I wonder what Linux exclusive software they are hoping to support. Everything I use in my Ubuntu daily driver has a Windows build or corollary app. I get how ‘you never have to leave Windows’ is a nice thing for their business, but I don’t see this being a reason I would stop dual-booting. The only reason I run windows in the first place is for a few apps, mostly games. Otherwise I really enjoy the bloat-free, ad-free, telemetry-free, snappy, tractable, and undistracted experience that is Linux desktop computing.
It would be nice if they did something actually useful, like add native ext4 support.
Even though our dev environment at work is Ubuntu, I greatly prefer running Windows on my ThinkPad X1 Extreme, because of the superior hardware support for the devices I use. Specifically:
• I spend a fair amount of time on Zoom calls (who doesn't?), and I like to use my Apple AirPods so I can move around while we talk. I was never was able to get these or any other Bluetooth headset to work on Ubuntu. They pair only as headphones with no microphone. On Windows they work "out of the box".
• I use a triple-monitor configuration with three 4K displays: the ThinkPad's internal 15" display and two 24" externals. In Ubuntu I can only get two displays to work. (BTW one external display is in landscape mode above the ThinkPad, and the other is to the left in portrait mode. I highly recommend this configuration - the portrait mode display is great for reading docs and especially PDF files.)
• I run the external displays at 200% scaling and the internal at 300% to match the differing pixel density. I didn't see any way to support this configuration in Ubuntu, much less be able to move an app window between displays and have it automatically update its scaling factor to match the display. This works "out of the box" in Windows.
So I run Windows on the hardware and Ubuntu with my dev tools like PyCharm and SmartGit in a VMware VM. (VMware works a lot better for this than VirtualBox - the display response is much snappier.)
Of course these are my own needs, and I have no quarrel with anyone who has different preferences. But I welcome anything Microsoft can do to make this an even smoother experience than it already is.
Bluetooth headsets (I have Bose) and automatic input switching works with pipewire, fractional scaling with different settings for each monitor works with Wayland.
I am using it on Archlinux without any problems whatsoever.
The problem with Ubuntu is - when it releases their latest version, it is already shipping a couple years old software versions.
And for pipewire, wayland, mesa and other desktop related things you want to run the latest version at all times. This is one of the major reasons why Valve chose Archlinux as a base for their new SteamOS version for Steam Deck.
> The problem with Ubuntu is - when it releases their latest version, it is already shipping a couple years old software versions.
That is quite a dramatic take and simply not true.
It maybe fits somewhat for Debian Stable (that has a freeze of 4 to 6 months), but Ubuntu bases off Debian Unstable (sid) and sid is very close to the Arch experience - I know because I use both a lot.
Granted, Ubuntu adds a bit of a delay due to QA and all that release fuzz a rolling release like Arch does not has to care for, but if an upstream software release happened one or two months before an Ubuntu release it's really likely to be included in that release.
> And for pipewire, wayland, mesa and other desktop related things you want to run the latest version at all times.
Meh, in general I agree with the sentiment, but there are also regressions that hurt running into, and if you have HW that was released over a year ago it may not matter that much.
> This is one of the major reasons why Valve chose Archlinux as a base for their new SteamOS version for Steam Deck.
Not directly, they could have used Debian sid for that, and the fact that SteamOS 2.0 is still on Debian 8 (newest is 11) also shows that they did not try to go for the latest releases until now. I'm working on a Debian derivative and we just backport things ourself if really required, it is a bit of work but not that much (we're definitively orders of magnitudes smaller than Valve) - especially as the Debian unstable/sid repo is quite up-to-date and thus we often can just take it from there and base on that anyway.
