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PM for Bash on Windows here. In answer to some of your questions: "Current beef is the BashOnWindows alpha. Why was this pushed out so early?" We released thi

PM for Bash on Windows here. In answer to some of your questions: "Current beef is the BashOnWindows alpha. Why was this pushed out so early?" We released this feature early because we wanted to get it into the hands of the community in order to learn how they'd use it, what tools they'd run on it, how it would stand-up to real-world use, etc. And the community has been AWESOME, filing lots of bugs (https://aka.ms/winbashgithub https://aka.ms/winbashgithub) and engaging in an overwhelmingly positive and supportive manner. Thanks to all of you that have provided your feedback. "Quite literally nothing works on it." This is just not accurate. There are a large number of things that do work surprisingly well on Bash/WSL, even in this early stage in its development. While Scott and I were on Skype, prepping for //Build, I curl'ed the Redis source tarball, unzipped it, apt-get install build-essential, built, and ran Redis, within minutes, without any modifications. Are there many things that don't work? Yes. Absolutely. We've been very, VERY transparent about this and, in fact, state explicitly in our intro video (https://aka.ms/winbashav https://aka.ms/winbashav) and our announcement (https://aka.ms/winbashann https://aka.ms/winbashann) that there will be many gaps and that lots of things won't work. But let's be fair here, we're talking about an early beta feature in early builds of a beta OS that you choose to download for free. If you don't know that you're going to experience issues, you should not be running Insiders builds. "Ubuntu Trusty was a weird release to begin with" No, it's not. That you don't like it is merely a reality of the Linux ecosystem: Ask 100 Linux dev's which distro to use and you'll get perhaps 20 suggestions - Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, CentOs, RedHat, Suse, Gentoo, etc. WSL is designed to be distro agnostic, but we had to start somewhere, so we chose a stable, supported distro's that is very popular with developers - Ubuntu 14.04. We plan on supporting other distro as we expand and improve our implementation of WSL. "it's very difficult to get modern versions of gcc, clang, python 3.5 or even ffmpeg" Really? You're suggesting you don't build everything from source??? ;) Realistically, we're aiming to benefit the most developers possible with this first release - there are far more developers using 14.04 right now than newer versions. And there's FAR more existing code targetting 14.04 era toolsets than the latest and greatest. We'll get there, but you'll have to be just a little patient while we improve the breadth and depth of WSL's implementation.

tacos 10y ago
First of all: software development 101. Is WSL even remotely feature-complete? So let's not call it a beta. I'm not sure why you guys have such a hard-on for Redis, but... whatever. It is clean code that compiles on old toolsets. Much other code does not. Keep rocking those Redis demos, setting and getting values is fascinating. :) Debating distros is pointless but I have noticed that Ruby (and oddly, Microsoft folk) tend to land on Ubuntu. Fine, no big deal. But Trusty was a weird release for them -- and the Canonical packages sort of suck. It's mid-2016. How much C++14 support would you expect to get from installing build-essentials? Shouldn't it compile code I'm writing in Visual Studio 2013? Would you expect to have Python 3.5 available? Would you expect to be able to type "apt-get install ffmpeg"? For various reasons these basic things do not work on Trusty. And then you made it worse by shipping bits that didn't even handle apt-get properly. I'm not anti-Ubuntu other than to point out every bag o' bits reaches a point in its lifecycle where it's a total pain in the ass to set up a modern development environment. Trusty is past that point. It's an unfortunate thing to launch with. Not being able to move forward is also unfortunate. Don't punt on that, trust me. If WSL actually worked, people would be screaming about that instead of all these noise bugs. You'll see. If you want to triage this, get Canonical to offer some more modern packages. Again, I'm not sure why Microsoft hopped into bed with Canonical (especially on the Azure/container side)... but ok. Now get them to ease some pain. I shouldn't have to install a half-dozen shady PPAs to try the stuff that hits the HN homepage every day. And I truly despise this "let's see what the community wants" fake project management technique. You know damn well what features you need to implement. You knew damn well what C99 stuff was needed 10 years ago. "Send us a note if it doesn't work" is lazy, shortsighted and damaging to all parties. It's community management, not engineering. Project Management via squeaky wheel is just stupid in 2016. It didn't work prioritizing C99 features and it's a particularly stupid way to implement a shim library for Linux userspace. This is Open development done wrong.
jmkni 10y ago
Is there any way to restore Bash on Windows to its factory settings as it were? I've enjoyed playing around with it, although I will echo what others are saying in that it certainly does still seem rather broken. It would be nice to have a reset switch of some sort for when it breaks.

tacos 10y ago

First of all: software development 101. Is WSL even remotely feature-complete? So let's not call it a beta. I'm not sure why you guys have such a hard-on for Redis, but... whatever. It is clean code that compiles on old toolsets. Much other code does not. Keep rocking those Redis demos, setting and getting values is fascinating. :) Debating distros is pointless but I have noticed that Ruby (and oddly, Microsoft folk) tend to land on Ubuntu. Fine, no big deal. But Trusty was a weird release for them -- and the Canonical packages sort of suck. It's mid-2016. How much C++14 support would you expect to get from installing build-essentials? Shouldn't it compile code I'm writing in Visual Studio 2013? Would you expect to have Python 3.5 available? Would you expect to be able to type "apt-get install ffmpeg"? For various reasons these basic things do not work on Trusty. And then you made it worse by shipping bits that didn't even handle apt-get properly. I'm not anti-Ubuntu other than to point out every bag o' bits reaches a point in its lifecycle where it's a total pain in the ass to set up a modern development environment. Trusty is past that point. It's an unfortunate thing to launch with. Not being able to move forward is also unfortunate. Don't punt on that, trust me. If WSL actually worked, people would be screaming about that instead of all these noise bugs. You'll see. If you want to triage this, get Canonical to offer some more modern packages. Again, I'm not sure why Microsoft hopped into bed with Canonical (especially on the Azure/container side)... but ok. Now get them to ease some pain. I shouldn't have to install a half-dozen shady PPAs to try the stuff that hits the HN homepage every day. And I truly despise this "let's see what the community wants" fake project management technique. You know damn well what features you need to implement. You knew damn well what C99 stuff was needed 10 years ago. "Send us a note if it doesn't work" is lazy, shortsighted and damaging to all parties. It's community management, not engineering. Project Management via squeaky wheel is just stupid in 2016. It didn't work prioritizing C99 features and it's a particularly stupid way to implement a shim library for Linux userspace. This is Open development done wrong.

jmkni 10y ago

Is there any way to restore Bash on Windows to its factory settings as it were? I've enjoyed playing around with it, although I will echo what others are saying in that it certainly does still seem rather broken. It would be nice to have a reset switch of some sort for when it breaks.