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by knolax 2209 days ago
Considering the fact that there are five times as many Android devices as Windows devices, and the greater ease of use of Termux compared to WSL. I find that highly unlikely. Anecdotally every newbie programmer I've seen try to use WSL has just ended up installing Linux in frustration.
2 comments
SifJar 2209 days ago
> greater ease of use of Termux compared to WSL

pretty subjective, I'm guessing most people find terminal-based stuff easier/nicer on a computer with an actual keyboard, rather than a (relatively) small phone screen with a touchscreen keyboard.

I believe Termux is also pretty majorly restricted by Android 10 (can only run binary code included within the application package, so no downloading additional linux packages or compiling things locally, I believe)

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teekert 2209 days ago
Termux is a terminal emulator, WSL is a subsystem. Did you try [0]? And WSL2?

It's pretty compelling, I predict they will pull in a lot of Apple (who use it for the terminal) devs and make a lot of Windows first devs very happy. And there are a lot.

Btw, am I downvoted because my original comment in not constructive or do people not agree with me?

[0] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-terminal/9n0dx20hk...

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VibrantClarity 2208 days ago
I doubt it pulls in anybody in the unfinished state its in. WSL does not integrate very well and is miserably slow. My 13yo thinkpad runs circles around WSL running on my workstation. WSL2 is still beta, and given how buggy 1909 still is, I am not installing 2004 on anything I care about. And I recently tried Windows Terminal, but it couldn't even give me an admin prompt without giving every single session elevated privileges, so I gave up after 5 minutes.
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PascLeRasc 2209 days ago
By the way, every terminal application you're used to (Terminal.app on macOS, iTerm, the Windows Terminal, Ubuntu's Terminal application) is a terminal emulator. I've tried WSL1 and 2 and couldn't get past the typing latency, awful font rendering, incredibly slow downloads, apt/dpkg bugs, and not syncing with the actual filesystem like Linux/macOS do. For example, I like to copy my dotfiles to ~/Dropbox/dotfiles. This isn't possible on Windows, and if you force it to do so it will corrupt the files.
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knolax 2209 days ago
Termux is a lot more than just a terminal emulator.
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