11 ms·

I will try some linux apologetics 1. What is great about the windows GUI? Virtual desktops depend on monitors, annoying popup notifications that cannot be disa

I will try some linux apologetics 1. What is great about the windows GUI? Virtual desktops depend on monitors, annoying popup notifications that cannot be disabled and its resource intensive. IMHO linux has always been light years ahead of windows for as long as I remember, theres dozens of window managers better than the windows one. I am never 100% comfortable in windows, it's so locked down I feel like I am living in a hotel. 2. I do everything with the google docs these days, even on windows. So do a lot of businesses. 3. Again, most people seem to be using google calendar. 4. I actually found it easier to install on laptops back in the day. UEFI made it more painful. 5. A lot of unix tools are 2nd class citizens on windows. You can use WSL but file access is dog slow compared to the real thing.

dboreham 5y ago
Use WSL2 for non-dog-slow filesystem.
- LAC-Tech 5y ago
  I've got a hazy memory of trying this but had to back out because something broke. There was some big limitation of WSL2 I cant remember.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    I'd bet it was network access. It's a bizarre and common problem (I see more people commenting on the issues all the time) which you can kind of fix by forcing 8.8.8.8 or a different nameserver into /etc/resolv.conf but it's unclear to me why this doesn't work out of the box.
    - LAC-Tech 5y ago
      yes that was 100% it! I use WSL to do web dev in a windows machine so I can use all my favourite tools. So no WSL2 for me (though that work around is worth a shot).
- andrewmackrodt 5y ago
  This is true if you put your code in the Hyper-V managed WSL2 VM but now you have the reverse problem of WSL1, i.e. access via Windows P9 is slow and things like symlinks do not resolve whatsoever (on the Windows side). In WSL1, access to files on the Windows host is far quicker than WSL2 and symlinks work everywhere. To try to counteract this, I opted in to the insiders dev channel recently to try the upcoming X11 support, i.e. run IDEA inside WSL. While the performance is quite good, it's broken, e.g. try using find in project, the window disappears immediately 9 times out of 10. In many ways, I found WSL1 more useable as I could use one shell for both the Windows and WSL filesystems with reasonable performance. I now use cygwin if I want to use gnu linux type tools on Windows. Once the X11 support matures it will be a pretty good experience overall if people are willing to install things like IDEA in WSL, I'm looking forward to that.
  - Tenoke 5y ago
    >In WSL1, access to files on the Windows host is far quicker than WSL2 and symlinks work everywhere. I find this pretty annoying, as I need to access Windows files from WSL more often than the opposite (e.g. get stuff from my Windows Downloads folder, or use bash to quickly interact with a Windows folder). Do you know if access to Docker volumes is faster or slower on WSL2 by the way? I wouldn't switch back to WSL1 since some nix/cabal stuff didn't work on WSL1 at all but I am curious as that's the other point where my windows/wsl filesystems touch in ways I've never looked into.
    - andrewmackrodt 5y ago
      > Do you know if access to Docker volumes is faster or slower on WSL2 If your files are stored within the VM itself, WSL2's access to them is effectively native. However accessing the files from Windows requires going through the \\wsl$ (P9) network share. This presents problems as Windows isn't going to receive file notification events if you do something like `git checkout`. Additionally, if your project utilizes symlinks, Windows only sees them as an empty file. Users of VS Code largely will not encounter these problems as running `code` from within the WSL layer will start a remote server, it's seamless, that's genuinely very cool. However, if you use anything else, I've found it to be problematic. The "best" solution I arrived at (other than dual-booting Linux, which is totally worth it!) is to install `xorg-server` from cygwin, install my IDE of choice in WSL2 (IDEA) and use X11 forwarding. This way the IDE has a relatively real-time view of the filesystem, receives notification events, symlinks work, chmod is preserved if using safe-writes etc. If you need to use bash (and other tools not provided by Git Bash), cygwin is a useful addition. You can also use `mklink` from cmd/powershell to create a directory hardlink to the \\wsl$ folder if you need to copy things into WSL (although it's easier to access /mnt/drive from WSL2). Either way, I've found any direction of crossing Host/VM filesystem boundaries to be slower than WSL1's approach.
- SXX 5y ago
