That’s a fair enough reason. I personally never noticed because the “this isn’t running” message is pretty clear to me. But I can see how that’s a potential blocker for new Linux users.

All the answers are going to assume WSL is using Ubuntu.

Every recipe that I have ever encountered for Ubuntu worked on Debian, except the recipes involving Snaps, which were inevitably much simpler on Debian. And I haven’t seen anything useful under WSL (cli tools) packaged better as a snap anyway.

Why do Linux advocates try so desperately to overcomplicate things?

Computers are complicated. Linux advocates just aren’t being paid to lie about it.

In this case, this is a simple 7 character (edit: plus a one line command to enable systemd) change that can save a newbie a lot of trouble, and comes with no downside. the downside that systemd isn’t enabled by default. (Edit: a good point made below.)

There’s very few cases where Debian and Ubuntu are different at on the command line (which WSL is). In those very few cases, anyone using WSL is going to have a much better time on Debian, because they’re more likely to find a working recipe.

The exact reasons for this are nuanced, but come down - folks liked me publishing recipes don’t target Ubuntu anymore, because I wasn’t (as a package maintainer) invited to the Snap party. Which is fine. Flatpak does the same job, in an open way.

So for the 98% of recipes that predate Snap, there’s no difference to be had as a user. For the cutting edge 2% of new stuff, newbies are increasingly better off on Debian.

“if you’re a Linux expert, this article isn’t for you. You’re probably already using Debian if you use WSL”

As a Linux expert - yep! My distro choice under WSL is Debian, for the same reasons shared in the article.

// portability

Gave me the giggles. I’ve helped maintain systems where this portable solution would have left everyone better off.

I’ve run almost every OS.

My daily driver is Debian. It’s practical, efficient, stable, and with just a few commands clipped out of blog articles, it morphs into whatever weird silly thing I happen to need it to be, this year.

as long as you write it for yourself, you re good. As soon as you want to share it, you have a problem

A perfect summary of the history of computer code!

I don’t believe that you can use traditional algorithms to teach the car street driving, because there are to many different variations… Even if your autopilot is 99% correct and you drive 20000km a year, you still drive wrong 200km of it.

Exactly!

And this is why, if the problem is solveable, it must be solved by learning models shepherded by expert engineers. The LLMs can take care of the long boring stretches, freeing skilled engineer time to fine-tune an LLM algorithm hybrid for the tricky bits.

I’m inclined to believe the problem is solveable, but since I’m not selling anything, I’m allowed to say “if”. Heh.

Yeah. Current generation learning models can do impressive things in the hands of a skilled engineer, but Elon is leading a round of class warfare against skilled engineers right now.

Shareholders need to decide which they really want to bet on to win.

Makes sense. I’m not picky about which exact risks our entitled overconfident billionaires opt to take.

I mean, if anyone ever introduces the average shareholder to those executive decision desk toy spinners, the average CEO is fucked.

Sometimes I’m reminded that there’s always a chance that they go submarine diving or some such with another overconfident crony who thinks their skills got them where they are today.

That out of the way, FSD sucks, and it’s getting worse, not better.

It’s almost like they bet on the AI to teach the AI, rather than continuing to pay for skilled engineers.

Buckle up folks, we’re going to see a lot more of this, across every industry, before the lawsuits go into high gear and anything gets better.

Historically, “nothing” is the label we apply when none of the things we are currently able to detect are present.

After we can detect what actually is there, we update our description to the much more accurate term “practically nothing”.

Large corporate donors decide, in a non-representative winner-take-all vote system.

Also, I think they meant to say “both parties”.

This is terrific. More folks would be more excited if they realized how much less hassle Podman is than Docker.

I set that up, once. It went poorly for me. Git behaves much better, for me, when used thoughtfully and manually.

What I now do instead, is work on certain projects on an SSH accessible host. This gives the same benefits of having my last state easily accesses, without causing noise in my development tools such as git.

Was the byline written by AI?

This comment was also brought to you by the artificial intelligence boom, and has as much to do with it.

You can still purchase this comment as an NFT.

I’m working with a supplier to create a limited edition Pog, with this comment printed on it.

This is the official comment of the new millennium.

This comment is drifting slowly backwards in time, in hopes of escaping the AI hype machine into an earlier, equally stupid hype train, but one made more tolerable by nostalgia.

This comment still only costs 5 cents.

I still get the meaningless Internet points though, right?!

I think they are absolutely, positively, going to breach their face database and everyone’s purchase history all over the Internet.

I’ve been watching for an event like this with popcorn ready.

I’ve got a good/bad/terrible feeling that they’re playing for keeps in the race to be the biggest consumer privacy headline public relations disaster.

What’s the benefit to the customer here?

There’s no intended benefit to the customer.