[crabbone]

Hi. While not actively looking for replacement to proprietary services s.a. Github or GitLab, from time to time I'm asked about an alternative.

I'm all for a distributed self-hosting solution, so Radicle is definitely hitting the mark here, however:

> Linux or Unix based operating system.

For the kind of project I have to assist with, this would be a deal-breaker. Since the code seems to be in Rust: do you intend to make it available to MS Windows? (I took it for granted that Mac OS is included in the Unix family, right?)

If not straight-up support for MS Windows, then maybe an MSYS2 port?

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To give some background: I'm not in charge of decisions like service vendor selection, and we are talking about a quasi-government organization with substantial open-source code base that is currently hosted on Github. I.e. sometimes I might have a chance to pitch a particular idea, but it's not up to me if the idea is accepted. They are quite motivated to make their work as resilient to private vendor policies as possible as well as try to "do good" in other ways (i.e. sustainability, breadth of the outreach etc. -- a typical European gov. org :) So, Github is... obviously in conflict with such policies.

While there are other gov. agencies tasked with archiving or networking support, they seem to be woefully incompetent and / or outdated, as well as often falling for the vendor-laid traps (eg. the archiving service went all-in after DataBricks not even realizing it's a commercial closed-source product). So, I wouldn't have high hopes for the org. to be able to leverage a self-hosted solution. That's why a distributed solution looks great.

However, they wouldn't be able to use a tool that doesn't work on major popular PC systems.

[cloudhead]

Hey there. Yes, Windows support is something we'd like to have, but focusing on less OSes is helping us ship faster. In principle, there shouldn't be any issue in porting to Windows, but since no one on the team runs Windows it would have been hard to ensure things are working smoothly. If there is demand though, we will certainly start allocating time towards it.

Radicle does work on macOS as well.

[miohtama]

Windows Subsystem for Linux should alleviate these pains a lot.

[crabbone]

It's just a somewhat better integrated VM with all the shortcomings that entails...

Having to deal with individual users of various software I'd sometimes resort to using WSL, but this isn't an always acceptable way.

To shed more light: some of the users of the system I'm talking about are hospital researchers. These people are very limited in terms of choices they can make about their computers. While it could be possible sometimes to convince hospital's IT to install / enable WSL, this won't work all the time esp. because it, essentially, allows too much control for the otherwise very restricted user over their workstation. MSYS2 here has an advantage that everything can be packaged as a single program (Git is distributed in this way for example), which makes it easier on the org. IT. In principle, WSL can be used that way too (iirc. Docker does something like it), but you'd still need a bunch of Windows-native wrapping for things to work (i.e. I understand that there needs to be at least one service process that does the peering).

[int_19h]

WSL is great so long as everything you need to do runs inside its VM. If you need to access things on the main Windows filesystem, you're basically accessing a networked file system at that point, with all that entails for perf.