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Ubuntu on Windows

(blog.dustinkirkland.com)
2049 points bpierre | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | source
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gumby ◴[] No.11397549[source]
I'm not being deliberately obtuse: I don't really understand how this helps anyone particularly much.

(OK, I assume there's a small number of developers who develop, or at least debug, for both systems and prefer windows as a development environment, but I assume that number is small, at least on Microsoft's scale).

If you're developing to deploy on Linux but are more of a Windows dev, this helps you, but that doesn't help Microsoft ship more server OS licenses.

If you're a Windows dev this is irrelevant.

If you're a linux (or posix only) dev I don't see how this helps you much. It does help a person like me, who only uses Windows when I need some weird tool like a compiler for an exotic embedded part or vendor-supplied FPGA tool that only works under Windows -- again, not a large enough market t move the needle.

Could the market be CIOs? I.e. demonstrating "hipness" in a way that can be verified when the CIO asks the devs "does this really work the way MS claims?"

Obviously it's not opening the huge number of popular Linux desktop apps to the Windows environment. :-(

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1. Slippery_John ◴[] No.11397641[source]
I work on a platform agnostic python tool. It's just so much easier developing python on a nix system, but I'm restricted to either an old version of enterprise linux or OSX. I love linux, but I don't love having to customize everything to get a workable environment. I tolerate OSX, but if it wasn't nix I would never touch it.

Now Windows has some pretty major issues (utf-8 in CMD is agonizing), but it comes out of the box more usable (to me) than either OSX or the vast majority of linux distros. If I can have my nice window management and also the ubuntu user space, I'll be a very happy camper.