Microsoft Releases New Tool To Get More Distros on Windows (zdnet.com) 216
Microsoft has released a tool to help Linux distribution maintainers bring their distros to the Windows Store to run on Windows 10's Windows Subsystem for Linux. From a report: Microsoft describes the tool as a "reference implementation for a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) distribution installer application," which is aimed at both distribution maintainers and developers who want to create custom Linux distributions for running on WSL. "We know that many Linux distros rely entirely on open-source software, so we would like to bring WSL closer to the OSS community," said Tara Raj of Microsoft's WSL team. "We hope open-sourcing this project will help increase community engagement and bring more of your favorite distros to the Microsoft Store." WSL helps programmers build a full Linux development environment for testing production code on a Windows machine.
Not getting the point. (Score:3)
I am not hating Microsoft but WSL main purpose is to bring Linux compatibility as a secondary purpose to a primarily Windows usage.
This is the case you need or want a Windows systems as your primary, but there is a subset of tools that work much better in Linux, but you don't need them as your primary set of tools.
Most distributions are built in mind of being your primary OS. Then running it in WSL you really don't get to experience all its real advantages.
I guess if a distribution maker may want to make a distribution specialized for WSL they could do that.
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The point is making sure people who develop for a Linux target (a mobile device, a phone, etc) use Windows on their desk. Differently put, the point is that they use Visual Studio instead of for example QtCreator.
While the developer still has Windows on their desk they will also more easily target Windows for their developments, too.
It's basically Ballmer's developers, developers, developers song.
However, being an open source developer myself, I don't think that's a bad thing. More toys for us.
No X yet? (Score:3)
The point is making sure people who develop for a Linux target (a mobile device, a phone, etc) use Windows on their desk.
Has WSL gained support for X.Org or Wayland or both recently? If not, then how is someone who develops a GUI application for an X11+Linux or Wayland+Linux target supposed to test?
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The free version of Xming has gone years without updates. In your experience, is it still stable after all these years?
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I've been running X on Windows for over 10 years, long before WSL. I don't think anything about WSL excludes you from running X.
No hardware access yet (Score:2)
Based on what I've already read, I'm under the impression that the WSL container doesn't give applications enough privileges to access the video hardware, which would be required to run an X server inside WSL.
Or were you referring to running the X server in the Win32 environment and allowing WSL applications to connect to it? This is the approach taken by Xming, but its free version hasn't been updated in a decade.
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A lot of people are moving over to the lighter weight Visual Studio Code (not to be confused with Visual Studio). VS Code already works on Linux (and Mac and Windows). It's actually a nice IDE regardless of the language you code in or the platform you code on.
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That is correct, the subject line anyway.Majority of enterprises still use Windows, email is on exchange, Microsoft office is the defacto app, vizio is your tool for diagrams, excel is what the business loves and uses. Yet a lot of developers love and want linux. As in my case, I like to think of myself as an above average software engineer. I would love to use Linux at work, I did for a while, soon Pidgin is a half baked replacement for Lync, Evolution almost works as a email client and even though Libre O
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Back in early 2000s, the solution was to have two computers at my desk. One for doing work, and the other for Outlook or the occasional Word document. Just swivel in the chair to multitask.
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Then running it in WSL you really don't get to experience all its real advantages.
You don't need *all* the advantages. You just need some of them. MS's biggest problem is that most of the web is run on Linux, that is Linux servers and services. The underlying OS is not the reason for it. This extends to their own Azure platform where Linux is a popular choice.
The point here is not to run Linux. The point is to run the things that Linux offers under Windows, scripts, applications, etc. That way they can start pushing their own Azure customers to run Windows server instead. Likewise develo
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But you don't need a wide verity of distributions to pick from to get some of the advantages. Not expecting to use the GUI or having to deal with a large set of drivers what real advantage is there to use Ubentu vs Debian or Redhat vs Suse... For the most part you will be using the standard Linux commands, or installing the additional software that you are looking for.
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Not expecting to use the GUI or having to deal with a large set of drivers what real advantage is there to use Ubentu vs Debian or Redhat vs Suse...
The difference every distro offers: The package management philosophy and their own home baked management apps (the most obvious of which being the package manager itself).
