9 ms·

Running I3 Window Manager on Ubuntu for Windows

234 points by bketelsen 10y ago

bketelsen 10y ago
author here - would love advice or tips on how to get dbus running so settings work well and other WMs work like Gnome.
- shlorn 10y ago
  Nice work. A few days ago I tried xfce4 with little luck, although xfce4-terminal + Xming get me pretty much everything I need. Windows ConHost.exe is a pretty poor terminal (specifically in terms of fonts and colors) but hopefully things will get better in time. Regarding Dbus, I haven't had time to try this out yet: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4ea4w4/fyi_you_can_run_gui_linux_apps_from_bash/d4o0k01 https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4ea4w4/fyi_you_c...
  - bketelsen 10y ago
    hey thanks! I'll give this a shot, might make GNOME start up now.
be5invis 10y ago
Can WLS run Wine?
- Longhanks 10y ago
  Can Wine run WSL's bash.exe?
  - johnhattan 10y ago
    Is it turtles all the way down?
    - frozenport 10y ago
      More like an operating system tower of babel!
  - Zardoz84 10y ago
    There isn't a "WSL's bash.exe". WSL run Ubuntu binaries.
repsilat 10y ago
Incredible. My fancy new Lenovo has gotten no use because they've made it impossible to install another operating system in it. I look forward to giving this a go.
- smcl 10y ago
  Who have, Lenovo?
  - wildster 10y ago
    I have an Lenovo Thinkpad x220 running Ubuntu that I needed to set the BIOS to Legacy.
    - vetinari 10y ago
      Weird. T430s in UEFI mode (with Secure Boot) has no problem with Fedora.
    - smcl 10y ago
      Weird, I didn't have to do anything to get my X250 to play nice with Debian
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - rmsaksida 10y ago
      I had a x220 and it worked fine with Ubuntu in EFI-only mode. Same for my current x230. Probably boots 1 or 2 seconds faster because of that. But I never managed to get it working by doing the partitioning work myself (which I prefer because I don't like having everything in a huge partition), you have to format the whole drive and let Ubuntu do its thing.
  - repsilat 10y ago
    Yeah. Yoga 900 ISK2, some BIOS problem that makes the hard drive not show up. No way to fix it except with a BIOS update that hasn't materialized.
clinta 10y ago
It's disappointing that i3 is constrained to one window. The ability to replace Microsoft's window manager with i3 and allow linux and windows apps to be nicely tiled together would be amazing.
- rcarmo 10y ago
  X was never designed to work like that. I personally run Visual Studio Code (with a patched X lib to allow Electron to start without graphics acceleration) with the "local window manager" (i.e., Windows itself). Works great.
  - colemickens 10y ago
    Okay I'll bite. Why are you running Linux vs∆ code in widnLaASaAAqaa@@@@£
    - colemickens 10y ago
      (Sorry, I put my phone in my pocket and this apparently happened. Wish I could delete it, didn't even know it sent, not a fan of my tone, apologies.)
    - rcarmo 10y ago
      Because I want full integration with a Git CLI that uses the exact same plugins as I use in Linux. Git on Windows is a pain for me.
- 616c 10y ago
  Now, it ain't tiling, but I once worked (not as the first guy, but took it over as a major project and the hell out of it) was one of the ports of Opebox-ish Windows managers (to be more accurate, really an Explorer replacement shell, not a Windows manager traditionally) to Windows XP to build very stripped down Windows kiosk machines with minimal UI and a lot of control, custom UI, and cool fun features. http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php God I miss this. It was way ahead of the time and I guess Microsoft got their UI act together, then lost it, and are trying to find it again. As for tiling, the best you can do are these: https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n https://github.com/ZaneA/HackWM https://github.com/ZaneA/HackWM The latter is by a budding Chicken Lisp; I found him and love a lot of what he does; not sure he is ready for prime-time.
616c 10y ago
Am ... am I falling in love with Windows? Well, time to see if I can get StumpWM running on it, for more hipster cred. (Partly joking, partly serious.)
- lj3 10y ago
  > Am ... am I falling in love with Windows? Spend some time with it again. You'll learn to hate it just as much as you did the first time around. For me, it's because of a single factor: BSOD caused by shitty geforce drivers. I used to think the linux geforce drivers were shit because it was a neglected platform. Now I know the truth: windows geforce drivers are full of pain and tears as well. I don't see any of the same issues on OS X.
  - sz4kerto 10y ago
    Except that graphics drivers on OSX are slower than their Windows or Linux counterparts. There is a lot of problem with Windows, GPU driver quality is not one of them.
  - mook 10y ago
    The specific case of terrible video drivers might have been slightly better these days (because part of it has been moved to user mode, so crashing it just means your screen flashes and weird for a second). Spending more time with it can let you find _different_ things to hate, of course. In general, all software suck.
    - lj3 10y ago
      > because part of it has been moved to user mode, so crashing it just means your screen flashes and weird for a second You mean on Linux, right? Because in Windows 10, going full screen in a youtube video on an external screen routinely causes my entire system to crash (BSOD, error dump, restart).
      - gman99 10y ago
        I'm on windows 10 with a shitty "optimus" enabled laptop. The NVidia drivers routinely crash (typically when viewing a heavy webGL enabled page) and windows 10 just flashes at me and throws up a notification saying my graphics drivers have crashed but it helpfully restarted the drivers for me. Perhaps you have a different issue? Maybe a hardware failure? Windows 10 should not be BSODing for a graphics driver failure
maga 10y ago
Anyone knows when WSL is expected to arrive on non-insider versons?
- tejinderss 10y ago
  2nd august with windows 10 anniversary update
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
616c 10y ago
Another thought: when people complain about the state of Linux email clients, what is so good about the Windows alternatives? Office productivity suites, I get it. But email clients all suck. Mutt's mantra is so true, at least they're honest about sucking less. I believe Linux is a 100% of the time platform because the choice (again, user choice) to run minimal terminal apps means like less than average 50% memory utilization for Thunderbird, which I love, with a web browser GUI and background full text indexing all damn day. Outlook is just as crappy.
- jkahn 10y ago
  Don't write off Outlook without a second thought. It's big with loads of features, yes - but that's what's good about it. If all you need to do is plain text email, sure, Mutt is fine. If you deal with a large amount of email, calendar appointments, tasks, contacts, etc, in a professional role, nothing beats Outlook. There's a reason it's so popular.
  - merb 10y ago
    unfortunatly Outlook 2013-2016 is pretty akward (resources) but I like Outlook 2010. Still I don't use it
  - douche 10y ago
    I've never had an installation of Outlook that stayed stable and usable for more than about six months. It doesn't help that you have other parts of Office that stick their grubby fingers in your address books, calendars, and mail files and do their best to scramble things up.
    - oblio 10y ago
      I don't know what you're doing with it, but I've used Outlook for 2 multinational companies for 4+ years each, had several GB of mails for each (probably hundreds of thousands of email per account, most of them automated), and the worst parts of it were a bug with password resets (it keps asking for my password for about a week after quarterly resets) and the slowness of filter sync with Exchange. As you can see, those were nuisances. Otherwise, it was pretty much rock solid. Several versions, ran them under XP and Windows 7.
yolyolo 10y ago
what about the normal ppl who use linux and dont know all these i3 shit
- drewm1980 10y ago
  I've met some of those people who use linux despite being normal. They complain constantly about Ubuntu's desktop user interface changing. I remind them gently that in linux-land all that crap is optional, but you have to give up on any claim to normalcy... and probably your disk auto-mounter... and any apps that blow up when they aren't able to choose their own size.
  - rmsaksida 10y ago
    I've been having a good run with Ubuntu MATE. MATE Desktop is based around Gnome 2 which is familiar to everyone, and it has sensible choices for all default programs. Ubuntu MATE doesn't have nearly as much bloat as standard Ubuntu, but has all its niceties. I recommend it if you want a 'normal' experience out of Linux.
