Why Microsoft needed to make Windows run Linux software

And how it could leapfrog Apple as the dev platform of choice.

Read the whole story

 

[skierpage]

pbarrette[/url]":dj7is0fm]

Applications demanding low-level access to hardware devices, such as Wireshark, seem similarly unlikely to run.

Except that the example, Wireshark, has been available for Windows for ages. In fact, it's available in 3 different Win flavors now: x64, x86 and a portable app.
https://www.wireshark.org/download.html

Peter Bright should have written "Linux application binaries demanding low-level access..." Amazingly, with this Windows Subsystem for Linux, the unmodified Ubuntu binaries for many command-line Linux programs now Just Work on Windows.

A lot of open source projects will now put even less effort into coding, maintaining, and building a Windows version. Not GUI programs like VLC and Inkscape, but languages and developer tools.

 

[erikengh]

While this is definitely a nice development, there are still fundamental problems with respect to using Windows as a Unix system. Both Linux and OS X expose a lot of the OS through the filesystem in plain text looking files. The Unix way of doing things depends on this. Secondly Unix style development relies heavily on forking processes which give poor performance on Windows, ref the problems with using git on Windows.

For me personally my interests and expertise has developed to far away from Windows, which was my original development platform. Visual Studio had a nice debugger, but other than that it just seems like a messy IDE with a non intuitive GUI. I know it is popular to hate xCode, but its problems has mainly been stability and poor refactoring, completion tools and debugger. But those things have come a long way with recent versions and xCode simply has a well thought out GUI. And for those who don't like it there is AppCode which is also quite nice.

The IDE is of course just a small part of the equation for software development. I regularly use TextMate, fish shell, homebrew, julia, Go, Kaleidoscope, Tower, Dash, Synalize It!, Pixen, Affinity Designer, Charles Web Proxy, OmniGraffle, ack etc which either don't exist on Windows or are second class.

For me the languages of most interest are julia, go, rust and swift of which Windows can only offer a second class environment for.

 

[Deckard75]

LordDaMan[/url]":iv8thdaq]

Obsydia[/url]":iv8thdaq]"Wind the clock back 15 years and Windows was the only serious platform for software developers. Linux was already an important consideration for servers, but on the desktop was even less of a concern than it is today, reserved only for the most hardcore fans. OS X was in its infancy, and only ran on weird, expensive, underpowered PowerPC hardware."

It ran just fine on both my 500 MHz G3 "Pismo" PowerBook and my 1 GHz G4 "Titanium" PowerBook, both Macs being the fastest laptops available at the time. PPC hardware was weird and expensive, but it sure as hell wasn't underpowered.

Those where right on the cusp of PowerPC becoming underpowered compared to x86. The G3 was in most cases better then what x86 offered. Somewhere around the g4 they become roughly equal and by the end of the g5 the whole ppc on a mac was underpowered compared to lower mid-range to budget x86 cpus.

It also never helped that apple was well known for cooking benchmarks at the time making people doubt any of thier benchmarks

How did Apple exactly cook benchmarks?

 

[agrouf]

Meathim[/url]":3la478cx]

agrouf[/url]":3la478cx]In a way that's a failing of the GPL. Maybe it's time for GPL v4. GNU is technically a good system but many people forget or don't care it's about freedom first and foremost. Running GNU on Windows defeats the purpose of GNU.
I know the Ars community doesn't care about freedom and I fully expect a rain of downvotes but I hope the few with an open mind can still read it before it disappears from view.

It's the forth page, the death by vote stuff happens on the first page.

Couldn't the same be said for anything GNU running on anything proprietary? If yes, I think you have many, many forums to hit. ^^

This is not the first instance where GNU is used for its technical merits at the expense of everything it stands for but this is an important case. There will be a new wave of users and developers that will flock to GNU and erode its ethics by ignoring the philosophy that drove GNU since the start. They already call it Linux even when Linux is not even there. They are not educated about software freedom and will demmand convenience at the expense of freedom and patches will follow for Cortana integration in bash. The FSF has to be vigilant to not let that happen.

 

[fatpugsley]

Indeed, for a number of years, it wasn't a huge exaggeration to say that Apple made the only x86 laptops that were both reasonably affordable [...].

Now that you have a UK site will somebody explain why in god's name are Apple products so hideously overpriced in the EU compared to the US prices, while other manufacturers seem to manage to just add taxes over the $ price?

 

[7dmk2]

Thanks MS, but I'll take the real Ubuntu.

 

[enduzzer]

agrouf[/url]":43xdipmr]In a way that's a failing of the GPL. Maybe it's time for GPL v4. GNU is technically a good system but many people forget or don't care it's about freedom first and foremost. Running GNU on Windows defeats the purpose of GNU.
I know the Ars community doesn't care about freedom and I fully expect a rain of downvotes but I hope the few with an open mind can still read it before it disappears from view.