  Can you now use WSL2 together with other hypervisors like VirtualBox or VMWare? A while back WSL2 required use of HyperV and that removes possibility to run other VM software. Big no go for anyone who also want to test software in other VMs
  - nirvdrum 5y ago
    Yes. I don't recall which version support was added in, but a recent Windows 10 release build using WSL 2 can coexist with both VirtualBox and VMware Workstation.
    - SXX 5y ago
      Thanks for informarion! This is actually cool if it works well.
- beermonster 5y ago
  Actually it’s only faster for native fs access IIRC. So if you need to access cross-fs WSL Legacy may be more performant.
ubermonkey 5y ago
>I do everything with the google docs these days, even on windows. So do a lot of businesses. Some might, but goodness knows I've never run into one. The corporate America I have interacted with so far (30 year career, so not trivial) is Office all the way down, and deeply enmeshed with Exchange calendaring. (I mean, as an MSFT-hater from the 90s, it pains me to admit this, but Exchange calendaring is materially better than anything else. Sometimes, Redmond does things well.)
- codazoda 5y ago
  There are over 2 billion G Suite users. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billion-vs-microsoft-office-2020-3?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billi...
  - blackoil 5y ago
    They probably count all Android users who create gmail account with phone as GSuite users. Corporate users should be couple of order of magnitude lower.
    - clhodapp 5y ago
      GSuite is (or rather was, until they renamed it) specifically the corporate version.
  - easton 5y ago
    I’d be surprised if there’s even 200 million GSuite (not free gmail account, since that’s not for commercial use) accounts active. They have like no market share in enterprise outside of schools. (I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t at a school that used GSuite. Which shows the circles I’m in, of course, but I think there’s a weird HN bias where people think that companies outside of smaller shops are using GSuite. Exchange is still good and cheaper than ever.)
    - amyjess 5y ago
      The last three companies I've worked at have all been GSuite shops.
nixpulvis 5y ago
UEFI really is an issue.
- herbst 5y ago
  It's annoying. But for the end user the install is just a button and a minute more. At least on Linux.
  - nixpulvis 5y ago
    I've yet to own a UEFI motherboard without a few glitches. I never had these problems with the BIOS...
    - Jenda_ 5y ago
      I had. For example, HP EliteBook 8470p claims the drive is not bootable if there is a DOS partition table where no partition is marked bootable (I think it shouldn't parse the partition table at all, just check the magic and execute the first sector). What glitches have you seen (so I'm prepared when I meet them)?
- Jenda_ 5y ago
  What is the problem with UEFI? I have only installed Linux on a few computers with UEFI so far, so I don't have a great sample, but I haven't seen any problems. (I have heard about secure boot that cannot be turned off - how often is this the case?)
phendrenad2 5y ago
> You can use WSL but file access is dog slow You can also use WSL2, which has fast file I/O. Unless you're trying to write to files in /mnt/c, at which point the comparison makes less sense, and a more accurate comparison would be trying to write to files on a remote Windows machine from Linux (also slow). > compared to the real thing Um, it is the "real thing". It's running in a hypervisor, on the real CPU core.
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  WSL2 is just a VM. It's nothing new. WSL was actually an interesting concept but it couldn't be implemented right sadly.
  - phendrenad2 5y ago
    How is running in a VM, on modern hardware with virtualization supported natively by the CPU, not the "real thing"?
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      There's no transparent support for anything GUI or GPU related. There's no ability to use another hypervisor without rebooting the machine and changing a flag and then changing it back. There's no seamless access to the same filesystem. There's no seamless networking. There's no interprogram communication across the OSes without the (kinda broken) network.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - phendrenad2 5y ago
        Only the first one is something you get running Linux on bare hardware. The rest are goalpost-moving (and I don't even know what we'd be discussing to make those valid points honestly). And about GUI/GPU, that's actually not a valid point either, as WSL2 has OpenGL support now.
blix 5y ago
> Virtual desktops depend on monitors Why is this a negative? This is actually one of the largest pain points for me in switching from Windows/Mac to Linux.