  - Zardoz84 10y ago
    Try KDE. Not sane defaults, but you can change at your pleasure.
  - aurelianito 10y ago
    Switch them to lubuntu. It is as close to Windows 98 as you can get. I mean it in a good way. It is my standard Linux distribution. All the Ubuntu packages but a simple UI.
ThinkBeat 10y ago
I haven't had any problems with macOS stability lately. Has anyone else experienced what the author describes? Around me Windows 10 has crashed more than macOS. but Windows 10 is really stable too.
- notifier2050 10y ago
  I had random freezes in 10.11.4, but it was fixed in 10.11.5.
- rahkiin 10y ago
  My mac often (once in about two weeks) freezes after trying to unlock. It just shows the load indicator. Need a hard kill to 'fix'. Don't know how to fix it. Note: I never shut my iMac down.
- waiseristy 10y ago
  I've never had Win10 crash on me, nor have I macOS. On the application front though, I have found the Win programs I use crash or hang far less often than their macOS counterparts.
- danieldk 10y ago
  From the post: but I do daily development on an Arch linux desktop sitting next to my MacBook Pro I have a similar set up, both at home and at work, where I use a MacBook for Office, Omni{Focus,Graffle}, etc., but SSH into a Linux machine for serious development word. My reasons are two-fold. First of all, many OS X's command-line tools are behind the times and buggy. For instance, grep segfaults on trivial usages such as[1]: % echo i860 | grep --color -e i860 -e i86 Or returns incorrect results for even trivial expressions: % echo "1234 1234 1234" | egrep -o "^...." 1234 123 4 12 Since I use UNIX command-line tools such as grep daily, I cannot have them fail (yes, I know, get GNU grep from Homebrew). Secondly, Mac hardware is very weak these days, even the Mac Pro is years behind. At the same time, you can get a similarly spec'ed machine on eBay for a couple of hundred of Euros. Plug a card to use CUDA, etc. [1] http://blog.loadzero.com/blog/tracking-down-a-segfault-in-grep/ http://blog.loadzero.com/blog/tracking-down-a-segfault-in-gr... I don't have many real stability problems (kernel panics), but there are oddball bugs everywhere. E.g. Mail.app likes to redownload all my e-mail when I quit and open it.
marmaduke 10y ago
There is a tiling window manager for windows using auto hot key, so entirely native and works on previous versions of Windows too. I seem to have forgotten the name but it worked well when I tried it.
- T-A 10y ago
  There seems to be a whole bunch: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/2rn775/best_tiled_window_manager_for_windows/ https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/2rn775/best_tiled_...
michaelmior 10y ago
> far too many things don’t work in macOS that are required for modern Internet software development It's been a few years since I've actively used Mac OS, but is this really true? Ancedotally it seems like a lot of Web developers still use Mac OS as their OS of choice.
- chris_st 10y ago
  Nope, it's not true, at least for what I do. You can look around [1] to see what kinds of things are just a "brew install" away on macOS... an awful lot of unix-y goodness. I have 61 things installed -- ansible, git, nvm, postgresql, the_silver_searcher, tmux... Since I develop on Linux for work, I don't know offhand of anything that Linux has that I can't get for macOS (not saying there are no such things, but I can't think of any). [1] http://braumeister.org http://braumeister.org
douche 10y ago
Initially I read this as "Running 13 Window Managers on Ubuntu for Windows", which piqued my interest as possibly the most Linux thing I can imagine doing. Still, exciting times.
kristopolous 10y ago
Well it's finally the year of the Linux Desktop.
- noinsight 10y ago
  Actually, I feel like this is the one instance where saying "GNU" instead of Linux is completely accurate, since WSL is not even running the Linux kernel but GNU userland tools... I wonder what Stallman would have to say about that? We've come around full circle to GNU/NT.
  - RubyPinch 10y ago
    If I'm not mistaken, the view is, a) don't want to provide nice tools to windows users because then they'll no longer have the need to switch to a libre system b) do want to provide nice tools to windows users because then they'll get a taste of how liberating freedom is obviously there is a balance there, and I think GNU/NT might be a bit too far into entrenching-the-user for his tastes, though I can't speak for him obviously. It seems there is no political note on his site for the announcement of ubuntu-on-windows.
  - mikegerwitz 10y ago
    Richard calls it "GNU/kWindows" (like GNU/kFreeBSD); I wrote an article with his input a while back: https://mikegerwitz.com/2016/04/GNU-kWindows https://mikegerwitz.com/2016/04/GNU-kWindows
    - kristopolous 10y ago
      I think Gnudows is a pretty catchy portmanteau.
  - sciurus 10y ago
    It's not running the Linux kernel, but it's implementing Linux kernel interfaces. Microsoft may ship a lot of GNU software now but presumably the same interfaces could be used to run alternatives like busybox and uclibc. This keeps the naming debates interesting, I suppose.
nray 10y ago
dyed in the wool...
- bketelsen 10y ago
  fixed, thanks.
Zardoz84 10y ago
I work on Windows. I can say that Thunderbird is far better that Outlook.
- dingo_bat 10y ago
  I have the opposite experience.
  - raesene9 10y ago
    I agree, I've tried both and whilst neither are the fastest programs in the universe, Outlook 2016 has been better than Thunderbird from a performance standpoint. Thunderbird was so slow, I went back to Outlook.
FeepingCreature 10y ago
Gentoo called it eleven years ago. http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/ http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/
mempko 10y ago
I'm one of those weird people that uses free software even if it isn't better. The quality of the software is beside the point.
- midnitewarrior 10y ago
  If you're not using the best functional tool for the job, the only person you are hurting is you.
  - mempko 10y ago
    Sometimes I use software when people aren't paying me. I even write software sometimes when people aren't paying me. So there isn't always a "Job" involved. In any case, while free software might hurt me short term, proprietary software is guaranteed to hurt me long term.
  - mtreis86 10y ago
    I do not agree. The best tool for the job is the one I am most comfortable using. If microsoft makes me uncomfortable (they remind me of an abusive spouse in their actions), then even if their software has some fancy features that may help productivity, it is not the best tool for me to do my job. I don't even consider it as an option.
ArnoldP 10y ago
Do you still need to be in the windows fast lane preview for access to bash on windows? I want to try this but im a bit hesitant to run the earliest of beta software on my only productivity machine...
- JL2010 10y ago
  I'm on the slow ring and recently received it. They have a blog here which details each of their releases on each of the release "rings": https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/tag/windows-insider-program/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/tag/windows-insi...
- pingec 10y ago
  Yes. It is coming with the big windows update on 2nd August.
shirro 10y ago
Turn the indexing off in Thunderbird and it is still quite a usable email client for me and I have recently done a bit of a tour of the alternatives. It hits the sweet spot for me. Mutt is awesome but I have to deal with too much html email. I pretty much run the same stack for email/editor/docs on every platform. For the most part Windows, OSX and Linux are interchangeable for me which is a nice place to be. I just find Linux gets in the way a lot less for my purposes. Every platform has advantages and a slightly different mix of applications that make it suit some users more than others. I can certainly understand swapping between a Mac and Windows for iOS and Windows development or games and back to Linux for web/server stuff. But being stuck on a particular platform because of an email client would bother me. I think it is great that this stuff is running on Windows but it bothers me that people feel they are trapped on Windows because of their email client. That seems so dated.
newman314 10y ago
This is tangential but my primary interest is being able to natively ssh into a Windows machine. I know options exist today but I would love to see native support and it's oh-so-close. Would be great to be able to finally script things to copy stuff over to the Windows box such as LE certs.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  It's getting there: https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH
anderspitman 10y ago
