Linux on Windows 10: Will penguin treats in Creators Update be enough to lure you? The Windows 10 Creators Update is set for release shortly, and comes with significant improvements to the Windows Subsystem for Linux, also known as Bash on Windows or Ubuntu on Windows. Just to remind you, this is not done via emulation, nor by running a virtual machine, but rather by redirecting system calls. Does Microsoft …
>"I am proud of my closed mind! The fact Windows sucks is immutable, like science!"
Right, nice strawman. What is immutable is that MS is a convicted monopolist. The fact that windoze tries to fistfvck me by raping my privacy is immutable too. Your ensuing jump across those grand cayons can only be seen as a shill kneepadder rimming corporate anvs. Enjoy, but anything that is full of subcreatinous devolved 4sslickers like you, I want no part of.
In other words: do you know what sucks more than windoze? It's stupid fanboy lusers (who tell me that I'm blind and can't trust my own judgement).
>...rimming corporate... fisftf... rape...
Such rapier wit, such eloquence and careful wordsmithing. Limpid elegant technical arguments, guaranteed to appeal to reason and lead lost sheep back into the obviously warm and welcoming fold of your community.
p.s. I am already off Windows so no need to waste your precious oratory gifts on me. I have seen the light, Hallelujah.
I'm struggling to see the point of this. I can run whichever flavour of Linux that I like in VirtualBox. I tried using Hyper-V, all I can say is "just don't". That aside VirtualBox is responsive enough and connected enough to permit the use of Linux machines where one needs access to Linux tools, some bizarre MS kludge doesn't appeal at all.
Running Linux under a VM is the kludge. The Windows loader now knows how to load a linux executable natively, and the linux program runs at full native speed (no traps for emulation). This is the way that homogeneous-CPU heterogeneous-OS inter-operation should be done.
Are we seeing desktop development mirroring auto technology, where the car is the same, just the power plant varies ?
It's been a while since we've had any suggestions for a new commentard icon. So may I propose a "thoughtful beard/chin stroking" icon. As in "interesting ..."
Hope so.... lets see a proper adult desktop on our work PCs and then test the users to see which one they prefer....
Then say f*** it and throw out the windows engine and replace that with a linux one too ..
M$ should have been split into OS and application divisions a long time ago... that way we still would have office/outlook etc without the crummy OS under it
"test the users to see which one they prefer"
I can tell you right now, that your users will prefer what they're used to, and will hate any form of change.
(Then, after you've dragged them kicking and screaming onto a new system, after about two weeks most of them will prefer the new system and will violently react against any possibility of going back to the old system.)
Which might be why Office 2003 users, XP / Vista / Win 7 users prefer Linux Mint + Mate + Redmond theme, rather than "Ribbon" or Win8 or Win 10.
I was just handed another laptop that "automagically" went from Win7 to Win 10 and now hated by user. They've seen Linux Mint + Mate + Redmond theme and want it instead.
I wish I'd never admitted I knew about Linux.
"I can tell you right now, that your users will prefer what they're used to, and will hate any form of change."
Linux it is then. You can rely on it to remain a good deal more consistent. Take, for instance, the time Gnome 3 replaced Gnome 2. Almost immediately there were two workarounds, one a fork of Gnome 2 and the other to make Gnome 3 look like Gnome 2.
I hate Outlook, esp, its ability to import malware. The only reason for it is Exchange + Scheduling/Meetings/Calendar.
The last decent MS Office was 2003.
Anyway, this is hardly a new approach from MS, is the Microsoft Services For Unix reached 15 years old or is it older?
"Is the Microsoft Services For Unix reached 15 years old or is it older?"
It had XP support. And it seemed _BETTER_ (back then) than now...