But actually Debian and Arch Linux are really close anyway, I do packaging for both (but neither a DM nor Arch trusted user) and if the software is not awful to package in general it's quite the bliss to do for both, there are also lots of parallels, even if often slightly hidden. So I won't care much; may even try out setting up Debian Sid once I get my Steam Deck :)
Debian used to be my main desktop distro 10 years ago, but I switched to Archlinux because for me personally Debian reqired too much work after packages got broken (I was on testing or unstable, don’t remember anymore), and it happened too frequently. And also Archlinux AUR was very powerful with no good alternatives on Debian at that time.
I still have some servers running Debian but I have migrated most to Ubuntu because of much simpler upgrade procedures between stable versions (basically I have enabled automatic upgrades with auto reboot on all of them).
I am an enthusiast but I like to have things running smoothly and even with Arch being rolling release, it has been working smoother for me than in my time prior with Debian.
Maybe it is because of the excellent documentation on Arch wiki, maybe it comes with experience. All of this is subjective anyway.
I'm using Fedora. Scaling works, but not for all apps. Gnome apps work just fine. But Chrome, Intellij Idea and some other apps do not scale when moved to other display. AFAIU Wayland-native apps work, but those which use Xlib do not re-scale properly.
> • I run the external displays at 200% scaling and the internal at 300% to match the differing pixel density. I didn't see any way to support this configuration in Ubuntu, much less be able to move an app window between displays and have it automatically update its scaling factor to match the display. This works "out of the box" in Windows.
This works if you use Wayland rather than X11. I'm using a similar configuration today.
I've been running {KDE, Gnome} on Wayland + KMS on a box with a GTX1080 for a few months, and
- it is really laggy (sometimes the mouse cursor is choppy)
- fractional scaling is practically unusable due to all kinds of important apps (e.g. Chrome) not supporting it and just blurring the screen instead of properly scaling
Overall I can't recommend it to non-enthusiasts, unfortunately.
"It works for me on very specific, ancient hardware, and also don't use <software you use>" isn't a great selling point for people who just want their machine to work and aren't bought into Linux On The Desktop as a philosophical ideal. That's why people use WSL2! Popular software works, popular hardware works, you can run Linux programs from the command line without installing and managing a separate VM yourself (yes, yes, it's virtualized under the hood by the OS, but you don't need to manage the VM yourself), and now you'll be able to run Linux GUI apps too.
If you want a great Linux desktop experience, don’t buy Nvidia GPU’s.
Intel and AMD has very good open source drivers, while Nvidia has only the proprietary ones and they are known to have all kinds of issues. There is a good reason Linus Torvalds said the famous words “fuck you Nvidia”.
And major problem that still persists with WSL is the NFTS mounts in Linux. At work we can’t have decent compile times on Windows because of the file system.
To be honest, with the amount of video meetings I have, I invested in a far better audio setup than Bluetooth headset microphone.
The amount of meetings I've had where the audio from the other end sounds like the BART announcements is too high...
That being said, I know what you mean. However, I'm actually rather annoyed at the headset microphone functionality on windows, because if anything starts using the microphone, it switches modes and the audio quality goes way, way down. Fine for a zoom call maybe, but having horrible audio in a video game is not fun. I constantly have to go to control panel to turns off hands-free telephony.
Audio quality matters to me too, and of course the AirPods are quite a compromise. The speakers in them sound good enough, but I know the microphones are not great. Mind sharing some details of your audio setup?
I do like having wireless headphones of one sort or another, so I can walk around while staying in the conversation.
Also, over-the-ear or in-the-ear (the kind that go into your ear canal) headphones don't work for me. The only kind I'm really comfortable with are the kind that sit lightly in my outer ear, e.g. AirPods and not AirPods Pro.
But in any case, I'm eager to hear about your setup. And I'm probably not the only one who would welcome better quality audio. Thanks!
As far as a microphone goes, I use a Blue Yeti on a shock mount suspended next to my desk along with a pop filter (about ~$200 USD all together). To be honest, I've had it for awhile because I've played games or talked with friends on Discord regularly for years. We all started with the inline microphones on our headsets and collectively decided to move past what we loving described as "BART station audio" since it became an almost daily activity.
