[grovulent]

I think this move by MS is wonderful and I support it completely - but there is one concern that you've left out that makes me more worried than anything.

I'm someone who doggedly persisted trying to dev on my windows box because the stability, speed, app support, GUI niceness of windows is just far superior to Ubuntu (I won't speak to OS X since I've only done minimal dev on it). I won't go into a lengthy defense of this claim - but will if pressed.

I put up with all the failed python module installations - the hunting around for the right VisualStudio compiler... the 64bit python install issues... on and on... I put up with it all... only to be defeated in the end by various node modules failing to install because they use ridiculous depth in their directory file structure that the windows filesystem can't handle. Our projected needed those dependencies. Something had to give.

So I tried vagrant VM with virtualbox - and shared folders... so I could keep my windows GUIs without needing to sshing everything to the VM. Somehow - even though the shared folders thing means the VM is ultimately using the windows filesystem - the node modules would install okay. BUt then I had problems with symlinks (which was solveable with effort)... But the worst thing was that various files, and sometimes whole directories would randomly have their permissions changed inextricably such that NO ONE - not even an admin user could touch them. The VM would get locked out, I would get locked out... it was horrid. It happened in the middle of a rebase once. Sad times... Sad... sad times.

So - I ditched vagrant and shared folders and use a totally contained VM with the ubuntu GUI... it's slow and horrid and it makes me cry... but at least I can alt-tab and waste time in a browser in the windows GUI if I want to.

So anyhoo - my concern. This approach by MS is going to mean everything plays with the same windows file-structure yeah? Or does the ubuntu thing get it's own self contained filey-bits to play with?

Cause if the former... then I will have the fear... THE FEAR... when I try to use it.

[barrkel]

NTFS supports 32k file names; the Win32 & Win64 layers, by default, only support PATH_MAX (260) characters for backward compatibility (compatibility with Win16, ironically enough). You can opt in to longer paths by prepending paths with '\\?\' to disable path length checking, but the check itself exists in the Win* layers. I would expect the Linux layer doesn't apply this check.

[grovulent]

OMG best answer. Thank... you!

[kbenson]

> So I tried vagrant VM with virtualbox - and shared folders... so I could keep my windows GUIs without needing to sshing everything to the VM. Somehow - even though the shared folders thing means the VM is ultimately using the windows filesystem

Maybe the other way would be easier, use the VM for all dev file storage as well, and export a SMB share that you can connect to from windows. Same sharing capability (as long as the VM is running), but you don't have to worry about different underlying file system semantics.

> So - I ditched vagrant and shared folders and use a totally contained VM with the ubuntu GUI... it's slow and horrid and it makes me cry... but at least I can alt-tab and waste time in a browser in the windows GUI if I want to.

Personally, I would just SSH for access to the VM though, as I find PuTTY superior to having a desktop as a window on a desktop (I would prefer to RDP to a local Windows VM as well). But I use Vim as my IDE, so it's extremely easy for me to do so.

That said, Visual Studio announced support for targeting Linux today (I assume either through SSH to a local VM or remote box and/or the local Linux support they announced here, so that might be an acceptable route in the future.

[grovulent]

I'm using atom - I wonder if it has a plugin that will ease ssh pain... thanks for the suggest!

[qb45]

> So - I ditched vagrant and shared folders and use a totally contained VM with the ubuntu GUI... it's slow and horrid and it makes me cry...

Is it really that bad? At one former job I ran Ubuntu under VirtualBox with guest additions installed (new Linux team in an old MS shop).

Performance was OK, at least for the things I used - terminals, vim, Firefox. The only thing that really annoyed me in this setup was the need to switch between the VM and Outlook every now and then. Fortunately, Outlook's notifications worked even in VM running fullscreen (IIRC).

[grovulent]

>Is it really that bad?

I was going to agree with you and admit I was being melodramatic...(well - I mean, saying that it makes me cry was certainly melodramatic - I don't really), but y'know what... it's definitely not ideal.

e.g. Scrolling in my ide.. sometimes lines of code don't refresh properly until I scroll back and forward a few times.

And with dev server, webpack watchers, test watchers open plus browser with a few tabs... yeah - it can get pretty sluggish. Maybe I'll try throwing a few more gig ram at the VM.