Originally shared by Gerwin Sturm
The linux bash environment that just arrived on Windows 10 with the mega anniversary update, might just be the solution for a lot of problems you could run into while developing on a windows machine.
No searching around to get all the setup files you need for git with a cygwin or mingw terminal, node and npm, python, and whatever other tools you might need, and then struggling to make them all work in the Windows environment.
Just enable the shell, install everything you need with some simple apt-get and npm commands, and you are all set to go in a couple of minutes.
John Hardy Developer 
Which begs the question; if the majority of the time one can use web apps, and the rest of the time use Linux tools, what do you need Windows for?
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Windows is a perfect Internet terminal for corporate VPN and some corporate applications. That’s it so far.
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Also, for example, raw file converter for my camera is only available for windows…
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The reason why this is a big deal is mainly for web developers who want to test under Microsoft’s two browsers. Using VMs and BrowserStack in Linux or Mac is such a pain that most developers rarely bother to do it enough.
Actually though it turns out that Windows 10 is pretty good for web development and most of the tools are portable to any OS, especially the ones written for Node.
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Windows has had a decent Microsoft-supported UNIX environment on Windows since Windows 2000 and “Services for UNIX” (Interix). They abandoned it after Windows 7. Don’t expect this one to stay around either.
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The only binary I care about is the browser. If nobody used Microsoft’s browsers I wouldn’t care about Windows. It remains however a major part of the workplace and this is where many of my users are. Furthermore, now that Microsoft has chosen to reboot its browser, I now have twice as many Microsoft browsers to support.
That said, after having forced myself to use Windows 10 for development, I’m liking it. 10 is a big improvement over 7.
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Even before this shipped (I still haven’t tried it), I got everything I needed running under Windows by downloading a Git Bash environment (based on mingw) and Node.js. Once set up, the environment which builds, concatenates and minifies my code felt as comfortable as my Linux set up.
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Peter da Silva the world has changed a lot since 2000 and Ballmer is long gone. In 2000 Internet Explorer had a 95% market share and binaries for the Windows desktop was the most popular target platform. Since then developers have abandoned the Windows platform in huge numbers. The new CEO has made some very pragmatic moves in this space in recognition of this massive loss of developer mind share. This will solve many problems for developers in supporting Windows and is all there is to it. It was the right response from Microsoft.
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It’s not Ballmer who killed it, it’s Nadella.
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Vaguely related masochism – I just tried out the T-UI text-only launcher on Android. Kind of fun, for about 2 minutes.
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Given that I never heard of it but have heard of this will probably mean it will get used by more people. If such a thing was available and useful why did so many feel the need to resort to Cygwin and Mingw?
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Gaming -> windows… Plus a few other necessary work evils like autocad, 3d studio and PLC dev tools.
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John Hardy not a Turnbull fan Partly because Korn’s feud with Microsoft, Cygwin, and everyone else in the space sucked out all the oxygen from the room. And Microsoft only publicly advertised it for maybe a year after they bought Softway Systems (the original developers they had licensed the POSIX subsystem source to).
But don’t forget that it survived a decade and a bit under Ballmer. If they still have Ubuntu-under-Windows in 10 years, you can say “I Told You So”.
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Right now I’d be happy if it was around for a few years. I’m not using it, I’m using a mingw bash shell. All I need is a thin layer of compatibility because I’m just running scripts. In ten years time, the world will look very different again for developers.
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My latest discovery: the windows users on gitbash keep flipping on the UNIX executable bit on source code. They do a git status and a whole whack of unedited files show as edited. Then they blindly the check in and make a mess of the repot. Gahhh! Effing windows..
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Someone decided that mapping the UNIX “execute” bit to a “backup” bit on Windows was a smart idea.
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Isn’t it still the case that Git doesn’t preserve permissions properly anyway?
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