For me, modern virtualization has gotten so good that it's my preferred solution. kvm, libvirt, virtio, and PCI passthrough et al have opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Currently still requires fairly specific hardware and kind of a pain to figure out how to make it work, but it's already very impressive. This is still really cool though.
- rl3 10y ago
  Thing is you can't run Windows natively that way, it has to be a guest operating system. Then you need multiple videocards to pass through, and the guest operating systems require custom drivers at that. My preferred setup would be Windows native, with macOS (ha) and Linux guests running with GPU acceleration—preferably in a manner that doesn't necessitate multiple videocards. Too bad Apple is hellbent on locking macOS to Apple hardware. I'd totally license it otherwise.
  - pierrec 10y ago
    >you can't run Windows natively that way, it has to be a guest operating system. Then you need multiple videocards to pass through, and the guest operating systems require custom drivers at that. I, for one, think that sounds excellent. For a workstation, I would much rather host everything on a simple Linux distro with focus on security and privacy, and keep Windows in VMs where I can manage it a little better. And the Windows Subsystem for Linux will run in there perfectly if I need it. Also, multiple video cards are only necessary if your guest needs that GPU power. Considering that having 2 video cards these days is surprisingly common (Intel on-board + separate video card), I'm wondering about the feasibility of easily switching between shared video (eg. when your laptop is on battery) and separate GPU passthru (eg. when you're plugged into your epic 16-monitor setup).
    - rl3 10y ago
      I'd prefer Windows as a guest OS too, but not at the expense of losing native performance. Granted, Windows makes for a fairly terrible host operating system when you have to reboot it frequently on account of updates.
rosstex 10y ago
I'm on Windows and I use Thunderbird. What's the alternative?
chx 10y ago
At first I was excited by bash for Windows but I am still not switching. You know why? Malware. Ransomware. I have many layers of defense from various harm (OpenWRT router, uBlock being the two most important ones) but the biggest defense I have is that Windows programs simply do not run on Linux and the Linux market is not big enough to bother with. And I know many of you will say, oh that's not a problem, it never happened to me -- I will say good for you. But I need my work computer to, well, work, constantly. Yes, fighting a broken Arch Linux after an update is bad but not as bad as fighting a downright malicious program.
- vesche 10y ago
  Somewhat unrelated, but you should check out pi hole https://pi-hole.net https://pi-hole.net . Ads / spyware traffic won't even enter your network. I still run uBlock, but it goes largely unused.
  - chx 10y ago
    Pretty good idea -- since I am running OpenWRT already I could just use https://gist.github.com/teffalump/7227752 https://gist.github.com/teffalump/7227752
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      Actually, good call. I'll just make a cron job to get uBlock's lists and stick them in dnsmasq.
dewiz 10y ago
Serious question, what's wrong with Thunderbird? I've used Eudora, Netscape Messenger, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook up to 2016, Mail, Gmail, Squirrel etc etc. I use Outlook where I _have_ to, but TB is a constant across all my systems. IMAP support is great, search is fast, I rely on Google to filter spam. Thunderbird is one of those apps that doesn't need extra work or new features, it just works.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  It's slow, it takes a crapload of resources and it has a bunch of bugs I've never been able to fix. If I click the unified inbox on my laptop, I get a blank view, even though there are emails in the sub-mailboxes. This has been going on for years, and I haven't been able to fix it (short of deleting my profile).
kristianp 10y ago
A lot of comments about Thunderbird here, despite the article saying "Save your apologist comments and what about Open Office/Geary/Thunderbird comments.". That means don't comment about it. The interesting part of the article is not the part about why this guy uses Windows!
- adambatkin 10y ago
  You missed the rest of the paragraph though: "If you’ve used them, you know that they’re not as nice as the applications available in macOS and Windows." I used Thunderbird for about 10 years on my Mac laptop and every time I tried to switch to Apple Mail (or anything else) I quickly switched back. But the truth is, I have used Linux on my primary desktop PC for about 15 years now and can honestly say that it is a very pleasant experience. I would agree that for a long time OpenOffice had compatibility issues (often no worse than trying to open an Office document on a Mac) but those days are long gone. As a software developer and general techie, I believe that Free Software is important for my profession and for the public at large. For me, even if Linux was less convenient (which it is not - today anyway...it was more challenging, say, a decade ago) I would use it because I have serious concerns some of how Apple and Microsoft treat developers and the Free Software movement.
  - hartator 10y ago
    Haven't Mozilla gave up on Thunderbird though?
    - MajesticHobo 10y ago
      There's always Icedove, which gets updates from Debian.
      - sciurus 10y ago
        Debian isn't doing any independent development on icedove, are they? I think if thunderbird development stops so will icedove's. https://wiki.debian.org/Icedove#The_future_of_Icedove https://wiki.debian.org/Icedove#The_future_of_Icedove
OneNoteIsFree 10y ago
Save your FUD, I've been using computers for 16 years and I've never had this problem. Malware/Ransomware hit only if you go around the dark corners in search of porn/free stuff without knowing what you're downloading. Even then the built in Windows defender catches it. I love Arch too but people like you are so die hard in their toxicity that any collaboration asking about Windows related stuff is impossible.
- ams6110 10y ago
  Many people who get ransomwared are naive victims of phishing emails, some of which are fairly convincing. There are usually some red flags if you're paying attention, but it only takes one mistake.
  - OneNoteIsFree 10y ago
    You're right. But I'd assume anyone using Linux (and arch at that) would be smart enough to know what's up. No OS is perfect but someone using Arch is just spreading FUD. Windows is a vector not because of security problems but because of its usage ratio. It just doesn't make economic sense to target any other OS plus the fact that hackers are not god, they need time to perfect their skills and they have it on Windows. Denouncing an OS despite the fact that it has stellar security on its own is basically bringing down people like you and I who are spending days and nights making things work for fine. Denouncing for valid reasons is fine. Security in Windows is not Microsoft's problem. They're trying their best, they're not all knowing. That loser on Arch should talk when Linux and macOS are completely impenetrable.
    - diyorgasms 10y ago
      >Windows is a vector not because of security problems but because of its usage ratio. I think the publication regarding vulnerabilities in the kernel's handling of font rendering would make you think twice about this assertion. Windows certainly has its share of design flaws. >That loser on Arch should talk when Linux and macOS are completely impenetrable. Maybe try again next time without the personal attack. Also, I don't think that because the alternatives are imperfect Windows should be immune from criticism. Microsoft might have come a long way, but running Windows these days is still a security liability in ways that running Linux or macOS aren't. Windows is just a big juicy target and attackers go for the big fish.
makecheck 10y ago
There’s something about “translating system calls” that just makes me wary. It’s the kind of thing that could be proven to work for some common cases while failing in mysterious ways for others (not to mention being hard to debug). Generally, there is a gap between what’s documented, what was thought to be true, and what is. At some point they will produce behavior that just doesn’t match what compiled code expects. For how many libraries, applications and combinations thereof will they deal with this? And then there’s maintenance. This is a scary kind of layer to be responsible for; future Microsoft employees will have a hard time doing anything to this layer without risking new misbehavior so we have to trust that they either know what they’re doing or that they won’t touch anything. I’m not saying that they weren’t clever to try this, or that there isn’t a way to pull this off successfully. I do think the odds are against them though. Or maybe, I just missed something about their implementation that makes this a lot less risky than it seems to be.
