
Windows Subsystem for Linux is out of beta - wisebit
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/07/28/windows-subsystem-for-linux-out-of-beta/
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sangd
I hope my Macbook days would be over soon. After using Macbook Pro many years,
I find good Windows machines are as reliable as Mac's ones. Apple products are
usually overpriced, much less options for hardware accessories and upgrades,
very expensive to fix. I have to keep running both Mac & Windows machines
which is very inconvenient sometimes.

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bradleyjg
Which laptop manufactures have you found to be as reliable and well put
together as macbooks? I haven't had too much luck with dells or lenovos.

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kristianov
Surface Book and Surface Laptop are quite good.

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vvanders
+1 on Surface Book. Great build quality, good dev machine and decent gaming
laptop as well.

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cgb223
Was thinking about getting one for work, and gaming is a nice perk

What kind of specs/graphics/resolution do you get on that for games?

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vvanders
Just make sure to grab one with the discrete GPU(dGPU aka Performance Base).
It's not going to be anything near a desktop(no laptop will) but I can run
most things at 1080p pretty well and some of the lighter stuff(like Pyre) at
3Kx2k(native resolution).

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nv-vn
Barely related, but what's with the whole "Creators Update"/"Fall Creators
Update" thing? It's not "Creator's Update," so I guess it's supposed to be
targetting "Content Creators," right? But looking at the changes in these
updates, I'm really not sure what's been added for any sort of content
creator. Windows Movie Maker hasn't turned into Premiere, Paint hasn't turned
into Photoshop, etc. So where the fuck does the name come from? And why not
just name it with some Apple/Google-esque codename like Snow Leopard or
Jellybean instead of making some half-baked marketing scheme?

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Sylos
Yeah, at the time I could still understand them calling the original Creators
Update that way, just to have some marketing buzzword to throw at people, but
"Fall Creators Update" is really just the dumbest thing I've seen in a while.

Not only is its meaning just as nonexistent as the first time around, it also
just seems like something that some guy thought up on the spot in a meeting,
after remembering that he was still supposed to ask the marketing department
about that.

It's not in any way a remarkable name and it's going to be confusing to many
people as well as to search engines, making troubleshooting any issues with it
unnecessarily hard.

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nerflad
I really hope they make WSL's /home/. symlink to /mnt/c/users/. by default.
What's the point of having a separate filesystem and home directory? I want
native POSIX in Windows. The WSL implementation feels like... not that.

~~~
smaddox
The linux filesystem has to be segregated from the windows filesystem. If I
remember correctly, the linux FS can read from windows FS, but not write to
it, due to locking issues. Or something like that. Whatever it was, it made me
discount it as a way to write windows code. Instead, I'm using Git Bash, which
is based on mingw

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aylons
I believe you got it inverted. You cannot write on the WSL file system from
Windows, but the other way (writing on windows from bash) is ok.

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styfle
How do they expect developers to write code if windows can't write to the file
system? Do they expect everyone to use vim or other text based editor?

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jamie_ca
Just host the code in Windows-land.

Symlink ~/code to /mnt/c/Users/jamie/code, run whatever editor I want in
windows to edit the code, and run my app from linux-land in the console.
Hasn't given me a hiccup yet, even with a local sqlite database and such.

If you just treat your linux homedir as a spot for dotfiles and symlinks out
to windows, it shouldn't give you much trouble unless you're doing stuff that
relies heavily on owner/write permissions.

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jdorfman
Rich Turner and his team has pretty much done the impossible. Huge
congratulations to them.

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blibble
finally I can remove the win32 specific code from all the open source software
I maintain

not sure that was what Microsoft was going for though...

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vvanders
Unless you're going to force your users to install WSL up front(which is a
pretty poor first contact) I think you might be better served by keeping it
around.

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43224gg252
Why? The Linux sub-system is the best part of Windows. He's doing them a
favor.

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untog
Extra dependencies are rarely ever doing anyone a favour. Yet another thing to
keep up to date, occupy disk space, memory...

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Spivak
That's a pretty flimsy case when it's bundled with the OS and the performance
and memory cost is in their court to improve.

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throwaway91111
So is this complementary to the linux subsystem in windows, or a completely
unrelated option?

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Infernal
I think you've fallen victim to Microsoft's somewhat awkward naming scheme -
the Windows Subsystem for Linux is the name of the "linux subsystem in
windows" that you're referring to. It's not complementary or unrelated, but
the same thing.

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TwoNineFive
The fundamental abusiveness of the naming of this product isn't lost on
people. Every time I see "Windows services for Linux" I know very well that
it's just Microsoft doing what their public manipulation thing.

I've actually heard this issue discussed by the Windows admins in my company,
without them having first heard my own opinion on the matter.

"Why didn't they name it 'Linux services for Windows', or something sane?" My
Exchange/storage admin asked. "Because that would make sense", our other
Windows admin says.

The discussion moved on to how Microsoft was afraid of the very notion of a
product name that made it clear that Linux was doing something useful on
Windows. They had to make it seem that Windows was offering services to Linux,
because Linux needed the help of Windows, not the other way around.

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Spivak
Because they want the first word to be Windows, their brand. They do the same
thing with Server for NFS.

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dijit
Great news, this will hopefully allow our developers to make code on Linux
since they've been forbidden from running VMs and it's extra overhead.

I hope Visual Studio gets good integration here because it truly is a first
class IDE and it's hard for me to tempt our windows developers away based on
that fact combined with the "We don't support linux on desktops" and "No VMS"
attitude of my company.

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moomin
I'd like that too. The main thing holding it back is the file interop. If a
windows program creates a file in a Linux directory bash literally can't see
it. I've worked around this by putting my real work in Windows directories and
symlinking then into my WSL home, but I can see this biting me at some point
in the future.

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Omnius
As a web developer why would this be useful to me. I know Linux and run it for
years and now at this job i am on windows. My stack is usually python flask,
postgres, vuejs/react, ...

All of these things run natively on windows is there another advantage to
moving to the WSL?

I know there are advantages but specifically for my tool chain is there
something i am missing?

TIA

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nikanj
Can someone point to a decent X server for windows?

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eridius
From the article:

> _NO current plans to support X /GUI apps, desktops, servers, etc. at this
> time_

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zbuttram
No plans to support specifically, but a surprising amount of things work
simply due to their effort making the rest of it work.

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harrygeez
Now all we need is a terminal emulator as good as iTerm/Terminal.app/urxvt.

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cadecairos
I've been quite happy using Cmder

[http://cmder.net/](http://cmder.net/)

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figers
WSL needs access to the wifi adapters for network security testing!!!

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jesuslop
Has anyone tried to use visual studio Open Folder feature [1] along the WSL to
work in that IDE with big C++ cmake built projects targeting linux?

[1]
[https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/04/12/ope...](https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/visualstudio/2016/04/12/open-
any-folder-with-visual-studio-15-preview/)

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ams6110
Every time I read about WSL I can't help but wonder why cygwin is never
mentioned. Cygwin provided all this over a decade ago.

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chokolad
Cygwin was able to run unmodified elf binaries on windows? And it was doing it
a decade ago? Wow, that's really impressive.

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ams6110
No, but it ran all the Linux applications and shells and utilities. I was
running Xemacs in X11 on Windows XP using cygwin years ago.

But to your point they were built for cygwin, not linux.

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freestockoption
I use a Mac. And I also use this when I'm using Windows. I try to use both so
I stay up to speed on the latest developments of both platforms.

WSL leveled the playing field for me. WSL makes Windows a decent dev machine
out of the box.

I wish Visual Studio would integrate better with it though. e.g. if I run a
project in VS, I want the option of running in WSL.

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tyrw
In my experience, emulators are never quite the same as the real deal. Has
anyone used this, and if so how was it?

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therein
It is not an emulator and the experience is pretty great for anything
involving Linux as a workstation.

Even though they say "NO current plans to support X/GUI apps, desktops,
servers, etc. at this time", this is achievable by installing VcXsrv.

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tyrw
Perhaps emulator was a poor descriptor in this case -- I haven't used it. But
it is running a subset of functionality non-natively, correct?

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wvenable
It's a pretty interesting design -- Microsoft created a new class of processes
called pico processes; these are native processes run without the normal Win32
overhead and are managed by a special pico process driver. For WSL, the driver
implements the Linux kernel API and process loading. Linux API calls are
mapped to existing Windows APIs or implemented directly in the driver.

Everything else in the WSL is the regular Ubuntu user land. So all the
processes are "native" and they make calls to a kernel that acts just like
Linux.

