
Arch Linux adapted for Windows Subsystem for Linux - hunterwerlla
https://github.com/turbo/alwsl/tree/dev
======
supernintendo
Maybe I'm in the minority but I prefer keeping my GNU/Linux and Windows
installations separate, with each OS on its own drive. My Linux setup is
secure, free of proprietary software and under my full control. When I run
tcpdump, I'm met with a clean log where every packet is one I recognize. I get
to use my favorite window manager (awesomewm) and I don't have to worry about
forced updates. My Windows install is quite a different beast - automatic
updates, mostly proprietary software and no major customizations other than
performance tweaks and what the OS allows. I use it for gaming and media, and
it works great. Boot times are very short with SSDs so restarting is not a
problem. No compatibility issues, no fussing about with drivers and no need
for translation layers like the Windows Subsystem or WINE; just two
independent OSs that never let me down.

That said, no hate toward this project. Arch Linux is probably my favorite
distro (although I'm on Xubuntu at the moment).

~~~
jcrites
It would be nice to be able to develop "native" Linux software right from
within Windows where I'm doing other things. I can see the appeal. That's why
Microsoft built the Linux subsystem, I suppose.

~~~
lugg
Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Although I'm guessing a few devs are in the boat with "all company PCs must be
windows." Gives them an out no?

~~~
sremani
No this is not that. The idea is some frameworks/platforms have become _nix
first, ex. Ruby, Python to an extent Java etc. OCaml to only name some.
Windows Subsytem for Linux is about bringing these_ nix first developer plats
to Windows and help developers like me to remain on Windows.

~~~
simula67
This is precisely the strategy of 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish'.

Step 1: Embrace new technology ( like Ruby, Python, Java etc ) that run on
other ecosystems

Step 2: Add extensions to the technology that only works in Microsoft
ecosystem. For example, add new functionality to Ruby for Windows that only
work on Windows

Step 3: As more and more people develop software that uses these features,
more people will have to switch to Microsoft ecosystem to continue using those
pieces of software. This is not a voluntary switching based on the merit of
the software ( as the same software could have been developed without those
extensions ). The switching is often mandated by management decree, customer
requests or market concerns.

The danger of this strategy is the cost for people outside the Microsoft
ecosystem.

a) Bad pieces of technology becomes successful, merely because it came from
Microsoft. Everyone is forced to use it.

b) People are locked into Microsoft platforms. This causes all the usual
problems associated with lack of freedom : harder to experiment, keep the
costs down for companies etc

Some people say Microsoft has changed their ways and they have since repented,
but most people are still suspicious. Once bitten, twice shy.

~~~
apatters
So what do you call it when Google adds great UX, advanced sorting and
searching etc. to email, and then slowly starts making it harder to send email
to Gmail accounts from non-Gmail accounts? (All in the name of eliminating
spam, of course.)

Or when Facebook Messenger supports XMPP up until the point where their user
base is big enough and they don't have to care about interop anymore?

Welcome to Software Business 101, everyone plays nice with the
standards/alternatives/competition until they don't have to anymore. I never
understood why Microsoft gets extra flak for this in 2016 - maybe they were
particularly good at it 20 years ago, but every big player will play hardball
if they get a chance.

The answer is to avoid single vendor lock-in under all circumstances, but
Microsoft is hardly on a trajectory to become the single vendor for Ruby or
any other Linux-first tech at the moment (ha!).

~~~
sjellis
Microsoft are _still_ doing it. The company that I work for didn't just pay
for Office subscriptions because we wanted Office for Mac (and I didn't want
to get it on subscription either, but the pricing strategy is designed to
penalize you if you don't). We actually have access to three different Office-
like products already (iWork, LibreOffice, Google Apps). None of them can yet
100% support Microsoft's "standard" file formats.

------
kozikow
I am currently dual booting between Arch Linux and Windows 10.

Moving to something like this one day makes me conflicted. On one hand I feel
like I would betray open source, on the other hand I wouldn't have to restart
my machine to play games...

~~~
Longhanks
If your hardware supports it, you may be able to pull a 180 and run a Windows
VM on the bare metal using hardware passthrough. There's a great community
here: [https://www.reddit.com/r/vfio](https://www.reddit.com/r/vfio)

~~~
Kenji
Wow, that works? Video games are pretty much the last thing that holds me on
Windows. Everything else is solved on Linux. I am very interested in any
solution for this problem.

~~~
socmag
Serious general open question here. It strikes me as odd that on the one hand
you say you want to ditch windows in favor of FOSS, but then go on to say that
you use Windows just to play games.

The interesting thing is that games are some of the most costly and closed
source things in software today. Windows costs the price of two games or less.

Further, if you own a PlayStation, an XBox it's likely you have spent hundreds
of dollars on closed source games. If you bought a fancy graphics card, would
you expect that to be free as well?

I love FOSS software as much a as the next person, but people who write
software do have to live. Like game developers, employees of NVIDIA, even the
people who make the Arch Linux distribution.

I'm truly not picking on you or FOSS, I just find it hard to rationalize FOSS
zealotry that is almost universally hypocritical to some degree. Even Linus
gets $10m a year or something like that. I'm not even sure to be honest what
FOSS software IS any more.

It's a serious question, because I'm really confused.

