
Ubuntu Unity running on Windows 10 - aj_jaswanth
https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues/637
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eumoria
Sounds a little bit like slashdot in here with the pointless Microsoft/Unity
hate rants. This is really awesome and I can't wait for more and more
integration. This is nothing but awesome

~~~
ehf_unity
No, seriously. Unity (the ubuntu desktop interface) is an abomination. Not a
joke. Very serious.

It is painful to even try to use. It forces so many unnatural behaviors, in
favor of... I don't even know why. It's not elegant, it's not pretty, it's not
fun to use.

It is bad. Horrendously bad. And suited to the tastes of little more than a
very small handful of people, who probably open a browser and read email, and
do little else, except maybe script shell commands on the rare occasion.

Their decisions arbitrarily imposed on many, who likely still use the distro,
simply due to ease of installation (and probably no other reason), and then
shoulder the burden of routinely overriding the default install configuration
_immediately_.

~~~
moon_priestess
I'm a software engineer and it's my favorite GUI available for Linux. I've
used all the hip things like Xmonad, dwm (for a long time), XFCE (for a very
long time), Gnome 2 and 3, KDE 4 and 5, i3 (which I still like a lot), et
cetera.

I still prefer Unity nowadays. It's simple, it's fast and stable (at least for
me), and it reminds me of OS X (which I also like).

Everyone who runs Linux at my job uses it. No one had to be taught how to use
it. No one has had any issues with it or complains about it. It just gets the
job done.

I totally get that not everyone likes it, but Canonical is targeting a general
audience and I think they're doing a good job. If you don't like it, just apt-
get something else. It doesn't need to be super customizable and cater to
everyone. Let them focus on their core features for their primary audience.

~~~
nightski
As a software engineer it's hard to imagine you can't see the benefits of
learning something in order to gain an edge in productivity. I mean that is
the essence of programming? In order to master something, it takes effort.

While lowest common denominator UIs are great for simple tasks performed by
novice users, so much more can be accomplished by even putting in a little
effort. I mean you did take the time to learn a programming languge, correct?
Or was your programming language so natural you never had any questions? Did
it just work without any effort?

Or are you implying that a GUI is a distraction? That it provides no benefit
and something like a tiling window manager or other system can't give you any
productivity benefit? I'd find this hard to believe.

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stenius
I'm personally a fan of Ubuntu's Unity and I can see the potential in this.
I've been using linux for 10+ years and I can't efficiently navigate multiple
windows in Windows as easily as under Linux.

Since lot's of mobile devices don't perform as well running Linux as Windows
and you want to get the maximum performance out of your device (think battery
life), Windows is really you best choice.

In the past, I replaced the windows shell with a couple different BlackBox
ports that were compiled for Windows but I was still missing out on all the
command line tools so it didn't meet my work flows.

But now that Microsoft let's you run BASH on Windows, I think if I gave it
another shot, this setup would work for me but at the moment I don't have any
requirements that depend on Windows that would cause me to switch OSs.

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skruvmejsel
Great, so now one can (amongst other things) finally run Wine on Windows
without resorting to a VM!

~~~
curiousgal
Huh? Why would you run Wine on Windows?

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skruvmejsel
To play older Windows games that for various reasons won't run on Windows 10,
for example.

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TillE
The conventional wisdom has always been that Microsoft is hyper-focused on
backwards compatibility, but there's only limited truth in that. Even if you
pick Windows XP as a starting point (just considering NT kernels), tons of
stuff broke with Vista.

Compatibility Mode has never been very good, though I don't think there's
anything preventing Microsoft from making a more Wine-like compatibility layer
if they really wanted to.

~~~
wcoenen
Microsoft provides a free Windows XP SP3 virtual machine image to run on
Windows 7:

[https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=800...](https://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=8002)

I'm not sure if the same thing is still available for Windows 10.

~~~
xorblurb
Nope. Reserved to Win7 (and then; only Pro). Even third party VM software able
to run it implements a custom check to make sure your host is Win7 otherwise
they refuse to run it. This is quite concerning, from a backward compat POV,
because it means that it only has deferred the incompatibilities it proposed
to solve, and that deferring is completely artificial.

Honestly MS is not _that_ good on backward compat. They are good on the story,
so/so on the facts. But I prefer that to being stuck in the dark ages of poor
design and the poor security which comes with.

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happycube
... I'm still waiting for the native-Linux-Docker-container announcement. I'd
be shocked if MS+Docker weren't working on it.

~~~
d33
Shouldn't that be even easier under OS X?

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jen20
Probably not - it would need syscall translation and an ELF loader for OS X to
make that happen.

~~~
gonzo
Apple will do it after Microsoft does

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yoavm
I wonder how Microsoft managed to implement the Linux ABI all of sudden, while
Wine has been developed for more than 20 years and yet it's still very hard to
run most modern Windows software using it.

Note this isn't a rant by any way, I appreciate the work done by the Wine
project a lot and use it every now and then. I'm just trying to understand if
it's a matter of manpower, simpler task, or better design.

~~~
gsnedders
The Linux syscall ABI is pretty small and stable, and once you have that any
userland program just works. Windows (NT) doesn't have a stable syscall ABI,
instead having stable ABIs for libraries that wrap it in various ways (Win32,
most prominently, but historically also a POSIX library).

As such, WINE has to reimplement all those libraries, whereas Windows only has
to implement something comparatively tiny.

I expect someone can write a better summary of pros/cons of both approaches
(and there are definitely both for both!), so I'll leave that to them!

