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Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

(www.zdnet.com)
535 points raddad | 17 comments | 30 Mar 16 11:12 UTC | HN request time: 1.202s | source | bottom
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typon ◴[30 Mar 16 13:46 UTC] No.11389194[source]▶
This might be the most exciting news I've heard in a long time. Being able to use Visual Studio and .NET for web development while using zsh and all the other Linux tools? Dreamland.
replies(3): >>11389261 #>>11389399 #>>11389628 #
1. sfilipov ◴[30 Mar 16 14:46 UTC] No.11389628[source]▶
The only reason I can't really use Windows as development OS are the inferior terminal emulators. As good as ConEmu is, it is still worse than Terminator etc. Unless I can run a native Linux terminal emulator, it doesn't make much of a difference to me. Also, the filesystem differences don't help.

I was also running into Haskell compilation problems that were fixed by running Ubuntu in a Vagrant environment but speed was slow. There isn't good NFS support on Windows either (there is some).

replies(2): >>11389712 #>>11390512 #
2. dogma1138 ◴[30 Mar 16 14:56 UTC] No.11389712[source]▶
I would call powershell anything but inferior.
replies(2): >>11390030 #>>11390120 #
3. ljani ◴[30 Mar 16 15:33 UTC] No.11390030[source]▶
I'm always put off by the ~five second startup time when I open PS to start learning it. Any tips for speeding it up?
replies(4): >>11390112 #>>11390258 #>>11390819 #>>11392608 #
4. ygra ◴[30 Mar 16 15:44 UTC] No.11390112{3}[source]▶
Speed was an issue on Windows 7 (PSv2), but they sped it up considerably in Windows 8 (PSv4, I think). Maybe installing the current PowerShell version helps; I doubt it's inherent in the OS.
replies(2): >>11390899 #>>11391736 #
5. ygra ◴[30 Mar 16 15:45 UTC] No.11390120[source]▶
PowerShell isn't a console or terminal emulator. It's a shell that uses conhost just like any other console application on Windows.
replies(1): >>11392470 #
6. kuma4 ◴[30 Mar 16 16:03 UTC] No.11390258{3}[source]▶
PowerShell is great. But I agree it starts slowly.
replies(1): >>11391128 #
7. djsumdog ◴[30 Mar 16 16:32 UTC] No.11390512[source]▶
I love tiling window managers...and real package management... and free software.

Windows still has a ways to go. I think this might make some Windows stuff easier to deal with, but I still prefer jobs where I can run Linux natively on my workstation.

replies(1): >>11391952 #
8. adiabatty ◴[30 Mar 16 16:57 UTC] No.11390819{3}[source]▶
On my i5-2400 with 8 GB of RAM and a 7200 RPM hard drive, it takes six seconds to start the first time and four seconds to start subsequent times.

On my i5-3550 with 16 GB of RAM and an SSD it takes a couple seconds to start the first time and less than a second for subsequent times.

Both machines are running Windows 10.

Right now, the machine with the spinning rust is loading a bunch of files with an I/O priority of "background" because it just got booted into Windows; that might slow it down a bit because of the seek times and I don't know if Windows is willing to starve background I/O for seconds at a time to speed up interactive requests (I doubt it).

Update: once all the background preloading is done, PowerShell restarts in three seconds on the spinning-rust machine.

Long story short, I think getting an SSD will be the thing that makes PowerShell start acceptably fast.

replies(3): >>11391382 #>>11391749 #>>11391796 #
9. vetinari ◴[30 Mar 16 17:05 UTC] No.11390899{4}[source]▶
Can confirm, it starts immediately in 2012r2.
10. orbitingpluto ◴[30 Mar 16 17:28 UTC] No.11391128{4}[source]▶
Just upgraded to WMF 5.0 on Windows 7. Start time is much better now. 4 seconds vs 8 seconds on a 2nd gen i5.
11. keithpeter ◴[30 Mar 16 17:50 UTC] No.11391382{4}[source]▶
Ancient Thinkpad dual-core with 512Mb RAM and 5400 legacy spinning rust disc running OpenBSD 5.9.

Left click in fwvm, select xterm, window appears in less than my blink response time.

Seriously: I think I might pop Win10 on an old Dell i5 that came with Win7 and play with this.

12. ljani ◴[30 Mar 16 18:30 UTC] No.11391736{4}[source]▶
I'm on Windows 10 and I agree it has improved a lot since Win7, but it's still not pleasant. I'm rocking a 7200rpm spinning disk, so as suggested by adiabatty, getting an SSD might help.
13. ljani ◴[30 Mar 16 18:31 UTC] No.11391749{4}[source]▶
Many thanks for the comparison! I'm indeed with a 7200 RPM disk. I guess I should invest into some new hardware soonish :)
14. JeffreySnover ◴[30 Mar 16 18:37 UTC] No.11391796{4}[source]▶
We did a lot of work on PowerShell startup in this next release - I think you'll be happy.

Jeffrey Snover [MSFT]

15. hxegon ◴[30 Mar 16 18:57 UTC] No.11391952[source]▶
I was always grumpy about switching to OS X because I missed xmonad, but then I found amethyst and rebound the keys to be the same :)
16. dogma1138 ◴[30 Mar 16 20:00 UTC] No.11392470{3}[source]▶
Powershell ISE is quite a good terminal emulator (even tho it wasn't intended as one), it's also extensible via addons and there are quite a few nifty ones like git integration and the likes.

This is the ISE in a default configuration https://imgur.com/xz9Kfpt On the left just an open terminal, in the middle a script which can be edited and executed at any time with F5, and on the right all the powershell commands which could be either immediately executed or inserted into your script with ease.

Unless you need tab browsing that much, which you can get via addons, the ISE is one of the best "terminals" out there imho.

17. dogma1138 ◴[30 Mar 16 20:16 UTC] No.11392608{3}[source]▶
Depending what you open, powershell.exe should open as fast as cmd.exe pretty much, the ISE can take a few seconds to load based on the addons you have and how many PS cmdlets you have registered on your system.

As people have mentioned the biggest factor here is probably your hard drive since you are loading maybe couple of 100's of small files when you load the ISE.