Microsoft and Canonical partner to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10

Well, this has increased the changes of my next laptop being a Surface Book by around 100%. I already loved the form factor of the thing, but lack of bash was absolutely causing me to hesitate and wonder if I could justify doing all my work in a Linux VM or something (I can't).

I'm genuinely very tired of OS X, which (to my perception at least) has gotten steadily worse with every version. I for one will be happy to switch.

Really...? What would you change about OSX? I just switched from Windows to a Mac and I can't see myself ever going back...

Like I said, maybe it's my perception, but I've lost count of the number of times it has failed to connect to a Wi-Fi network, randomly crashed... it's been unable to connect to any links from http://t.co for months, for goodness sake (this has recently been fixed).

I think part of my objections are that OS X used to be absolutely rock solid, around the Snow Leopard era. An entire release dedicated just to tuning up the OS! Unheard of now - I will never install a new version until the x.1 patch is out, there are always huge bugs.

I don't expect Windows to be rock solid, I just don't expect it to be any worse than OS X any more.

Yea same here, the Surface Pro is just such a nice piece of powerful hardware and a great form factor to carry around. Having bash/linux subsystem on Windows makes it a pretty damn nice development machine for pretty much anything (web/games/etc.).

I have far more issues with OS X than with Windows. I get kernel panics, waking from sleep crashes, weird issues with external monitors not being detected as connected, or worse, disconnected.

Windows also offers a lot more customizations than OS X.

However, there are things I like about OS X also, like spaces and multi-touch trackpad support.

I use both on a daily basis.

Increasing a ~0% chance by 100% is still ~0ish%

Working SMB networking would be nice. Tired of mysterious issues. I can't remember a single time in past year when whole directory copy/move to SMB share succeeded. OS X just gives me these descriptive "error -51" or whatevers. (It's really mature (not!) of OSX to have that blue screen icon for SMB shares.)

Stable USB stack would be nice as well. Ever since El Capitan, virtual machines I run off USB drive have been getting random I/O timeouts.

OS X tends to need quite a bit more memory than Win10. Win10 is as usable on 2 GB RAM as OS X on 4 GB. OS X graphics driver is also pretty slow, some 30% slower than on Windows. OpenGL support is pretty bad on OS X.

On Windows 10 side my biggest issues are unstable (or temporarily unavailable) RDP and bluetooth stereo audio stuttering. RDP color accuracy leaves also a lot to be desired.

I don't disagree that quality has dropped a bit lately, but I don't think your experience with OS X is typical. I have not had a kernel panic in years. Maybe time you did a clean install.

No, it's ambiguous whether he was talking about percentage or percentage points.

Funny, that it's SMB that I hate on Windows. With OSX or Linux its no problem to access shares with different credentials, no matter whether Windows server in AD or standalone samba-based NAS, while it is a major pita in Windows.

Odd. I think my issues might have something to do with file sizes. Maybe there are some issues with files over 2 GB or 4 GB. I don't know. I've just resorted to using FTP (ugh!) and USB drives to get files out of my OS X machines.

> I get kernel panics, waking from sleep crashes, weird issues with external monitors not being detected as connected, or worse, disconnected.

This is a real problem for me as well. Not enough to make me want to ditch my Mac, but it's a real PITB.

The unstable USB stack is annoying. Before it was fixed in the latest OS update middle clicking with a USB mouse would cause the USB audio driver to segfault. Clicking too fast would end up with a kernel panic.

The panics I get are related to Thunderbolt, so I suspect it's an issue with the Thunderbolt kernel drivers. I run two external Apple Thunderbolt monitors and that's at the core of most of my issues.

The network is OK? Are you connected over wifi? No packet loss?

And even though it is 3x3 MIMO, copying 20GB vm images is not something you want to do over wifi, so in the end I've got the Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter. Works like a charm, shorted the transfer by more than 10x.

SMB by itself never gave a problem (clean install of 11.0, then continuously updated to 11.4).

> Well, this has increased the changes of my next laptop being a Surface Book by around 100%.

And thus MS has achieved their goal.

I run two external Thunderbolt monitors through a couple of cheap adaptor boxes and have never had a problem.

I suspect RAM issues. OS X isn't great if - say - Chrome eats all the memory. And if the RAM itself isn't rock solid, you will get crashes.

A lot of issues went away when I installed 32GB.