~~~
MaulingMonkey
> The interesting thing is that games are some of the most costly

Hah! I wish. I've spent thousands on single SKUs - yet SASS and anything B2B
can make that look like chump change.

Meanwhile, Steam sales discount high quality, high end titles significantly
pretty quickly - to the point where a lot of gamers basically never pay full
price.

To say nothing of mobile being flooded with $0.99 titles. To say nothing of
the effectively free humble bundles. To say nothing of all the free web and
indie games out there.

Although I guess the right freemium Skinner box can also cost thousands in DLC
and micro-transactions? But you can get games so cheap these days that people
don't even get around to playing everything in their Steam libraries.

> I just find it hard to rationalize FOSS zealotry that is almost universally
> hypocritical to some degree.

On the more practical side of things, games are entertainment and frequently
rely heavily on obfuscation to avoid hacking to gain unfair advantages in
multiplayer. It's all somewhat fungible - if you can't play game X, you can
still have fun playing game Y - the only real downside being your emotional
investment in game X. Vendor lock-in isn't much of a problem, and a number of
games are mod friendly.

Having your business and personal data stuck in vendor lock-in and being
legally prohibited from taking over where they fuck up, or try to escape from
their clutches should they jack up their prices, etc. is a whole new level of
potential downside. Entire businesses die when twitter changes their API
terms.

Meanwhile, if WoW ever shut down, gold farmers would find another MMO to abuse
the same day.

~~~
socmag
Right I know, I've been there and witnessed it first hand trying to sell on
the iPhone app store.

I was more thinking of zero day PC Games and especially console games in my
comment but that should have been made clearer. I get that they do get heavily
discounted though over time.

Totally agree with your penultimate paragraph, nobody likes it yet we still
have our Netflix accounts AND our Amazon accounts.

To me it seems HN often picks on the little guys who are just trying to make a
buck while actively supporting giant corporates and going Wheeee!

Nice post by the way

------
Longhanks
This pulls something from
[https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs](https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs)
\- what's this URL? How can anyone tell this is related to Arch Linux? Why do
the readmes link to 404s? All of this seems rather unfinished. Could have
polished at least the github presence a little.

Also, what are the advantages compared to solution like
[https://github.com/RoliSoft/WSL-Distribution-
Switcher](https://github.com/RoliSoft/WSL-Distribution-Switcher), which allows
selecting different distributions, including Arch Linux?

~~~
ackalker
> ...which allows selecting different distributions, including Arch Linux?

Sorry to rain on your parade, but there is _no_ official Arch Linux image on
Docker[1], as you can easily verify[2]. Use at your own risk whatever Arch
Linux image you happen to find on Docker Hub, such as this one[3]. It might
work or it might break, but it ain't official.

[1]:
[https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=214973](https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=214973)

[2]: [https://hub.docker.com/explore/](https://hub.docker.com/explore/)

[3]:
[https://hub.docker.com/r/base/archlinux/](https://hub.docker.com/r/base/archlinux/)

~~~
colemickens
The attitude here is hard to understand. [3] is very clear about how it's
built, no guess work involved.

------
rl3
I really hope Microsoft continues development on WSL until it's production-
ready. Right now both piping and filesystem interop need a lot of work.

------
prirun
If WSL were truly Linux compatible, then why would anyone need to adapt Linux
software to run under it?

This is the first step: embrace. The next step: extend. Apparently it's
already happening, as people scurry to adapt shit so that it works with WSL.
Next you'll have companies requesting that all Linux software be "adapted" to
work under WSL, and if it isn't, they won't buy it.

Once this happens, Microsoft can proceed to step 3: Extinguish. How? Easy - by
adding incompatible shit to WSL. If companies succeed in forcing Linux
software vendors to provide a WSL-specific version, they will have to be
compatible with these WSL extension. Voila - now they are supporting a new
Microsoft platform that Microsoft controls.

Back before many of you were born, Microsoft killed entire product categories
and companies by providing free versions of Office when it was first
introduced, and making it compatible with competitors' file formats. Is it
free now? Hell no, it's their main source of revenue!

Can they repeat the same hat trick with Linux? Who knows, but they damn sure
are gonna try. Anyone who thinks "Microsoft loves Linux" needs to take a
history lesson. The only Linux Microsoft would love would have a dead penguin
for a logo.

------
fungi
[http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/](http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/)

------
ladzoppelin
WSL is really amazing, I hope they keep going. The devs have done a really
good job and seem to be very open to suggestions.