- OneNoteIsFree 10y ago
  Have you heard of testing? And have you heard of software verification? Microsoft research is far and away the leader with single person publishing multiple papers in the best conferences- POPL etc. orrying about imaginary Don't worry about imaginary future problesm. Its like me saying- my car is very complex and may crash, I will not drive it. This is how you hold technology back.
  - makecheck 10y ago
    This is actually just about the exact opposite of proper testing and verification. The main problem is the idea of running compiled programs unmodified: programs that had an entirely different OS target when they were built. If this is what Microsoft is doing then they’ve invented an environment that could not possibly have been anticipated by those who built the original programs. Anything could happen. And worse, it’s not clear who to send the bug report to when things go wrong.
  - quickben 10y ago
    With all due respect, your post looks like a shiny marketing pitch to me. What you call 'imaginary future problem' is everyday for some people. Think three months of work for a team of eight senior system devs per sys call behaving unexpectedly. And tbh, windows was historically far worse than Linux in that area with all the 'bug compatibility' and closeness per version. Yes they can provide a layer for some calls now, it's all shiny and hipster, but it will be cold day in hell before a major bank or big enterprise runs anything serious on it. Maybe in ten years if Microsoft doesnt chop it out by then.
jimmcslim 10y ago
I wonder if someone will get xmonad working?
dantillberg 10y ago
I think the real trouble with Windows for many folks is not that we can't figure out how to convert linux kernel calls into NT kernel calls, but that we don't want to convert our linux kernel calls into NT kernel calls PLUS "telemetry" data sent to Redmond. Windows is explicitly non-free (in so many ways), and that's cool and all, but no thanks.
rspeer 10y ago
When it comes to finding a decent terminal emulator for Windows: mintty is the terminal you get when you use Git Bash, right? Because in my experience it's better than ConEmu. ConEmu makes a staggering number of off-by-one errors in putting characters on the screen when I ssh into a Linux machine and use tmux. Vertical separators end up jagged, things that are supposed to fit the width of the screen end up wrapping, my Vim status line says "IISUAL", and so on. But mintty gets tmux right.
- bketelsen 10y ago
  i've noticed a lot of these same off-by-one errors in MobaXTerm, too.
nowprovision 10y ago
This is awesome stuff. If you fullscreened MobaXTerm and autohide the Windows taskbar then what are the problematic points vs running a linux/i3wm natively? Do certain keystrokes get intercepts by Windows regardless? You mention Firefox have you tried Chrome/Chromium in i3wm? Can you play a HTML5 youtube video? Thanks for writing it up, interesting stuff! - An i3 user
- bketelsen 10y ago
  I hadn't found any keystrokes that were masked by windows, but most of what I do is ALT+something, I use ALT as my meta key in i3.
hamilyon2 10y ago
Did anyone try to use xmonad?
vesche 10y ago
At this point why not just have a Linux system on your local network and connect with VNC from Windows...? You can have a Linux environment to hack around in while getting to use all the "nice" Windows GUI apps.
- hiram112 10y ago
  VNC has never been near as fast as even Remote Desktop, and even that is pretty slow for anything more than basic administration. Maybe in a local lan it would work better, but I doubt considering it's slow even in a VM on a powerful workstation. It's getting to the point where I'm thinking about using a Windows laptop and Linux desktop with a KVM switch, but then I'm not portable.
qplex 10y ago
It is rather trivial for Microsoft to implement support for Linux. Also, if Windows source code was freely available there would be support for Windows applications on Linux.
- icebraining 10y ago
  There is support for Windows applications on Linux, no source code needed: https://www.winehq.org/ https://www.winehq.org/
  - qplex 10y ago
    Yes. My point was that it is trivial for Microsoft to implement support for an open system, compared to implementing support for a closed system such as Windows. There would be better support for running Windows applications under Linux if Windows was an open system.
    - douche 10y ago
      Still, even if everything Windows-based was open-source, you'd still have to build out the shim layers in front like Wine does, unless you wanted to deal with the extreme tedium of converting all the Win32, DirectX, etc, etc, calls over.
technojunkie 10y ago
How did the author miss out on using Cmder? It's better the ConEmu and probably the best terminal for Windows today.
- b15h0p 10y ago
  Well, actually, Cmder is just a distribution around ConEmu. But I agree that it is quite acceptable.
- bketelsen 10y ago
  author here - I searched and asked Windows using friends for recommendations.
diminish 10y ago
A lot of alarms ringing in my mind, as a long time Linux and i3 user and developer. 1. You ran i3 as a proof of concept now but going long term you ll face dozens of issues when you want to make it useful. The same is true for everything you ll install through Ubuntu for Windows.. 2. Windows mail clients are totally wrong, slow and they are not only hazardous to people using but also to receivers of emails. Outlook users don't know how to put subjects, respond and distort the format and conversation all the time. (Long time outlook user here) 3. Desktop productivity tools are long history. No reason why someone would use ms office anymore. 4. Windows for Ubuntu is doomed to be a second class citizen, and if it by chance becomes a first class citizen then why would someone need the Windows overhead and complexity? (How can I apt-get remove windows) I congratulate MS devs taking HN seriously recently but windows in 2016 is obsolete..
- raesene9 10y ago
  oh dear. I'd have to suggest here that you're projecting your own use cases and assuming that they have a universality that they really don't. Desktop productivity tools are history... no, no they're not, MS office sells millions of copies for a reason. Windows mail clients are wrong. They're not the same as unix mail clients for sure, but who gets to dictate whether that's right or wrong? Personally I think all mail clients that allow HTML are wrong, but I understand that I'm in a minority there. I'd suggest that Windows has many advantages over linux on the desktop. The hardware support is better, there's a better range of desktop apps available for people who like desktop apps (including games of course). Personally I'm looking forward to ubuntu on windows. there's a load of areas where I prefer working in a linux/unix like environment (e.g. anything command-line based where linux is far superior to Windows (although Windows is getting better in that regard)), and I hope that this will let me get the best of both worlds, whilst avoiding the overhead of running a VM.
- erelde 10y ago
  > Desktop productivity tools are long history You should take a walk in an administration building. IE6 and MS Office are still in use. "For security reasons".
- StavrosK 10y ago
rbanffy 10y ago
As someone who has only briefly worked on Windows since the early 2000s, when I moved to Debian and then Ubuntu (and, then, using Cygwin to make things comfy), what is the compelling reason to adopt it? Both Mac ans Linux offer very good developer experiences, with hosts of cross-platform tooling and environments that are closer to the server that will most likely run your application. I understand that Windows is essential when you write code that runs on Windows, but, apart from that, what are the advantages over macOS and a more traditional Unix-like environment?
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Having used Windows extensively up until Vista (at which point I switched to Ubuntu), none. It's a more solid OS than Ubuntu (in that the UI doesn't sometimes have weird corruption bugs and is more responsive), but development is a nightmare. Development is split into two camps, Windows-centric and UNIX-centric. Trying to develop one on the other is a disaster, so let that inform your choice. As a consumer OS, I have a much easier time installing Ubuntu on my parents'/friends' computers, as it's easier to get used to and doesn't have as many viruses.
epheo 10y ago
The gnu binaries used in this article are the ones included in maboXterm and compiled for windows, nothing related to an abstraction layer between nt kernel and Ubuntu gnu bin builds as mentioned I suppose. Working great anyway.
ilaksh 10y ago
Embrace, extend, extinguish.

