I haven't dug deep into it yet. But, I'll say that I've been having fun compiling (command line) Linux apps with Clang and visually debugging them with GDB all through the UI of VStudio Community Ed and without a VM. /shill mode<p>Linux is not a target for the code I'm working on. But, I like to keep my code as cross-platform as possible. Between this setup and prototyping code on several compilers via goldbolt.org, staying standard-compliant and compiler-agnostic is much easier than ever before.
Network filesystems! That's the last big feature I've been needing for regular use of WSL for light tasks. There's still enough weird behavior I wouldn't look at WSL as a complete Linux replacement, but it sure is a lot nicer than Cygwin/msys2.<p>They don't say anything about FUSE, I wonder if this work is at all related?
WSL is really interesting. I switched to the Mac in 2006 but I’ve never really used the fact it’s built on Unix much because it’s so different and frankly outdated comparede to the Linux systems I work on. When I want to do ‘Unixy’ stuff at home I run a Linux VM in VirtualBox. But WSL seems to offer the best of both worlds – a solid mature desktop environment with plenty of well supported professional level apps and an approaching first class Linux environment baked right in. I’m still very happy on the Mac and would miss a lot of Mac specific features and applications, but this is the first thing to happen in Windows Land that’s made me even think of the possibility of wanting to run Windows at home for over 10 years.<p>Edit: What would be the nearest thing to WSL on a Mac? VirtualBox is a bit heavy-weight. Maybe something based on Hyperkit and Docker?<p><a href="https://github.com/moby/hyperkit" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/moby/hyperkit</a><p><a href="https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-mac/</a>
Does it suffer from similar quirks as Cygwin (.exe suffix removal, symlinks, permissions mapping)?<p>- <a href="https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html" rel="nofollow">https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using-specialnames.html</a><p>- <a href="https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#pathnames-symlinks" rel="nofollow">https://cygwin.com/cygwin-ug-net/using.html#pathnames-symlin...</a>
I wonder if they have plans to add other emulation features, most importantly the ability to passthrough USB devices (or even graphic cards?).<p>I don't need or want the Linux graphical interface of my VM, it's pretty much redundant, but I do need to make devices available to the Linux software. Otherwise it's a bit like emulating a microcontroller - sure, Turing says the thing can compute everything, but in a very practical sense it can do absolutely nothing without it's outside inputs and periphery. I need the damn side-effects!
I wish there was a way to get lxss updates without being a Windows Insider.<p>I turned on Insider on my brand new laptop last summer and it immediately overwrote some vendor-supplied drivers by newer-but-broken ones. Result: no sound. I didn't manage to fix it except through a full reinstall. Now that's exactly the sort of problem you need to prepared for when doing the Insider thing, but it sortof ruins the point. I want to beta test lxss, not Paint 3D or some fancy new device driver release schedule.
Is it at the point where one can, for example, use PyCharm to develop Python/Django sites residing in the Windowns file system (say, z:/sites/project_099) while hosting from WSL?<p>Or would it be treated more like a VM that you simply deploy to?<p>We currently run one or more Ubuntu server VM's per machine as needed for local testing. If needs go beyond that, we have physical (virtualized) servers on our network (for example, web and database servers).<p>I can see WSL possibly being good for local development if it can somehow integrate seamlessly with the Windows file system and various tools (PyCharm) can be setup to run on Windows yet talk to WSL. I guess this might be equivalent to running a remote interpreter.<p>Need to think about this a bit. Running a server or two on VMs is pretty clean and painless. On machines with 64 GB of memory you don't even know they are running (from a performance/resource perspective).
I was going to make another comment, but just found out while searching that WSL is //supposed// to be based on Ubuntu (20)16.04 now (instead of 14.04) I guess the next time I work with those systems I'll have to run down some upgrade / re-install directions.<p>I wonder if that will fix the issue where I was unable to mv folders around the c:\ drive within the /mnt/c FS. (It more or less locked up to the point that I had to restart to clear the issue.)
Last time I tried to use the Windows Subsystem for Linux it was a mess. I thought I could access my files from windows and messed all the filesystem.<p>Now it looks like I can freely exchange my files between the WSL and Windows. Is it true?<p>Do I finally have a linux inside a windows machine where I can install things using apt-get (instead of cygwin setup.exe)?<p>When will it goes into the official Windows 10 version?
Java still doesn't work properly though =(. "mvn clean package" on one of corporate projects takes about 5 to 8 minutes in native java on Windows or Mac and it takes more than one hour in WSL. I had so much hope for WSL that I would finally have only ONE device (surface), but no, we're not there yet.