jcelerier 5y ago
> IMHO linux has always been light years ahead of windows for as long as I remember, theres dozens of window managers better than the windows one. I confirm, my pathway to linux started with using alternative shells & apps on windows to improve on the existing ones, bblean, xoblite, aston shell... good times
- flas9sd 5y ago
  bblean, thanks for the flashback, these were unholy times!
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
herbst 5y ago
Not sure what you guys are doing all day. But I barely need a calendar and even more rare need any office software. When I document or plan I document in markdown in my favourite editor.
KronisLV 5y ago
Here's my own slightly out of touch that simultaneously holds true for me and doesn't for a very large part of the populace: 1) XFCE is the pinnacle of desktop environments: https://xfce.org/ https://xfce.org/ It's extremely stable, looks good, works fast and is customizable. It works equally well on old underpowered devices, modern ones, as well as servers (should you ever need that sort of thing for whatever reason). It also has plenty of widgets without any of the modern bloat. 2) LibreOffice is great open source office software: https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/ It started out as a fork of OpenOffice and has since become the mainstay under GNU/Linux distributions. It does word processing. It does spreadsheets. You can make drawings and visualizations in it. It does presentations. There's even a simple database offering in there, a la MS Access. It also supports MS Office formats for the most part and can convert them to open ones with very few issues! The performance is also better than any web based offering. Plus, it's cross platform! 3) Thunderbird is perhaps the best mail client, regardless of platform: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ It's stable, reliable and has its origins in Mozilla. It does everything i'd expect a mail client to do and i've had no problems with it to date. Plus, it's cross platform! As for mail servers, i think that mail servers are a horrible mess for the most part, regardless of which platform you need them on. I think that your best bet in that regard is just using a Docker container that packages all of the components that you'd need: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver 4) This is absolutely true, but then again, you can say the same about any piece of unpopular hardware. Linux on mobile phones is a mess. Then again, even FreeBSD on certain pieces of desktop hardware oftentimes fails to work as well. Many years have passed, but this can still be problematic, given that perhaps we treat drivers wrong as an industry. My cheap Chinese netbook (i'm not too well off financially) had the mouse not work on Fedora and some other distros. Sometimes the audio wouldn't work. Now, sometimes the mouse gets stuck in a state where it acts as a scroll wheel. In Windows, function keys worked as they should (after pressing the Fn key you could access them), but in Linux distros it was flipped and i found myself having to press Fn to use the F1-F12 keys, with no option in BIOS to flip this. The fingerprint scanner just doesn't work and isn't even detected. The Wi-Fi drivers didn't work and i had to compile them from some random GitHub repository that i found online. The distro didn't have GCC and the netbook doesn't have an ethernet port so i had to suffer through doing an air gapped install, which was problematic because of the dependencies. I got it working for the most part, but it was a pain. Things really should be better. But that can probably only be achieved by either open drivers and open standards for most of the hardware out there, or by killing off about 75% of the hardware vendors out there, which in practice simply means that you only have to buy hardware that works well (e.g. Thinkpads). 5) The choices that i find myself making are rather easy - either i use open source software, or i do less. However i agree for the most part with the observations about Linux not being an awfully popular platform for porting applications. I do think that this has three main causes: packaging being somewhat difficult to get started with (as well as needing to support a variety of distros), the GUI frameworks across Windows/Linux/Mac being a total mess and there being no "good" options out there, and then there also really not being a large commercial effort to make the struggle of porting something over worthwhile. Interestingly, the GUI framework situation isn't such a large issue if you go with something like Lazarus, JavaFX or even Swing for your software, but those can be ugly, so people don't. Still, i'd argue that either of those have the potential to be better choices than Electron apps.