234 points by bketelsen 10y ago

bketelsen 10y ago

author here - would love advice or tips on how to get dbus running so settings work well and other WMs work like Gnome.

shlorn 10y ago
Nice work. A few days ago I tried xfce4 with little luck, although xfce4-terminal + Xming get me pretty much everything I need. Windows ConHost.exe is a pretty poor terminal (specifically in terms of fonts and colors) but hopefully things will get better in time. Regarding Dbus, I haven't had time to try this out yet: https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4ea4w4/fyi_you_can_run_gui_linux_apps_from_bash/d4o0k01 https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/4ea4w4/fyi_you_c...
- bketelsen 10y ago
  hey thanks! I'll give this a shot, might make GNOME start up now.

be5invis 10y ago

Can WLS run Wine?

Longhanks 10y ago
Can Wine run WSL's bash.exe?
- johnhattan 10y ago
  Is it turtles all the way down?
  - frozenport 10y ago
    More like an operating system tower of babel!
- Zardoz84 10y ago
  There isn't a "WSL's bash.exe". WSL run Ubuntu binaries.

repsilat 10y ago

Incredible. My fancy new Lenovo has gotten no use because they've made it impossible to install another operating system in it. I look forward to giving this a go.

smcl 10y ago
Who have, Lenovo?
- wildster 10y ago
  I have an Lenovo Thinkpad x220 running Ubuntu that I needed to set the BIOS to Legacy.
  - vetinari 10y ago
    Weird. T430s in UEFI mode (with Secure Boot) has no problem with Fedora.
  - smcl 10y ago
    Weird, I didn't have to do anything to get my X250 to play nice with Debian
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - rmsaksida 10y ago
    I had a x220 and it worked fine with Ubuntu in EFI-only mode. Same for my current x230. Probably boots 1 or 2 seconds faster because of that. But I never managed to get it working by doing the partitioning work myself (which I prefer because I don't like having everything in a huge partition), you have to format the whole drive and let Ubuntu do its thing.
- repsilat 10y ago
  Yeah. Yoga 900 ISK2, some BIOS problem that makes the hard drive not show up. No way to fix it except with a BIOS update that hasn't materialized.

clinta 10y ago

It's disappointing that i3 is constrained to one window. The ability to replace Microsoft's window manager with i3 and allow linux and windows apps to be nicely tiled together would be amazing.

rcarmo 10y ago
X was never designed to work like that. I personally run Visual Studio Code (with a patched X lib to allow Electron to start without graphics acceleration) with the "local window manager" (i.e., Windows itself). Works great.
- colemickens 10y ago
  Okay I'll bite. Why are you running Linux vs∆ code in widnLaASaAAqaa@@@@£
  - colemickens 10y ago
    (Sorry, I put my phone in my pocket and this apparently happened. Wish I could delete it, didn't even know it sent, not a fan of my tone, apologies.)
  - rcarmo 10y ago
    Because I want full integration with a Git CLI that uses the exact same plugins as I use in Linux. Git on Windows is a pain for me.
616c 10y ago
Now, it ain't tiling, but I once worked (not as the first guy, but took it over as a major project and the hell out of it) was one of the ports of Opebox-ish Windows managers (to be more accurate, really an Explorer replacement shell, not a Windows manager traditionally) to Windows XP to build very stripped down Windows kiosk machines with minimal UI and a lot of control, custom UI, and cool fun features. http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php http://www.lsdev.org/doku.php God I miss this. It was way ahead of the time and I guess Microsoft got their UI act together, then lost it, and are trying to find it again. As for tiling, the best you can do are these: https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n https://github.com/fuhsjr00/bug.n https://github.com/ZaneA/HackWM https://github.com/ZaneA/HackWM The latter is by a budding Chicken Lisp; I found him and love a lot of what he does; not sure he is ready for prime-time.

616c 10y ago

Am ... am I falling in love with Windows? Well, time to see if I can get StumpWM running on it, for more hipster cred. (Partly joking, partly serious.)

lj3 10y ago
> Am ... am I falling in love with Windows? Spend some time with it again. You'll learn to hate it just as much as you did the first time around. For me, it's because of a single factor: BSOD caused by shitty geforce drivers. I used to think the linux geforce drivers were shit because it was a neglected platform. Now I know the truth: windows geforce drivers are full of pain and tears as well. I don't see any of the same issues on OS X.
- sz4kerto 10y ago
  Except that graphics drivers on OSX are slower than their Windows or Linux counterparts. There is a lot of problem with Windows, GPU driver quality is not one of them.
- mook 10y ago
  The specific case of terrible video drivers might have been slightly better these days (because part of it has been moved to user mode, so crashing it just means your screen flashes and weird for a second). Spending more time with it can let you find _different_ things to hate, of course. In general, all software suck.
  - lj3 10y ago
    > because part of it has been moved to user mode, so crashing it just means your screen flashes and weird for a second You mean on Linux, right? Because in Windows 10, going full screen in a youtube video on an external screen routinely causes my entire system to crash (BSOD, error dump, restart).
    - gman99 10y ago
      I'm on windows 10 with a shitty "optimus" enabled laptop. The NVidia drivers routinely crash (typically when viewing a heavy webGL enabled page) and windows 10 just flashes at me and throws up a notification saying my graphics drivers have crashed but it helpfully restarted the drivers for me. Perhaps you have a different issue? Maybe a hardware failure? Windows 10 should not be BSODing for a graphics driver failure

maga 10y ago

Anyone knows when WSL is expected to arrive on non-insider versons?

tejinderss 10y ago
2nd august with windows 10 anniversary update
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

616c 10y ago

Another thought: when people complain about the state of Linux email clients, what is so good about the Windows alternatives? Office productivity suites, I get it. But email clients all suck. Mutt's mantra is so true, at least they're honest about sucking less. I believe Linux is a 100% of the time platform because the choice (again, user choice) to run minimal terminal apps means like less than average 50% memory utilization for Thunderbird, which I love, with a web browser GUI and background full text indexing all damn day. Outlook is just as crappy.

jkahn 10y ago
Don't write off Outlook without a second thought. It's big with loads of features, yes - but that's what's good about it. If all you need to do is plain text email, sure, Mutt is fine. If you deal with a large amount of email, calendar appointments, tasks, contacts, etc, in a professional role, nothing beats Outlook. There's a reason it's so popular.
- merb 10y ago
  unfortunatly Outlook 2013-2016 is pretty akward (resources) but I like Outlook 2010. Still I don't use it
- douche 10y ago
  I've never had an installation of Outlook that stayed stable and usable for more than about six months. It doesn't help that you have other parts of Office that stick their grubby fingers in your address books, calendars, and mail files and do their best to scramble things up.
  - oblio 10y ago
    I don't know what you're doing with it, but I've used Outlook for 2 multinational companies for 4+ years each, had several GB of mails for each (probably hundreds of thousands of email per account, most of them automated), and the worst parts of it were a bug with password resets (it keps asking for my password for about a week after quarterly resets) and the slowness of filter sync with Exchange. As you can see, those were nuisances. Otherwise, it was pretty much rock solid. Several versions, ran them under XP and Windows 7.

yolyolo 10y ago

what about the normal ppl who use linux and dont know all these i3 shit

drewm1980 10y ago
I've met some of those people who use linux despite being normal. They complain constantly about Ubuntu's desktop user interface changing. I remind them gently that in linux-land all that crap is optional, but you have to give up on any claim to normalcy... and probably your disk auto-mounter... and any apps that blow up when they aren't able to choose their own size.
- rmsaksida 10y ago
  I've been having a good run with Ubuntu MATE. MATE Desktop is based around Gnome 2 which is familiar to everyone, and it has sensible choices for all default programs. Ubuntu MATE doesn't have nearly as much bloat as standard Ubuntu, but has all its niceties. I recommend it if you want a 'normal' experience out of Linux.
- Zardoz84 10y ago
  Try KDE. Not sane defaults, but you can change at your pleasure.
- aurelianito 10y ago
  Switch them to lubuntu. It is as close to Windows 98 as you can get. I mean it in a good way. It is my standard Linux distribution. All the Ubuntu packages but a simple UI.