As far as work goes, a few of my coworkers use RTX Voice to remove background noise since they use their gaming computers for work. For headphones, I personally like over-ear headphones and use wireless noise-cancelling headphones.
> if anything starts using the microphone, it switches modes and the audio quality goes way, way down.
Funny, I don't see this on windows, which will leave the headphones at high quality (except for when I'm speaking, at which point I don't care that much about audio) - but on Linux I have to set the audio profile for the headset to low quality in order to enable the microphone at all - so all audio out is crap as long as I'm on a call/have the microphone enabled (even muted).
Still waiting for this to improve - but looks like it'll require new hw (new Bluetooth receiver and sender).
Ubuntu by default pairs Bluetooth headsets as A2DP, which has higher quality for music but no mic-support. You have to go in to Ubuntu bluetooth sound settings and change the output device to headset mode every god damn time you turn on the headset. And then toggle it back to A2DP if you want to listen to music again. I don't know how Windows or iOS deals with this but there both modes seem to work seamlessly.
Pipewire can switch to headset mode automatically whenever a microphone input is needed. And it switches it back to headphone mode afterwards.
It works on Linux exactly like on a phone or macOS.
Pipewire is backwards compatible with Pulseaudio so there is no reason to not migrate.
I've not heard of pipewire. Need to check this out because I'd love for my truly wireless earphones to be able to seamlessly switch modes on Ubuntu. I use a wired headset for work calls I need to be on quickly because it's pretty flawless, but the tether is more than a little annoying.
EDIT: It took me 5 minutes after reading the comment above to replace pulseaudio with pipewire on Ubuntu 20.04, now I have access to my earphones' high quality codecs too right from the Ubuntu sound control panel!
EDIT2: Switching to/from my earphones and from 1 bud to 2 buds appears flawless so far, even for the Spotify desktop for Linux app which usually requires a `pulseaudio -k` to send the audio out of the right device usually, even if it's correctly selected in sound settings.
EDIT3: Don't forget to mask pulseaudio (yellow box, second link) or pulseaudio will load on reboot and break things, no amount of systemctl disable will stop it without masking.
EDIT4: Linked site has different theme on mobile so yellow box in EDIT3 isn't yellow.
oooh... Thanks! Thanks!... This was a breeze and I had to pinch myself to make sure that it was really working...
PS: In the past, I've wrestled with PulseAudio & BT dongles and my JBL headsets on Ubuntu. Banging my head on a brick wall would have been more pleasurable than that.
PPS: and today we have Pipewire on the front page!
Glad you got it working. I deserve no credit though, I just followed some instructions and linked it here.
It was even easier to setup on my desktop (now running Manjaro rather than Ubuntu because of SteamPlay/Proton et al) and simply `sudo pacman -Sy manjaro-pipewire` followed by a reboot. If it complains about pulseaudio related conflicts, just `pacman -R` the packages it mentions then try manjaro-pipewire again, and then reboot and you're done.
I sort of had heard of pipewire - but only to the extent that it was the next audio/video stack.. No idea about how far along it was. Also no idea that it had the BT headset thingy all sorted out.
Your comment made me go "huh! that's easy enough to finish off in 10 now" and provided the impetus I needed
Does Macos doesn't deal with this? IME, MBluetooth Audio from Mac sounds like a fart in a pringles can unless you update some plist somewhere. But once you do that It JuSt WoRks.
> I spend a fair amount of time on Zoom calls (who doesn't?), and I like to use my Apple AirPods so I can move around while we talk. I was never was able to get these or any other Bluetooth headset to work on Ubuntu.
I do not want to be the cliché Linux user and recommend some config change and assert that would have been simple and helped 110%, but out of interest, did you also try something like
> Set ControllerMode = bredr or ControllerMode = dual by editing
> /etc/bluetooth/main.conf file
> systemctl restart bluetooth
On linux mint, zoom works fine, with bluetooth headphones, attached speakers, bluetooth speakers, etc. Has for years (well, I started using it (bluetooth headsets with linux) in 2008 or so, and it worked then as well).