dboreham 5y ago

Use WSL2 for non-dog-slow filesystem.

LAC-Tech 5y ago
I've got a hazy memory of trying this but had to back out because something broke. There was some big limitation of WSL2 I cant remember.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  I'd bet it was network access. It's a bizarre and common problem (I see more people commenting on the issues all the time) which you can kind of fix by forcing 8.8.8.8 or a different nameserver into /etc/resolv.conf but it's unclear to me why this doesn't work out of the box.
  - LAC-Tech 5y ago
    yes that was 100% it! I use WSL to do web dev in a windows machine so I can use all my favourite tools. So no WSL2 for me (though that work around is worth a shot).
andrewmackrodt 5y ago
This is true if you put your code in the Hyper-V managed WSL2 VM but now you have the reverse problem of WSL1, i.e. access via Windows P9 is slow and things like symlinks do not resolve whatsoever (on the Windows side). In WSL1, access to files on the Windows host is far quicker than WSL2 and symlinks work everywhere. To try to counteract this, I opted in to the insiders dev channel recently to try the upcoming X11 support, i.e. run IDEA inside WSL. While the performance is quite good, it's broken, e.g. try using find in project, the window disappears immediately 9 times out of 10. In many ways, I found WSL1 more useable as I could use one shell for both the Windows and WSL filesystems with reasonable performance. I now use cygwin if I want to use gnu linux type tools on Windows. Once the X11 support matures it will be a pretty good experience overall if people are willing to install things like IDEA in WSL, I'm looking forward to that.
- Tenoke 5y ago
  >In WSL1, access to files on the Windows host is far quicker than WSL2 and symlinks work everywhere. I find this pretty annoying, as I need to access Windows files from WSL more often than the opposite (e.g. get stuff from my Windows Downloads folder, or use bash to quickly interact with a Windows folder). Do you know if access to Docker volumes is faster or slower on WSL2 by the way? I wouldn't switch back to WSL1 since some nix/cabal stuff didn't work on WSL1 at all but I am curious as that's the other point where my windows/wsl filesystems touch in ways I've never looked into.
  - andrewmackrodt 5y ago
    > Do you know if access to Docker volumes is faster or slower on WSL2 If your files are stored within the VM itself, WSL2's access to them is effectively native. However accessing the files from Windows requires going through the \\wsl$ (P9) network share. This presents problems as Windows isn't going to receive file notification events if you do something like `git checkout`. Additionally, if your project utilizes symlinks, Windows only sees them as an empty file. Users of VS Code largely will not encounter these problems as running `code` from within the WSL layer will start a remote server, it's seamless, that's genuinely very cool. However, if you use anything else, I've found it to be problematic. The "best" solution I arrived at (other than dual-booting Linux, which is totally worth it!) is to install `xorg-server` from cygwin, install my IDE of choice in WSL2 (IDEA) and use X11 forwarding. This way the IDE has a relatively real-time view of the filesystem, receives notification events, symlinks work, chmod is preserved if using safe-writes etc. If you need to use bash (and other tools not provided by Git Bash), cygwin is a useful addition. You can also use `mklink` from cmd/powershell to create a directory hardlink to the \\wsl$ folder if you need to copy things into WSL (although it's easier to access /mnt/drive from WSL2). Either way, I've found any direction of crossing Host/VM filesystem boundaries to be slower than WSL1's approach.
SXX 5y ago
Can you now use WSL2 together with other hypervisors like VirtualBox or VMWare? A while back WSL2 required use of HyperV and that removes possibility to run other VM software. Big no go for anyone who also want to test software in other VMs
- nirvdrum 5y ago
  Yes. I don't recall which version support was added in, but a recent Windows 10 release build using WSL 2 can coexist with both VirtualBox and VMware Workstation.
  - SXX 5y ago
    Thanks for informarion! This is actually cool if it works well.
beermonster 5y ago
Actually it’s only faster for native fs access IIRC. So if you need to access cross-fs WSL Legacy may be more performant.