There's a thread on Trisquel forums about this.

https://trisquel.info/en/forum/ubun...roject-canonical-and-microsoft-what-your-idea

 

[MementoMori]

I think it'll easier that ms devs (when they'll start loving WLS) will move to linux than linux devs migrating to windows...

 

[moltonel]

Wind the clock back 15 years and Windows was the only serious platform for software developers. Linux was already an important consideration for servers, but on the desktop was even less of a concern than it is today, reserved only for the most hardcore fans. OS X was in its infancy, and only ran on weird, expensive, underpowered PowerPC hardware. This made Windows the development platform of choice by default. There simply wasn't any good alternative.

16 years ago I entered a programming school. 95% of the work was done on various *nix flavors. The rare times we used Windows was for some gaming side-projects or some specific software like 3d modelers. No need to be a "hardcore fan", Linux was already a very good alternative for development back then. I've never needed to do any professional work on Windows. Maybe Ars staffers have a view of "development" that is highly biased towards "game development" where Windows actually was much stronger at the time (much less so nowadays, even if the market share hasn't caught up yet).

 

[enduzzer]

I found this on the Trisquel forum that sums it up:

Isn't it fantastic how Microsoft can reap the benefits of GNU/Linux to fairly easily implement this compatibility, while the Wine project has had to reverse-engineer several components for a compatibility layer?

 

[peaceminded]

mrnomnoms[/url]"rvd015m]

peaceminded[/url]"rvd015m]Given how shitty XCode is and given how little Apple cares about non-iOS developers, given how shitty the virtualization situation is on OS X - if MS continues the terrific work they've done to attract developers (Android emulator, iOS bridge, Free VS2015 with support for ton of stuff - C++11/17, Python/Django, Java, HTML5 etc.) - it doesn't sound very far fetched that Windows soon will become the developers' platform of choice.

For me personally, it already is.

What do you mean by "how shitty the virtualisation situation is on OS X" given that the Hypervisor framework was introduced yet so few vendors have been bothered taking advantage of it in favour of re-inventing the wheel with their own.

You mean the same Hypervisor.framework that was too little, too late and is still so buggy they can't even get Docker running reliably on it? (Check the docker/xhyve Hacker News thread for source - they are still working with Apple to get the Hypervisor framework bugs fixed - 12 days ago they were still fixing those - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11355164 .)

 

[BarkingGhostAR]

unequivocal[/url]":3a7m202q]

BeowulfSchaeffer[/url]":3a7m202q]"Linux for various reasons still may not be the most comfortable desktop platform..."

I've had both Windows and Linux Mint on my computer for about a year I think. I put Mint on to "try it out" and I like it quite a lot. I rarely go back to windows (7 Pro) and whenever I do, I have to update all of the software and restart the machine, sometimes multiple times. I have to say, Linux just... works.

That has not been my experience with Linux. Currently I run Windows with a virtual box Linux setup, mostly because Windows drivers all work well for monitors, video cards, printers, usb doo-dads, etc. In Linux, there's always something misbehaving, in my experience (one monitor fritzes out periodically with static, or the usb wifi stick stops working, or my headset's usb thing isn't supported, or...).

For me right now Windows is one giant hardware abstraction layer for Virtual Box running Linux, but it works well and I get 3 monitors of Linux with no hassles.

If I could get rid of the Virtual Box layer, that's fine by me!

Hmm, the first year M$ removed HAL there were a ton of people complaining about video drivers because peripheral makers (especially vid card makers) no longer had direct access to their own hardware.

And let's not confuse the efforts of a bunch of free-working developers that stand behind Linux and the commercial efforts of a paid-for product. I would imagine a double or triple intrusion into the adopted ranks for Linux would see peripheral developers putting a lot more effort behind drivers for their products and not expecting the free efforts of volunteers.

That being said, how about removing the Virtualbox layer and just booting directly into Linux? I hear SSD's as boot drives are pretty cheap these days. I boot multiple operating systems, each to their own SSD.

 

[BarkingGhostAR]

I don't get the need for people to compare apples to oranges. One is free based on volunteers developing the Linux platform and the other is a commercial product based on paid for developers because it is their job.

If the Linux arena had half the development money that Windows had for one year it would probably crush the market from corporate to gamers alike. But criticizing Linux for not having drivers because they ignore the fact that development is mostly free is just silly.

 

[MalEbenSo]

Aureum Aquilam[/url]":3khyv47c]

FatAndrew[/url]":3khyv47c]I'd slightly expand on how the MacOS X brought unix into play. The importance wasn't that it was unix but that the OS went from (pre-OSX) co-operative multitasking to (OSX) pre-emptive multitasking. In the pre-OSX days a poorly written app could crash the whole OS requiring you to restart your Mac. With OSX you could create crappy apps that crashed but the OS could survive. That was the real significance - that unix was the technology used could almost be an accident.

More than that, it had a workable virtual memory implementation, better modularity, an existing API that supported the new preemptive environment, and was just overall much better than the MacOS operating system (at least, theoretically; it took a few releases to get stability and performance at an acceptable level).