~~~
stuaxo
Yup, Wine is more like implementing the syscall API, LibC, OpenGL, and a
couple of GUI libraries all in one.

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kirkdouglas
It looks pretty cool. I think I might switch from OS X to Windows 10 on my
laptop someday, maybe after Surfacebook 2 release.

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rukittenme
Wow that's really cool. This is pretty close to native performance? This is a
really great step for Linux on the desktop. Such an easy way to onboard
people.

~~~
bluejekyll
Not really except on the broadest definition of Linux, where Linux is ~= Unix.
Linux is a kernel. GNU is the Unix environment which they are getting to
explore, more specifically with the Ubuntu OS mgmt tools.

Now what I don't get, and I'm not trolling here, is why would you want this?
Isn't a VM a better option?

I assume people using Windows want to because of the UI, not the kernel.
Whereas people generally choose Linux/Gnu/Unix for the kernel and OS
environment, not the UI. With Ubuntu on Windows you get part of what people
have wanted, and arguable the most important part people want.

Will people really want a Windows kernel, with Ubuntu/GNU OS tools, and Unity?
I suspect most would still want the Windows UI.

~~~
ksk
>Isn't a VM a better option?

Please explain how it is better.

They've implemented the ABI/syscalls in the kernel allowing for direct
execution of unmodified ELF64 binaries.

~~~
bluejekyll
If you're going for a full Linux/GNU/Ubuntu/Unity stack, the only thing this
cuts out is Linux, making his a Windows/GNU/Ubuntu/Unity stack. I know they've
replicated the system calls, but they won't perform or always operate
identically to a Linux kernel.

Which is why I asked about where people thought Unity on Windows would make
sense. Because a VM will most likely generally give a better experience.

If you restrict yourself to bash and standard Unix tools, you'll end up with a
similar experience to macOS and terminal (or my preference iTerm2)

~~~
ksk
> but they won't perform or always operate identically to a Linux kernel.

Why does the implementation have to be identical? How would that even be
possible, unless they violate the GPL. I don't get your point.

> Because a VM will most likely generally give a better experience.

Again, please explain WHY it would give a better experience. What do you see
lacking?

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akavel
Haven't seen anyone write this yet, so: I wonder if this (I mean the whole
Linux subsystem for Windows) is gonna be the downfall of Windows in the end.
As at this moment, somewhat counter-intuitively, it should actually make more
sense to write software _purely for Linux_ , effectively ignoring Windows, as
then you'll get Windows compatibility for free. I'm somewhat surprised they
didn't actually try to contribute to Wine instead, or build something similar
on their own.

~~~
lamarkia
The purpose of WSL is to bring back developers to Windows. It is more
efficient than Wine and is more useful to Microsoft to get almost native
Ubuntu containers than some way to run Windows GUI apps on Linux.

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briandrupieski
Does this offer any glimmer of hope that GPU support is one day possible, and
we'll be able to run machine learning and other general purpose GPU tasks
through WSL?

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sdegutis
Personally, I'll be much more interested in Windows once it has standard UNIX
tooling available without needing something like cygwin. Especially if it ends
up allowing me to replace the new Windows shell with something like xmonad and
dmenu.

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weitzj
Looks nice.Now give me a good Filesystem à la ZFS and maybe I might come back.

~~~
xorblurb
Not gonna happen. The last MS attempt at FS is ReFS, and it certainly won't
support WSL given its by design lack of some features WSL is using. Not even
talking about WSL, I don't think you can even put the system on ReFS, you sill
need NTFS for that. MS approach at FS is a little bit odd, I think. There is a
lot of confusion between the abstract features NTFS provides (and the rest of
the systems needs), and the actual concrete NTFS filesystem.

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tener
Cool hack, but I really prefer native Win 10 window management. The only thing
superior is IMHO XMonad.

~~~
freekh
I suppose there's nothing stopping one for doing that tho? I was sitting here
and thinking about trying it out with i3. If that works then it is only
missing a decent pkg mgmt (in my opinion ofc), at least on the technical
level. I sort of enjoy the thought that my current setup (arch) is entirely
OSS and hackable though (not on a hw level ofc)... It makes me smile every
time I log in :)

~~~
tener
I don't think any of Windows 10 window managers is swappable so anything you
will run on top will mean significant friction and loss of usability.

I think Cygwin is already using Pacman so perhaps you can get it to work
without root on Ubuntu and hence on Windows 10.

~~~
petecox
From the screenshot, all this seems to be doing is running an X server, so it
should be trivial to switch from Unity to i3, Xmonad or whatever.

The next level of integration would be running X11 fullscreen and then
launching Windows programs inside that environment. e.g. Word 2016 launched
and managed from the Unity launcher.

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interdrift
Thought it was the Unity IoC ( might want to specify this more explicitly )

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norswap
Why oh why would one want to do this terrible thing?

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z3t4
Great, now make it possible to also run Mac and Android.

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sinkasapa
Windows 10 with Unity: you've got two problems now.

~~~
ksk
This meant for people who _don't_ think either are "problems". I don't
understand the point of your comment.

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jdimov10
In case your Windows experience wasn't tragic enough...

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milansuk
If you like Ubuntu, just install it or use live USB/CD. It looks like
Microsoft lost focus(one the most important thing in the business) and plays
it on all sides.