~~~
2bitencryption
The best software is always made by happy developers making software to make
other developers happy.

This also applies to Visual Studio Code.

~~~
herbst
Atom really is a nice piece of software, definitly done by happy devs. Havent
tried to microsoft fork you mention yet.

~~~
contextfree
VSCode isn't based on Atom in any way except being built on Electron.

------
shmerl
WSL is useful for some, but personally I'm more interested in reverse (Wine),
mostly for some games without native Linux releases.

~~~
SwellJoe
I was so excited when Linux versions started showing up on Steam. It meant I
very rarely needed to reboot into Windows.

But, I've tinkered recently with Windows 10 and WSL, and it's actually really
neat. They've done a remarkable job making it work like a real Linux system in
a lot of regards; my projects kinda bump up against the limitations of that
(as they are administrative tools and perform actions as root and such), and
so I can see areas where it's still incomplete, but I'm honestly shocked at
how well it all works.

~~~
shmerl
What kind scenarios do you find it useful in? I.e. when would you use it
instead of native Linux for the same purpose?

~~~
SwellJoe
Mostly just when I first got my laptop and didn't have Linux on it, yet.
Which, I guess is begging the question..."When would you use WSL?" "Well, you
know, those times when I used it."

So...the answer is I would never use it over native Linux, except when I
happen to be in Windows and need to use Linux. The people who currently run a
VM with Linux in it on their Windows machine are an excellent target audience.
I would guess people who build cross-platform apps would also be an excellent
target audience. In fact, using it for a little while got me thinking about
what kinds of apps I might like to make, if I were to work on desktop apps
again (it's been a very long time since I've worked on anything that installed
on Windows, and even as recently as a year ago, the idea of it probably never
crossed my mind).

So, it's good for Microsoft. And, good for people who prefer Windows on the
desktop, but also have to deploy on Linux servers or deliver to Linux users.
People who use Linux natively, by choice, and are very comfortable doing so
probably don't gain anything from using Windows with WSL.

~~~
shmerl
I just thought about other scenario. Some restricted corporate environment
which forbids running Linux natively.

------
0x0
What's that certutil and public key thing at the bottom of the .bat?

~~~
alphaneuron
Was curious, too. It's the archlinux icon/shortcut encoded as base64. (it's a
common trick to store binary data in a batchfile)

------
sha666sum
The screenshot on the github page shows running _yaourt_ as _root_. I can't
see how doing it on Windows makes it less horrifying than on Arch.

~~~
JdeBP
No, it doesn't.

* [http://askubuntu.com/questions/754942/](http://askubuntu.com/questions/754942/)

------
sidegrid
Care to explain what this is? FAQ = 404

~~~
romanovcode
Native linux subsystem for windows can run Ubuntu no problem. This "tool"
gives you the option to run Arch instead of Ubuntu.

~~~
JdeBP
Others have already run Fedora.

* [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38802362/](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38802362/)

------
teekert
Main advantage I see above Ubuntu would be the Arch User Repo (AUR) which
contains almost all software you can think of. Although that can change when
Snap picks up speed. Snapd is also available under Arch though. Moreover, Arch
will be much more current in general.

~~~
alfalfasprout
aur is amazing. For a desktop distro, it's what makes Arch one of the best
choices IMO. Want <insert package>? You can compile from source and get
something your package manager can track. Not to mention never needing to
reinstall for a new version.

I love RHEL/CentOS dearly for servers, but needing to write a complex spec
file and deal with the rpmbuild system just to get an RPM for a library is a
pain. You end up with /usr/local full of stuff that's hard to update.

------
yellow_postit
The FAQ link is broken on the page, any ELI5 on what this brings beyond using
Arch's package manager and the general goodness of choice? Both of which are
awesome in and of themselves, just wasn't sure if there's more here before I
jump in.

~~~
alphaneuron
From what I can gather from the BOW discussion (see my link below), it's a
kind of custom arch distro
([https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs](https://cdn.turbo.run/alwsl/alwsl.sfs)).
AFAIK WSL is just a rootfs extracted by the lxrun cmdlet. So I guess this
replaces Microsoft's rootfs with arch. It seems to be modified to work around
some issues in WSL.

------
angvp
Good job man, despite all the hate from linux users to windows, truth to be
told, this might be helpful instead of running arch on a vm..

------
partycoder
Interesting to see a Windows Subsystem for what they once called cancer.

------
jinmingjian
Ubuntu is crying^_^

------
jlebrech
would this allow for a SteamOS with all windows games support?

~~~
throwaway7767
No. The linux subsystem cannot call windows programs and windows programs
can't call linux programs. It's entirely seperated in that way.

WSL looks like a nice replacement for cygwin, but that's about it for me.

------
mangix
yay something that doesn't suck. hope it gets better.

