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by upthedale 4725 days ago
Yep, I've been advocating running a headless nix VM on Windows for a while now, where you can easily 'shoosh' in (as Hanselman likes to call it - never heard this before myself).

The problem comes when you want the *nix tooling to interact with the Windows environment. Personally I like the clear separation between the host and guest environments, but YMMV. At the very least you can mount some share the Windows host provides inside the guest OS.
2 comments
a3n 4725 days ago
I've used Vagrant for this, and it works pretty well, including sharing directories between the host and guest. But of course you don't get to run Windows programs from within the VM, you only get to manipulate Windows files with Linux programs. So it's not a 100% substitute for a Windows shell.
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H3g3m0n 4724 days ago
Cygwins not bad if you just want a shell. It does Xorg too, but it's not fantastic. The main problem is not all programs will work on it (no tmux, but screen is ok), or be in the repos (I actually made an attempt to get Arch's makepkg/pacman working on it, but quite a few deps wouldn't compile properly, gpgme failed tests for example).

I think it would be great to have a tightly integrated VM. There are some that allow you to open Linux X apps in a Windows desktop rather than confined to a VM Window.

Perhaps we could get a Wayland/Mir port for Windows. Run the VM in the background but have a full Linux desktop environment. Might need a shim layer or some remote desktop extensions.

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