ubermonkey 5y ago

>I do everything with the google docs these days, even on windows. So do a lot of businesses. Some might, but goodness knows I've never run into one. The corporate America I have interacted with so far (30 year career, so not trivial) is Office all the way down, and deeply enmeshed with Exchange calendaring. (I mean, as an MSFT-hater from the 90s, it pains me to admit this, but Exchange calendaring is materially better than anything else. Sometimes, Redmond does things well.)

codazoda 5y ago
There are over 2 billion G Suite users. https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billion-vs-microsoft-office-2020-3?op=1 https://www.businessinsider.com/google-g-suite-gmail-2-billi...
- blackoil 5y ago
  They probably count all Android users who create gmail account with phone as GSuite users. Corporate users should be couple of order of magnitude lower.
  - clhodapp 5y ago
    GSuite is (or rather was, until they renamed it) specifically the corporate version.
- easton 5y ago
  I’d be surprised if there’s even 200 million GSuite (not free gmail account, since that’s not for commercial use) accounts active. They have like no market share in enterprise outside of schools. (I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t at a school that used GSuite. Which shows the circles I’m in, of course, but I think there’s a weird HN bias where people think that companies outside of smaller shops are using GSuite. Exchange is still good and cheaper than ever.)
  - amyjess 5y ago
    The last three companies I've worked at have all been GSuite shops.

nixpulvis 5y ago

UEFI really is an issue.

herbst 5y ago
It's annoying. But for the end user the install is just a button and a minute more. At least on Linux.
- nixpulvis 5y ago
  I've yet to own a UEFI motherboard without a few glitches. I never had these problems with the BIOS...
  - Jenda_ 5y ago
    I had. For example, HP EliteBook 8470p claims the drive is not bootable if there is a DOS partition table where no partition is marked bootable (I think it shouldn't parse the partition table at all, just check the magic and execute the first sector). What glitches have you seen (so I'm prepared when I meet them)?
Jenda_ 5y ago
What is the problem with UEFI? I have only installed Linux on a few computers with UEFI so far, so I don't have a great sample, but I haven't seen any problems. (I have heard about secure boot that cannot be turned off - how often is this the case?)

phendrenad2 5y ago

> You can use WSL but file access is dog slow You can also use WSL2, which has fast file I/O. Unless you're trying to write to files in /mnt/c, at which point the comparison makes less sense, and a more accurate comparison would be trying to write to files on a remote Windows machine from Linux (also slow). > compared to the real thing Um, it is the "real thing". It's running in a hypervisor, on the real CPU core.

sudosysgen 5y ago
WSL2 is just a VM. It's nothing new. WSL was actually an interesting concept but it couldn't be implemented right sadly.
- phendrenad2 5y ago
  How is running in a VM, on modern hardware with virtualization supported natively by the CPU, not the "real thing"?
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    There's no transparent support for anything GUI or GPU related. There's no ability to use another hypervisor without rebooting the machine and changing a flag and then changing it back. There's no seamless access to the same filesystem. There's no seamless networking. There's no interprogram communication across the OSes without the (kinda broken) network.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - phendrenad2 5y ago
      Only the first one is something you get running Linux on bare hardware. The rest are goalpost-moving (and I don't even know what we'd be discussing to make those valid points honestly). And about GUI/GPU, that's actually not a valid point either, as WSL2 has OpenGL support now.

blix 5y ago

> Virtual desktops depend on monitors Why is this a negative? This is actually one of the largest pain points for me in switching from Windows/Mac to Linux.

jcelerier 5y ago

> IMHO linux has always been light years ahead of windows for as long as I remember, theres dozens of window managers better than the windows one. I confirm, my pathway to linux started with using alternative shells & apps on windows to improve on the existing ones, bblean, xoblite, aston shell... good times

flas9sd 5y ago
bblean, thanks for the flashback, these were unholy times!

