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WLinux, the First Paid-for Linux Distro for Windows 10, Goes On Sale on Microsoft Store (techrepublic.com)
puddingebola shares a report: WLinux is a $20 open-source, Debian-based distribution, designed to run on Windows 10's Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL). The WSL allows Windows 10 to run various GNU/Linux distros inside Windows as Microsoft Store apps, providing access to Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, Fedora, Kali Linux, and others. The WSL has disadvantages over a running a dedicated GNU/Linux system. For example, there's no official support for desktop environments or graphical applications, and I/O performance bottlenecks, but it is being improved over time. The developers of WLinux describe it as a "fast Linux terminal environment for developers", saying it is the first distribution to be "pre-configured and optimized to run specifically on Windows Subsystem for Linux". Announcing WLinux's availability, Microsoft program manager Tara Raj, called out the wlinux-setup tool, "which allows users to easily set up common developer toolchains, and removes unsupported features like systemd."
Did Microsoft just release a Linux distro without systemd?
Up is down and black is white, the world has gone mad.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Would one pay instead of using openSUSE, Ubuntu, or Debian? The value add from these guys must be tiny, maybe donate that $20 to Linux Foundation or some meaningful open source project.
This was my impression. I use MacOS with Windows in a VM. I don't have a Linux VM because I have so many other systems that I can ssh into and do stuff either from the shell or an X app.
But if Windows were my primary operating system and I wanted to use Linux, I don't see why a Linux VM wouldn't be better than this halfway solution.
Exactly. Installing VirtualBox with any of the great Linux distros works like a charm. I almost don't understand why would someone pay for this crippled solution.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." - Jiddu Krishnamurti
I haven't tried it yet, but my understanding is that it's relatively lightweight compared to running a VM, and it has direct access to your Windows filesystem. I used to use Cygwin to run a script to resize my photos, I could see this being used in a similar way.
People who don't want to screw around often buy commercially supported software. If you are going to run a windows shop the techs you hire are (eventually) going to know WLinux if they know any Linux. Likewise if you use Azure and purchase a configuration you know will just work well because microsoft will make sure it does.
And finally people who want re-implement some stack that is already working on WLINUX. it's cheap.
Eventually however I think the log game is IBM is going to move into the Azure linux turf since they just bought red hat. Linux sales and support. Now Microsoft can play too with a holistic solution.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A Clue for you, who invented SystemD, what company does the man work for and who bought the company the man works for? there you go, the dots will connect
http://chimpbox.us
This particular product simplifies the installation and setup. You're paying for convenience. With cloud services using Windows and Linux boxes, having both available as dev environments without having to dual boot is nice, and an installer that does most everything for you is nice.
I plan to install my own choice of distro, but many people don't be comfortable doing that. And yes that means they probably should not be doing cross platform development.
It's for developers. Developers are very often developing apps for multiple OSs. This makes doing that, easier, because it allows them to stay within one environment.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Would like to see in the future for Microsoft to partner with Canonical and just sell Ubuntu laptop; MS can even buy Canonical if they wanted to. But for Linux to get mass adoption at the desktop level that would help a lot.
It's the year of the linux desktop! On the windows desktop!!!
Youâ(TM)re confusing WSL (which is Microsoftâ(TM)s system for running Linux distros on windows without using the Linux kernel) with WLinix which is a 3rd-party district that runs on WSL.
WSL is definitely worth it - itâ(TM)s free and the convenience/compatibility trade off is excellent. Sure, youâ(TM)ll need to run a VM if you need to test explicitly Linux kernel stuff like systems or iptables (for example), but for almost everything else, it just rocks. I use it all the time at work.
WLinix is not. Itâ(TM)s a scam intended to part people from their money
Exactly. Installing VirtualBox with any of the great Linux distros works like a charm. I almost don't understand why would someone pay for this crippled solution.
Because it's faster and better in certain scenario's to do it like this.
Faster because:
A. To start it up, it's one click or one word away from a CLI. Virtualbox needs to be installed, spun up, wait till it's booted or restored, and taking up a truckload of RAM and CPU power. Just for running a simple command line tool. VB is total overkill when all you need is a simple CLI tool.
B. The executable runs natively. There's no virtualization overhead. This means full or better speed for execution and network (and other i/o) access.
Also, it works right on your own filesystem. No need for a 'shared folder' with you VM. Your drives are available as-is. And so are your gnu tools. So i can do anything with my files i want, no matter where they reside, without the hassle of copying them around to this shared-with-VM-folder.
Then, as far as security goes.. A VM not really adds any security here, i trust my ubuntu (or whatever) distro the same as on any native linux box. Why would i want to virtualize my gnu/linux environment.