Getting a little off-track. Apologies to those who are not interested.

Yes, those were the technical drivers and benefits that came with NeXTStep/OPENSTEP.

These could have been had in other ways, though. And it did make a difference that OS X had the FreeBSD base of NeXTStep/OPENSTEP beyond those technical benefits.

For one: Maturity. The failures of Taligent/Pink and then Copland demonstrated, that a new OS was not trivial, getting all the quirks out. Gone were the days of quick and dirty OS development. The underlying FreeBSD provided a solid foundation that had matured over years with real world usage. This was not the case for the main alternative at the time: BeOS, even though it was in some ways superior to NeXTStep/OPENSTEP (filesystem, multithreading, hardware requirements)

And then: Reputation and credibility. In my workplace at the time we used mostly SUN OS / Solaris boxes, some IBM AIX, some NT. Before OS X, my perception was that admins considered Apple and Mac mostly as toys and "something that designers use". With OS X, that notion changed: I remember one colleague walking up to me asking to see OS X in action. I think he was sold after seeing the Terminal and MS Word running side by side on the same OS natively. Within a year or so the team of admins was 90% running OS X on their private machine. I don't think this would have happened with BeOS or something not Unixish.

 

[enduzzer]

BarkingGhostAR[/url]":3mg4wsca]...criticizing Linux for not having drivers because they ignore the fact that development is mostly free is just silly.

Less than twenty percent of contributions are non-paid. Most people developing GNU/Linux get paid -- they are employed by corporations like IBM, Red Hat or Canonical. The lack of drivers for Wi-Fi has nothing to do with paying, though. It's mainly because some manufacturers refuse to tell how the thing works so no driver can be made or they only supply a binary that nobody can maintain.

Free as in freedom is the goal. It's not about gratis. Commerciality is ok as long as the license is retained and the four freedoms are not ignored.

 

[Jiggers]

If you have not noticed, the new corporate MS has been trying to follow Apples lead for a while.
Korporate VPs can't ignore the fact that Unix/Linux is as good as it gets and free.
It's only a matter of time before MS junks Windows core and switches to a Linux core.

 

[Ragnir]

zogus[/url]":3m58lc6d]
[…]My wife takes one last look at Surface Book, shrugs at the sticker price, and says "At this kind of a price, I'd rather get the Mac."

So once again I find myself enriching Tim Cook by process of elimination, and I can't help asking myself where this urban legend of Apple's "huge premium" comes from.

Same here. I wonder if the folks touting it ever did make an objective comparison themselves.

At home, I have a mixed OS X/Win/Linux environment, but for work, I do need a windows laptop, there's just no way around it really. Since I wanted something comparable to a MacBook in quality and reliability.

In the end, I bought a Thinkpad X250 w/1080p display, 8 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD for over $2k. And just looking at the varying clearings, it still doesn't hold a candle to the workmanship present in a retina MacBook. And don't get me started about the driver issues I had at first. At least it wasn't as bad as the Surface Pro 3 it replaced.

So no, you can't compare Apple products to the cheapest alternative available. And as soon, as you choose a product on the same level, differences in price are negligible.

 

[damnhandy]

neonspark[/url]":1lr344c2]yes, but also, besides web developers which are a minority source of revenue: azure, azure, azure. Making BILLIONS for microsoft linux. Yes kids. MS has monetized linux big time and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

So by making windows more friendly to linux devs, it also introduces them to the MS ecosystem in azure via tools like visual studio, sql server (which is on its way to linux), etc.

So the plan is to assimilate linux (borg pun) into their azure cloud and make linux based enterprises pay for the azure compute time they use, instead of having them pay for windows which was a far less profitable model.

So overall windows is just the gateway drug into azure, and based on the response, the linux crowd is sniffing it hard!

Exactly! Everyone is focusing on web development, but the real target is the cloud and AWS. If you're doing anything in the DevOps space, you're using tools like SaltStack, Chef, Puppet, Docker, etc.. All of these are not very enjoyable on Windows, but work great in a bash shell on OS X and Linux.

Linux dominates in the cloud environments and AWS is in the lead here. The only time I've head to spin up a Windows host is to run some type of vendor app that only runs on Windows. So it's not only web developers they are targeting, it's the cloud. You bet that WSL will have some pretty slick Azure tools to boot.

I also find it interesting that they went with Ubuntu as opposed to RedHat.

 

[futzbugger]

vartec[/url]":102ebrrx]

zogus[/url]":102ebrrx]

Fast forward to February 2016.
[...]
Well, again, I was surprised that the situation is still the same--the cheap Windows laptops are hobbled with huge 15" chassis coupled with crappy displays, and the nice ones with SSDs and retina-grade displays are as expensive as equivalent Macs. At least the trackpads are much better today. My wife takes one last look at Surface Book, shrugs at the sticker price, and says "At this kind of a price, I'd rather get the Mac."

