861–870 of 1001 posts
Sec guy (who was mainly a linux guy) was never happy to let people use WSL in corp due to security bugs. Can anyone chime in - is this still a concern? Was it ever a concern?
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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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I'll say it too! There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features. You can't just edit Excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets, or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.
Can you give me an example of such advanced features? I really don't understand what outstanding feature did they pack in this "Excel" which has no alternative? If the only problem is migrating from XLSX to some other format I'm sure this is trivial and some tooling must be available.
There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.
The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.
If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.
There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.
Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.
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The obvious answer: you can't. I work in constrained environment with an IT department that provides the hardware and (most of) the software I develop on. I agree with all the WSL cheering here, it integrates almost seamlessly. But you're asking the wrong question. It should be "why not use MacOS?" if you need a stable UI with UNIX underneath :).
That's another sound option, but as a person who doesn't like Homebrew and stuffing /usr/local with tons of things, a lightweight Linux VM becomes mandatory after some point on macOS, too. Other than that, macOS plus some tools (Fileduck, Forklift, Tower, Kaleidoscope to name a few), you can be 99% there.
I use macos as my daily driver, but any real work on it happens on a linux container or VM. Using one of {cursor, vscode, windsurf} with a devcontainer is a much better approach for me.
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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…
Windows LTSC already exists, but Microsoft, in all their wisdom, restricts it to enterprise licensees only, and seems to actively discourage using it as a desktop OS. The first problem is of course fixable with some KMS server shenanigans, but the second can be kinda painful when it comes to keeping drivers up-to-date, installing apps that rely on features LTSC excludes (and doesn't provide an easy way to install man…
I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux. If you are in Windows and have the urge to use Linux, do the proper switch once and for all. You will never look back. I haven't in almost 15 years. Given what Windows has become and already discussed here on HN I would even hesitate to run it in a virtual machine. Edit: more than 15 years.
Except that if you require anything that is GPU-related (like gaming, Adobe suite apps, etc) you'll need to have a secondary GPU to passthrough it to the VM, which is not something that everyone has. So, if you don't have a secondary GPU, you'll need to live without graphics acceleration in the VM... so for a lot of people the "oh you just need to use a VM!" solution is not feasible, because most of the software that…
I will do anything to avoid Windows but I miss Premiere.
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On linux it's quite trivial. KVM is part of the kernel. Installing libvirt and virt-manager makes it really easy to create vms. I'd say even passing through a GPU is not that hard these days though maybe that depends on hardware configuration more.
“On Linux it’s quite trivial…” giving big “ or a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”[1] vibes. Convenience features in software are huge and even if a system is well designed a system…
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
This probably isn't even the best dang comment about the situation, it's just the one I could find quickly.
WSL 2 is one of the biggest reasons I'm able to be productive as a blind software developer. With it I'm able to enjoy the best desktop screen reader accessibility (Windows and NVDA) as well as the best developer tools (Linux). I hate Microsoft's AI and ads force-feeding as much as anyone else but trust me, you'd do the same if you were in my shoes. Screen reader accessibility on Mac Os is stagnating even faster than…
I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux. If you are in Windows and have the urge to use Linux, do the proper switch once and for all. You will never look back. I haven't in almost 15 years. Given what Windows has become and already discussed here on HN I would even hesitate to run it in a virtual machine. Edit: more than 15 years.
Counterpoint: things like the Valve Index for VR simply don't behave well in this environment no matter how much I've worked on getting it there. I'm not a novice either, $dayjob has me working on the lowest levels of Linux on a daily basis. I did linux from scratch on a Pentium 2 when I was 12. All that to say yes I happen to agree but edge cases are out there. The blanket statement doesn't apply for all use cases