There's other reasons as well, probably others will fill you in here. But to me just the ease and the speed are saving my sanity. Running anything in a VM still sux, even in 2018.
You can also reverse the argument, and compare it with using wine on gnu/linux. That's a pretty fair comparison as WSL and wine actually work in a very similar way. Yes, you could run anything you run with wine in a VM. Sometimes you even have to. But you'd rather not, for various reasons, but mostly because wine usually performs better and is less hassle.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
So how easy to pull the source and compile it? Save $20!
It's not Linux. The Linux Kernel is not run.
At least that's pronounceable.
I don't want a another desktop environment when i already got one and don't need one. And i never said 'development' although there it gots is uses too. I said 'gnu tools'.
WSL is actually what makes using W10 a bearable experience. I'd almost say it's a game changer. I would prefer using gnu/linux altogether. But when stuck on windows 10 it's just great to have all the command line tools available as fast as native. (and if you bother to set up a x server even a lot of gui tools). I don't get all the hate on WSL.
Why are people stuck in this 'we must virtualize everything'. And then virtualize the virtualization. And virtualize anything within the virtualization. I'm not even kidding, you run a web os in a vm with a sandboxed browser that runs javascript to virtualize an online X86 emulator written in js to boot linux so you can etc... But you always have to question yourself: who will virtualize the virtualizers.
I rather go native especially if the job already took 20 mins on 8 cores in the first place. And where my interaction time with the machine is reduced to 12 seconds instead of 12 minutes.
A glitch a day keeps the bugs away.
This is actually GNU on Windows, not Linux.
Can they legally call it "WLinux" when there is no Linux kernel in it?
Yes, a free Linux distro for $20 from the one company that's worked harder than anyone else to destroy Linux.
Where can I bow and worship at the feet of my new alien overlords?
Ehud
FAA Commercial helicopter pilot
Mint Linux user
Have not booted a Windows box in any property I rent or own since 2000
Has not paid "Microsoft Tax" on my Android phones, my laptops, my server, etc.
Oh yeah and if you want to downvote me, I voted BLUE not orange.
I'm running Ubuntu in WSL and it's nice to have for an rsync or a find/replace since I'm much more comfortable with bash than I am powerscript or dos. The advantages over a full VM are that it's got direct access to the Windows FS and that it runs instantly without having to run a (memory and processor intensive) VM.
Is the same as doing heart surgery in the hospital toilet. It can work in theory, but you end up swimming in shit.
Digital is, by definition, imperfect. Analog is the way to go.
first, Microsoft is pretty much aware that they've lost the server/cloud game to linux (and router. and embed. and smartphones. and SBC. basically, desktop/workstation is the single niche that Microsoft is still holding)
BUT they know they hold the desktop, and would very much to keep holding it.
some of the logic going in the heads of microsoft is that wsl can be a bit of anti-gateway drug.
for all these devs, who have a mostly windows environment but need a bit of unix in their workflow. (devs that need to write code that will end on the linux server/cluster/etc)
until now their main choice were installing a Linux VM (or SSH into a Linux test server. or Switching to Mac OS X or some Linux powered laptop)
and probably some at Microsoft would be afraid that this VM would be a gateway drug: once they got a bit of taste of Linux, some are likely to jump ship and install Linux (or switch to OS X. or exclusively run a Linux VM full screen).
by providing wsl, Microsoft is giving an alternative test environment for the couple of linux needs, while keeping everyone still firmly within their system.
the problem (for them, but advantage for us) is that it might end up the other way around:
wsl is so much limited that eventually it will encourage some to go further and transition to the real deal.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
... DOS which had horribly buggy implementation of the add-ons!
Microsoft mostly managed to kill markets by turning people off with their horrendous reimplementations.
People default to Microsoft's built-in. Said built-in catastrophically blows up on them. People decide to abandon the technology.
Microsoft is happy to have gotten rid of a competitot (but technology stagnates).
see: Stacker vs. DoubleSpace/DriveSpace for an exemple.
there are numerous others.
some might wonder if the horrible quality of Internet Explorer wasn't actually an attempt to kill the whole internet in the same way.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Not the first, far from it. There have been various paid-for boxed set Linux offerings, including Xandros, Suse and even Red Hat before they went all weak kneed on the desktop.
Possibly the most successful? Well, the price is right. I seem to recall Xandros was $200 at the time. I can see numerous Windows users who previously swallowed the company line of Linux as cancer doing a 180 at this point for a tryout. Whether Microsoft is sincere in offering a polished product or whether their real goal is to make Linux look bad on the desktop, hence keeping their sheep in the flock, remains to be seen.