You must be living in some parallel universe. In my universe MBA 13" has crappy 1440x900 screen, while MB 12" is seriously underpowered and costs $1300 + tax for basic version.

Meanwhile you can get ASUS UX305 with Skylake CPU for $700.

I was with ya until you said "Asus".

Now, I know the parts for a lot of Asus gear comes right from the same sources Apple uses, but I have never had such a ridiculous time of warranty service, repair and outright failure as the two Asus machines I have used. Fortunately, these were work assigned machines and not something I purchased.

That's great if you haven't had the same bad luck, but my 7 year old MBP is still running along and still my primary computer. As far as I'm concerned, money well spent.

edit: fix grammar bad word yada yada

 

[Rene Gollent]

How did Apple exactly cook benchmarks?

As I recall at the time, they had a habit of trying to hide the subpar general purpose performance by touting Altivec, which was essentially irrelevant for 99% of code your system at the time would've been running.

 

[alleendert]

One thing I am missing from this story is the fact that a lot of frontend developers today come from a design background and that is where Apple has been king all along. This at least to some degree explains why Apple could gain traction in the development world. Especially as fronted is where a lot of the progress has been made over the last 10 years.

I am not saying this is the reason but it definitely helped.

 

[pirhotek]

Anyone know if WSL will suffer or not from the same rebase/fork issue that cygwin does?

 

[TEAMSWICTHER]

peaceminded[/url]":3oavgw4a]Given how shitty XCode is and given how little Apple cares about non-iOS developers, given how shitty the virtualization situation is on OS X - if MS continues the terrific work they've done to attract developers (Android emulator, iOS bridge, Free VS2015 with support for ton of stuff - C++11/17, Python/Django, Java, HTML5 etc.) - it doesn't sound very far fetched that Windows soon will become the developers' platform of choice.

For me personally, it already is.

There's nothing wrong with Xcode. the problem is that you've brought too much Windows Baggage to Xcode development, or you never even tried it and are just spewing crap.

 

[Blue Daisy]

cwsars[/url]":2lo280v4]

Blue Daisy[/url]":2lo280v4]

WSL also doesn't include X Windows or any other graphical subsystem

*twitch*

There's no such thing as "X Windows." It's called "The X Window System," or "X11" or just "X" among friends.

Thank you, carry on

Why place any reasonable limits on pedantry?

Please, take this opportunity to also inform folks that they are misusing the terms "client" and "server".

Why would I do that? Perhaps some people find it weird that the X server is called a server, and that their Firefox, xterm, etc. are all clients, but first of all I'm not even sure this confusion actually exists (other than in the obligatory "some people find it confusing that..." remark in any intruduction to X), but second and more telling, I have never actually heard anyone use the wrong terminology. And why would they? A server is something that sits around and waits for connections to come in; a client is something that initiates a connection. It's not a difficult concept.

Got any more straw men you wanna throw out there, big boy?

 

[YourOldBuddy]

Windows just works for a lot of things. Programming is not one of them. I have had a hell of a time getting QT to (not really) work with a new framework yesterday while the Linux installation was a couple of apt-get's away. I'm waiting for Visual Studio to work better on Linux.

 

[DrPizza]

replace the shitty out of date poorly optimised compiler with clang/llvm

clang's front-end would be a modest improvement (though the gap isn't really that big any more), but llvm's back-end almost certainly would not.

 

[GoodOnYaMate]

Windows, sliding into irrelevancy, saved by *supporting Linux apps*. Who'd have ever expected that?

 

[ampet]

DrPizza[/url]":2k0n5tgw]

1232[/url]":2k0n5tgw]

Linux for various reasons still may not be the most comfortable desktop platform (especially for anyone wanting to use it on a brand-new laptop)

Can't write one goddamn article without taking potshots at Linux, Apple or Google, right Peter? By the way, look up the Dell XPS series and other brands like System 76, Sager or zaReason laptops for out of box Linux experience. But hey, don't let facts get in your way of mindless bashing.

The same Dell XPS series that has to ship with a different Wi-Fi card than the Windows version because of driver support?

Yes, please tell me about how Linux is every bit the equal of the Windows experience on brand-new laptops.

It's up to the manufacturer, not the OS developers, to provide good drivers for their hardware. Windows works well only because (some) hardware manufacturers decide to support Windows exclusively or better.
You don't complain that OS X only works well on Apple computers (because Hackintosh is a pain).

When you choose to use Linux, you should choose hardware which is known to work well on Linux, so I don't see what's the problem with Dell going with better-supported hardware for their Developer line.

Anyway, in my experience, Linux is still leaner generally on the same hardware than Windows, unless you're a gamer. And that is despite the X server being a beacon of inefficiency. (Wayland can't come soon enough). If you choose the right distribution (therein lies the rub: you don't choose Debian for a desktop), it's hardly less cohesive than Windows (for example Mint does a pretty good job, as does Ubuntu - although I hate Unity, and apparently some Ubuntu spins are very good too). GNOME is finally shaping up to be a very good DE (with a few extensions it's great and it's also aesthetically very pleasing, there are a few pain points but that's true for *all* platforms). There are basically two areas where Linux is a very bad choice: one is for creative applications, since the software isn't really there, and the other one is gaming. In both cases things are slowly but surely improving (Lightworks is apparently a very good video editing software, and there are a couple of good DAWs for audio production). For the rest, really, I think it's great.

