Ask HN: Have any of you switched to Bash on Windows? I've owned a Mac for about a year now, and it's worked very well. I do however miss being able to game on my laptop, and with the announcement of Bash on Windows I'm thinking of making Windows my sole environment. Those of you who have tried this: What's your experience been like? Is it inferior in any significant way to your workflow? |
2) It’s not ready yet. Lots of stuff doesn’t work, though much does.
3) It’s oddly separate from Windows, which makes perfect sense, but the unix is so much less integrated than mac (or obviously linux) systems are.
3a) Not being able to launch windows binaries from Bash makes scripting hybrid stuff hard. I think this will be fixed at some point.
3b) I’m not sure if the windows file explorer can see the ubuntu root fs. Could be wrong here.
It seems that once it goes 1.0, it will have some advantages over a VM with shared files, but also a few disadvantages.
I've yet to have a computer that was made in the past 5 years that I haven't been able to get it running on. It's amazing.
If you start it with the non-free (as in libre) installer, you'll definitely get near perfect hardware support. You'll need to install two packages if you want good battery life (TLP and thermald).
After that, it's ready for production use on almost every system I've tried.
If you like it/try it I'd like to see how it works out for you so try and contact me and tell me how it went. I might try starting to recommend this for some family I know who get viruses but don't do much else but Youtube and Facebook.
Also, if you use the ext2 volume manager to access EXT3 or EXT4 drives, they don't show up in bash at all. I haven't figured out why yet.
I was able to install ZSH after some fiddling with ZSH and compiling a custom version. That was a month or two ago, though. I don't know if that's necessary anymore or if they fixed the issue. But, everytime I run bash.exe I have to switch to ZSH manually. For whatever reason, chsh thinks zsh is an invalid shell.
A bigger issue, for me, is it runs as root by default. I was able to create another user and manually switch over using 'su', but it's an annoyance. I haven't figured out how to automatically start a session as a non-root user using zsh. Actually, scratch that... I just added /bin/zsh to the bottom of my .bashrc file and it works.
Another downside is the linux subsystem has no awareness of the rest of windows and vice versa. I imagine that kind of integration is going to take some time, but I look forward to being able to automate my windows programs with bash!
All the things I need it to do work, though. I use vim and grep and search and all those lovely features that I call my "zsh ide".
So, on the whole... I wouldn't use it as my primary daily driver yet, especially considering you have to sign up for the windows 10 dev updates in order to get it. Every morning when I wake up it's a coin flip whether the machine will work or decide not to render drop down menus (just as an example...).
But, when they finally get it working and release it as standard, it'll be marvelous. Much, much faster and easier than running a VM or Cygwin.
Definitely worked with just apt-get for me.
>A bigger issue, for me, is it runs as root by default. I was able to create another user and manually switch over using 'su', but it's an annoyance. I haven't figured out how to automatically start a session as a non-root user using zsh.
Huh? It does not run as root by default.
The install worked, but running it was a different story. It would spit out an error after every command. Like I said, this was a while back. It's probably fixed now.
> Huh? It does not run as root by default.
When I run bash.exe, I'm greeted with this prompt
root@DESKTOP-F7NGQJX:~# pwd
/root
There is no need to run setup.exe each time and hope somebody ported it to Cygwin.
accidentally typing ls in a regular ol' windows command prompt leading to explosive crashes drives me slightly nuts from time to time for instance...
Otherwise it's been pretty awesome, despite some incompatibilities.
And oh, get ConEmu to fix the garbage cmd.exe https://conemu.github.io/
Every Mac since the switch to Intel processors has built in support for dual-booting Windows. If you want to play games that don't run on OS X, boot into Windows and play your game.
I am struggling to understand the concept of compromising your working environment so much, just for the ability to play games without a reboot.
I would imagine the productivity losses in a single hour of working would be more time than is required for two full reboots - into Windows and back to OS X.
Some flaws you have to witness to actually believe. As an example, I'd go as far as saying that Windows doesn't support high DPI (retina) displays. It does, but it's broken to a degree that I considered switching the hardware. If you're running a setup with both high DPI and regular DPI screens, be prepared to constantly manage your windows because Windows fucks them up all the time. The bad support for multiple displays doesn't help there either.
In theory the OS might be able to support these setups well, but dozens of included programs fail to comply. Even major ones like the password prompt. For programs not included, I have yet to see any to scale properly.
This thing where the included programs serve as examples of how a decent program should look and feel like, I think this just never existed on Windows.
Any Mac user considering using Windows more I'd suggest to try it for some time. Even if it's just to appreciate Mac OS again. OS X is getting worse, but they're still worlds apart.
One of the most glaring issues is that it's contained in a windows-like terminal and the fonts are broken for non-standard characters.
ConEmu is amazing. Right now I have it set such that each time I launch it, it opens a Cygwin tab and a regular Windows command prompt tab. Customization options are endless as well.
I found it very useful for monitoring - instead of waiting for someone to write e.g. a Nagios script for the thing you want to keep an eye on, you can just write a bash script.
I have yet to have to try the official Microsoft bash. The question is whether it is competitive with Cygwin for these purposes. i.e., does it carry all the other GNU tools with it.
I gave up using Windows when the Windows rot got too bad after about a year and I couldn't be bothered reinstalling. YMMV.
That's the wrong question. Microsoft doesn't bundle toolsets with the Windows Subsystem for Linux. It provides a binary-compatible platform, and Ubuntu provides the toolsets. Or Fedora, people having already run Fedora on the Windows Subsystem for Linux.
So the right question is Does Ubuntu/Fedora carry all of the GNU tools?, subordinated by Do they require any of pseudo-terminals, framebuffers, signals to Win32 processes, or a proper daemon branch of the process tree?
As for gaming, I have one HD on my machine with Windows, and I boot from it to play.
This has the added bonus of completely separating my "work" environment from my "play" environment.
I remember it all working very nicely with little perceptible difference from working on Linux.
# apt-get install fish
# fish
Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell Type help for instructions on how to use fish
There you go :)
https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/commandline/wsl/user_suppor...
I have a rule of thumb: I try to NEVER touch the console for my non-development OS. Manjaro allows me to accomplish that and it also works on most hardware I've tested it on.
There is a reason GUIs won out over terminals, and that is because no one in the main stream wants to touch one.
A good OS should allow you to do every necessary task via a GUI. If there is a Linux DE/WM that can provide an experience like that, I feel like GNU/Linux will have its break through in the consumer market.
I use my "I never need to do something in the terminal" as a basic user acceptance test.
