On Tue, Jan 14, 2020 at 07:53:31PM -0500, Paul King via talk wrote: > I have been running dual boot into Windows and Linus for decades, but had a > major problem with the latest Windows 10 in dual booting with Ubuntu. > Apparently, I have heard (can't locate the source) booting into Linux can no > longer be done on the latest major upgrade to Windows 10. And this was my > direct experience when a Windows 10 upgrade this past September all but > bricked by computer, rendering 50% of my storage inaccessible. I tried to > check the boot area, and fix the situation with a Windows disk then a Linux > disk, which rendered both systems unbootable. The problem pretty much solved > itself when I downgraded to Windows 7, not touching Linux. > > Whether it boots or not may be moot, since Windows has offered many Linux > distros to run in a windowed environment on top of Windows 10, kind of like > VLC. That is to say, you go to the Microsoft Store, download a Linux distro, > and it will install as a Windows application under Windows 10. Sample link: > https://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/p/ubuntu-1804-lts/9n9tngvndl3q?activetab=pivot:overviewtab > > The link points to a copy of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. I can see from the offerings, > you can also install Debian, Suse, Fedora, and something called "Pengwin". > Beware: some of these cost money, sometimes a fair chunk of it. > > It begs the question also as to how different are these distros from Cygwin? > Sounds like these are just different attempts to duplicate what Cygwin is > doing. BTW, Cygwin itself is not offered at the Microsoft store. > > Anyone have experiences with these weird versions of Linux running on > Windows? I would like to hear about it. Any experience with how it would look > with a dual monitor?
There is no issue with dual booting with Windows 10. In fact newer versions of Windows finally stopped overwriting the boot loader when you install them or upgrade. As for Linux running on Windows, it works very well, in fact so well my own laptop doesn't currently have a Linux install on it anymore because I never booted it. I can do everything I want using a Debian install running on Windows (I did buy the X410 X server app for Windows 10 which lets me run X applications in Linux which is useful). I have other machines that are dedicated Linux boxes in the house of course, but my laptop just is more useable with Windows 10 and Debian on top. My wife still dual boots Debian and Windows 10 on her laptop with no issues. Cygwin was always a bad joke in my view. It is nothing like what you get with the Windows subsystem for Linux. Cygwin tried to adapt posix compatible code into Windows calls. This instead implements a Linux kernel compatible system call layer so actual standard Linux binaries can run (there are a few exceptions due to a couple of still missing system calls, for example Qt needs a small patch to make it work). If you were to go with Windows subsystem for Linux 2 rather than the original one, then it actually runs a Linux kernel soemwhat like a virtual machine would and hence all the system calls work, and you can even do things like docker and such that require the proper kernel to work, and I believe it then has its own IP address and network stack which makes it a bit harder to setup (I have not tried it yet). Dual monitors are fine on Windows and you can place your windows however you want. I tend to use the new "Windows Terminal" to run the Linux instances with the keymappings changed to be similar to Konsole. With X410 each X app runs in a window as if it was a Windows app (you can choose to run an X desktop in a window if you really want to, but why would you?) so it integrates very well. Here is a screenshot where I have dual monitor, and Debian's gvim running as well as the Windows terminal: https://i.ibb.co/k8K1Df4/Debian-on-windows10-with-X411-and-gvim.png I do find it ammusing that these days it is Microsoft emulating Linux to run Linux binaries, rather than the days when Linux had to try to run other binaries. That happened with BSD too. Linux used to have support for running BSD binaries on x86, and these days it is the other way around instead. -- Len Sorensen --- Post to this mailing list talk@gtalug.org Unsubscribe from this mailing list https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk