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I think it's more about the package management system. I use Bash on Windows regularly, and whatever I install on that subsystem comes in through Ubuntu repositories. That is, if it's something not in Ubuntu main repositories, they aren't going to be available on Bash on Windows.
Maybe there are people out there who use Redhat's system (yap or whatever; I haven't looked in a very long time), or maybe there is software package configured well in a Debian repository but for whatever reason not in Ubuntu reposi
Evidently nothing has changed in M$ (Score:2)
Embrace. Extend. Extinguish.
Maybe they can first fix Win10 so updates work (Score:5, Insightful)
I have one computer now that been trying to get Win10 1709 for over 3 months. Keeps getting 83% done then bows off, reloads old version of Win10, then starts at it all over again starting with the download. There is no way to stop it or control it.
You want Linux to run on such a broken system? My Linux boxes are going on over 100 days of uptime (moved from one room to another). Maybe Win10 should be a subsystem to Linux? At least I know Linux is stable enough to run a subsystem.
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Wine needs X11 (Score:2)
Last I checked, Wine required an X server, and Microsoft didn't provide one for WSL. Nor has the free version of Xming been updated in over a decade.
Or are you referring to running Linux on the bare metal and running applications in Wine? That works so long as Linux and X.Org support your PC's hardware. Though some PCs work better with Linux, others work better with Windows, sometimes fairly spectacularly [debian.org].
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cmd.exe / powershell.exe from the linux shell works if you need them, and it's a far-superior terminal emulator to that shit Microsoft ships with windows.
How the hell do Windows people survive without a tabbed terminal emulator?
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Nor has the free version of Xming been updated in over a decade.
I run gnome-terminal via WSL/Xming whenever I need a terminal in Windows.
Free Xming or paid Xming?
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You think Linux syscalls work in Windows? There's a lot more to it than an ELF loader, just like there's a lot more to Wine than a PE loader.
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Well, if you run your "Linux distro" on Windows, as described in the article, then the kernel which you describe as the source of driver hell and kernel panics wont be running. Meaning you wont have the driver hell and kernel panics anymore.
ps. To be fair, any distribution that will run in or on top of Windows will in that form not be running as a Linux distribution but just as a distribution containing a bunch of open source softwares that run on Windows.
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So..., we can trust Microsoft now? (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean, when /. first started, it was all "embrace, extend, extinguish" with MS using a Borg Gates avatar.
Is this the "embrace" part or the "extend" part of that whole process? Or can we really trust them?
Re:So..., we can trust Microsoft now? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is this the "embrace" part or the "extend" part of that whole process? Or can we really trust them?
Microsoft is a publicly traded corporation controlled by a board, so anyone who trusts them (regardless of their history) really could not get any dumber. However, they could seem dumber if they ignored Microsoft's history, which proves conclusively that no one should trust them.
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The only dumb thing is misusing the word trust to be all encompassing. There are many things I trust about Microsoft, such as their inability to create a lightweight useful server product. I trust that all their software will have some way of trying to ex-filtrate data.
I also trust that their history can't be used to predict their future given that their history was based on leadership by a malevolent and technically quite brilliant and strategic mind with impeccable attention to detail, whereas their futur
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In summary, MS are too stupid to be genuinely evil.
Stupid and evil are not mutually exclusive.
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I didn't say they were stupid. I said they were "too stupid" to be evil. They are mutually exclusive on account of the adverb I used before stupid.
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So you donâ(TM)t trust Intel, Red Hat and all the other publicly-traded corporatioms that work on the Linux kernel, right? How silly of me. Why would a freetard be anything but a hypocrite?
If you think I'm a hypocrite, you're an idiot too. I do not trust Intel, Red Hat, or any of the other publicly-traded corporations that work on the Linux kernel. I trust the kernel development process, as guided by Linus Torvalds. If he gets hit by a bus, I'll be worried.
What kind of total fucking maroon trusts Intel at this point, anyway? That takes an even more special kind of stupid than trusting Microsoft.
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This is just a continuation of their older Unix layer they’ve had for decades, but just without a decrepit old codebase.
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This is a much deeper level.
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I mean, when /. first started, it was all "embrace, extend, extinguish" with MS using a Borg Gates avatar.
When /. first started MS was run by a smart CEO with an incredibly strategic way of thinking slowly working its way to an incredible monopoly. The MS of today can't even convince people to get a free upgrade of an existing MS product, or extract anything of value from a $7.6bn acquisition of a large mobile phone company.
I have high trust that MS's current leadership is too incompetent to execute an embrace, extend, extinguish strategy. Not only that but in order to so you need to come from a position of a m
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I mean, when /. first started, it was all "embrace, extend, extinguish" with MS using a Borg Gates avatar.
Is this the "embrace" part or the "extend" part of that whole process? Or can we really trust them?
This is "embrace". "Extend" will come when they have their own linux group, their own distro, and are committing code to the kernel.
Re:So..., we can trust Microsoft now? (Score:5, Insightful)
One _single_ act doesn't magically negate the 20 years of why Microshaft sucks [youtube.com].
Have they disabled telemetry in Windows 10 yet? Why was ON in the _first_ place??
Can I buy an license for Windows 7? Forced upgrades are bullshit.
Can Explorer show me folder sizes yet? This isn't fucking rocket science, just basic computer science.
There are numerous technical reasons [altervista.org] why Windows is still crap.
Microshit's "innovation" is total joke. [dwheeler.com]
Measuring folders in a file manager takes time (Score:3)
Have they disabled telemetry in Windows 10 yet? Why was ON in the _first_ place??
Which of the following would you prefer that the maintainer of a computer program do, given a limited budget of time=money?
A. Fix bugs in components that end users often use
B. Fix bugs in components that end users seldom use
If you guessed "A", then the next step is to measure which features end users often use. Telemetry does this. Even GNU/Linux distributions have this sort of thing, such as the optional popularity-contest package in Debian and Ubuntu. I think Microsoft forces it on as a condition of suppo
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> Would it be acceptable for folder sizes in a file manager to initially appear as a throbber and then be replaced with the actual size after several seconds of HDD thrashing?
Gee, if only there was a such as concept as a low-priority thread.
> Or would you prefer that a file manager hide the contents of a folder entirely until it has run the equivalent of du to query all folders within that folder for their sizes?
Why??? There is no need to BLOCK on a _background_ task.
> And what value would you pre
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Gee, if only there was a such as concept as a low-priority thread.
Of the following possibilities, which would you prefer?
A. You navigate to a folder, see "Measuring..." for subfolder sizes, and hear HDD thrashing while a low-priority thread measures each subfolder, causing you to become impatient and navigate away after fifteen seconds.
B. You navigate to a folder, see "Measuring..." for subfolder sizes, and hear HDD thrashing while a low-priority thread measures each subfolder. Because you are patient, you sit and wait for the background measurement to complete, only for
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> Which of the following would you prefer that the maintainer of a computer program do, given a limited budget of time=money?
> A. Fix bugs in components that end users often use
> B. Fix bugs in components that end users seldom use
You DO realize that the choice is NOT mutually exclusive, right?
> the next step is to measure which features end users often use. Telemetry does this.
So how did they manage for the past 30 years without Telemetry???
30 years from 1985 (release date of Windows 1.0) to 20
Bug fixing time is a scarce resource (Score:2)
Which of the following would you prefer that the maintainer of a computer program do, given a limited budget of time=money?
A. Fix bugs in components that end users often use
B. Fix bugs in components that end users seldom use
You DO realize that the choice is NOT mutually exclusive, right?
It is when a publisher has a limited amount of money to spend on hiring people to fix bugs.
So how did they manage for the past 30 years without Telemetry???
By charging more. I seem to remember Windows 7 retail being more expensive at launch than Windows 10 retail was at launch. Charging more led some PC makers to try loading GNU/Linux onto ultra-low-cost PCs. In addition, Windows 7 had fewer features to maintain than Windows 10, though I admit fewer antifeatures as well. There was no UWP in Windows 7, for instance.
* Opt-in is fine.
* Opt-out is bullshit.
Would you prefer that your computer be attacked by a botn
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I'm not your son but I'm probably old enough to be your brother and/or father. ;-) But I digress ...
> Microsoft has a track record for anti-competitive
I'm quite well aware of the DR-DOS, Stacker/DoubleSpace, etc. shenagins. Hell, even _part_ of the FCB (File Control Block) in DOS 1.x and 2.x was a blatant rip-off from CP/M.
Guess I missed the '+', as in 20+. And you're right, I should have said 30+. Is 40+ stretching it?