On windows, brand new Dell laptop for work, with an insanely locked down version of windows 10, zoom often crashes, especially when sharing my screen. This in turn takes down many other applications. Generally making the whole windows experience far from optimal.
My Sager Laptop a few years ago, and now my HP Omni (personal) laptop, I regularly drive 2 screens and the laptop display. Works. Out of the box. Work windows 10 laptop, its a crap shoot at best. And I can't use the NVidia card very much in windows 10, simply because the system is so locked down. Thus I'm stuck with an expensive and useless feature. One that works flawlessly in my locked down linux box.
On different scalings for different monitors, its built in to mint.
I'm guessing you are either running a very old version of Ubuntu (literally all the complaints you made are many years out of date, having been solved long ago), or you copy-pastaed from somewhere else. My priors on this are 60% the latter 40% the former.
On my linux laptop, I run windows the way it should be run (if you really need to run it). In a kvm instance. Never touching real hardware. And whats funny about this, is that the virtualized Win10 is faster than the far more expensive windows 10 work laptop right next to it.
Go figure.
FWIW, I've been using Linux on my desktop for 23 years, and as my primary OS on my desktop/laptop for 20 of those years. So ... YMMV.
This seems mostly anecdotal, but I've been using Bluetooth headsets and headphones on Linux since around 2008, and most have worked out of the box with no issues.
I do remember at the time, windows didn't really work with those Bluetooth headphones, and I actually started bringing my own Linux laptop to work just so I could use my headphones.
When it comes to Zoom, I'd say the problem is having to use that crap and not the fact that they barely support Linux. MS Teams also won't work on Linux, but it's hard to claim it's an issue on Linux's side. I'd suggest looking at something like Jitsi, which is also encrypted and takes security into consideration.
Ubuntu is a pretty bad example for anything though: they're usually trying to reinvent the wheel and it's very common for things not to work there and work anywhere else. I personally have mixed feeling because they both make Lonux more popular and build good tools, but also give Linux a bad rep at the same time. Maybe give Fedora a shot?
Finally, per-display scaling works fine on Wayland, but won't work on Xorg. I believe Ubuntu still uses the latter.
It is not true that Ms Teams does not work on Linux. We do have several devs working on Linux (don't know which specific distros though) and it works just fine. There are some annoying pop ups saying "Teams is ready" anytime they get a message and one of them has to switch something about his graphics from time to time to be able share his screen (which has never been a problem problem for anyone else), but I wouldn't say that it doesn't work at all.
> When it comes to Zoom, I'd say the problem is having to use that crap and not the fact that they barely support Linux. MS Teams also won't work on Linux, but it's hard to claim it's an issue on Linux's side. I'd suggest looking at something like Jitsi, which is also encrypted and takes security into consideration.
Jitsi is not as good as Zoom. Zoom seamlessly integrates with multiple monitors, and it provides a variety of tooling to rearrange your view of people and shared desktops. Just as an example last week I was helping two coworkers troubleshoot something, and I was able to have both of them share their desktops simultaneously. I had one on one monitor and one on the other. It was painless and instant. Maybe Jitsi supports such a thing somehow but it would have taken a minute or two to find the right buttons to press.
Also Zoom is encrypted. It has always been encrypted. Zoom lied about having E2E encryption and also weirdly had a lower-grade AES. Zoom is weird because while I 100% mistrust their motives in using weaker encryption, there are some legitimate tradeoffs between reliability and encryption - and it's actually pretty unlikely that they could implement E2E encryption without compromising video quality.
And ultimately especially with the pandemic and only being able to see people via video, even the smallest problems are potentially quite massive. I've used Jitsi a bit, and I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that it would mean that I would have spent at least an extra hour a week during the pandemic troubleshooting video when I was trying to have a nice visit with friends or family. I'm not going to be an ideologue when I lose that kind of time.