Once into a boxed set, it's easy to imagine most making the move to "real Linux".
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I use Cygwin, but not on Windows 10 because I use WSL for that. Cygwin and WSL are very similar - the difference is the level they interface at. Cygwin is a translation layer between POSIX (or really SUS) APIs and the Win32 API. As far as Windows is concerned, every Cygwin application is just a console Win32 application.
WSL is lower level, and basically implements the Linux syscall interface on the Windows kernel. So applications talk to Linux based libraries which make system calls as Linux would expect, except they're being trapped by the Windows kernel and executed there. They are not technically Win32 applications and don't really have the interactions with Win32 that Cygwin applications would have. This would be the closest to "GNU/kWindows" you can get
Note that the Windows kernel is still enforcing security and other things, so WSL cannot be used to bypass permissions since the kernel is still involved with regular enforcements.
WSL is actually more like the BSD Linux personality - where the base kernel pretends to be Linux to run Linux binaries.
Given who is running the Linux section at Microsoft, old Xamarin retreads, it's a safe bet that there will be a shit-ton of promo for Mono build in, with a view to getting Windows Linux users hooked on DOT.NET.
Naturally, expecting a bunch of slimy tricks. It's Microsoft after all, and some Linux turncoats.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
I will stick to the free versions. don't need windows at all.
I have linux on all of my computers. over the years I may have had one computer that either dual boot or just windows" just in case." but for the last couple of years I have not needed windows except to make sure it was updated so it is now gone.
Can't see the point for us users, anyway.
I use Cygwin, but not on Windows 10 because I use WSL for that. Cygwin and WSL are very similar - the difference is the level they interface at. Cygwin is a translation layer between POSIX (or really SUS) APIs and the Win32 API. As far as Windows is concerned, every Cygwin application is just a console Win32 application.
WSL is lower level, and basically implements the Linux syscall interface on the Windows kernel. So applications talk to Linux based libraries which make system calls as Linux would expect, except they're being trapped by the Windows kernel and executed there. They are not technically Win32 applications and don't really have the interactions with Win32 that Cygwin applications would have. This would be the closest to "GNU/kWindows" you can get
Note that the Windows kernel is still enforcing security and other things, so WSL cannot be used to bypass permissions since the kernel is still involved with regular enforcements.
WSL is actually more like the BSD Linux personality - where the base kernel pretends to be Linux to run Linux binaries.
I find this interesting because I am an long-time linux user but work at a windows shop. When we needed to edit large (5MM row) csv files, people were trying to open them in Excel. I installed msys64 and using vi and other gnu tools sed/awk/cut/etc. I was able to quickly edit their files to do what they needed. Later on I wrote a shell script to take inputs and generate the csv files... and it was soooooo slow. It was faster to ssh to my home machine, run the script there, zip up the csvs, and send them back. It was on the order of 100x faster on Linux.
I have many opportunities to continue to leverage Linux now as we are creating new products using Linux servers in AWS. Now I am a go-to person since all of our developers are Windows developers. Worlds are colliding all over the place, but still need to keep a close eye on MS... trust has to be earned.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
Downloaded Microsoft's proprietary, heavily restricted build of this editor which Microsoft suggests is an editor for wlinux. WTF? Doesn't run in text mode. But wlinux is text mode only. WTF.
And this is written in javascript. Again. WTF? Takes a full second to start up. Seriously, WTF?
Is this what it's always like in Microsoft land? I don't miss it a bit.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
Youâ(TM)re is Microsoftâ(TM)s
OK JarJar, when Naboo gets a Microsoft Store, get back to us.
Honestly, what's the point of this over the already free Ubuntu shell that you can get in the store? I use that every day on my work computer running Win10 and I have all the terminal goodness I need. I can grab almost anything I need via apt and can even run graphical programs if I kick off an xserver inside WIn10.
I've said it before, and yearly it gets to be more and more prophetic.
Year Of The LINUX Desktop!!!
Brought to you by your good friends at Microsoft!!
Donald Trump, on a crusade to make Nixon look respectable
huh?
WSL is everything I wished Cygwin could be- by no fault of Cygwin's, of course.
We are unfortunately required to maintain a few Windows servers for certain software suites, and WSL has been a dream come-true in being able to get our standard Linux instrumentation, monitoring, and automation working.
That and using konsole via Xming instead of cmd.exe or powershell's interface window is worth any fucking overhead.
No, but the binaries are compiled to run on a Linux kernel, and Windows is emulating a Linux kernel while running said binaries, soooo, ya, WLinux actually works as a name.
