies are so detached from reality they forget that people have creative hobbies and have to use industrial grade software. Doing creative hobbies on Linux is an act of sadomasochism. And on top of that, Linux and MacOS cannot run software from 3 years ago while Windows can run software from 35 years ago. And on top of that, Linux is completely unu…

>And on top of that, Linux is completely unusable to Japanese/Chinese speakers due to how hard it is to input the moon runes

How do Deepin and such solve this?

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#762

Post by pjmlp »

thewebguyd wrote: post #105
elif wrote: post #7

Every time I praise WSL on hn I pay the karma tax but I will die on this hill. WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously. It's as powerful as Linux with some janky custom local docker wrappers for device support, local storage mapping, and network mapping. Except it's not janky at all. It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop…

You can accomplish the same with Distrobox on Linux, but there's definitely something to be said about having the best of both worlds by running Windows + WSL. I honestly think Microsoft could win back some mind share from Apple if they: * Put out a version of windows without all the crap. Call it Dev edition or something and turn off or down the telemetry, preinstalled stuff, ads, and Copilot. * Put some effort into…

Outside US and countries of similar income level, Windows is doing quite alright in mindshare, and will keep doing that unless Apples stops pretending being the computer version of audiophile.

I on the other hand cannot get an affordable Mac that has the same GPU, disk space and memory size as my workstation class laptop.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#763

Post by rossy »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #746
jjcm wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fair comment, but the argument I'd make against that is a lot of those creative tools are moving to the web. I personally work for Figma, and have seen that first hand. UI/UX design was entirely OSX/Windows centric for the last 40 years, and now it's platform agnostic. Even video editors are just at the nacent stage of looking at the web as an editor surface. Totally hear you though for things like CNC milling soft…

Software moving to the web is not a win for Linux, it's a loss for everyone .

No, it's definitely a win for Linux. I get it. I've dabbled in software minimalism. I love native dev. I know the web "sucks." But the range of mainstream software available for Linux has exploded now that software is moving to the web (including Electron) and I can't see how that's a bad thing from the perspective of a Linux user. Of course I'd rather open a web browser to run an app than change my entire operating system to run an app.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#764

Post by fsflover »

elif wrote: post #7

Every time I praise WSL on hn I pay the karma tax but I will die on this hill. WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously. It's as powerful as Linux with some janky custom local docker wrappers for device support, local storage mapping, and network mapping. Except it's not janky at all. It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop…

> Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24.

Sounds like you could benefit from Qubes OS, which runs everything in VMs with a great UX. Including Windows.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#765

Post by pjmlp »

alex_smart wrote: post #180
thewebguyd wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can accomplish the same with Distrobox on Linux, but there's definitely something to be said about having the best of both worlds by running Windows + WSL. I honestly think Microsoft could win back some mind share from Apple if they: * Put out a version of windows without all the crap. Call it Dev edition or something and turn off or down the telemetry, preinstalled stuff, ads, and Copilot. * Put some effort into…

I don't think Microsoft losing the mind share has anything to do with software. Macbooks are winning the laptop war because of superior hardware.

Only on countries where people earn salaries big enough to pay for the Apple hardware tax.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#766

Post by udev4096 »

grishka wrote: post #728
udev4096 wrote: post #724

I still can't believe how people use windows as their main system with all the extremely invasive telemetry and bogus "AI" features that hogs a LOT of resources at idle

Some people don't know that computers can be fast. Others modify their system to remove/neutralize all this crap. There are even tools to automate that.

"Some people are just stupid"

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#767

Post by _flux »

okanat wrote: post #477
tacker2000 wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting comment there: “ I still hope to see a true "Windows Subsystem for Linux" by Microsoft or a windows becoming a linux distribution itself and dropping the NT kernel to legacy. Windows is currently overloaded with features and does lack a package manager to only get what you need...”

NT is a better consumer kernel that Linux. It can survive many driver crashes that Linux cannot. Why should Microsoft drop a better kernel for a worse one?

Meanwhile in Linux we cannot even restart compositor without killing all GUI apps.

I swear sometimes progress goes backwards..

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#768

Post by dncornholio »

zamadatix wrote: post #323
nickserv wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, which games gave you problems?

Unfortunately many of the more popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat tend to consider "made working on Linux" a bug rather than a feature. E.g. Easy Anti-Cheat and Unreal Engine both support Linux natively but Epic still doesn't want to allow it for their own game, Fortnite. https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781

Nowhere it says they don't want to.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#769

Post by Flamentono2 »

baq wrote: post #165
JonChesterfield wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

putty is longer necessary? That would be a wild upgrade in usability for the work laptop, shall go try it

openssh has been an optional windows component for... almost a decade now? including the server, so you can ssh into powershell as easily as into any unix-like. (last time I set it up there was some fiddling with file permissions required for key auth to work, but it does work.)

I feel old but its only 6 years not a decade :P

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#770

Post by jpc0 »

ok123456 wrote: post #512
jchw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More powerful than Linux" is silly. It's a VM. The most useful thing is that it does a bunch of convenience features for you. I am not suggesting that it is not extremely convenient, but it's not somehow more powerful than just using Linux. You know what's even more convenient than a VM? Not needing a VM and still having the exact same functionality. And you don't need a bunch of janky wrapper scripts, there's more…

My coworkers stubbornly try to use WSL instead of Linux directly. They constantly run into corner cases and waste time working around them compared to just using Linux. Some tooling detects that it is running on Windows, and some detects that it is running on Linux. In practice, it's the worst of both worlds.

I would love to hear about these edge cases and which tooling fails to detect they they were launched form linux.

Sounds a lot like a picnic problem but you didn’t give nearly enough details.

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