On: Ask HN: Is Bash for Windows good enough to replace a Linux/Mac terminal?

[miriadis]

Why not a Virtual Machine on your PC?

[gargravarr → miriadis]

A virtual machine is a hideous amount of overhead for a shell, not least because a lot of people like to drop to a shell specifically for its low resource consumption for large tasks. It's a valid solution, yes, but I would rank it below Bash on Windows 10 in any form.

[jiantastic → miriadis]

For my use case I would prefer to have 100% of system resources on one OS. Also, I'm coming from a Mac and would prefer the "integrated" feel if that makes sense

[LifeQuestioner → jiantastic]

The VM's are amazing.

You don't have to dual boot.

You can have on one screen Ubuntu, on the other, windows. So you can use all your photoshoppy design programs on windows and the best coding on linux.

Best of both worlds.

You can also intall cygwin in windows which gives you a terminal on windows. Although there may be be a better program now than cygwin

Also, not sure if this is any good: http://www.pcworld.com/article/3106463/windows/how-to-get-ba...

[ars_nihili → LifeQuestioner]

> You can also intall cygwin in windows which gives you a terminal on windows. Although there may be be a better program now than cygwin

Yes, like WSL, which OP is asking.

[LifeQuestioner → ars_nihili]

Nothing wrong with broadening an answer, no need to be black and white. Cygwin has been around for ages.

[bitcrazed → LifeQuestioner]

There's a big difference between Cygwin and Bash on Windows though: Cygwin is a Win32 port of the GNU tools, whereas Bash on Windows is a Linux kernel emulation layer that allows you to run unmodified Linux binaries directly on Windows.

[jbmorgado → jiantastic]

You could make it the other way around. Install Linux and use KVM to have a windows virtual machine at almost 100% native speed and basically full access to the hardware.

The only difficulty is if the hardware doesn't fully support Linux without hassle (in very recent notebooks for instance).