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).
This is pretty OT, but I feel like it is worth pointing out:
> Boot times are very short with SSDs so restarting is not a problem.
Personally - this is a question of individual preference, though - I do not mind the OS boot time itself very much (to a degree). Whether the system takes ten seconds or two minutes from reset/power-on to the login screen does not make much of a difference, to me, psychologically. But once I log in, I need to open all of these programs, make sure the windows are in the right place, SSH connections to certain machines are open, etc. I admit I am kind of obsessive-compulsive about this, but this is a far greater (psychological) barrier to rebooting than the OS boot time itself.
I do not use Windows at home, and my work laptop runs Windows 7 (I intend to keep it that way, too), so I have not been able to play with the Linux subsystem on Windows. But if you consider it as an alternative to Cygwin (which I do use), it sound kind of nice. Now if only Windows had a native, builtin X server... ;-)
EDIT: With Cygwin or the Linux subsystem, driver issues are not an issue, of course, because hardware is still managed by the Windows kernel and Windows drivers.
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.
>Maybe I'm in the minority but I prefer keeping my GNU/Linux and Windows installations separate
I'm excited because everyone at my company doesn't develop on linux because "we know visual studio" and "setting up a build environment will take too much time".
With the linux subsystem for windows, we have the ability to push them to slowly start developing new systems on linux. So I'm super happy about it.
Yeah there seems to be some magic going on behind the scenes. I'm not a huge fan of magic in this case. Though it's just Beta now still right? I like having VMs on my local machine that I can snapshot. I would prefer if MSFT bolstered their Hyper-V performance for GUI apps as I found them sort of slow both to RDP/VNC into remotely and also locally.
Would be cool if the Windows Linux subsystem can work like Parallels for OSX that can be blended into the general OS but also snapshots taken and if the user wants, bring the Linux environment in it's own window.
The point here is, it's not how we feel as a desktop user, it's more interesting to think about what new technical solutions can be created because of this.
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...
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
Or you could just only play Linux games. I mean sure, you'll eventually get tired of Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of Mordor. But when that happens you can just play Shadow of Mordor.
Just take the Linus Torvalds school of open-source philosophy and don't give a shit whether your software is open source, closed source, free, or $299. Just use good software that makes you happy.
Exactly the same for me! Got bash for Windows up and running with i3 on vcsrt. Ff is running in i3 and it is relatively smooth (I have a beefy specs). Almost all my settings have been ported. However, emacs is struggling because of some weird issue not going fullscreen and there's lots of issues with other execs (GUI in particular) because of dbus (I think)...
There's also a super annoying issue with the windows button which I normally use as meta key for i3....
I suppose by open source you mean free software (because I can't see how you can betray software development methodology by switching OSes). If this is so, than do you understand how silly your alternative sounds? It feels almost like a sarcasm.
This pulls something from 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.
> ...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.
Typical of windows ecosystem and developers to sow confusion and infringe upon trademarks. Windows/Microsoft - where "X actually means Y" and always changes meaning, never for the freedom of the user, always to maintain tight control and power over computing.
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.
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.
The only issue I had was with my Oculus Rift, but I suspect I could have fixed it by getting a dedicated USB PCI card to passthrough. Anyways, for AAA games it worked wonderfully with very near native speeds.
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.
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.
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.
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). 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.
[+] [-] _qbjt|9 years ago|reply
That said, no hate toward this project. Arch Linux is probably my favorite distro (although I'm on Xubuntu at the moment).
[+] [-] krylon|9 years ago|reply
> Boot times are very short with SSDs so restarting is not a problem.
Personally - this is a question of individual preference, though - I do not mind the OS boot time itself very much (to a degree). Whether the system takes ten seconds or two minutes from reset/power-on to the login screen does not make much of a difference, to me, psychologically. But once I log in, I need to open all of these programs, make sure the windows are in the right place, SSH connections to certain machines are open, etc. I admit I am kind of obsessive-compulsive about this, but this is a far greater (psychological) barrier to rebooting than the OS boot time itself.
I do not use Windows at home, and my work laptop runs Windows 7 (I intend to keep it that way, too), so I have not been able to play with the Linux subsystem on Windows. But if you consider it as an alternative to Cygwin (which I do use), it sound kind of nice. Now if only Windows had a native, builtin X server... ;-)
EDIT: With Cygwin or the Linux subsystem, driver issues are not an issue, of course, because hardware is still managed by the Windows kernel and Windows drivers.
[+] [-] jcrites|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dijit|9 years ago|reply
I'm excited because everyone at my company doesn't develop on linux because "we know visual studio" and "setting up a build environment will take too much time".
With the linux subsystem for windows, we have the ability to push them to slowly start developing new systems on linux. So I'm super happy about it.
[+] [-] flukus|9 years ago|reply
That's essentially how the windows subsystem works. It might not technically be a VM, but practically it is.
[+] [-] wangchow|9 years ago|reply
Would be cool if the Windows Linux subsystem can work like Parallels for OSX that can be blended into the general OS but also snapshots taken and if the user wants, bring the Linux environment in it's own window.
[+] [-] unixhero|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikegerwitz|9 years ago|reply
Consider full disk encryption on the GNU/Linux drive as well, since Windows can still access the disk.
[+] [-] reddytowns|9 years ago|reply
(*Or a boot loader on a separate USB drive which is never plugged in while running Windows)
[+] [-] kozikow|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] briansteffens|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2bitencryption|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] freekh|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ZoomZoomZoom|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Longhanks|9 years ago|reply
Also, what are the advantages compared to solution like https://github.com/RoliSoft/WSL-Distribution-Switcher, which allows selecting different distributions, including Arch Linux?
[+] [-] ackalker|9 years ago|reply
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
[2]: https://hub.docker.com/explore/
[3]: https://hub.docker.com/r/base/archlinux/
[+] [-] alphaneuron|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] voltagex_|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opello|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] antocv|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rl3|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] prirun|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ladzoppelin|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 2bitencryption|9 years ago|reply
This also applies to Visual Studio Code.
[+] [-] shmerl|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SwellJoe|9 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Relys|9 years ago|reply
The only issue I had was with my Oculus Rift, but I suspect I could have fixed it by getting a dedicated USB PCI card to passthrough. Anyways, for AAA games it worked wonderfully with very near native speeds.
[+] [-] 0x0|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphaneuron|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] est|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sha666sum|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] JdeBP|9 years ago|reply
* http://askubuntu.com/questions/754942/
[+] [-] sidegrid|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] romanovcode|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teekert|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alfalfasprout|9 years ago|reply
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|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alphaneuron|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angvp|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] partycoder|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jinmingjian|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jlebrech|9 years ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway7767|9 years ago|reply
WSL looks like a nice replacement for cygwin, but that's about it for me.
[+] [-] fungi|9 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mangix|9 years ago|reply