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The Year of Linux on the (Windows) Desktop – WSL Tips and Tricks

25 points by benaadams 8y ago

finchisko 8y ago
Even-though I'm not huge Windows fan, I like to watch Scott Hanselman's videos. He's smart and funny, but hope he's wrong with "The year of Linux on the (Windows)". Not sure what is the Microsoft's initiative with WSL, but if I were them, I would be very careful. WSL can be two sided sword for them. I think for most Linux users, WSL is not enough to switch to Windows (there will be some, but talking about majority here). So IMO WSL will attract Windows user to Linux and not the other way round. Those same users may later discover that, they're actually more productive in Linux and eventually migrate away from Windows. Microsoft is also giving good reasons to do so (telemetry, forced updates,...). Almost hear Satya Nadella singing Ariana Grande's – No Tears Left To Cry :D
- holografix 8y ago
  I view this from an entire different perspective. WSL has nothing to do with Linux it’s 99% about MacOS. A lot of developers wouldn’t consider a move to Windows in the past because they’re we’re far too used to the gorgeous, hassle free version of Linux that is MacOS. Now give Windows a way for people to keep using most if not all of their dev stack, earn street cred by creating a very nice skinny IDE (VSC) and capitalise on Apple putting out disappointing Macs... a lot of Mac devs made the jump.
  - finchisko 8y ago
    People bitch about the mac all the time. And yes, regular Joes disappointed of mac might migrate to Windows (but not because of WSL). But I doubt there will be significantly large group of macOS developers, that rely on *NIX command line tools willing to migrate to WIN because of WSL. Yes, they may "threaten" on forums, they will, but in reality only few do. :D I would rather install Linux on mac and recycle the hw than buy new PC with Windows. Of course for non heavy terminal users, WSL and Windows might be good option. But IMO we might both be correct. It's not mutual exclusive. Time will tell.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    I do get your point, but we should make it clear that OS X is a pretty UNIX, not Linux. In that regard OS X succeeded in where NeXTSTEP failed. NeXTSTEP was never about UNIX, rather their Foundation framework, Postscript display, Renderman and everything else that the Objective-C stack provided. Having UNIX underneath, even if in the form of BSD and Mach mixture, was just a way to get a foot into the UNIX graphical workstation market, fighting against SGI and Sun. So real NeXTSTEP developers, and the related OS X culture never really cared about UNIX culture as such, they had their own. Microsoft just realized that many brought OS X devices, just because they wanted an UNIX CLI experience with pretty face, after anyone serious about Linux would never use OS X, given that syscalls and file structures, on good UNIX compatibility tradition, aren't really the same. So having realized the mistake it was to ditch the POSIX NT personality, and that nowadays Linux syscall compatibility is more relevant than POSIX, Microsoft is offering an UNIX experience to those that only care about bash, awk, perl, docker, ... without any regard for the actual kernel running them. So yeah, as you say, it is all about those that were buying an UNIX experience with a pretty face. With GNU/Windows on one corner, and ChromeOS with an upcoming official Linux userspace, I am curious to see what WWDC will bring, if at all.
slededit 8y ago
Its ironic that Linux (i.e. the kernel) is the one part of the operating system explicitly not being used in WSL. GNU userspace may have won a victory but its sad its not under its own name.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  Technically it is GNU/Windows, but Linux was won the market share among common people, and yeah I don't think FSF will find it amusing. However, I bet if Microsoft had improved the original POSIX personality on NT instead of the way it dealt with it, Linux would probably never won't the hearts of the other UNIX vendors. Many of us only jumped into GNU/Linux, because it provided a path to use the work of the university computers at home, Windows 95 wouldn't do it and getting NT 3.51 with the respective hardware was too expensive.
  - slededit 8y ago
    At that time they thought they could destroy Unix. Its interesting to think of what could have been, but it was never a real possibility as far as microsoft was concerned.
    - pjmlp 8y ago
      They could have destroyed UNIX, traditional commercial UNIXes that is, like SGI and such. Many UNIX customers were in the process of evaluating their workstation story related to hardware and license costs, eyeing a possible switch to NT Workstations. That did not happen, because GNU/Linux came into the scene and many saw there an opportunity to improve it and get a pass porting their UNIX software into it instead, while using commodity PC hardware, specially as BSD future was still being decided. Without BSD and GNU/Linux, the future would have looked much different. Instead BSD and GNU/Linux were the ones killing commercial UNIXes.
tracer4201 8y ago
I installed all of this with Ubuntu so i could mimic my development environment I have on my Mac with zsh. Running apt-get to install some packages was orders of magnitude slower than it should be. Doing a Google search at the time showed some Github discussions with no resolution. I wad far from the only one. Unless they've fixed it, I have no use for this.