~~~
xenadu02
This is possible because Dave Cutler and the rest of his VMS team built
Windows NT to support multiple personalities. From day one the Win32 subsystem
was just one of several. That idea got sidelined when Windows became so
popular but the core has always been there.

It's kinda funny: the Windows NT kernel (and Executive, the actual native API)
are a single-root object hierarchy where everything gets mounted - much like
unix - only even moreso. Mutexes, Registry Keys, etc are all objects mounted
in the root filesystem.

I guess everything old is new again. Microsoft used to have a server product
called Services for Unix that replaced the built-in POSIX 1.0 subsystem with a
legit Unix environment but it was always a neglected product that only existed
to get people to port server apps to Windows. This time they're doing the
integration on end-user desktops and have spent more time getting Win API
integration working smoothly.

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wvenable
> This is possible because Dave Cutler and the rest of his VMS team built
> Windows NT to support multiple personalities.

Although it would seem logical, the WSL doesn't actually use this system. The
whole pico process engine and how it interacts with Windows is all new and not
related to that design. I'm not really sure the reasoning behind it; perhaps
it didn't allow them to do the level of integration they wanted.

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randomString1
Regarding security, it increases attack surface but besides that is there any
critical issues?

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morecoffee
Please support FUSE!

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arunc
MS Word and Excel

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frozenport
Does anybody use this?

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adrianlmm
I do, for Ruby/Sinatra development, it works very good.

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justin--sane
What about PostgreSQL? Last time I tried it I had to install it on Windows
because of some reason I cannot remember...

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adrianlmm
I do not use Postgress, I use Firebird SQL and I had no problems installing it
in WSL.

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0xbear
Why is it called Linux, though? There's no Linux there at all IIRC, in the
sense that it's not using the Linux kernel.

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karlshea
If you're going to be pedantic shouldn't it be "GNU/Linux"?

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jameshart
I guess technically MS need to start referring to Windows 10 as
GNU/Linux/Windows now.

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ric2b
More like GNU/Linux/Microsoft/NT. Windows is more of a distro name such as
Ubuntu.

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smegel
Only $300 a license.

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melling
Isn’t there a way to get a free beta version? I got an image once for Virtual
Box.

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smegel
Why would you want to?

Windows is for corporates putting spreadsheets in front of coin counters.

For everything else there is Linux (or FreeBSD), which is probably why
Micro$oft is porting SQL server to it.

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skinnymuch
Are you being facetious? It seems like you are. I'm 99% sure you have to be,
but some people do think and write like that.

Notably the cringeworthy second paragraph and substituting $ for s like this
is Slashdot in the 00s.

