At first I was excited by bash for Windows but I am still not switching. You know why? Malware. Ransomware. I have many layers of defense from various harm (OpenWRT router, uBlock being the two most important ones) but the biggest defense I have is that Windows programs simply do not run on Linux and the Linux market is not big enough to bother with.<p>And I know many of you will say, oh that's not a problem, it never happened to me -- I will say good for you. But I need my work computer to, well, work, constantly. Yes, fighting a broken Arch Linux after an update is bad but not as bad as fighting a downright malicious program.
A lot of comments about Thunderbird here, despite the article saying "Save your apologist comments and what about Open Office/Geary/Thunderbird comments.". That means don't comment about it.<p>The interesting part of the article is not the part about why this guy uses Windows!
Turn the indexing off in Thunderbird and it is still quite a usable email client for me and I have recently done a bit of a tour of the alternatives. It hits the sweet spot for me. Mutt is awesome but I have to deal with too much html email.<p>I pretty much run the same stack for email/editor/docs on every platform. For the most part Windows, OSX and Linux are interchangeable for me which is a nice place to be. I just find Linux gets in the way a lot less for my purposes.<p>Every platform has advantages and a slightly different mix of applications that make it suit some users more than others. I can certainly understand swapping between a Mac and Windows for iOS and Windows development or games and back to Linux for web/server stuff. But being stuck on a particular platform because of an email client would bother me.<p>I think it is great that this stuff is running on Windows but it bothers me that people feel they are trapped on Windows because of their email client. That seems so dated.
Initially I read this as "Running <i>13</i> Window Manager<i>s</i> on Ubuntu for Windows", which piqued my interest as possibly the most Linux thing I can imagine doing.<p>Still, exciting times.
Another thought: when people complain about the state of Linux email clients, what is so good about the Windows alternatives? Office productivity suites, I get it. But email clients all suck. Mutt's mantra is so true, at least they're honest about sucking less.<p>I believe Linux is a 100% of the time platform because the choice (again, user choice) to run minimal terminal apps means like less than average 50% memory utilization for Thunderbird, which I love, with a web browser GUI and background full text indexing all damn day.<p>Outlook is just as crappy.
Serious question, what's wrong with Thunderbird? I've used Eudora, Netscape Messenger, Thunderbird, Outlook Express, Outlook up to 2016, Mail, Gmail, Squirrel etc etc. I use Outlook where I _have_ to, but TB is a constant across all my systems. IMAP support is great, search is fast, I rely on Google to filter spam. Thunderbird is one of those apps that doesn't need extra work or new features, it just works.
For me, modern virtualization has gotten so good that it's my preferred solution. kvm, libvirt, virtio, and PCI passthrough et al have opened up a whole new world of possibilities. Currently still requires fairly specific hardware and kind of a pain to figure out how to make it work, but it's already very impressive.<p>This is still really cool though.
I haven't had any problems with macOS stability lately.
Has anyone else experienced what the author describes?<p>Around me Windows 10 has crashed more than macOS.
but Windows 10 is really stable too.
As someone who has only briefly worked on Windows since the early 2000s, when I moved to Debian and then Ubuntu (and, then, using Cygwin to make things comfy), what is the compelling reason to adopt it?<p>Both Mac ans Linux offer very good developer experiences, with hosts of cross-platform tooling and environments that are closer to the server that will most likely run your application. I understand that Windows is essential when you write code that runs on Windows, but, apart from that, what are the advantages over macOS and a more traditional Unix-like environment?
There’s something about “translating system calls” that just makes me wary. It’s the kind of thing that could be proven to work for some common cases while failing in mysterious ways for others (not to mention being hard to debug).<p>Generally, there is a gap between what’s documented, what was thought to be true, and what is. At some point they will produce behavior that just doesn’t match what compiled code expects. For how many libraries, applications and combinations thereof will they deal with this?<p>And then there’s maintenance. This is a scary kind of layer to be responsible for; future Microsoft employees will have a hard time doing <i>anything</i> to this layer without risking new misbehavior so we have to trust that they either know what they’re doing or that they won’t touch anything.<p>I’m not saying that they weren’t clever to try this, or that there isn’t a way to pull this off successfully. I do think the odds are against them though. Or maybe, I just missed something about their implementation that makes this a lot less risky than it seems to be.
