Windows Subsystem for Linux

[Anonymous]

Does anyone have experience with this ? Stable ? Reasonable substitute for having actual Linux on one’s Windows10 machine ? Reasonably complete ?

(Dual-boot to Linux is disallowed where I work, so that is not an option.)

[Anonymous]

It depends upon your use case. If you need Linux to connect to and/or control physical hardware, it is pretty useless. It also won't help if you need a more stable OS than Windows, an OS that runs well on older hardware, or are trying to save on licensing costs for the OS.

A more common (and resonable) use case would be for someone who needs to run Linux software and already has a Windows license. If you are in that category and are happy with the available distributions, it can be a good, lightweight alternative to running Linux in a VM or on bare metal.

[Anonymous]

How is WSL similar or different from Cygwin ?
Are they different ways to do the same thing ?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It depends upon your use case. If you need Linux to connect to and/or control physical hardware, it is pretty useless. It also won't help if you need a more stable OS than Windows, an OS that runs well on older hardware, or are trying to save on licensing costs for the OS.

A more common (and resonable) use case would be for someone who needs to run Linux software and already has a Windows license. If you are in that category and are happy with the available distributions, it can be a good, lightweight alternative to running Linux in a VM or on bare metal.

Isn't this the main reason people install distros like linux mint, to revive old pc's?

And anecdotally, LM is much more stable for me on my Dell than Windows 10.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:How is WSL similar or different from Cygwin ?
Are they different ways to do the same thing ?

WSL is a closer emulation of a Linux kernel, so you get better behavior of utilities. The last time I used cygwin, you needed to recompile and potentially some source changes.

[Anonymous]

The use case is that I need some open-source tools to process data for work. Catch-22 is that company policy says all laptops must run Microsoft Windows and also must-not be dual-boot to Linux or anything else. In fact, the hw is totally locked down. I do not need to control connected hardware.

I want to understand the alternatives (Cygwin and WSL) and their tradeoffs before I open negotiations with IT.

[Anonymous]

Can't they just give you login access to a Linux server? Is there a reason why you need to process the data locally?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Can't they just give you login access to a Linux server? Is there a reason why you need to process the data locally?

No Linux or other OS computers or servers are allowed. IT will not allow *anything* that is not from Microsoft. What makes WSL a possibility given the policy is that it does come from Microsoft. The whole situation is Catch-22. What I need is not push back on the policy - I know that policy is silly. What I need is help understanding the tradeoffs between Cygwin and WSL, before I engage with IT.

[Anonymous]

We use it (WSL2) at my company for development. We have Ubuntu as the base Linux. It works great. It does require admin access to enable/install though. But once running, the dev can pretty much do whatever they need - they have root within the instance. Your windows admins will have little understanding of how it works which is a plus and a minus. There are occasionally weirdness with networking, but those were easy enough to work around. We have it tied into docker desktop for windows. It works well with vscode (make sure to install into user space in windows otherwise every patch requires admin). We have java, node/react, python, cloud devs(AWS) all using it for local development. Although we deploy into AWS primarily for testing and production. If you can't get that but can have docker, then I guess you could install an image with Linux on it and go that route, but wsl is a good way to go.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We use it (WSL2) at my company for development. We have Ubuntu as the base Linux. It works great. It does require admin access to enable/install though. But once running, the dev can pretty much do whatever they need - they have root within the instance. Your windows admins will have little understanding of how it works which is a plus and a minus. There are occasionally weirdness with networking, but those were easy enough to work around. We have it tied into docker desktop for windows. It works well with vscode (make sure to install into user space in windows otherwise every patch requires admin). We have java, node/react, python, cloud devs(AWS) all using it for local development. Although we deploy into AWS primarily for testing and production. If you can't get that but can have docker, then I guess you could install an image with Linux on it and go that route, but wsl is a good way to go.

Very helpful, thanks. Which specific piece(s) do I need to ask to have installed into user space ?

Cannot have Docker. Cannot have AWS or any other “cloud”instance. Cannot have a non-Microsoft VM. So many restrictions…really not sure how they can expect me to process the data with so many approaches disallowed.

[Anonymous]

Installing wsl requires an admin. But after that you don't need anything. The user space comment was for VSCode. Often admins install it for all users, but it can be installed for just your user and then won't need admins for version upgrades. If you're processing data anaconda is useful for a full up python environment. Depending on what you're doing, tools like Knime can also be useful. But given all the restrictions and no Linux or AWS, they probably want you to stay in a .Net Microsoft world. Then you'd use tools like SQL server data tools, visual studio data tools, azure data factory and powerbi to stay within their stack choices. Good luck, this company doesn't sound like they support developers all that well.