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Maybe I'm in the minority but I prefer keeping my GNU/Linux and Windows installations separate, with each OS on its own drive. My Linux setup is secure, free of

• jcrites 10y ago
  It would be nice to be able to develop "native" Linux software right from within Windows where I'm doing other things. I can see the appeal. That's why Microsoft built the Linux subsystem, I suppose.
  • lugg 10y ago
    Embrace, extend, extinguish. Although I'm guessing a few devs are in the boat with "all company PCs must be windows." Gives them an out no?
    • sremani 10y ago
      No this is not that. The idea is some frameworks/platforms have become nix first, ex. Ruby, Python to an extent Java etc. OCaml to only name some. Windows Subsytem for Linux is about bringing these nix first developer plats to Windows and help developers like me to remain on Windows.
      • pg_is_a_butt 10y ago
        ummmmm.... that is the "embrace" part. you're all idiots.
      • kristianp 10y ago
        It may be that Microsoft is doing their usual embrace and extend, perhaps the extinguish part is not possible these days. This is an interesting effect there, that due to WSL, there will be less perceived need to support windows for development tools. However, isn't WSL aimed mainly at developers? Regular users won't be turning it on. So if you're developing the next dropbox with clients written in Ruby, you'll still need a ruby and gems that run on Windows. i.e. to support end users, we'll still need dev tools that run on Windows. edit: Server-based stuff not so much, and server-based stuff is the main thing these days, to put it clumsily.
        • owaislone 10y ago
          Correct, but a LOT of developers today write code that eventually runs on Linux in the cloud. With WSL, such developers using Windows will not leave for OS X/Linux
          • Ericson2314 10y ago
            Hmm, perhaps it's really a move against OS X. If you actually run Linux you're probably committed.
            • int_19h 10y ago
              Keep in mind that Microsoft itself writes and/or maintains a lot of software for Linux - as you can imagine, WSL comes in very handy there.
            • shams93 10y ago
              Yeah I would agree it's a move against osx. I run debian on a raspberry pi3 don't even deal with Windows but this is clearly aimed at the corporate web developers where you have a macosx near monopoly.
    • koko775 10y ago
      If Microsoft can extinguish Linux by adding some subsystems to Windows, I'll eat my hat.
    • hollander 10y ago
      MS is seeing that it can't extinguish Linux, as well as the iPhone or iOS system. It has to adapt to it. Making it easier to develop on a Linux subsystem makes people stay on Windows, which still has stuff like Photoshop that blows away Linux alternatives. Plus of course MS Office, for which LibreOffice is a real alternative, but in some environments it's not.
  • timgws 10y ago
    have you seen the VS GDB Debugger extension? https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/11/18/announcing-the-vs-gdb-debugger-extension/ https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2015/11/18/announcin...
    • robotdad 10y ago
      Actually we have something better than that now. Check out http://aka.ms/vslinux http://aka.ms/vslinux
      • ackalker 10y ago
        Much better than that, actually: http://visualgdb.com/ http://visualgdb.com/ This one has been around a bit longer, too, and despite its name is now much more than just a pretty face for GDB but rather a full cross-platform development environment which has IntelliSense everywhere, handles the installation of toolchains and BSPs for embedded targets, building kernel modules (with VisualKernel addon), etc.
  • zamalek 10y ago
    I tried dual booting Linux back in high school, never got anywhere because I never selected it at boot. Virtual Machines changed that - I was able to play around with Linux without having to worry about a power cycle. Now I can play around Tensor flow (in theory) and not have to worry about the crummy GPU support in nearly all hypervisors. I've reached the point where I'd love to have Linux on my work machine, no Windows at all. That's only because for the first time Linux isn't this cool kids playground that I'm not invited to.
    • ajoy39 10y ago
      my first semester of college back in 2010 I, for reasons I cannot explained, decided that I would keep my windows and linux installs on totally separate hard drives. With a laptop. With one drive bay. You never appreciate how quick rebooting into linux is until you spend 4 months physically swapping a hard drive every time you want to switch which OS you're using. I was not a smart freshman
      • aruggirello 10y ago
        If your laptop was able to boot from USB, perhaps you could place the second disk (the one with Linux) in an external USB 2.0 (better yet 3.0) case. That'd solve the issue...
  • mrweasel 10y ago
    I would prefer it the other way around: Having a good Windows subsystem in Linux. If however I'm to work on Windows, it's nice to know that I'll finally be able to have access to a functional shell.
    • ericfrederich 10y ago
      I like the approach here; different than WINE. Apparently WinNT was built all along to run applications for different OSs at the same time, like OS/2. They didn't try to implement all of userspace, just the system calls... a lot less to cover. Very cool project.
      • aruggirello 10y ago
        Yeah, easy. But AFAIK, unfortunately Wine could not just reimplement the Windows Kernel interface, since Windows DLLs are subject to copyright (so you need permission to redistribute them, guess by whom?), and lots of them are needed for a "working" system. That's why they set out to also create a full set of compatible DLLs for each subsystem instead - a monumental task involving reverse-engineering [often poorly documented] stuff, and reimplementing the thing [possibly without infringing any patents]... BTW Wine is approaching release 2.0. Hooray for Wine!
  • j4_james 10y ago
    The real benefit is not just being able to develop Linux software, but the ability to work on cross-platform code. I do most of my coding and debugging in Visual Studio, but when I want to test the changes on Linux I now simply alt-tab to the bash shell which I have open in the appropriate directory, rebuild the changes with make, and then run the updated executable. That's not necessarily doable for everyone, but for me that workflow is so much simpler than it would be with dual booting or a separate Linux VM.