Microsoft has a LONG history [wikipedia.org] of not-invented-here buying companies.
> They have not
Re:So..., we can trust Microsoft now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Microsoft could cure Cancer and they'd still be considered the most evil ever around here.
When Jack The Ripper claims he is reformed, and then says he wants to manage the women's shelter, it's prudent to consider past behavior.
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A funny, but sad, analogy for how Microsoft behaves.
A "good" example is how they every few years they hype a 3 letter acronym as the latest and greatest fad, and then abandon it.
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Microsoft could cure Cancer and they'd still be considered the most evil ever around here.
If Microsoft cured Cancer, it would come with a required, expensive subscription. If you tried switching to a cheaper cure, your cancer would come back twice as bad and with a hefty dose of AIDS.
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Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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Open source existed before Microsoft existed as a company. So no, open source was not developed in direct opposition to it and its licensing models.
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in other words, given the chance, no one is going to intentionally shell out cash to run GCC on a copy of windows.
Who said anyone would? WSL is for people already running Windows and used something prior like Windows Services for Linux. Microsoft has never claimed anyone is going to buy Windows purely to run WSL.
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and used something prior like Windows Services for Linux
Ugh, obviously meant Windows Services for Unix.
Proponents of WSL on /. (Score:2)
Microsoft has never claimed anyone is going to buy Windows purely to run WSL.
Even if Microsoft has not claimed so, a few some Slashdot users have. When asked what Linux laptop to use in size ranges that System76 doesn't cover, particularly smaller than 13", I seem to remember a few users replying suggesting buying a Windows laptop and running WSL.
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Open source was developed in direct opposition to the types of traditional licenses and restrictions placed on code and programs from Microsoft and other companies like them.
You misspelled "Free Software" there. Open Source just means that you can get the sources [hyperlogos.org], and the concept (if not the name) actually predates Microsoft. People were giving away source code to CP/M programs before Microsoft knocked it off as DOS.
The fact is Linux never needed windows support, and no one has explained the net-gain from supporting the execution of free software that has run stand-alone for decades other than the potential to sell more licenses for the proprietary OS under which it is being made to run.
Support for one or two Windows applications has roped many people into Linux, because it made it possible for them to ditch Windows. How many? Who knows? But it was useful.
in other words, given the chance, no one is going to intentionally shell out cash to run GCC on a copy of windows.
Which is not even vaguely close to what is happening, or what is suggested to be happening.
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The fact is Linux never needed windows support
Software does not have needs. Users have needs. Software tries to meet that need.
As for me, I used to have a number of applications that ran on Windows. It would have been shittier for me if Cygwin wasn't around to give me a real shell[1]. I donated some bux to the Cygwin maintainers, contrary to your claim that no one is going to pay for that.
[1] This was before PowerShell (get off my lawn). Since I've only got so much room in my brain for shell languages so I would still prefer BASH on Windows even if PS
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Open source wasnt developed
Actually you're missing the point of Open source. By-n-large most large players don't give a shit about open source when they chose Linux or such toolkits for their enterprise solutions. Altruism doesn't fit in anywhere in the procurement strategy.
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You're thinking about it backwards. Microsoft isn't imagining that Linux needs Windows support. They want Windows to have Linux support.
If you want/need to run some Linux tool, they want to make it as easy as possible to run that on Windows. It's an added feature for Windows if it can run Linux stuff.
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If you want/need to run some Linux tool, they want to make it as easy as possible to run that on Windows.
Is that just for command line tools or also for tools that present a graphical user interface (GUI)? Or should all GUI applications for Linux be client-server, with a web or UWP front-end and a Linux back-end? Good luck getting that past the "I don't want any script in my document viewer!" crowd that inhabits parts of Slashdot.
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Or should all GUI applications for Linux be client-server
All GUI applications for Linux are client-server, with the client (app) and X (server)
There are many X servers for Windows available. If you want one that runs on the Linux side, you don't understand how this works.
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There are many X servers for Windows available.
Then why doesn't Microsoft offer a list of them when WSL is being installed, as it used to do with the "Browser Choice" thing in Europe?
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Reversed (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux on windows = stupid. Windows on linux = ok, but still stupid. Windows is a bloated, fat OS where FAR greater than 75% of its code is there to LIMIT what you can do in some way. It is always working against you and policing what you can do on your own system. Why would you allow it to be the base OS?