Interix / SFU / SUA has gone through some minor changes (mostly the name) since XP, and it was OUT OF DATE BACK THEN, too, when it first appeared. It was purchased technology. Initially (as I recall) you could install it on pretty much any XP system, and later it requried a 'Pro' version (windows 7), and after that, just wouldn't install at ALL (win-10-nic). And they're still using X11R5 last I looked... and really out of date gcc... and I couldn't compile a number of standard libraries with it (gtk-related stuff as I recall), and so I completely gave up on it. Even the NFS share method was flakey, trying to replicate UNIX-style UID security and whatnot. A complete and total kludge. And I said good things about it in the past, too, thinking that having UNIX tools on the command line was its saving grace. Except they don't even have 'tar' (there's a 'pax' but it's kludgy). There are other non-Linux non-BSD quirks as well, but I digress...
In any case, I found CYGWIN to be 'the saving grace' for getting a command prompt that was actually USEFUL for things like ssh and rsync, just to maintain backups on another drive across the network if for no other reason.
So yeah Micro-shaft's "lipstick on a boar" would make a LOT more sense if you haven't heard of CYGWIN before.
And once they integrate ".Not" with it, that will be the 'Extend' part of 'Embrace, Extend, Extinguish', then WATCH OUT! Look what they did with POWERSHELL, and expect POWERBASH to be *NEXT* - *urp* sorry, need more pink liquid...
Can anyone with experience of both say if this environment is 'better' / 'worse' than Cygwin? I use Cygwin (including the Cygwin/X server now, since we lost support for Exceed) as my Linux-style comfort environment on Windows 7, and will probably have to update to Windows 10 at some point.
Current laptop came with Win 8.1, and there was NO way I was going to downgrade to Win 10. Cygwin has its problems because of the underlying host file system, but VirtualBox and a downloaded openSUSE iso to load into the VM does the job. Less risk than wiping the machine down and finding that linux won't install from a USB memory key (laptops with optical drives are getting rare ...)
It's better, IMHO. I have one Win10 laptop (for games) on which I've been experimenting with WSL, basically to see whether my current personal development laptop (an aging MacBook Pro) could get a Win10 successor. I like WSL a lot, so far, although some bugs have still to be worked out (Emacs in text mode backgrounds itself all the time, for example). The biggest win is that WSL (I call it GNU/Win10) is binary compatible with GNU/Linux, meaning that a WSL bash will have an apt setup pointing straight at Canonical's repositories. I never liked Cygwin's setup.exe, and that's now gone.
Pretty much the biggest thing on my wishlist is a better X server. VcXsrv does the job very well, but font management is a pain. Having an Ubuntu-integrated X server would be great. But I can totally see myself working full-time in it - for my next home system, it'd be great to have One To Rule Them All (a platform that can run games, Lightroom, _and_ all my dev tools); for my next work system, it's up to my employer - I won't pay for Apple hardware anymore as it's too locked down and the OS is crap for developers, and I can completely see me working on a work Win10 laptop. I'd prefer that over a work Linux laptop as Win10 takes care of talking to the hardware and does a way better job at it than Linux (I'm talking odd device drivers, GPU drivers, hotplugging hardware, sleep modes, etcetera - from what I'm hearing from Linux-wielding colleagues, still an unsolved problem).
Better support for porting Linux apps to Windows for sure. An example would be that Handbrake, the video compression tool can leave all their libraries (shared libraries) in native Linux format compiled with GCC or LLVM with GNU assembler optimizations while building a UI using XAML and C#. This will save thousands of hours working out platform incompatibility issues often associated with porting complex applications to Windows.
Cross compiled tool chains are another advantage. For example, one could develop code using Apple Swift for IOS development directly on Windows and thoroughly troubleshoot the code using tools like Visual Studio and then compile natively for Android.
Android is another one. It's possible to build the native Android emulator for Ubuntu on Windows allowing native access to Dalvik, GCC and LLVM directly from within Visual Studio allowing faster and more accurate memory debugging than has been possible using SSH or Cygwin/MingW implementations.
There are many reasons this is better for developers.
As for users, that's different. A user probably won't care much about the differences since it's basically the same code. It should be a bit better with the recent emergence of alternative to X11 which generally don't "remote" as well for screen mirroring.
The inability to open a locked file is a Windows "feature" -- I find it hard to believe that their linux implementation will be able to get around that.