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

herbst 5y ago

Not sure what you guys are doing all day. But I barely need a calendar and even more rare need any office software. When I document or plan I document in markdown in my favourite editor.

KronisLV 5y ago

Here's my own slightly out of touch that simultaneously holds true for me and doesn't for a very large part of the populace: 1) XFCE is the pinnacle of desktop environments: https://xfce.org/ https://xfce.org/ It's extremely stable, looks good, works fast and is customizable. It works equally well on old underpowered devices, modern ones, as well as servers (should you ever need that sort of thing for whatever reason). It also has plenty of widgets without any of the modern bloat. 2) LibreOffice is great open source office software: https://www.libreoffice.org/ https://www.libreoffice.org/ It started out as a fork of OpenOffice and has since become the mainstay under GNU/Linux distributions. It does word processing. It does spreadsheets. You can make drawings and visualizations in it. It does presentations. There's even a simple database offering in there, a la MS Access. It also supports MS Office formats for the most part and can convert them to open ones with very few issues! The performance is also better than any web based offering. Plus, it's cross platform! 3) Thunderbird is perhaps the best mail client, regardless of platform: https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ https://www.thunderbird.net/en-US/ It's stable, reliable and has its origins in Mozilla. It does everything i'd expect a mail client to do and i've had no problems with it to date. Plus, it's cross platform! As for mail servers, i think that mail servers are a horrible mess for the most part, regardless of which platform you need them on. I think that your best bet in that regard is just using a Docker container that packages all of the components that you'd need: https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver https://github.com/docker-mailserver/docker-mailserver 4) This is absolutely true, but then again, you can say the same about any piece of unpopular hardware. Linux on mobile phones is a mess. Then again, even FreeBSD on certain pieces of desktop hardware oftentimes fails to work as well. Many years have passed, but this can still be problematic, given that perhaps we treat drivers wrong as an industry. My cheap Chinese netbook (i'm not too well off financially) had the mouse not work on Fedora and some other distros. Sometimes the audio wouldn't work. Now, sometimes the mouse gets stuck in a state where it acts as a scroll wheel. In Windows, function keys worked as they should (after pressing the Fn key you could access them), but in Linux distros it was flipped and i found myself having to press Fn to use the F1-F12 keys, with no option in BIOS to flip this. The fingerprint scanner just doesn't work and isn't even detected. The Wi-Fi drivers didn't work and i had to compile them from some random GitHub repository that i found online. The distro didn't have GCC and the netbook doesn't have an ethernet port so i had to suffer through doing an air gapped install, which was problematic because of the dependencies. I got it working for the most part, but it was a pain. Things really should be better. But that can probably only be achieved by either open drivers and open standards for most of the hardware out there, or by killing off about 75% of the hardware vendors out there, which in practice simply means that you only have to buy hardware that works well (e.g. Thinkpads). 5) The choices that i find myself making are rather easy - either i use open source software, or i do less. However i agree for the most part with the observations about Linux not being an awfully popular platform for porting applications. I do think that this has three main causes: packaging being somewhat difficult to get started with (as well as needing to support a variety of distros), the GUI frameworks across Windows/Linux/Mac being a total mess and there being no "good" options out there, and then there also really not being a large commercial effort to make the struggle of porting something over worthwhile. Interestingly, the GUI framework situation isn't such a large issue if you go with something like Lazarus, JavaFX or even Swing for your software, but those can be ugly, so people don't. Still, i'd argue that either of those have the potential to be better choices than Electron apps.