 

[beebee]

kobblestown[/url]":1oypfu1b]

beebee[/url]":1oypfu1b]

BeowulfSchaeffer[/url]":1oypfu1b]"Linux for various reasons still may not be the most comfortable desktop platform..."

I've had both Windows and Linux Mint on my computer for about a year I think. I put Mint on to "try it out" and I like it quite a lot. I rarely go back to windows (7 Pro) and whenever I do, I have to update all of the software and restart the machine, sometimes multiple times. I have to say, Linux just... works.

Windows update is just plain awful. When it works, fine. When it breaks, it is a pain. Linux/BSD package management isn't perfect, but it is far better than Windows update.

In all fairness, this is largely due to the development model. The Linux kernel and most of the software that comprise a Linux distribution are open source and the binaries can be freely distributed by anyone. This allows to build repositories for distributions which contain all packages and their dependencies. As a result, there's little code duplication, because libraries are pulled as dependencies rather than being installed by each application. The distribution is more coherent, because everyone runs the same sets of packages wrt package versions (minor updates notwithstanding). So you can expect that the different parts fit quite well. Also, everyone can create repository mirrors so chances are you have a local mirror nearby - my closest Ubuntu mirror is ~1ms away and I can download with the full speed of my connection. So I always install over the network and don't need to update the packages after installation because they are the latest versions right after installation! In short, I love it.

Having said that, it's not always easy to install later versions of specific applications. They may depend on newer version of their dependencies and so forth down the chain. The most painless way is to move to the next version of the distribution, say from Debian stable to Debian testing. I usually manage such situations with root jails (using schroot). I guess Docker and the like can help too (I haven't yet tried). But sometimes I really wish there was a single self-contained package of the latest version of sth that I download and install on my Linux machine even if I run a pretty old and rock-solid distribution.

You should see the cluster fuck known as VLC. I added Packman, upgraded ffmpg, and VLC has been shared mess. So you can add repositories and make a mess, but still nothing as bad a windows update.

Note there are non-oss repos.

 

[authorandrew]

xWidget[/url]":27h8doah]
Where I work you have to go out of your way to get anything other than a Mac (which then your only choice is a Lenovo ThinkPad, which isn't a shining beacon of good hardware anymore.)

Hey, me too. If you're not a mac person, you get a T450s. i5, but runs Photoshop well enough. My coworkers, on the other hand, say "Real designers only use Mac," so I'm not sure what that makes me.

On the topic of the article, this can only be good news. Really refreshing to see Microsoft maturing their platform and taking the time to make life easier for devs.

 

[civbat]

zogus[/url]":2mcx51p8] At least the trackpads are much better today.

You'll never pry my thinkpad from my grubby mits, but the trackpad on my W540 is an abomination

 

[idleberg_]

Microsoft is positioning WSL strictly as a tool for developers, with a particular view to supporting Web developers […] Many developers are very familiar with the bash shell, with building software using make and gcc

Don't get me wrong, I'll choose bash over cmd.exe any day, but why would any Web developer require make or gcc? Node is available for Windows, Ruby is available for Windows, Python is available for Windows…

 

[auxilio]

BarkingGhostAR[/url]":1zaeva73]I don't get the need for people to compare apples to oranges. One is free based on volunteers developing the Linux platform and the other is a commercial product based on paid for developers because it is their job.

If the Linux arena had half the development money that Windows had for one year it would probably crush the market from corporate to gamers alike. But criticizing Linux for not having drivers because they ignore the fact that development is mostly free is just silly.

So you're saying that because they don't have the resources to make good drivers, they get a free pass?

Sorry, that's not how the world works. If I want to run Linux on my laptop and it's not working because of a bad graphics or WiFi driver, then telling me they didn't have enough resources isn't going to console me at all. Quite the opposite. I'll just question why I bothered trying Linux.

 

[auxilio]

GoodOnYaMate[/url]":ejr2osvn]Windows, sliding into irrelevancy, saved by *supporting Linux apps*. Who'd have ever expected that?

This had nothing to do with "saving Windows".

This option is going to appeal to software developers that want to work with *nix tools on Windows. That's a very small part of the market.

 

[Lavonheim]

vnicolici[/url]":3203a44p]

Muon[/url]":3203a44p]I wonder if this means Windows 10 is going to be case-sensitive now.

Windows is case preserving already. Unless you really need to have two files with the same name but different capitalization in the same folder, it should work fine as it is.