The main problem is NTFS. Unlike linux, which can have data on disk pointed to by multiple names, so locking happens from the name(its "inode number), an offset and a range. But on NTFS, locks happen by locking the file's data on disk -- so another process trying to open the same area -- even by a different name, will hit the same lock. Also, on linux, files stay around until the last link or handle to the file is closed. All the links on the file system may be deleted, but as long as a process has that file open, that process can still see and read the original file. This makes it easy to replace in-use files -- currently running procs will keep using the old file until they are restarted. While new procs will pick up the new file. If you *want* to force all procs to update, you must restart the processes that hold on to the old file. On Windows, it seems you can't do that -- or can't determine who holds the file, not sure which -- either way, to replace an in use file on windows, usually involves rebooting the machine.
To really not be affected by NTFS's limitations, MS would have to provide some other file system that allows linux/unix-like semantics. I'd have a hard time seeing how that could be done in an emulation layer that operated over NTFS ...
Technically, opening a file on Windows only locks it if you open it in a locking mode. Open a file in notepad, then rename/modify/delete whatever you want. Windows doesn't stop you.
Presumably, what you mean is that, by default, executing a file on Windows locks it, and that the shadow-copy service or the replace-on-reboot service are common ways of replacing locked executables. And most executables that you would want to replace lock the disk copy, rather than locking a memory copy.
This hasn't been a problem for me. Which is just as well, since the unix/linux system of locking on the i-node instead of locking the locked file has been unworkable for me. When I had multiple systems accessing the files, I kept getting file corrupton and file lockups, neither of which was what I wanted.
Will make it easier to demonstrate why Linux features are better than Windows features without the hassle of a livecd.
My conversion rate should increase. I moved a dozen garden variety punters to Linux last year none of them have gone back, that said I failed 10 times because "Outlook".
I only use Windows when I have to for teaching. I use a Mac for my own development work and Linux for my server.
Running Linux on Windows will only serve to make some small tasks easier, and will also remind me why I prefer a *nix environment wherever possible. It certainly won’t encourage me to actually like Windows, or to use it with any enthusiasm.
With complete betrayal of trust in the while Windows 10 disaster, they are slowly providing a reason to prefer Windows 10 to, say Windows 8. Better still, they are clearly helping technical users to prefer *nix.
I’m not sure that’s what Microsoft had in mind, though …
"I’m not sure that’s what Microsoft had in mind, though …"
FWIW I think what MS have in mind is developers.
If they can bring developers into the fold who would normally work on OSX or Linux and get them using visual studio* then there is potential new revenue there.
* Fully expect down votes for this but VS is by far the best IDE I have ever used.
I am surprised that no one mentions the obvious, run Win10 on Linux instead. WAY BACk when, Caldera distributed "wabi" which loaded Win3.1 from your registered floppies and launched it on your Linux desktop. That was pretty amazing to see, plus Win3.1 ran faster on 32bit Linux than it did on 16bit DOS. There was a version to run Win95, but the company got bought up and it disappeared.
Microsoft is asking you to move out of your house that's served you well for decades and into a special Microsoft house that looks quite like yours except none of the doors fit properly, one of the bedrooms is missing and none of the foundations have been dug correctly.
It's more like, Microsoft are taking people who've been quite happy with their pre-fabricated, cookie-cutter homes, and adding a rustic log cabin on the back, in an attempt to appeal to the hand-built log cabin crowd, who wouldn't be seen dead in a pre-fab.
I guess in this analogy that OSX is something designed by a famous architect and BSD is equivalent to living under a bridge.
I doubt MS are under any illusions that they will convert any Linux users to windows.
It is mostly a defensive play - if you need a couple of tools, do you want to fight for a Linux install (another unmanaged VM/SOE) or are you going to just use the tools Windows comes with? The idea is to keep Linux off the radar.
It's mostly that unux users are no longer comfortable re-compiling their source for different unix platforms, and now expect linux binary compatibility.
It's also that linux has replaced BSD.
That's it. Those are the differences between the unix subsystem on XP, and the unix subsystem on Win 10.
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