> far too many things don’t work in macOS that are required for modern Internet software development<p>It's been a few years since I've actively used Mac OS, but is this really true? Ancedotally it seems like a lot of Web developers still use Mac OS as their OS of choice.
This is tangential but my primary interest is being able to natively ssh into a Windows machine.<p>I know options exist today but I would love to see native support and it's oh-so-close.<p>Would be great to be able to finally script things to copy stuff over to the Windows box such as LE certs.
The gnu binaries used in this article are the ones included in maboXterm and compiled for windows, nothing related to an abstraction layer between nt kernel and Ubuntu gnu bin builds as mentioned I suppose.
Working great anyway.
At this point why not just have a Linux system on your local network and connect with VNC from Windows...? You can have a Linux environment to hack around in while getting to use all the "nice" Windows GUI apps.
It's disappointing that i3 is constrained to one window. The ability to replace Microsoft's window manager with i3 and allow linux and windows apps to be nicely tiled together would be amazing.
When it comes to finding a decent terminal emulator for Windows: mintty is the terminal you get when you use Git Bash, right? Because in my experience it's better than ConEmu.<p>ConEmu makes a staggering number of off-by-one errors in putting characters on the screen when I ssh into a Linux machine and use tmux. Vertical separators end up jagged, things that are supposed to fit the width of the screen end up wrapping, my Vim status line says "IISUAL", and so on. But mintty gets tmux right.
I think the real trouble with Windows for many folks is not that we can't figure out how to convert linux kernel calls into NT kernel calls, but that we don't want to convert our linux kernel calls into NT kernel calls PLUS "telemetry" data sent to Redmond. Windows is explicitly non-free (in so many ways), and that's cool and all, but no thanks.
This is awesome stuff. If you fullscreened MobaXTerm and autohide the Windows taskbar then what are the problematic points vs running a linux/i3wm natively? Do certain keystrokes get intercepts by Windows regardless? You mention Firefox have you tried Chrome/Chromium in i3wm? Can you play a HTML5 youtube video?<p>Thanks for writing it up, interesting stuff! - An i3 user
Am ... am I falling in love with Windows?<p>Well, time to see if I can get StumpWM running on it, for more hipster cred. (Partly joking, partly serious.)
A lot of alarms ringing in my mind, as a long time Linux and i3 user and developer.<p>1. You ran i3 as a proof of concept now but going long term you ll face dozens of issues when you want to make it useful. The same is true for everything you ll install through Ubuntu for Windows..<p>2. Windows mail clients are totally wrong, slow and they are not only hazardous to people using but also to receivers of emails. Outlook users don't know how to put subjects, respond and distort the format and conversation all the time. (Long time outlook user here)<p>3. Desktop productivity tools are long history. No reason why someone would use ms office anymore.<p>4. Windows for Ubuntu is doomed to be a second class citizen, and if it by chance becomes a first class citizen then why would someone need the Windows overhead and complexity? (How can I apt-get remove windows)<p>I congratulate MS devs taking HN seriously recently but windows in 2016 is obsolete..
Do you still need to be in the windows fast lane preview for access to bash on windows? I want to try this but im a bit hesitant to run the earliest of beta software on my only productivity machine...
There is a tiling window manager for windows using auto hot key, so entirely native and works on previous versions of Windows too. I seem to have forgotten the name but it worked well when I tried it.
Gentoo called it eleven years ago. <a href="http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gentooexperimental.org/nt/</a>
Incredible. My fancy new Lenovo has gotten no use because they've made it impossible to install another operating system in it. I look forward to giving this a go.
It is rather trivial for Microsoft to implement support for Linux.<p>Also, if Windows source code was freely available there would be support for Windows applications on Linux.
Save your FUD, I've been using computers for 16 years and I've never had this problem. Malware/Ransomware hit only if you go around the dark corners in search of porn/free stuff without knowing what you're downloading. Even then the built in Windows defender catches it.<p>I love Arch too but people like you are so die hard in their toxicity that any collaboration asking about Windows related stuff is impossible.