ThinkBeat 10y ago

I haven't had any problems with macOS stability lately. Has anyone else experienced what the author describes? Around me Windows 10 has crashed more than macOS. but Windows 10 is really stable too.

notifier2050 10y ago
I had random freezes in 10.11.4, but it was fixed in 10.11.5.
rahkiin 10y ago
My mac often (once in about two weeks) freezes after trying to unlock. It just shows the load indicator. Need a hard kill to 'fix'. Don't know how to fix it. Note: I never shut my iMac down.
waiseristy 10y ago
I've never had Win10 crash on me, nor have I macOS. On the application front though, I have found the Win programs I use crash or hang far less often than their macOS counterparts.
danieldk 10y ago
From the post: but I do daily development on an Arch linux desktop sitting next to my MacBook Pro I have a similar set up, both at home and at work, where I use a MacBook for Office, Omni{Focus,Graffle}, etc., but SSH into a Linux machine for serious development word. My reasons are two-fold. First of all, many OS X's command-line tools are behind the times and buggy. For instance, grep segfaults on trivial usages such as[1]: % echo i860 | grep --color -e i860 -e i86 Or returns incorrect results for even trivial expressions: % echo "1234 1234 1234" | egrep -o "^...." 1234 123 4 12 Since I use UNIX command-line tools such as grep daily, I cannot have them fail (yes, I know, get GNU grep from Homebrew). Secondly, Mac hardware is very weak these days, even the Mac Pro is years behind. At the same time, you can get a similarly spec'ed machine on eBay for a couple of hundred of Euros. Plug a card to use CUDA, etc. [1] http://blog.loadzero.com/blog/tracking-down-a-segfault-in-grep/ http://blog.loadzero.com/blog/tracking-down-a-segfault-in-gr... I don't have many real stability problems (kernel panics), but there are oddball bugs everywhere. E.g. Mail.app likes to redownload all my e-mail when I quit and open it.

marmaduke 10y ago

There is a tiling window manager for windows using auto hot key, so entirely native and works on previous versions of Windows too. I seem to have forgotten the name but it worked well when I tried it.

T-A 10y ago
There seems to be a whole bunch: https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/2rn775/best_tiled_window_manager_for_windows/ https://www.reddit.com/r/windows/comments/2rn775/best_tiled_...

michaelmior 10y ago

> far too many things don’t work in macOS that are required for modern Internet software development It's been a few years since I've actively used Mac OS, but is this really true? Ancedotally it seems like a lot of Web developers still use Mac OS as their OS of choice.

chris_st 10y ago
Nope, it's not true, at least for what I do. You can look around [1] to see what kinds of things are just a "brew install" away on macOS... an awful lot of unix-y goodness. I have 61 things installed -- ansible, git, nvm, postgresql, the_silver_searcher, tmux... Since I develop on Linux for work, I don't know offhand of anything that Linux has that I can't get for macOS (not saying there are no such things, but I can't think of any). [1] http://braumeister.org http://braumeister.org

douche 10y ago

Initially I read this as "Running 13 Window Managers on Ubuntu for Windows", which piqued my interest as possibly the most Linux thing I can imagine doing. Still, exciting times.

kristopolous 10y ago

Well it's finally the year of the Linux Desktop.

noinsight 10y ago
Actually, I feel like this is the one instance where saying "GNU" instead of Linux is completely accurate, since WSL is not even running the Linux kernel but GNU userland tools... I wonder what Stallman would have to say about that? We've come around full circle to GNU/NT.
- RubyPinch 10y ago
  If I'm not mistaken, the view is, a) don't want to provide nice tools to windows users because then they'll no longer have the need to switch to a libre system b) do want to provide nice tools to windows users because then they'll get a taste of how liberating freedom is obviously there is a balance there, and I think GNU/NT might be a bit too far into entrenching-the-user for his tastes, though I can't speak for him obviously. It seems there is no political note on his site for the announcement of ubuntu-on-windows.
- mikegerwitz 10y ago
  Richard calls it "GNU/kWindows" (like GNU/kFreeBSD); I wrote an article with his input a while back: https://mikegerwitz.com/2016/04/GNU-kWindows https://mikegerwitz.com/2016/04/GNU-kWindows
  - kristopolous 10y ago
    I think Gnudows is a pretty catchy portmanteau.
- sciurus 10y ago
  It's not running the Linux kernel, but it's implementing Linux kernel interfaces. Microsoft may ship a lot of GNU software now but presumably the same interfaces could be used to run alternatives like busybox and uclibc. This keeps the naming debates interesting, I suppose.

nray 10y ago

dyed in the wool...

bketelsen 10y ago
fixed, thanks.

Zardoz84 10y ago

I work on Windows. I can say that Thunderbird is far better that Outlook.

dingo_bat 10y ago
I have the opposite experience.
- raesene9 10y ago
  I agree, I've tried both and whilst neither are the fastest programs in the universe, Outlook 2016 has been better than Thunderbird from a performance standpoint. Thunderbird was so slow, I went back to Outlook.

FeepingCreature 10y ago

Gentoo called it eleven years ago. http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/ http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/

mempko 10y ago

I'm one of those weird people that uses free software even if it isn't better. The quality of the software is beside the point.

midnitewarrior 10y ago
If you're not using the best functional tool for the job, the only person you are hurting is you.
- mempko 10y ago
  Sometimes I use software when people aren't paying me. I even write software sometimes when people aren't paying me. So there isn't always a "Job" involved. In any case, while free software might hurt me short term, proprietary software is guaranteed to hurt me long term.
- mtreis86 10y ago
  I do not agree. The best tool for the job is the one I am most comfortable using. If microsoft makes me uncomfortable (they remind me of an abusive spouse in their actions), then even if their software has some fancy features that may help productivity, it is not the best tool for me to do my job. I don't even consider it as an option.

ArnoldP 10y ago

Do you still need to be in the windows fast lane preview for access to bash on windows? I want to try this but im a bit hesitant to run the earliest of beta software on my only productivity machine...

