On Wed, 17 Jun 2020 at 10:26, Ranjan Maitra <maitra@email.com> wrote:
Dear friends,

As someone who does not see the value of Windows (or MacOS), I wonder what thoughts are regarding this:

https://towardsdatascience.com/dual-boot-is-dead-windows-and-linux-are-now-one-27555902a128?source=post_internal_links---------0------------------


For me, I hope that MS does not degrade the linux experience further because more people will have hopped on (assuming that this will be true).

Many large enterprises make Windows their "corporate standard".  Student labs 
are almost universally built to run Windows, typically using a network file server 
to install fresh images.  I have done a number of practical sessions for workshops 
using command-line software from NASA that originated on unix and will never run 
natively on Windows.  The practical sessions usually relied on VM's.    I think 
enterprises are reluctant to enable WSL in their corporate standard configuration, 
but the NASA software does run in WSL2 linux distros.  Performance lags, but is  
adequate for small problems and workshop examples.   For many grad students 
and postdocs working from home and using personal laptops while unable to 
access linux servers at their lab, WSL2 is a quick and easy way to get a linux 
command line.  Of course, many students will run linux natively, but in some research 
groups linux is managed by staff and the majority of students and postdocs have 
no linux administration experience, and general computer knowledge at the level of 
"I got a disk full error, so I need more RAM", or "I keep getting out of memory errors 
so I need a bigger disk".

WSL2 still has some rough edges that impact certain use cases, so it remains to be
seen how far it can be pushed, but it has been very useful to some groups while 
research labs are closed due to COVD-19 lockdowns.

--
George N. White III