About the headphones, are you sure you've selected the right thing in the app? Not pulseaudio, but zoom. I had this problem that zoom would ignore whatever I set with pulse. Once I figured this out my problems went away.
For games, proton has come a long way. I don't find myself needing to boot out of Linux very often anymore.
Thanks for asking. In fact that is one of my pet peeves with Zoom, that it has its own audio selection independent of the host OS. This is a problem on Windows as well - and I assume on macOS too.
I have a friend who uses Zoom a lot on her Windows laptop, and this "feature" of Zoom has messed her meetings up so many times!
I didn't install any Apple drivers, just paired and connected them in the Windows settings. I also tried a couple of cheaper Bluetooth headsets and they worked equally well. None of them would connect as headsets in Ubuntu 20.04.
Indeed. We take for granted this kind of robust hardware support on macOS and Windows.
macOS by itself wouldn't work for me, though. I would still need to run a Linux VM because of our very fussy build system. And besides, where would my beloved TrackPoint be? :-)
Nice setup. I prefer one large monitor over dual displays and a desktop over a laptop. I just don't have any use for the small laptop screen and keep it closed most of the time.
In truth, I don't spend that much time on Zoom calls, and of the few that I have, many are no video, just substitutes for a phone call with better audio quality and the ability to share screens if needed.
To be honest, theres alot of research related software (including for visualization) that works on Linux only or has very poor support for windows. As a roboticist one example that comes to mind is the whole open source robotics ecosystem with ROS/Gazebo which is pretty linux only. Personally I've been using linux as a daily driver for 10+years now so its not a problem for me per-se, however I'm sure there are many who would be interested in seeing better windows support. I've heard of similar issues in the domain of particle physics and a few other niche research areas.
As someone who uses Windows as their main driver, I will personally find it a useful way to test/debug our Electron based app on Linux. Right now I’m using a full VM.
When you consider that Edge is available for Linux, MS could very well be using WSLg to develop it.
So it seems to me that this just makes it easier to anything you need to do on Linux, “on” Windows.
Of course making it easier for people on Windows to make software for Linux seems like a way to help Linux, which is a bit confusing to see MS do.
WSL1 was done that way (though with a compatibility shim not a real linux kernel), but it had a number of shortcomings, primarily that I noticed in file io performance, but also in compatibility as they had to map all the syscalls themselves.
A bridge between kernels is how most VMs work these days. The kernel inside the VM has special drivers for extra-simple 'hardware' that the host OS provides.
As opposed to WSL1 where there's a wine-esque module in the windows kernel, and there is no linux kernel at all.
A super fast one. After one click, within 2-3 seconds I can have an Ubuntu terminal open with wsl. To spin up a vm from let’s say VMware, I need at least 10times that.
I don't think that's magic in the hypervisor, so I doubt it affects overall performance of the VM very much. But WSL images have a special boot process instead of a full init system like systemd, which is probably where the fast startup comes from. Maybe it also has to do with how they configure storage for the VM. On real hardware with a decent SSD, Ubuntu usually gets you a graphical login in less than 10 seconds.
Anyway it's a cool feature, and I'd love to know more about how it works.
And the fact that they probably use a slimmed down kernel with just the right amount of modules, I guess.
In any case, booting Linux (the kernel) is always incredibly fast, and booting to a tty, without all the systemd units that are generally loaded, is incredibly fast per se.
> I wonder what Linux exclusive software they are hoping to support.
It would be more of a case of how well certain software works, or how well that software works together, than one of supporting Linux exclusive software. There have been a variety of ways to run Unix software under Windows for decades. Quite often, there are quirks to deal with unless considerable effort has also been put into the Windows native version. I doubt that WSL will actually appeal to many existing Linux users, but it will probably prevent the slow flow of people from Windows to Linux.
I agree that native ext4 support would be more useful for people who dual boot.