NTFS even supports backslashes and other reserved characters in file names and case-sensitivity... though application support is non-existent. For some reason the NTFS-3g driver does not make acting windows-like the default, so I personally have several such examples that I can't delete until I bother to boot into a LiveCD again.... Or if I break down an upgrade to Windows 10 when this comes out.

 

[enduzzer]

auxilio[/url]":2sh8dat4]If I want to run Linux on my laptop and it's not working because of a bad graphics or WiFi driver, then telling me they didn't have enough resources isn't going to console me at all. Quite the opposite. I'll just question why I bothered trying Linux.

I'd just question why I bothered with that particular hardware at all.

https://www.thinkpenguin.com/

 

[DKlimax]

DrPizza[/url]":irao7l8f]

pbarrette[/url]":irao7l8f]

Applications demanding low-level access to hardware devices, such as Wireshark, seem similarly unlikely to run.

Except that the example, Wireshark, has been available for Windows for ages. In fact, it's available in 3 different Win flavors now: x64, x86 and a portable app.
https://www.wireshark.org/download.html

Right, but it's rebuilt and I believe still needs winpcap installed to get the low-level access it needs.

You can't just run Linux Wireshark on Windows, and I don't imagine that's going to change with WSL.

Frankly, why one would want to run Linux Wireshark, when there is Wire shark using right interfaces. The only case I know of is sniffing all Wi-Fi networks. (Most Windows drivers for Wi-Fi chips don't allow this)

zogus[/url]":irao7l8f]

tjukken[/url]":irao7l8f]"Indeed, for a number of years, it wasn't a huge exaggeration to say that Apple made the only x86 laptops that were both reasonably affordable and pleasant to use."

THAT really was a huge exaggeration. Windows laptops were no harder to use than Apple's. And they were more affordable, as they didn't command the huge premium Apple took for essentially the same hardware.

No they weren't, and aren't.

In Christmas 2011 I was looking for a light laptop to take on a trip. Although I have been a Mac user, I wanted a cheap Windows machine because all I was planning to use on the road were web, mail and a couple of small Windows-only apps, and we all know Apple overcharges, right?

Well, Windows laptops turned out to be either too big (15", 2.5kg and a 1366x768 display?), ran on glacial Atoms, or too expensive (comparable to Macs), and all were hobbled with terrible trackpads. In the end, I was surprised to find that an 11" MacBook Air was the only machine that was neither ridiculously expensive, ridiculously slow, nor absurdly large, all at the same time. So I got one of those, with the Windows apps running in a VM. It's still my road machine today.

Fast forward to February 2016. Now my wife wants a laptop of her own, so we go look for a Windows machine because that is what she uses at work. We started by looking at a MacBook Pro 13", which she liked a lot, and decided to find a Windows machine that is approximately equivalent but is cheaper--because we all know Apple overcharges, right?

Well, again, I was surprised that the situation is still the same--the cheap Windows laptops are hobbled with huge 15" chassis coupled with crappy displays, and the nice ones with SSDs and retina-grade displays are as expensive as equivalent Macs. At least the trackpads are much better today. My wife takes one last look at Surface Book, shrugs at the sticker price, and says "At this kind of a price, I'd rather get the Mac."

So once again I find myself enriching Tim Cook by process of elimination, and I can't help asking myself where this urban legend of Apple's "huge premium" comes from.

Ehm, I see no mention of Probooks and Elitebooks. In comparison to them, Apples stuff is overpriced and not good and definitely badly maintainable or repairable. Also highly resistant to physical damage. I didn't know selection in Japan is so bad...
(Or you were doing selection badly)

pipe13[/url]":irao7l8f]

microlith[/url]":irao7l8f]

hfm[/url]":irao7l8f]Any time you need to cherry pick hardware to get it up and running you lost.

Yes, you lost 20 years ago when Microsoft gained their desktop monopoly and caused hardware vendors to rarely ship drivers for non-Windows platforms outside of the enterprise space.

It's not a failing of Linux, it's a failing of the market due to a market distortion. Maybe some day it will recover, things are very, very slowly improving.

It's a "failing" of neither. I think some of our Linux proponents are misunderstanding the very marked difference between marketing a hardware device for Windows and marketing the same (or equivalent) device for Linux.

++> Mark this Difference:

Windows has a stable kernel API and ABI. Linux has neither.

++> Unmark this Difference.

This is by intent, both by MSFT and by the Linux kernel maintainers.

Linux kernel is GPL, not LGPL. And Linux kernel maintainers want to keep it that way.

Linux kernel API is a moving target and quite hostile to third-party device drivers. This is by intent and Linux kernel maintainers want to keep it this way.

The reason Linux kernel maintainers want to keep it this way is that in the not-so-distant-past Windows had earned a reputation of being notoriously unstable. Blue Screen of Death was routine. You never ran Windows for more than a few hours. 24/7 was a joke.