JL2010 10y ago
I'm on the slow ring and recently received it. They have a blog here which details each of their releases on each of the release "rings": https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/tag/windows-insider-program/ https://blogs.windows.com/windowsexperience/tag/windows-insi...
pingec 10y ago
Yes. It is coming with the big windows update on 2nd August.

shirro 10y ago

Turn the indexing off in Thunderbird and it is still quite a usable email client for me and I have recently done a bit of a tour of the alternatives. It hits the sweet spot for me. Mutt is awesome but I have to deal with too much html email. I pretty much run the same stack for email/editor/docs on every platform. For the most part Windows, OSX and Linux are interchangeable for me which is a nice place to be. I just find Linux gets in the way a lot less for my purposes. Every platform has advantages and a slightly different mix of applications that make it suit some users more than others. I can certainly understand swapping between a Mac and Windows for iOS and Windows development or games and back to Linux for web/server stuff. But being stuck on a particular platform because of an email client would bother me. I think it is great that this stuff is running on Windows but it bothers me that people feel they are trapped on Windows because of their email client. That seems so dated.

newman314 10y ago

This is tangential but my primary interest is being able to natively ssh into a Windows machine. I know options exist today but I would love to see native support and it's oh-so-close. Would be great to be able to finally script things to copy stuff over to the Windows box such as LE certs.

voltagex_ 10y ago
It's getting there: https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH https://github.com/PowerShell/Win32-OpenSSH

anderspitman 10y ago

For me, modern virtualization has gotten so good that it's my preferred solution. kvm, libvirt, virtio, and PCI passthrough et al have opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Currently still requires fairly specific hardware and kind of a pain to figure out how to make it work, but it's already very impressive. This is still really cool though.

rl3 10y ago
Thing is you can't run Windows natively that way, it has to be a guest operating system. Then you need multiple videocards to pass through, and the guest operating systems require custom drivers at that. My preferred setup would be Windows native, with macOS (ha) and Linux guests running with GPU acceleration—preferably in a manner that doesn't necessitate multiple videocards. Too bad Apple is hellbent on locking macOS to Apple hardware. I'd totally license it otherwise.
- pierrec 10y ago
  >you can't run Windows natively that way, it has to be a guest operating system. Then you need multiple videocards to pass through, and the guest operating systems require custom drivers at that. I, for one, think that sounds excellent. For a workstation, I would much rather host everything on a simple Linux distro with focus on security and privacy, and keep Windows in VMs where I can manage it a little better. And the Windows Subsystem for Linux will run in there perfectly if I need it. Also, multiple video cards are only necessary if your guest needs that GPU power. Considering that having 2 video cards these days is surprisingly common (Intel on-board + separate video card), I'm wondering about the feasibility of easily switching between shared video (eg. when your laptop is on battery) and separate GPU passthru (eg. when you're plugged into your epic 16-monitor setup).
  - rl3 10y ago
    I'd prefer Windows as a guest OS too, but not at the expense of losing native performance. Granted, Windows makes for a fairly terrible host operating system when you have to reboot it frequently on account of updates.

rosstex 10y ago

I'm on Windows and I use Thunderbird. What's the alternative?

chx 10y ago

At first I was excited by bash for Windows but I am still not switching. You know why? Malware. Ransomware. I have many layers of defense from various harm (OpenWRT router, uBlock being the two most important ones) but the biggest defense I have is that Windows programs simply do not run on Linux and the Linux market is not big enough to bother with. And I know many of you will say, oh that's not a problem, it never happened to me -- I will say good for you. But I need my work computer to, well, work, constantly. Yes, fighting a broken Arch Linux after an update is bad but not as bad as fighting a downright malicious program.

vesche 10y ago
Somewhat unrelated, but you should check out pi hole https://pi-hole.net https://pi-hole.net . Ads / spyware traffic won't even enter your network. I still run uBlock, but it goes largely unused.
- chx 10y ago
  Pretty good idea -- since I am running OpenWRT already I could just use https://gist.github.com/teffalump/7227752 https://gist.github.com/teffalump/7227752
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Actually, good call. I'll just make a cron job to get uBlock's lists and stick them in dnsmasq.

dewiz 10y ago

Serious question, what's wrong with Thunderbird? I've used Eudora, Netscape Messenger, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook up to 2016, Mail, Gmail, Squirrel etc etc. I use Outlook where I _have_ to, but TB is a constant across all my systems. IMAP support is great, search is fast, I rely on Google to filter spam. Thunderbird is one of those apps that doesn't need extra work or new features, it just works.

StavrosK 10y ago
It's slow, it takes a crapload of resources and it has a bunch of bugs I've never been able to fix. If I click the unified inbox on my laptop, I get a blank view, even though there are emails in the sub-mailboxes. This has been going on for years, and I haven't been able to fix it (short of deleting my profile).

kristianp 10y ago

A lot of comments about Thunderbird here, despite the article saying "Save your apologist comments and what about Open Office/Geary/Thunderbird comments.". That means don't comment about it. The interesting part of the article is not the part about why this guy uses Windows!

adambatkin 10y ago
You missed the rest of the paragraph though: "If you’ve used them, you know that they’re not as nice as the applications available in macOS and Windows." I used Thunderbird for about 10 years on my Mac laptop and every time I tried to switch to Apple Mail (or anything else) I quickly switched back. But the truth is, I have used Linux on my primary desktop PC for about 15 years now and can honestly say that it is a very pleasant experience. I would agree that for a long time OpenOffice had compatibility issues (often no worse than trying to open an Office document on a Mac) but those days are long gone. As a software developer and general techie, I believe that Free Software is important for my profession and for the public at large. For me, even if Linux was less convenient (which it is not - today anyway...it was more challenging, say, a decade ago) I would use it because I have serious concerns some of how Apple and Microsoft treat developers and the Free Software movement.
- hartator 10y ago
  Haven't Mozilla gave up on Thunderbird though?
  - MajesticHobo 10y ago
    There's always Icedove, which gets updates from Debian.
    - sciurus 10y ago
      Debian isn't doing any independent development on icedove, are they? I think if thunderbird development stops so will icedove's. https://wiki.debian.org/Icedove#The_future_of_Icedove https://wiki.debian.org/Icedove#The_future_of_Icedove

OneNoteIsFree 10y ago

Save your FUD, I've been using computers for 16 years and I've never had this problem. Malware/Ransomware hit only if you go around the dark corners in search of porn/free stuff without knowing what you're downloading. Even then the built in Windows defender catches it. I love Arch too but people like you are so die hard in their toxicity that any collaboration asking about Windows related stuff is impossible.

ams6110 10y ago
Many people who get ransomwared are naive victims of phishing emails, some of which are fairly convincing. There are usually some red flags if you're paying attention, but it only takes one mistake.
- OneNoteIsFree 10y ago
  You're right. But I'd assume anyone using Linux (and arch at that) would be smart enough to know what's up. No OS is perfect but someone using Arch is just spreading FUD. Windows is a vector not because of security problems but because of its usage ratio. It just doesn't make economic sense to target any other OS plus the fact that hackers are not god, they need time to perfect their skills and they have it on Windows. Denouncing an OS despite the fact that it has stellar security on its own is basically bringing down people like you and I who are spending days and nights making things work for fine. Denouncing for valid reasons is fine. Security in Windows is not Microsoft's problem. They're trying their best, they're not all knowing. That loser on Arch should talk when Linux and macOS are completely impenetrable.
  - diyorgasms 10y ago
    >Windows is a vector not because of security problems but because of its usage ratio. I think the publication regarding vulnerabilities in the kernel's handling of font rendering would make you think twice about this assertion. Windows certainly has its share of design flaws. >That loser on Arch should talk when Linux and macOS are completely impenetrable. Maybe try again next time without the personal attack. Also, I don't think that because the alternatives are imperfect Windows should be immune from criticism. Microsoft might have come a long way, but running Windows these days is still a security liability in ways that running Linux or macOS aren't. Windows is just a big juicy target and attackers go for the big fish.

makecheck 10y ago

There’s something about “translating system calls” that just makes me wary. It’s the kind of thing that could be proven to work for some common cases while failing in mysterious ways for others (not to mention being hard to debug). Generally, there is a gap between what’s documented, what was thought to be true, and what is. At some point they will produce behavior that just doesn’t match what compiled code expects. For how many libraries, applications and combinations thereof will they deal with this? And then there’s maintenance. This is a scary kind of layer to be responsible for; future Microsoft employees will have a hard time doing anything to this layer without risking new misbehavior so we have to trust that they either know what they’re doing or that they won’t touch anything. I’m not saying that they weren’t clever to try this, or that there isn’t a way to pull this off successfully. I do think the odds are against them though. Or maybe, I just missed something about their implementation that makes this a lot less risky than it seems to be.