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Sorry, but in this day and age why are we still running a base OS of any description?
Why are things not supplied with a hypervisor and then people just choose what they want on first boot, even choosing "all" if they want both OS.
Running a general purpose OS on top of a general purpose OS is just a waste. Virtualise, and make the hypervisor be the "OS", the only thing that actually needs to integrate with the hardware whatsoever.
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Why are things not supplied with a hypervisor and then people just choose what they want on first boot, even choosing "all" if they want both OS.
Depends on your use case. There are plenty of places where the hypervisor is the default state. 2 of the machines in my house do just that. My desktop? Well one of the reasons people run Windows is to run certain applications which also have very real performance constraints (i.e. games). Good luck with your hypervisor there.
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Linux on windows = stupid.
Fortunately we're not running Linux on Windows. What we're running is Linux based applications on Windows, and given the great speeds WSL provides along with not needing to fire up an entire virtual machine to get the job done this sure as hell is a heck of a lot less stupid than having to manage 2 OSes on one machine.
As for why people use Windows at all, If you don't know it already it's only because you don't want to accept it. This has been discussed to death.
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Telemetry, reboots, and data caps (Score:2)
Good Linux GUI software is cross platform
True, but running this software on Linux still has benefits.
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It's insulting that Microsoft claims that enterprises are asking for this.
Why else would they have also maintained a Unix layer on NT for decades prior if no one was asking for something like this? Just because you don’t use something doesn’t mean others don’t.
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Windows Services for Unix was around since 1999. So, yes, that would span multiple decades.
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And that has what to do with anything?
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Wow. Where to start.
Linux is not a second-class citizen that needs to ride on the back of Microsoft Windows.
It doesn't. Linux isn't running anywhere. Windows Subsystem for Linux is all about not running Linux AT ALL, but giving Windows users access to Linux userland apps.
It's insulting that Microsoft claims that enterprises are asking for this.
Then you should blame the enterprises for your insult. The same enterprises who spin up 40% of Azure instances not because they give a shit about Linux, but rather to access software that only runs on Linux.
Any enterprise that uses Linux know, Linux stands on its own.
Of course it does, but for what reason? Very few enterprises use Linux because Linux. They use Linux because Apache or so
Paging RMS... (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, I'm not exactly getting bent out of shape over it. I just find it wryly amusing.
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You're right, it isn't Linux. It's the Windows Subsystem for Linux. I don't understand what people find so hard to understand about the name. It runs in Windows, it's a subsystem for software that traditionally runs on the Linux kernel.
Anti-Virus and WSL (Score:2)
Did they ever provide the necessary APIs and hooks and other things to allow anti-virus vendors to properly monitor and check WSL processes?
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It's likely they want WSL to become a malware vector, so they can blame linux for the malware...
How is this different than Cygwin? (Score:2)
Other than not having to recompile and relink binaries with cygwin, or Ming, how is this very different?
We can already run pretty much everything of importance on Windows, using Cygwin.
Re:How is this different than Cygwin? (Score:5, Informative)
Cygwin is slow to create or fork processes, while WSL is much faster there. So things like autotools, config scripts, or make run a lot faster under WSL than Cygwin.
Also, there is more software and library availability for the Linux distros than on Cygwin.
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Other than not having to recompile and relink binaries with cygwin, or Ming, how is this very different?
You say "other than not having to recompile binaries" as if this is a small thing. It is a very big difference and fundamentally being able to emulate the Linux Kernel ABI to natively run entire linux distributions within windows makes comparing cygwin to WSL similar to comparing Docker to VMWare.
They are emulating a completely different layer and as such providing a completely different level of compatibility and usability. Cygwin is great for running some scripts and some basic small binaries, but it's qu
Lower Level. (Score:2)
Cygwin does its work at the user level. It's just another Win32 application that use the Win32 API provided by Windows NT kernel to try to do what a POSIX compliant program compiled against Cygwin wants to do.
(Among other things, this causes "fork()" to be slow due to Win32 API sucking at it).
(And as you mention it means that you need to recompile and relink against it).
WSL does its work at the kernel level. Just like Win32 is one of the API tha the NT Kernel provides (and just like the OS/2 API that it did
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Speaking from experience. My current project is replacing Cygwin with WSL where I can. We use it to handle automation of our few Windows servers (mostly running proprietary billing software and such) via the rest of our Linux infrastructure. WSL is fucking awesome.