Even in time of Windows 98 it wasn't 100% really true (and NT line was of course different beast altogether)
It depended on how badly applications/drivers were written. (Might test it again on old Pentium 1 with Windows 95/8)

Reminder: Do not confuse blue screen in Windows 3.x, Windows 9x and Windows NT. Those three cases were quite different things.
(Windows 3.x used it as general system alert and as such was never BSOD, that is Windows NT with Windows 95 being in the middle)

And the reason for this was not Windows per se, but rather the deplorably badly written device drivers that every fly-by-night cheap hardware vendor tacked on as an afterthought to their cheap product in order to get it to market before its equally cheap competition.

I wasn't a Windows user at this time for this reason (and a few others). Dr. Pizza can tell us when it was Microsoft started requiring signed and certified device drivers. IIRC it was Vista, but could be wrong. What wasn't wrong (or rather was very wrong) was the amount of blowback Microsoft got from cheap third-party hardware vendors who were unable to take the time to write drivers to Microsoft's standards. If they had the ability to write them at all.

IIRC XP, but there were some attempts even before:

What were the tests that WinG did to evaluate video cards?
text you'd like to be linked
Defrauding the WHQL driver certification process

...
The upside is that modern up-to-date Linux kernels support far more legacy hardware than does Windows, as its not the hardware vendor (if there still is one) who has to maintain the drivers. The downside is that brand-shiny new hardware frequently is not supported on Linux as soon as it is on Windows, if it is ever at all. Even Intel has sometimes been remiss. Remember Sandy Bridge?
...

Not sure if/how much it is true though. A lot of old WDM drivers still work. (As long as there is out there driver for Windows NT 4 or newer it may work, Windows 2000 version is almost certain) Installers themselves might be more problematic and require workarounds...

Owl Saver[/url]":irao7l8f]I wonder how long before Microsoft makes Inux the underlying OS and Windows the GUI and API on top of it? If they can do that, it would be a great step. This is because they could leverage all the advances in Linux.

Why? Why the hell would they do anything like that? What the hell would be the point? There is nothing Linux kernel can offer and there would likely be some severe regressions.

Aureum Aquilam[/url]":irao7l8f]

vnicolici[/url]":irao7l8f]

Muon[/url]":irao7l8f]I wonder if this means Windows 10 is going to be case-sensitive now.

Windows is case preserving already. Unless you really need to have two files with the same name but different capitalization in the same folder, it should work fine as it is.

Not only that, but NTFS natively supports case sensitivity. Like so many other things, the Win32 subsystem does not generally support the feature (it has to support it as part of the NFS For Windows subsystem and the earlier POSIX subsystems, but for most computers is only accessible via a registry change), but other subsystems that work against the IFS can take advantage of it. It'll confuse Windows Explorer, more often than not, but it's there.

Honestly, sometimes I wish Microsoft would just bite the bullet and make Win32 less awful. I mean, it's not horrible, but having the API default to exclusive locking (which most frameworks don't even let you opt out of for some silly reason), not allowing case-sensitivity, still preserving 8.3 names after all this time, and still throwing errors due to MAX_PATH makes for a sad developer. Or at least a frustrated one.

Cannot happen. Backwards compatibility either with binaries or source code trumps a lot of thing. Short of security vulnerability there cannot be any such changes.

Exclusive locking dates back to MS-DOS and had to survive DOS->WinAPI16->WinAPI32->WinAPI64 transitions because code compatibility. (The lesser costs of updating the bigger chance of adoption)
Case-sensitivity was never an option and will NEVER be an option. You would break EVERY* single application. Assumption has been baked in there for so long (CP-M/DOS) that it has 0% chance of happening in WinAPI. Not close to 0, but total absolute 0.

*there might be some odd code which does not rely on it. (Maybe some Linux based utils retained it)

8.3 preservation is off by default for some time. IIRC Windows 7 no longer had it on by default and it is configurable. WinAPI itself was never dependent on it, nor using it unless explicitly passed by developer or requested by them.
Max_path is same thing as exclusive locking. You cannot lift the restriction on standard paths as very large number of applications rely on it and allocate based on that. That's why to get pass the limit one has to use UNC path, which gives 32K long paths.
(https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/librar ... 65247.aspx)

Abandon all hope about changing already existing WinAPI functions as there compat lies. (That's why there are Ex or numbered version of functions...)

mrnomnoms[/url]":irao7l8f]

peaceminded[/url]":irao7l8f]Given how shitty XCode is and given how little Apple cares about non-iOS developers, given how shitty the virtualization situation is on OS X - if MS continues the terrific work they've done to attract developers (Android emulator, iOS bridge, Free VS2015 with support for ton of stuff - C++11/17, Python/Django, Java, HTML5 etc.) - it doesn't sound very far fetched that Windows soon will become the developers' platform of choice.

For me personally, it already is.

What do you mean by "how shitty the virtualisation situation is on OS X" given that the Hypervisor framework was introduced yet so few vendors have been bothered taking advantage of it in favour of re-inventing the wheel with their own. As for Windows itself, it is still riddled with stupid shit like the 260 character MAX_PATH limitation that they could have addressed in the move from win32 to win64 but failed to do so and now Windows x64 is stuck with bad decisions from 30+ years ago because no one had the balls to make a decision in the transition to win64 to fix up some bad design decisions. When I use my Mac I know it isn't perfect but at least I get the sense that Apple actually fixes shit up rather than letting it rot and fall to pieces as developers become increasingly annoyed.