Whenever you want to natively operate on files within WSL instead of going through the network share abstraction, this is definitely helpful. I'm running my git GUI (Sublime Merge) on the Linux side and am currently piping the UI through to Windows using VcxServe. If I can remove another dependency using this - great.
So even if a windows build is available, sometimes the user experience of linux-first software on windows can be subobtimal because of differences in filesystem and process model of the two operating systems. I much prefer using git and emacs within WSL than their windows builds.
> The only reason I run windows in the first place is for a few apps, mostly games
Another reason to use windows is if you are on a laptop and care about battery life. Browsers on Linux still don't have hardware accelerated video playback.
> Another reason to use windows is if you are on a laptop and care about battery life. Browsers on Linux still don't have hardware accelerated video playback.
That's just not true. Might be a problem with some GPUs but not with all. At least I got hardware accelerated video playback on Chromium with my AMD GPU.
At least for AMD cards it works with no extra configuration. Besides installing the open-source driver if the distro doesn't do it automatically. I'm not sure which framework it's using VAAPI/VDPAU. My test method is: my GPU activity spike up when I hit play on a Youtube video. :) I'm on Arch/Gnome.
It sounds like they did significant work getting the whole stack to work well, from Wayland to the RDP back-end to improvements to the RDP client on the Win32 side.
GPU passthrough on WSL2 is a thing since around December 2020 -- but I'm not sure if it's in stable yet, I had to install an insider build for it. It works surprisingly well and I was able to develop my ML project using it (with the help of VSCode devcontainers)
I think it's mostly a "because they can". WSL is a no-brainer because developers are used to Unix shells and most programming languages are Unix-first, Windows-maybe. But WSLg feels like a weird experiment with no purpose.
This could very well be the case, but as someone who is just dipping a toe into programming, installing and using WSL2 knowing that I can fall back on GUI when I can't figure out bash is a feature for me.
My networked workplace computer needs to be able to compile a Windows application plus peripherals running various other architectures. The Windows part happens best in Windows, while the other parts are remarkably painful to compile without Linux. And all the platforms can compile in parallel.
I suspect this is to try to push large business/corporate clients to drop Linux.
Windows adds support for running Linux apps, then spreads some FUD about Linux, and convinces companies they need to ban dual-booting and only allow Windows internally.
I was looking into this further because it’s sort of impacting my dual-boot workflow. I have ext4 media drives on Linux that aren’t viewable or readable from Windows, but Linux can at least read the NTFS drive. The third parties I’ve tried in the past for making Ext4 readable in Windows File Explorer have some sketchy security concerns and/or missing Win10 support.
It looks like using the method described in the link below it’s now possible to mount ext4 drives via WSL2 and even browse them in File Explorer:
So far no good. That feature was a preview release that required insider builds, which require enabling telemetry that sends, among other things, "information about websites you browse, apps and features you use..."
Moreover, I'm not able to use Windows 11 which has the feature because of my AMD Threadripper 1950X processor.
Almost everything I use runs faster on Linux so even if it isn't Linux exclusive I'd very much prefer to run it on Linux.
VS Code brilliantly lets me develop on WSL2, IntelliJ is getting there but with these new developments it might become easier to run everything on Linux.
That said, IT at work not only tolerates Linux but actively support it so I might be back on Linux again very soon.
I use WSL with VcXsrv on my work machine. For me, the biggest feature is that I can share clipboard between vim running in WSL and windows. It's also often significantly faster to get a program up and running in Linux than on Windows, especially if it has lots of dependencies.
you would be surprised at what a large effect the removal of friction can have. I bet this will convince a decent chunk of people that dual booting isn't worth it
I can't tell you how many people want to mess around with the robot operating system but don't want to dive head first into Linux. Hell, my very large robotics company won't even give you a linux machine. You're forced to use Mac or Windows or build it yourself.