As long as you had a WSL-compatible *userspace* init, setting up other basic userspace interfaces as expected, the said distro would run flawlessly on a Linux kernel as well with zero binary modification.
I love it when people have no idea what the fuck they're talking about.
You're paying for convenience.
You're paying to download it directly from the developer. Nothing stops you from getting a copy from your friend, which is perfectly legal and might be even more convenient.
They would probably be better off with a pay what you want model.
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
A Clue for you, who invented SystemD, what company does the man work for and who bought the company the man works for? there you go, the dots will connect
Are you talking about the Company that invented launchd, the Progenitor of SystemD?
Year Of The LINUX Desktop!!!
Brought to you by your good friends at Microsoft!!
Just without the Linux bit.
there is no VM
IANAL
Not really a revelation there. How does any of that relate to the topic at all? Windows doesn't ship with any of this, it's an application that runs atop it just like any other application. Just because you run a GPLv3 program on Windows doesn't suddenly make Microsoft beholden to the terms of the license of the program you chose to run.
> WSL is for people that don't have the balls to use anything but Windows
LOL!
WLinux is a scam. WSL is the windows subsystem for linux.
reasons to run windows:
1) windows applications
2) windows development
3) a desktop environment that doesn't suck
what a load of nonsense that article is. i mean, sure it's 'GNU/Windows' technically. but the whole 'it has nothing to do with Linux' thing is ridiculous - it's emulating Linux syscall functionality with high-enough fidelity to run a large percentage of Ubuntu (or whatever distro's) user-mode code. it's not emulating BSD or Solaris. it's emulating Linux. besides, it doesn't need to run GNU software at all, it's a kernel emulation layer - you could have init run anything.
and the whole bashing MS out of the side of his mouth thing doesn't help either. MS is exposing its users to GNU tools in possibly the best way it could. not porting them to win32 (like it did with several old BSD utils back in the day), but unadulterated, with all the trimmings.
it says it right there:
C:\>wsl uname -a
Linux hostname 4.4.0-17134-Microsoft #285-Microsoft Thu Aug 30 17:31:00 PST 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
You know, as funny as that was on your end, we actually can't even see you and so we missed the entire physical comedy routine and only saw the word "huh?"
Sorry JarJar, internet is hard, I know. Keep trying, you'll get it.
Whatever, troll. Nice try.
If you're a professional developer, and you prefer Windows, you're not a professional developer.
I would think about two categories :
- Game dev, either targeting Windows or XBox as main platforms, and not giving much fucks about server-side code, or about cross platform ports (with these handled by other devs in the crew, and thus definitely the kind that will need to run some linux tests once every blue moon and thus target for wsl)
- Legacy dev, stuck maintaining horrendous in-house custom apps that where designed before web apps were all the rage (I suspect that one day, the various VB, VB.Net etc will go the way of COBOL, skills that nobody with a sane mind would like to use but that are still in demand for business legacy reasons).
But that's not the kind of devs I'm having in my field of work.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The "extend" part is what is technically impossible to achieve.
This strategy has been successful in the past in killing competitor, by having microsoft releasing a proprorietary variation with their own incompatible microsoftian twists inside. (Think Microsoft's flavor of Java).
This is what enabled to flow into the "extinguish" part (Microsoft manages to become the "default go-to" provider for that either because "nobody got fired for buying Microsoft" (as a variation of the previous generation's IBM memes) or because they did package it for free with one of their offerings (mostly the OS). Then everybody, because they use that, get used to rely on Micosoft's specific incompatible implementation. Then the thing either don't work elsewhere in competitor's product, or the microsoft implementation is so craptastic that everybody decides to drop the technology anyway).
In the specific case of Linux distros "extend" is impossible due to how GPL family licenses work (and their the one covergin most of the component in a distro). Nearly all attempt at "extend"ing will end up with Microsoft needing to open their code and thus unable to keep the proprietary part of these extensions.
(And also further down the line, the extinguish phase is going to be extremely hard too, as pointed by others in this thread the targetted userbase by WSL is insanely tiny, so the quantity of users for whom it becomes the "default go-to" is insignificant. Also it's nearly impossible to bankrupt something that is free)
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Nope, this is the beginning of the end of Windows.
Yeah yeah, Year of the Linux Desktop is coming. Been hearing that for the better part of 3 decades now.
Now Windows has Linux running in it.
No it doesn't. All of these "Linux distributions" running on WSL in Windows are precisely not Linux at all, they are the distributions with Linux stripped out. Linux is an operating system kernel, WSL enables applications built to run on the Linux kernel to instead run on the Windows kernel.
There you go, that's more like it! Welcome to slashdot!