4 ms·
Can someone explain what this is for someone not really into the lingo here?
by maaaats 10y ago
Can someone explain what this is for someone not really into the lingo here?
- revelation 10y agoIt uses the new Windows 10 Linux subsystem (WSL) to run your window manager of choice on a Windows port of the Xserver (pray for the soul of whoever ported that). Then it neatly integrates that into the standard Windows login.
- spooterspooter 10y agoYeah, or I guess I could just install my own keyloggers and just email the reports to MS directly.
- killjoywashere 10y agoHe's sort of running open source desktops on a Windows 10 kernel. But not really, there's an abstraction layer called WSL in between. There are some interesting effects though: you can touch test.txt in Bash and then open that file in Notepad without setting up any network shares, virtual machines, etc. In my mind, Microsoft developed WSL to try to keep developers: if you grew up on Linux but are now employed maintaining Windows servers, WSL gives you a way to get to your shell of choice and maybe you won't tell your boss to migrate from Azure to GCP or AWS. There's a lot of stuff (notably a lot of hardware) that still doesn't work as advertised. Graphics cards being a big one. This fellow got graphical desktops running. Sounds like I/O is an issue, but it works.
- majewsky 10y ago> if you grew up on Linux but are now employed maintaining Windows servers I think it's the other way around. It's useful for people who develop for Linux, but their company issues Windows notebooks to employees because their internal IT infrastructure is AD+Exchange+etc.
- dingo_bat 10y agoBingo. I just hate it.
- killjoywashere 10y agoWow, it hadn't occurred to me they would that systematically unsupportive. Even in the military a lot of devs use Mac or Linux for their work laptop.
- Florin_Andrei 10y ago> In my mind, Microsoft developed WSL to try to keep developers: if you grew up on Linux but are now employed maintaining Windows servers, WSL gives you a way to get to your shell of choice IMO Cygwin did that well enough before WSL. I "grew up on Linux" (starting back in the day when it came on a stack of floppies and nobody knew what it was) and I've always installed Cygwin on all Windows systems where I had admin privileges. It worked fairly well for command line stuff.
- ams6110 10y agoI was running X11 apps (mostly xemacs) in Cygwin on Windows XP nearly a decade ago.
- mtdewcmu 10y agoCygwin is slow at things like process creation, I think, which made shell scripts slow. Plus, cygwin was its own environment that required some porting, or, at least, recompiling to get apps to work. The new Linux subsystem runs Linux binaries at something like full speed (to the extent that I've played with it).
- cmrdporcupine 10y agoI am using WSL on my new box, but also have Cygwin installed. Cygwin is night and day worse than WSL. But I have to have Cygwin installed to get CLion to work. I look forward to the day when MingW and Cygwin can be replaced with the far nicer WSL alternative. It really is mostly seamless, and very fast.
- yjftsjthsd-h 10y agoI wouldn't say there's an abstraction layer between the kernel an programs; my understanding is that it's in the kernel and no more an abstraction layer than Win32.