If you don't mind having an extremely bloated OS, which is why I quit programming on Windows and switched to Linux in the first place. Now they've just added even more bloat and I imagine developing using the "linux environment" will be a huge pain in the ass because it'll basically be like programming on a new operating system.

Can't get node.js to run on your "Linux environment" and access a database running on windows? Good luck finding an answer for that on stackoverflow.

You'll have to target yet another environment for any app you develop. Will it be running on a Windows server? A Linux server? A server running "Windows with bash"?

11ac wifi. Usually connected at 702/780/867 Mbps. Works fine from Linux and Windows VMs running on OSX (and laptops).

Transfer speed after overhead over 11ac 867 Mbps wifi is usually 400+ Mbps.

No packet loss (or at least it's below 0.1%).

Me too, but to be honest I am not quite sure what I don't like about Mac OS X anymore. At work I got Arch with i3 which is (extremely) addictive, but at home I have Mac OS X (and I use for work too). I don't really have any specific problems (compared to Arch :) with Mac OS X. Still I was thinking to put Arch on it, but I don't want to tinker to be able to watch netflix after a long flight in that 'weird' network which the wifi driver version X.Y doesn't like :) Windows felt weird after getting used NIX-ish systems so it was out of the question.

I have tried to figure out why I want a non-mac for my laptop and concluded I just like change... :) I was almost settled on that dell xps with ubuntu, but if the Surface Books get thunderbolt 3 and this before the autumn I am pretty sure I can't resist anymore...

EDIT: typo

This could very well be it. I was about to comment that I've been using OS X for about 10 years and I'm pretty sure I can count the number of kernel panics I've had on my fingers. Most of those happened a long time ago.

Why don't you just use Linux in a VM on Windows? I don't really understand why native bash (and full Linux ABI) would make Windows a better development environment than just running a Linux VM.

If you plan on using the Linux environment and having it interact with the Windows environment you're going to have the same limitations that you would with a VM, OR you'll have to change your workflow because the way a program running under a Linux environment interacts with some windows service is going to be a completely new thing.

Will I be able to use a windows only service to interact with a command line program written in python running in the Linux layer? If I can't interact with the windows layer completely then it's very much like a VM or a container running inside a jail.

What happens when I install python or nodejs and stuff just doesn't work right? Like say I have a database running on windows and I want to interact with it with python. Will I have to rely in Windows making sure the compatibility layer always work?

Honestly: don't know... :) I suppose when looking for a new fancy (and expensive) gadget I would like it to work like I want it to out of the box. I can admit it is not a rational thing: I would have to install stuff either way, but it makes me _want_ it less... I know it doesn't make sense, but I believe that is it... :)

Oh, and I don't think I am afraid if something doesn't work (like node in your example or what not) with the barebone ubuntu on windows as long as the minimals: drivers, etc etc work... I am pretty used to tinkering and figuring out those things and I really enjoy that barebone speed. Willful waste makes woeful want, my mom always said :)

EDIT: idiom

Yes of course. Anyone who doesn't recognize that your opinionated development style is superior has to be a shill.

There's no Surface Pro equivalent for OSX (the iPad Pro not running a real OS is too bad), and Mac machines are crazy expensive for what's inside. At least, that's why I switched.

Have you forgotten about privacy issues in Windows 10 or you just don't care?

Just use linux.

I thought you could turn them all off if you were really diligent?

I haven't had any bugs at all on El Capitan.

Apparently not: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/even-w...

Bloat is an overused, nebulous concept. Most people actually like rich desktops and lots of features, which is why Mac laptops have proliferated in the dev community.

Things like Node.js already run pretty well on Windows as it is, and MS is building native tooling in Node.js (e.g. their Azure CLI).

With this change, Microsoft is definitely going to encourage a lot of Surface adoption for geeks.

So, VMs are effectively a completely different machine. Different memory space, different disk space, different process space, etc. This is linux applications running on the same machine as your windows applications. Yes, they'll be able to talk to each other. Your windows service will be able to talk to a database running from linux and vice versa. The linux processes are still processes running on your windows machine (evidently they're some sort of "lighter process" but that hasn't been explained well... but it was explained that they'll be able to be communicate directly with other processes via sockets, ports, etc).

The demos are VERY convincing. Basically everything works exactly like you would want it to work. It's exactly ubuntu and windows running through the same kernel at the same time.

The leaking random machine ID is pretty bad. The other things seem rather harmless, or you can turn them off.