OneNoteIsFree 10y ago
Have you heard of testing? And have you heard of software verification? Microsoft research is far and away the leader with single person publishing multiple papers in the best conferences- POPL etc. orrying about imaginary Don't worry about imaginary future problesm. Its like me saying- my car is very complex and may crash, I will not drive it. This is how you hold technology back.
- makecheck 10y ago
  This is actually just about the exact opposite of proper testing and verification. The main problem is the idea of running compiled programs unmodified: programs that had an entirely different OS target when they were built. If this is what Microsoft is doing then they’ve invented an environment that could not possibly have been anticipated by those who built the original programs. Anything could happen. And worse, it’s not clear who to send the bug report to when things go wrong.
- quickben 10y ago
  With all due respect, your post looks like a shiny marketing pitch to me. What you call 'imaginary future problem' is everyday for some people. Think three months of work for a team of eight senior system devs per sys call behaving unexpectedly. And tbh, windows was historically far worse than Linux in that area with all the 'bug compatibility' and closeness per version. Yes they can provide a layer for some calls now, it's all shiny and hipster, but it will be cold day in hell before a major bank or big enterprise runs anything serious on it. Maybe in ten years if Microsoft doesnt chop it out by then.

jimmcslim 10y ago

I wonder if someone will get xmonad working?

dantillberg 10y ago

I think the real trouble with Windows for many folks is not that we can't figure out how to convert linux kernel calls into NT kernel calls, but that we don't want to convert our linux kernel calls into NT kernel calls PLUS "telemetry" data sent to Redmond. Windows is explicitly non-free (in so many ways), and that's cool and all, but no thanks.

rspeer 10y ago

When it comes to finding a decent terminal emulator for Windows: mintty is the terminal you get when you use Git Bash, right? Because in my experience it's better than ConEmu. ConEmu makes a staggering number of off-by-one errors in putting characters on the screen when I ssh into a Linux machine and use tmux. Vertical separators end up jagged, things that are supposed to fit the width of the screen end up wrapping, my Vim status line says "IISUAL", and so on. But mintty gets tmux right.

bketelsen 10y ago
i've noticed a lot of these same off-by-one errors in MobaXTerm, too.

nowprovision 10y ago

This is awesome stuff. If you fullscreened MobaXTerm and autohide the Windows taskbar then what are the problematic points vs running a linux/i3wm natively? Do certain keystrokes get intercepts by Windows regardless? You mention Firefox have you tried Chrome/Chromium in i3wm? Can you play a HTML5 youtube video? Thanks for writing it up, interesting stuff! - An i3 user

bketelsen 10y ago
I hadn't found any keystrokes that were masked by windows, but most of what I do is ALT+something, I use ALT as my meta key in i3.

hamilyon2 10y ago

Did anyone try to use xmonad?

vesche 10y ago

At this point why not just have a Linux system on your local network and connect with VNC from Windows...? You can have a Linux environment to hack around in while getting to use all the "nice" Windows GUI apps.

hiram112 10y ago
VNC has never been near as fast as even Remote Desktop, and even that is pretty slow for anything more than basic administration. Maybe in a local lan it would work better, but I doubt considering it's slow even in a VM on a powerful workstation. It's getting to the point where I'm thinking about using a Windows laptop and Linux desktop with a KVM switch, but then I'm not portable.

qplex 10y ago

It is rather trivial for Microsoft to implement support for Linux. Also, if Windows source code was freely available there would be support for Windows applications on Linux.

icebraining 10y ago
There is support for Windows applications on Linux, no source code needed: https://www.winehq.org/ https://www.winehq.org/
- qplex 10y ago
  Yes. My point was that it is trivial for Microsoft to implement support for an open system, compared to implementing support for a closed system such as Windows. There would be better support for running Windows applications under Linux if Windows was an open system.
  - douche 10y ago
    Still, even if everything Windows-based was open-source, you'd still have to build out the shim layers in front like Wine does, unless you wanted to deal with the extreme tedium of converting all the Win32, DirectX, etc, etc, calls over.

technojunkie 10y ago

How did the author miss out on using Cmder? It's better the ConEmu and probably the best terminal for Windows today.

b15h0p 10y ago
Well, actually, Cmder is just a distribution around ConEmu. But I agree that it is quite acceptable.
bketelsen 10y ago
author here - I searched and asked Windows using friends for recommendations.

diminish 10y ago

A lot of alarms ringing in my mind, as a long time Linux and i3 user and developer. 1. You ran i3 as a proof of concept now but going long term you ll face dozens of issues when you want to make it useful. The same is true for everything you ll install through Ubuntu for Windows.. 2. Windows mail clients are totally wrong, slow and they are not only hazardous to people using but also to receivers of emails. Outlook users don't know how to put subjects, respond and distort the format and conversation all the time. (Long time outlook user here) 3. Desktop productivity tools are long history. No reason why someone would use ms office anymore. 4. Windows for Ubuntu is doomed to be a second class citizen, and if it by chance becomes a first class citizen then why would someone need the Windows overhead and complexity? (How can I apt-get remove windows) I congratulate MS devs taking HN seriously recently but windows in 2016 is obsolete..

raesene9 10y ago
oh dear. I'd have to suggest here that you're projecting your own use cases and assuming that they have a universality that they really don't. Desktop productivity tools are history... no, no they're not, MS office sells millions of copies for a reason. Windows mail clients are wrong. They're not the same as unix mail clients for sure, but who gets to dictate whether that's right or wrong? Personally I think all mail clients that allow HTML are wrong, but I understand that I'm in a minority there. I'd suggest that Windows has many advantages over linux on the desktop. The hardware support is better, there's a better range of desktop apps available for people who like desktop apps (including games of course). Personally I'm looking forward to ubuntu on windows. there's a load of areas where I prefer working in a linux/unix like environment (e.g. anything command-line based where linux is far superior to Windows (although Windows is getting better in that regard)), and I hope that this will let me get the best of both worlds, whilst avoiding the overhead of running a VM.
erelde 10y ago
> Desktop productivity tools are long history You should take a walk in an administration building. IE6 and MS Office are still in use. "For security reasons".
StavrosK 10y ago

rbanffy 10y ago

As someone who has only briefly worked on Windows since the early 2000s, when I moved to Debian and then Ubuntu (and, then, using Cygwin to make things comfy), what is the compelling reason to adopt it? Both Mac ans Linux offer very good developer experiences, with hosts of cross-platform tooling and environments that are closer to the server that will most likely run your application. I understand that Windows is essential when you write code that runs on Windows, but, apart from that, what are the advantages over macOS and a more traditional Unix-like environment?

StavrosK 10y ago
Having used Windows extensively up until Vista (at which point I switched to Ubuntu), none. It's a more solid OS than Ubuntu (in that the UI doesn't sometimes have weird corruption bugs and is more responsive), but development is a nightmare. Development is split into two camps, Windows-centric and UNIX-centric. Trying to develop one on the other is a disaster, so let that inform your choice. As a consumer OS, I have a much easier time installing Ubuntu on my parents'/friends' computers, as it's easier to get used to and doesn't have as many viruses.

epheo 10y ago

The gnu binaries used in this article are the ones included in maboXterm and compiled for windows, nothing related to an abstraction layer between nt kernel and Ubuntu gnu bin builds as mentioned I suppose. Working great anyway.

ilaksh 10y ago

Embrace, extend, extinguish.