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Unless you're going to force your users to install WSL up front(which is a pretty poor first contact) I think you might be better served by keeping it around.
by vvanders 9y ago
Unless you're going to force your users to install WSL up front(which is a pretty poor first contact) I think you might be better served by keeping it around.
- 43224gg252 9y agoWhy? The Linux sub-system is the best part of Windows. He's doing them a favor.
- untog 9y agoExtra dependencies are rarely ever doing anyone a favour. Yet another thing to keep up to date, occupy disk space, memory...
- Spivak 9y agoThat's a pretty flimsy case when it's bundled with the OS and the performance and memory cost is in their court to improve.
- gtirloni 9y agoIt seems to still be a feature hidden under Developer Mode thus not appropriate as a dependency for end users. Maybe OP is talking about tools installed on his/her own system only?
- pvdebbe 9y agoWSL is not always available for corp Windows setups
- hossbeast 9y agoYou are misunderstanding the point of WSL. It's not about writing software with Linux that users will run with Windows. Rather, it's about writing software on Windows that users will run on Linux. The target demographic is developers of Linux server software. A lot of those devs today run macOS
- vvanders 9y agoOh no, I get that. The OP was making the assertion that open source doesn't need win32 portability. That's a huge pain in the ass for those of us who work in things that are tied to win32(graphics, gamedev tools, etc) we happily contribute back but ripping out a working port just seems petty.
- blibble 9y agoit's a maintenance cost I have to maintain a separate build system for Windows, all the win32 specific code, and also test under Windows... and most of this requires a Windows license if I can rip all of that out by outsourcing the compatibility testing to Microsoft: all the better, even if I have to add a line to the documentation requiring users to check a checkbox once in some control panel somewhere
- Spivak 9y agoOnce you turn WSL would the actual user experience of those apps change? Shouldn't you be happy that WSL will enable F/OSS devs to write cross-platform software much easier by not having to keep two sets of code?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoHonestly, Windows users should be accomodated for as little as possible. I don't want to write my software once for 12 operating systems and once again for one. WSL is the only reason my software runs on their shitty OS at all.
- vvanders 9y agoIf you're just looking to do open source for the fun of writing software then by all means ignore portability(which is a totally legit approach). However if you're goal is to have an impact with your software then supporting win32 is a good bet since you're going to find an order of magnitude more users on win32. You'll also probably want iOS, Android and other platforms that aren't drop-in ports for POSIX if you want to provide a reasonable interface.
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoiOS and Android are largely POSIX-compatible. Windows is not as an intentional anticompetitive design choice. Now that WSL is mature, there's no reason to play into that nonense any further (though in my opinion there was never any reason to).
- wornohaulus 9y agoWhat is your product ? What software do you write ?
- Sir_Cmpwn 9y agoMany different kinds of open source software: https://github.com/SirCmpwn https://github.com/SirCmpwn