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Ubuntu on Windows

(blog.dustinkirkland.com)
2049 points bpierre | 2 comments | 30 Mar 16 16:35 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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zymhan ◴[30 Mar 16 17:09 UTC] No.11390932[source]▶
"Linux geeks can think of it sort of the inverse of "wine" -- Ubuntu binaries running natively in Windows. Microsoft calls it their "Windows Subsystem for Linux"."

I find it amazing that you can have such a functional Ubuntu environment by translating system calls. Microsoft does have the advantage of Linux being open-source I suppose, while the Wine project had to reverse engineer DLLs. Or have you supply them on your own.

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dec0dedab0de ◴[30 Mar 16 17:23 UTC] No.11391074[source]▶
I would rather have the opposite. I would even pay for an official "Windows on Linux". There is a handful of games I would like to play, but other than that I have no interest in windows.
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xienze ◴[30 Mar 16 17:32 UTC] No.11391181[source]▶
Totally doable. Use KVM to virtualize Windows and (the important part) make sure your CPU and motherboard support VT-d. Then you can pass a graphics card (separate from the one you run Linux with, naturally) to the VM and get >95% of native performance. There's lots of videos of folks doing this.
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wernercd ◴[30 Mar 16 17:35 UTC] No.11391210[source]▶
That's still "VM" not "Native".

You aren't running them "side by side"... you are running them "One inside the other".

Not exactly an apple-to-apple comparison.

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xienze ◴[30 Mar 16 17:37 UTC] No.11391235[source]▶
The performance hit is so negligible on modern hardware that the distinction doesn't really matter.
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kuschku ◴[30 Mar 16 17:49 UTC] No.11391373[source]▶
Except, it does matter.

Not having a unified filesystem, not having a unified window manager, etc are quite some issues.

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1. dllthomas ◴[30 Mar 16 17:51 UTC] No.11391395[source]▶
Those are not meaningful issues for the stated use case of playing some handful of games.
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2. kuschku ◴[30 Mar 16 18:57 UTC] No.11391949[source]▶
They are when you want to use the game on multiscreen setups, or if you want to backup the game’s save files manually.

Source: I use my VM only for gaming, and it’s a horrible experience.