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I can't comment on the network development side, but ....
It seems really slow. Maybe it's just my imagination, but sometimes I'd do something as simple as an 'ls' and patiently wait.
WSL has bench marked in a variety of use cases (including disk IO) with very similar results to Docker and VMWare. It's certainly not native performance, but it isn't that far from it. ls is instant on my machine, so maybe something went wrong in your install.
There was no GUI support out of the box. I had to setup Xming on the windows side. Again, not super complicated, but it seems like little thought was put into it.
Plenty of thought has been put into it. The big problem here is users expecting software that specifically flashes up as being experimental when you first install it to be feature complete. If yo
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First, windows has a terrible terminal emulator
It does! My main impetus for keeping WSL on my machine. gnome-terminal is *soooo* much nicer.
Raw sockets didn't seem to work correctly (or at all). I tried a few network tools and they generally fell flat on their face.
Raw sockets do not work at all, except for ICMP proto raws- they're not provided by the MS kernel, unfortunately.
It seems really slow. Maybe it's just my imagination, but sometimes I'd do something as simple as an 'ls' and patiently wait.
I haven't noticed the slowness.
There was no GUI support out of the box. I had to setup Xming on the windows side.
Wait, what? What do you think "GUI" support in Linux is? What do you want, an X server running from within the WSL layer? That makes literally no sense. Or do you want *microsoft* to provide their own X server while they're at it? No thanks. I like having options.
but from a practical standpoint WSL isn't even very good.
I think it'
How about: Linux Subsystem for Windows (Score:2)
Why is it all about Windows running Linux as a 2nd class citizen?
It would best for Linux to be our core, and make Windows an optional subsystem of a LInux host.
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It's not. Linux isn't running at all. It's about running GNU/Windows.
It would best for Linux to be our core, and make Windows an optional subsystem of a LInux host.
You should tell Code-weavers to get working on it. Me, I'm personally happy having the option rather being told what is "best".
It's a trap (Score:2)
MS wants your money. Even if you need to run a free OS. That's always been the case and hasn't changed. In general, they're winning and this is the start of the endgame for them.
With everyone progressively more and more locked into Office365, this gives MS an argument to say there's not even a need to find a way to unlock and escape.
If all your Linux needs can be met from Windows, how are you ever going to convince the CTO to abandon Windows even for the technical staff?
FB must be wondering why they're gett
I'm confused... (Score:3)
Is this the "Embrace" or "Extend" phase?
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Embrace. You can't extend what isn't embraced. WSL usage is basically non existent.
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Embrace. You can't extend what isn't embraced. WSL usage is basically non existent.
But hasn't MS been making a LOT of "Embrace" noises ALREADY vis-a-vis Linux and W10?
I actually kind of like WSL (Score:2)
I'm sure I'm in the minority here, but I actually kind of like WSL. It isn't perfect, and it isn't a "real" VM (it uses a sort of kbi translation layer and is more like a jail or a container than a vm), so some things obviously don't work, particularly system tools. But that's mostly fine. I never liked Cygwin, going back years. Windows Services for Unix was cumbersome and weird. WSL doesn't suffer from as many problems, IMO.
For my home hobby workflow, being able to pop open WSL and have all the bits of U
It's not real Linux if it runs UNDER WINDOWS (Score:2)
Last year I predicted that Microsoft would try to annex Linux, and now I see I was right.
I'll say it again: It's not real Linux if it runs UNDER WINDOWS. Don't fall for it, gentlemen (Gentoo-men?).
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It's not Linux at all. You do realise that right?
Not even the slightest bit of Linux code is being run. That's entirely the point of a Windows Subsystem for Linux.
It is however still perfectly real GNU program regardless of which kernel it runs on.
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Telemetry, that's what is missing on a pure distro. [...] Finally a Linux with advertising in the main menu
You mean Ubuntu?
I can't tell which of these antifeatures (telemetry or advertising) you're claiming applies to Ubuntu. If you mean advertising, Ubuntu abandoned the Unity "shopping lens" long ago. If you mean telemetry, you can turn off all Ubuntu telemetry, but don't complain when Ubuntu drops your favorite package because your usage thereof didn't register on your distribution maintainers' radar.
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