Linux on the Desktop

Linux is still a good desktop for a resource limited machine. I put Ubuntu on my Windows 10 netbook and it is waaaaaay faster.

Methinks youā€™ve had some bad experiences with NFS. Care to elaborate? Also which version of NFS (2, 3, 4)?

It was a long time ago, so probably the lower numbers? It worked when it worked, but it was just a pain to setup and not user friendly.

Fair enough. NFS server setup always was and still is pretty persnickety. Definitely Unix Santa territory. But as you said, once you got it working, it usually worked really well.

Microsoft will be shipping a Linux kernel with Windows

Wow. This is crazy talk.

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Iā€™ve been a very happy WSL user for over a year now. Itā€™s really fantastic. RIP virtual machines when all you want to do is develop software.

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Iā€™m with you here on the most part. Unless youā€™re developing kernel mode stuff or really, really, really need your kernel and underlying binary libraries to match what youā€™re deploying to, something like WSL is pretty much an ideal scenario. For that other stuff, you kind of still need VMs, but thatā€™s a small subset of developers out there. Admittedly, for my work stuff, Iā€™m part of said subset.

Oh yeah definitely. WSL is just great fun. Iā€™ve had it be effective for the part of an interview where they want you to write code.

Iā€™ve had it be a really cool way to dip my toe in for Kali and perhaps most importantly. Iā€™m not sure why I still have putty. I have WSL for managing the various servers that tend to get build in my general vicinity.

PuTTY is finally dead. Even without WSL, windows now includes OpenSSH.

Iā€™ll wait and see how well WSLā€™s terminal emulation is before I declare PuTTY dead. But assuming its emulation is competent, yeah, PuTTY will probably become a niche player in the grand scheme of things.

Then again, PuTTY also exists on Linux, so it may still kick around for those who like to use a GUI to configure their sessions instead of the command line. shrugs

I think you donā€™t fully understand. It has nothing to do with WSL. The real OpenSSH is now shipped free as a native windows application. ssh.exe, legit.

The only reason to use PuTTY is maybe if you have an older version of Windows and canā€™t get the native OpenSSH build installed somehow.

EDIT: Screenshot added.

Ah, okay, I forgot that genuine OpenSSH ships as part of Windows now, natively compiled.

Still, it doesnā€™t address the fact that the terminal emulation of the current native Windows command line blows chunks. Last time I tried it with Cygwin, which admittedly was a while ago, it was utterly worthless. Good luck running anything more complicated than ed in your command line window with native OpenSSH.

That said, there is a new Windows Terminal application thatā€™s supposed to be shipping alongside WSL 2, if I remember correctly. If that has decent terminal emulation when running Linux apps, locally or remotely, then yeah, PuTTY is probably truly dead except for GUI-only die-hards and those who arenā€™t running new enough versions of Windows, such as those in corporate environments who are very, very slow with their non-security-patch upgrade cycles.

Edit: I donā€™t have native OpenSSH on my work Windows machine, so PuTTY will be kicking around a bit longer for me at my job.

PowerShell might be better than cmd, but once the ssh client is connected, you may as well be sitting in front of the machine you are connected to. You can run vim in it or whatever just fine. I didnā€™t notice any difference from gnome-terminal or iterm2 or rxvt or any other. X-forwarding will even work if you have something like VcXsrv or XMing running.

PowerShell and Cmd typically run in the same console host environment.

Ahā€¦ here we goā€¦ Looks like support for VT codes was introduced in Windows 10ā€¦ That makes sense as most of my experience with Unixy stuff from the Windows console was pre-Windows 10: Microsoft is making the Windows command line a lot better | Ars Technica

That said, and I think Iā€™m going old and senile here, I have used WSL stuff using the native Windows console on Windows 10 and it worked fine now that I think about it. So my bad.

Edit: and hereā€™s an article about the improved Windows Terminal I was talking about: Coming soon: Windows Terminalā€”finally a tabbed, emoji-capable Windows command-line | Ars Technica

Yeah, if you really want to you can open cmd or powershell and type ā€œbash.exeā€ to do some WSL biz. I donā€™t do that very often. I setup some biz using VcXsrv. I double click on a shortcut to a .bat script that launches a .vbs script and an .xlaunch config file. What it does is launch a full screen X session on the second monitor and run i3 inside of that. You would never know it wasnā€™t a virtual machine full screen.

https://i3wm.org/

When I donā€™t have a second monitor I have a similar setup that just launches gnome-terminal as a free floating window.

Iā€™ve done that sort of thing as well, but I donā€™t drop into WSL at work all that much as I have a second desktop running Linux right next to my Windows desktop (and use Synergy to share my keyboard and mouse).

Itā€™s my home machine where things would get more interesting, especially with the upcoming WSL and console/terminal improvements. It would making some of my pet projects much easier to do given that I wonā€™t need a Linux VM.

Wow, this looks so spicy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gw0rXPMMPE

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And that right there, combined with native OpenSSH, is the PuTTY killer on Windows.

I need to check to see if my work laptop can even do these. The IT department at my company sucks, so itā€™s often hard to get any dev tools to work right, so everything is a combo of Putty and Git bash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwhMThePdIo

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