25 points by benaadams 8y ago

Even-though I'm not huge Windows fan, I like to watch Scott Hanselman's videos. He's smart and funny, but hope he's wrong with "The year of Linux on the (Windows)". Not sure what is the Microsoft's initiative with WSL, but if I were them, I would be very careful. WSL can be two sided sword for them. I think for most Linux users, WSL is not enough to switch to Windows (there will be some, but talking about majority here). So IMO WSL will attract Windows user to Linux and not the other way round. Those same users may later discover that, they're actually more productive in Linux and eventually migrate away from Windows. Microsoft is also giving good reasons to do so (telemetry, forced updates,...). Almost hear Satya Nadella singing Ariana Grande's – No Tears Left To Cry :D

holografix 8y ago
I view this from an entire different perspective. WSL has nothing to do with Linux it’s 99% about MacOS. A lot of developers wouldn’t consider a move to Windows in the past because they’re we’re far too used to the gorgeous, hassle free version of Linux that is MacOS. Now give Windows a way for people to keep using most if not all of their dev stack, earn street cred by creating a very nice skinny IDE (VSC) and capitalise on Apple putting out disappointing Macs... a lot of Mac devs made the jump.
- finchisko 8y ago
  People bitch about the mac all the time. And yes, regular Joes disappointed of mac might migrate to Windows (but not because of WSL). But I doubt there will be significantly large group of macOS developers, that rely on *NIX command line tools willing to migrate to WIN because of WSL. Yes, they may "threaten" on forums, they will, but in reality only few do. :D I would rather install Linux on mac and recycle the hw than buy new PC with Windows. Of course for non heavy terminal users, WSL and Windows might be good option. But IMO we might both be correct. It's not mutual exclusive. Time will tell.
- pjmlp 8y ago
  I do get your point, but we should make it clear that OS X is a pretty UNIX, not Linux. In that regard OS X succeeded in where NeXTSTEP failed. NeXTSTEP was never about UNIX, rather their Foundation framework, Postscript display, Renderman and everything else that the Objective-C stack provided. Having UNIX underneath, even if in the form of BSD and Mach mixture, was just a way to get a foot into the UNIX graphical workstation market, fighting against SGI and Sun. So real NeXTSTEP developers, and the related OS X culture never really cared about UNIX culture as such, they had their own. Microsoft just realized that many brought OS X devices, just because they wanted an UNIX CLI experience with pretty face, after anyone serious about Linux would never use OS X, given that syscalls and file structures, on good UNIX compatibility tradition, aren't really the same. So having realized the mistake it was to ditch the POSIX NT personality, and that nowadays Linux syscall compatibility is more relevant than POSIX, Microsoft is offering an UNIX experience to those that only care about bash, awk, perl, docker, ... without any regard for the actual kernel running them. So yeah, as you say, it is all about those that were buying an UNIX experience with a pretty face. With GNU/Windows on one corner, and ChromeOS with an upcoming official Linux userspace, I am curious to see what WWDC will bring, if at all.

slededit 8y ago

Its ironic that Linux (i.e. the kernel) is the one part of the operating system explicitly not being used in WSL. GNU userspace may have won a victory but its sad its not under its own name.

pjmlp 8y ago
Technically it is GNU/Windows, but Linux was won the market share among common people, and yeah I don't think FSF will find it amusing. However, I bet if Microsoft had improved the original POSIX personality on NT instead of the way it dealt with it, Linux would probably never won't the hearts of the other UNIX vendors. Many of us only jumped into GNU/Linux, because it provided a path to use the work of the university computers at home, Windows 95 wouldn't do it and getting NT 3.51 with the respective hardware was too expensive.
- slededit 8y ago
  At that time they thought they could destroy Unix. Its interesting to think of what could have been, but it was never a real possibility as far as microsoft was concerned.
  - pjmlp 8y ago
    They could have destroyed UNIX, traditional commercial UNIXes that is, like SGI and such. Many UNIX customers were in the process of evaluating their workstation story related to hardware and license costs, eyeing a possible switch to NT Workstations. That did not happen, because GNU/Linux came into the scene and many saw there an opportunity to improve it and get a pass porting their UNIX software into it instead, while using commodity PC hardware, specially as BSD future was still being decided. Without BSD and GNU/Linux, the future would have looked much different. Instead BSD and GNU/Linux were the ones killing commercial UNIXes.

tracer4201 8y ago

I installed all of this with Ubuntu so i could mimic my development environment I have on my Mac with zsh. Running apt-get to install some packages was orders of magnitude slower than it should be. Doing a Google search at the time showed some Github discussions with no resolution. I wad far from the only one. Unless they've fixed it, I have no use for this.