But in general, I haven't dual-booted my main machine since WSL got good, and I'm a linxu-first kind of person with a penchant for windows gaming.
Possibly, but that would be misguided. That's not even close to the niche ROS fills. ROS runs on Ubuntu pretty much exclusively, is essentially a mediocre messaging middleware and a mediocre build system, upon which 95% or more of the worlds decent robotics research is conducted. The main research tools, like Gazebo, require gobs of GPU processing that usually preclude virtual machines. So everyone dual boots or goes Ubuntu-native. I'm not saying that's why WSLg is being invented, but if it can produce native-ish GPU performance, that would be an amazing use case.
WSLg had an early demonstration of ROS simulations running, in fact. So I can double down on this being a use case.
I have a Windows machine for my work at giant megacorp. I run Linux on my at home machines, but the honest to god I can't believe it's not Linux experience I've gotten from WSL has been great. I pretty much tab into my full screen Linux Window manager running in a X11 client window and get down to work.
> Everything I use in my Ubuntu daily driver has a Windows build or corollary app.
And using them is an endless shuffle with fractured distribution and update. WSL gives you apt-get. And good luck when every port you use integrates with a different subset of the ca 5 SSH options that are in common use on Windows.
They’re supporting servers. That’s the whole story. They won business desktops but lost enterprise in the “anything that requires network access”, and want to continue to sell software to those customers. Making development less onerous supports that goal.
the reverse would also be pretty useful. heck if they would pull off office for linux even when they would charge windows pro and a 365 license it would probably be welcomed.
You can always just use Unity mode on the free VMware Player. VMware may allocate resources, but plays nicely with sharing them when not actually in use, so there's not much a performance hit on the host machine unless you really need to do something that has the CPU pegged.
I think VirtualBox has a similar feature, but in my limited experience VB doesn't perform as well as VMware.
Every single person who has ever claimed Linux runs flawlessly on a piece of hardware has had some flaws. I include myself here - I once bought a laptop with entirely OSS mainline kernel supported hardware and compositing didn’t work on external displays.
99% hardware support isn’t good enough. I want to make new software not troubleshoot other people’s.
Thinkpads generally work perfectly. Also, windows hardly has even 99% compatibility with hardware. There is hardware that behaves better under linux than windows as well.
I have a colleague that uses Linux with a thinkpad, he was the person that made me think of my comment. Linux works perfectly but then starting Citrix causes a weird perpetually zooming effect on his external display.
> It would be nice if they did something actually useful, like add native ext4 support.
Other way around. The Kernel getting real support for NTFS (was merged into Linus' tree a month ago [0]) there's hope to get native performance on WSL2.
Microsoft is building the dev environment for the next decade.
No, really, when all of my development happens over SSH or inside Docker anyway, it doesn't really matter which is the "outer" OS. I'm happy with Windows.
It really depends on the company. In my limited experience I can say that only FAANGs will probably allow such an environment. Other big corporations aren't quite there yet.
It’s pretty common among game, .net, and Java EE devs. For me as a Python/Node/Cloud dev it was kinda a nonstarter (it all theoretically works, but has all kinds of little bugs and caveats) until WSL was stable. Since then it’s been perfectly viable for anything I’m working on, and I was able to use it exclusively for dev work for about 6 months. I have a Mac laptop too, but my desktop is too beefy to not use as my daily driver. Still, I prefer Linux for development work.
I develop Linux software on Windows using Visual Studio / C++. It lets me build and debug my servers on Linux machines remotely using nice IDE and tools. Also use CLion from Jet Brains the same way
Linux has had read-only support for NTFS longer than WSL has been around. And if you think that Kernel patch is a testament to the greatness of Windows, you should try reading some of it. It's infamously incomprehensible.
I'd be onboard with Windows as a next-gen dev environment if it was compatible with more filesystems, had a more organized file structure, featured greater CPU compatibility, and eliminated the system registry altogether.
It would be nice if they did something actually useful, like add native ext4 support.