• flukus 10y ago
  > Maybe I'm in the minority but I prefer keeping my GNU/Linux and Windows installations separate, with each OS on its own drive. That's essentially how the windows subsystem works. It might not technically be a VM, but practically it is.
  • e40 10y ago
    Don't know why you were downvoted without explanation, because that's my understanding how this new feature works. Just like the Posix subsystem before it, completely cut off from the Win32 subsystem. So, yeah, it feels like it would be like a VM to me.
    • flukus 10y ago
      > Don't know why you were downvoted without explanation If past conversations on reddit are anything to go by it's because a lot of people don't want to recognize that WSL is essentially a VM. Docker too for that matter.
      • voltagex_ 10y ago
        WSL is definitely not a Virtual Machine, unless you're saying that WINE is also a VM, in which case you have a very broad definition of VM that's different from most other people. The way WSL is implemented is actually really interesting. Linux syscalls are translated by an NT kernel driver and some other shims handle the NTFS->POSIX transition on the filesystem side.
        • flukus 10y ago
          > WSL is definitely not a Virtual Machine, unless you're saying that WINE is also a VM, in which case you have a very broad definition of VM that's different from most other people. Wine runs on the host OS, WSL runs apps from linux image. This image is self contained, just like a VM. Aside from that, I said it's practically a VM. There might be some different technical stuff going on underneath, but for a user there is very little difference between WSL and a VM.
• krylon 10y ago
  This is pretty OT, but I feel like it is worth pointing out: > Boot times are very short with SSDs so restarting is not a problem. Personally - this is a question of individual preference, though - I do not mind the OS boot time itself very much (to a degree). Whether the system takes ten seconds or two minutes from reset/power-on to the login screen does not make much of a difference, to me, psychologically. But once I log in, I need to open all of these programs, make sure the windows are in the right place, SSH connections to certain machines are open, etc. I admit I am kind of obsessive-compulsive about this, but this is a far greater (psychological) barrier to rebooting than the OS boot time itself. I do not use Windows at home, and my work laptop runs Windows 7 (I intend to keep it that way, too), so I have not been able to play with the Linux subsystem on Windows. But if you consider it as an alternative to Cygwin (which I do use), it sound kind of nice. Now if only Windows had a native, builtin X server... ;-) EDIT: With Cygwin or the Linux subsystem, driver issues are not an issue, of course, because hardware is still managed by the Windows kernel and Windows drivers.
  • Wofiel 10y ago
    You can run things like VcXsrv or Xming, then you can pretty much run anything through them, including window managers. When WSL went mainline I had all sorts of fun playing with it, building Servo and VLC and running them in a tiling wm, just because I could. (Not exactly productive time though)
    • Wofiel 10y ago
      And I can't seem to edit my post, but your comment about it be a Cygwin replacement is spot on. It's definitely replaced the need for it almost entirely.
  • piaste 10y ago
    Personally - this is a question of individual preference, though - I do not mind the OS boot time itself very much (to a degree). Whether the system takes ten seconds or two minutes from reset/power-on to the login screen does not make much of a difference, to me, psychologically. But once I log in, I need to open all of these programs, make sure the windows are in the right place, SSH connections to certain machines are open, etc. I admit I am kind of obsessive-compulsive about this, but this is a far greater (psychological) barrier to rebooting than the OS boot time itself. Hibernation should solve this issue, no? It certainly does on single-OS machines. I practically only shut down my desktop when I want to tweak the hardware and/or BIOS. It's a little more annoying for dual-OS because there is a 'hibernate' command and a 'reboot' command, but I'm not aware of a 'hibernate-then-reboot' one, so you have to manually hit the power button after hibernating instead.
• unixhero 10y ago
  The point here is, it's not how we feel as a desktop user, it's more interesting to think about what new technical solutions can be created because of this.
• dijit 10y ago
  >Maybe I'm in the minority but I prefer keeping my GNU/Linux and Windows installations separate I'm excited because everyone at my company doesn't develop on linux because "we know visual studio" and "setting up a build environment will take too much time". With the linux subsystem for windows, we have the ability to push them to slowly start developing new systems on linux. So I'm super happy about it.
• reddytowns 10y ago
  If you're not using secure boot* and an encrypted Linux partition you are not secure. (*Or a boot loader on a separate USB drive which is never plugged in while running Windows)
  • mcsofake 10y ago
    I don't think that will help. Windows can patch the bootloader to cache the encryption password. Since Microsoft controls the secure boot signing keys, they can sign the patched bootloader too, so even secure boot cannot protect you. Having the bootloader on a USB drive is probably a good idea though.
• mikegerwitz 10y ago
  > Maybe I'm in the minority but I prefer keeping my GNU/Linux and Windows installations separate, with each OS on its own drive. Consider full disk encryption on the GNU/Linux drive as well, since Windows can still access the disk.
  • mcsofake 10y ago
    I don't think that will help. After all Windows can patch the bootloader to cache the encryption password too. Even secure boot won't protect you since Microsoft has the signing keys.
• wangchow 10y ago
  Yeah there seems to be some magic going on behind the scenes. I'm not a huge fan of magic in this case. Though it's just Beta now still right? I like having VMs on my local machine that I can snapshot. I would prefer if MSFT bolstered their Hyper-V performance for GUI apps as I found them sort of slow both to RDP/VNC into remotely and also locally. Would be cool if the Windows Linux subsystem can work like Parallels for OSX that can be blended into the general OS but also snapshots taken and if the user wants, bring the Linux environment in it's own window.