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How is Windows Subsytem for Linux these days? Windows has plenty of warts that I doubt WSL will resolve (can't delete open files, spectacular suicide if you us

How is Windows Subsytem for Linux these days? Windows has plenty of warts that I doubt WSL will resolve (can't delete open files, spectacular suicide if you use symlinks or junctions on system resources, different administrative abstractions and CLI tools, that sort of thing) but I might be willing to give it a spin if someone other than microsoft says nice things about it.

Jare 8y ago
If you only want a Unix environment then it's overkill because you do have to deal with Windows and pay some perf / usability penalties. But as the place to do my unix-y things in a computer otherwise setup to run games and big software packages (Unity, Maya, etc) it is great and keeps improving.
excalibur 8y ago
For the (relatively common) use case of managing a mixed Windows and Linux server environment, the winning strategy these days seems to be to run your preferred Linux flavor inside a VM on a Windows host. In this scenario, WSL has been very useful for situations where I just don't want to fart around with the full VM. Now that Windows does SSH natively, I don't really have much need for it anymore.
ms013 8y ago
I use it daily for all of my development work (Ocaml, Python, LaTeX, vim, emacs, and a host of other tools, including X11 apps). It is the single biggest reason I was able to ditch my 2017 MacBook Pro a year ago for a Surface Book 2 after ~20 years of mac laptops and Lenovos running linux. I couldn't work with the terrible clacky keyboard they introduced - it didn't malfunction for me, I just loathed how it felt and sounded. Occasional friction when bouncing between apps on the Linux side and the Windows side sharing files, but as long as I work in /mnt/c/Users/USERNAME/ from the Linux side it isn't too bad. I don't buy the "I've used OSX for so long I can't possibly adapt my workflow to Windows" argument. It took me a few days to get used to the new idioms, but it wasn't that bad. Then again, I've been pretty OS agnostic for my career - Irix, SunOS/Solaris, Linux, OSX, and now Windows+WSL. Other than the part of my career when I was doing systems research and had to care about OS-specific details (e.g., writing Linux kernel modules), I haven't really found it hard to adapt to new environments and be happily productive.
- tlavoie 8y ago
  How does the performance feel? I've got a decent Lenovo, primarily running Linux. When I reboot to Windows (10, home came with), everything feels noticeably slower. I haven't tried dev stuff on Windows, but general UI, browsing and so on.
  - ms013 8y ago
    It can be sluggish at times (SB2 13”, maxed out specs), usually on boot when a bunch of background tasks are starting up. I haven’t run Linux on its own on this specific machine, so I don’t have a good comparison. It is tangibly slower than my 15” MBP 2017 when running some compute intensive tasks for work, but that is likely due to differences at the hardware level and not OS. I also have encountered some slowness at the filesystem level, which occasionally annoys me when I’m doing tasks that hit the FS very frequently. It isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough that I don’t notice the warts too frequently. I’m not very fickle though: at this point in my career, I’ve come to the conclusion that all systems suck in their own special ways.

Jare 8y ago

If you only want a Unix environment then it's overkill because you do have to deal with Windows and pay some perf / usability penalties. But as the place to do my unix-y things in a computer otherwise setup to run games and big software packages (Unity, Maya, etc) it is great and keeps improving.

excalibur 8y ago

For the (relatively common) use case of managing a mixed Windows and Linux server environment, the winning strategy these days seems to be to run your preferred Linux flavor inside a VM on a Windows host. In this scenario, WSL has been very useful for situations where I just don't want to fart around with the full VM. Now that Windows does SSH natively, I don't really have much need for it anymore.

ms013 8y ago

I use it daily for all of my development work (Ocaml, Python, LaTeX, vim, emacs, and a host of other tools, including X11 apps). It is the single biggest reason I was able to ditch my 2017 MacBook Pro a year ago for a Surface Book 2 after ~20 years of mac laptops and Lenovos running linux. I couldn't work with the terrible clacky keyboard they introduced - it didn't malfunction for me, I just loathed how it felt and sounded. Occasional friction when bouncing between apps on the Linux side and the Windows side sharing files, but as long as I work in /mnt/c/Users/USERNAME/ from the Linux side it isn't too bad. I don't buy the "I've used OSX for so long I can't possibly adapt my workflow to Windows" argument. It took me a few days to get used to the new idioms, but it wasn't that bad. Then again, I've been pretty OS agnostic for my career - Irix, SunOS/Solaris, Linux, OSX, and now Windows+WSL. Other than the part of my career when I was doing systems research and had to care about OS-specific details (e.g., writing Linux kernel modules), I haven't really found it hard to adapt to new environments and be happily productive.

tlavoie 8y ago
How does the performance feel? I've got a decent Lenovo, primarily running Linux. When I reboot to Windows (10, home came with), everything feels noticeably slower. I haven't tried dev stuff on Windows, but general UI, browsing and so on.
- ms013 8y ago
  It can be sluggish at times (SB2 13”, maxed out specs), usually on boot when a bunch of background tasks are starting up. I haven’t run Linux on its own on this specific machine, so I don’t have a good comparison. It is tangibly slower than my 15” MBP 2017 when running some compute intensive tasks for work, but that is likely due to differences at the hardware level and not OS. I also have encountered some slowness at the filesystem level, which occasionally annoys me when I’m doing tasks that hit the FS very frequently. It isn’t perfect, but it’s good enough that I don’t notice the warts too frequently. I’m not very fickle though: at this point in my career, I’ve come to the conclusion that all systems suck in their own special ways.