
Ask HN: Is anyone actually using Windows Subsystem for Linux? - tarr11
Trying to understand if this is actually a usable solution, and what scenarios?  My main scenarios are nodejs &#x2F; react &#x2F; webpack and Rails &#x2F; Postgres.<p>I have a 2014 MBP and thinking of upgrading to a windows laptop (since 2016 MBP dropped the escape key), but being able to do rails development easily is a requirement.  I used to use an Ubuntu VM with Virtual Box and VIM &#x2F; SSH on a previous windows box, but I find that clunky compared to Visual Studio Code in my MBP.<p>So far, both Rails and Webpack have broken in subtly weird ways every time I&#x27;ve tried.  I was able to get my rails app working by installing Postgres and Elasticsearch on windows, and connecting.  But it was slow and occasionally had weird issues.<p>Would love to know what others are doing here.
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janesconference
Not mature yet.

\- You actually need a workaround to listen to an address in node -
os.networkInterfaces() returns an error:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37497914/node-http-
server...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/37497914/node-http-server-not-
working-on-windows-10-ubuntu-bash)

\- You cannot run Docker (you can run it on Windows and use the docker client
from the subsystem though)

\- You cannot use Tensorflow with a GPU (many people keep their Windows
install to use the GPU drivers)

\- You need workarounds to use MongoDB:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38798593/windows-10-linux...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/38798593/windows-10-linux-
subsystem-how-to-install-mongodb)

\- There are a lot of issues:
[https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues](https://github.com/Microsoft/BashOnWindows/issues)

If you're really using your machine for work, you want a stable system, not a
non-reproducible mess of workarounds.

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WorldMaker
I use it for Ruby at this point. Python and Node install and play well enough
on Windows that I generally use them directly in Windows. Ruby on the other
hand I primarily use for GitHub Pages/Jekyll work, and it is much easier to
install and work with from the Bash on Ubuntu on Windows shell than directly
in Windows.

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is a much nicer alternative to a full VM and
working directly from a folder from an NTFS drive is nearly seamless working
with the same files in VS Code (in Bash cd to a /mnt/c/users/... or
/mnt/d/repos/... folder), with the exception that watch support (such as
jekyll serve --watch) isn't great but is improving.

(A welcome surprise to me is how fast my jekyll builds have been in this
configuration, especially comparing to the native Windows installs I used to
try to use.)

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rijoja
Not really what you are after but the first thing I do with a windows machine
is to install cygwin to make it usable. It sports a nice terminal and then you
can ssh from it.

Also I've developed a win32 program on windows and since I'm used to the UNIX
way of doing things.

So why not. I wouldn't use it for a server if I've needed node.js I'd spin up
an additional VPS.