If Microsoft want to wow me, replace the win32 subsystem with the *BSD one, move UWP from being based on win32 to sitting on top of the *BSD subsystem, replace the shitty out of date poorly optimised compiler with clang/llvm and whilst I'm dreaming how about fix up the damn kernel by moving to ELF binaries and allow files to be replaced whilst in use rather than the elaborate mess that exists where there are exotic shut down and load up sequences as the operating system tries to dance around its own shitty design flaws just to get the system up to date. Like so much of what Microsoft does - it looks great on the promo but the devil is in the details.

HAHAHA. That was great joke you wrote there. Why should Microsoft use BSD? What for? Just to waste resources on bringing in something which offers nothing, but regressions?

As for your funny assertion about compilers, do you have any good evidence that it is true? Heh, I am not going to wait, so far all there is out there shows how much better VC++ is and the only compiler beating it is ICC (even on AMD CPUs) and just recent Update 2 pushed it again further. That'
s why devs were so ecstatic that Clang can be used as front end for VC++ backend compiler. (They get some advanced C/C++ features not yet implemented without suffering slow codegen)

And what kind of love you have with ELF. Again, offers nothing, but degradation. Sometimes you should learn what and why in Windows. You would know that your suggestions are idiotic, ignorant and totally stupid.
You would even know why executables cannot be replaced while running. (Hint: It is not arbitrary restriction)

 

[jcupitt]

idleberg_[/url]":1bfalg2b]
Don't get me wrong, I'll choose bash over cmd.exe any day, but why would any Web developer require make or gcc? Node is available for Windows, Ruby is available for Windows, Python is available for Windows…

Node, Ruby and Python are almost useless on Windows. As soon as you hit a module with some native code, it's just chance if it works or not, and your chances are not good. Some npm modules with native components work very well on Windows, but that's because the developers of those modules have spent weeks of their time getting it working. Most developers just don't bother.

Hopefully WSL will make a lot of this pain go away.

I do wonder a bit how useful it'll be. You can't run notepad.exe from inside bash, for example, or run a linux binary from powershell. It's much more like a VM with a shared filesystem.

 

[Danrarbc]

Aureum Aquilam[/url]":1afcb7ee]

vnicolici[/url]":1afcb7ee]

Muon[/url]":1afcb7ee]I wonder if this means Windows 10 is going to be case-sensitive now.

Windows is case preserving already. Unless you really need to have two files with the same name but different capitalization in the same folder, it should work fine as it is.

Not only that, but NTFS natively supports case sensitivity. Like so many other things, the Win32 subsystem does not generally support the feature (it has to support it as part of the NFS For Windows subsystem and the earlier POSIX subsystems, but for most computers is only accessible via a registry change), but other subsystems that work against the IFS can take advantage of it. It'll confuse Windows Explorer, more often than not, but it's there.

Honestly, sometimes I wish Microsoft would just bite the bullet and make Win32 less awful. I mean, it's not horrible, but having the API default to exclusive locking (which most frameworks don't even let you opt out of for some silly reason), not allowing case-sensitivity, still preserving 8.3 names after all this time, and still throwing errors due to MAX_PATH makes for a sad developer. Or at least a frustrated one.

Well they had two options. Make Win32 less awful, at the likely expense of harming backward compatibility, or leave it mostly alone and create a new environment. They opted for option two with UWP.

 

[Milo_Hoffman]

My best experience is having a Desktop PC under the desk running Enterprise Linux with a big monitor (used to have duals) and doing ALL MY productive work there. It is vastly more productive to do coding and real work on the Linux desktop.

And off to the side is the 'corporate' Windows laptop. It has been relegated to basically running outlook all day long. Its not useful for all that much else.


Putting Linux on a laptop is often troublesome because laptops are PROPRIETARY ONE-OFF HARDWARE land. There are very few standard parts among laptop brands, they are often a huge mush of different designs and niche hardware solutions. Desktops nearly always are 100% fully supported by Linux because they usually use big name standard components like ATI or Nvidia video cards, ASUS motherboards etc.. I have had nearly zero issues running Linux on a REAL desktop. But when I try to run it on a laptop, the manufacturers just don't provide the support you need. It is not the fault of Linux, its the fault of the laptop manufacturers not providing the support.

With a dedicated Linux Desktop + Windows Laptop setup, I find that using Synergy it makes it super easy to use the same keyboard/mouse to switch between the systems just be moving the mouse cursor between them like they were multiple monitors of the same system.

Now, if we could only convince our email people to allow access to email via IMAP or something reasonable instead of Outlook only, I could almost have my laptop turned off all day and then only use it at home for off-hours VPN if needed.