Linux On Windows 10: Running Ubuntu VMs Just Got a Lot Easier, Says Microsoft (zdnet.com) 193
Liam Tung reporting for ZDNet: Ubuntu maintainer Canonical and Microsoft have teamed up to release an optimized Ubuntu Desktop image that's available through Microsoft's Hyper-V gallery. The Ubuntu Desktop image should deliver a better experience when running it as a guest on a Windows 10 Pro host, according to Canonical. The optimized version is Ubuntu Desktop 18.04.1 LTS release, also known as Bionic Beaver. Microsoft's work with Canonical was prompted by its users who wanted a "first-class experience" on Linux virtual machines (VMs) as well as Windows VMs. To achieve this goal, Microsoft worked with the developers of XRDP, an open-source remote-desktop protocol (RDP) for Linux based on Microsoft's RDP for Windows. Thanks to that work, XRDP now supports Microsoft's Enhanced Session Mode, which allows Hyper-V to use the open-source implementation of RDP to connect to Linux VMs. This in turn gives Ubuntu VMs on Windows hosts a better mouse experience, an integrated clipboard, windows resizing, and shared folders for easier file transfers between host and guest. Microsoft's Hyper-V Quick Create VM setup wizard should also help improve the experience. "With the Hyper-V Quick Create feature added in the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, we have partnered with Ubuntu and added a virtual machine image so in a few quick minutes, you'll be up and developing," said Clint Rutkas, a senior technical product manager on Microsoft's Windows Developer Team. "This is available now -- just type 'Hyper-V Quick Create' in your start menu."
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I was doing that already years before MS got into the Linux game (out of desperation, I might add) and don't need their "help" to run a linux VM inside MS Windows.There is nothing MS has that I want.
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The broad driver and application support of Windows with the powerful UNIX-like utilities of Linux, for the majority of users that is a good combination. Yes there is a tiny percentage of computer users that feel hurt and will never forgive Microsoft for their transgressions from decades ago but that's ok, this isn't targeted at you just like whatever bespoke, non-mainstream, usability rats nest of a Linux distro you use is not aimed at the broader population of computer users.
so that more data can be stolen from the users.
I don't think you understand w
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Windows 10 will never touch a system I own. Period.
It's glorified spyware/adware. I don't care what it offers. Once Win7 is done, it's Linux from here on out, even with the recovery/UI issues.
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A better combination is to run Linux and run Winders in a VM where its malevolent tendencies can be restrained.
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Steam runs much better with Windows as the native operating system. So do other resource intensive applications. And on a laptop, especially, sacrificing a few Gig of RAM to run the hypervisor and X Windows and running Windows inside the VM is sacrificing those resources to the virtualization layer. It's why, given the choices, I will normally equip a laptop as a Windows host and run Linux as the virtual machine, using an SSH client to access the Linux host to get cut and paste operations to work best.
Re: But why would you? (Score:1)
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VirtualBox works very well, with nice support for multiple monitors.
One click to give/take away Windows VM network access as and when required.
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Forgetting the past puts us all in peril. From the days of DR-DOS up through the OOXML sham, Microsoft consistently practiced anti-competitive behaviour, working towards vendor-lock in and maintaining that lock in. Only when they didn't have market dominance did they actually try to compete fairly. You're seeing a better behaved Microsoft today likely because they're way behind in the mobile market, they've lost web browser dominance, and they're trying to carve out a place in the "cloud"; they're having
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Right. Personal data and usage habits are completely worthless to a company like Microsoft that has absolutely no incentive to, say, push ads out to users.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to buy this new product that I just saw in my start menu.
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Here [microsoft.com] is the diagnostics list for the telemetry with an explanation of what the fields are, also it is anonymized.
You mean there's what Microsoft says it is or does. Since the data transmitted encrypted, all those claims are unverifiable. I know it, you know it, Microsoft knows it. Give the past, I'd feel stupid trusting in that Microsoft accurately describes what they are doing there. Wonder what makes you so certain?
You realise that one line of text in the start menu you can just turn off right?
Pretty sure it's more than "one line of text", and the fact that you can go out of your way to turn it off until the next upgrade is worthless.
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You sound like someone that swallows hook, line and sinker the "please allow our tracking cookies. We want to to have the meta experience on our sight that you richly deserve" and the ad blocker lines of bullshit.
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The "Linux wave" has been coming for about 20 years now... exactly when is it supposed to arrive?
Can we have this the other way, please? (Score:1)
It would be nice to have this the other way. I use Linux as my Desktop OS, but it might be nice to run Windows in a VM condom to play games without having to physically disconnect my primary Linux hard drive to keep Microsoft's dirty mitts off of it when I boot Windows.
Re: Can we have this the other way, please? (Score:2, Insightful)
Uh, we run Windows on VMs all the time. Apparently the point of the article is that hyper V is still pure shit compared to vmware or nutanix.
Already available since forever. (Score:1)
Both Wine and various VM solutions usually run Windows programs just fine.
And thanks to Valve, now basically any game in the Steam catalogue can run on Linux. Period. Which is huge.
(Even if it actually runs on a Windows with a Linux backend, since Steam is not actually a Linux application, but merely disguising itself in some Wine wrapper, with the un-Unixy/Linuxy uglinesses hanging out left and right. Like its complete ignorance of LSM rules of where which files should go, its attempt to be its own package
Which is the OS package manager? (Score:3)
[the Steam store's] attempt to be its own package manager instead of using the OS one
Which is "the OS one"? Linux does not provide a package manager. Nor does GNU alone. Package management under GNU/Linux is currently the job of distributions, and different distributions' package managers tend to be mutually incompatible. So which distribution's package manager should Steam be wrapping?
Re: Which is the OS package manager? (Score:2)
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License a major proprietary engine ported to multiple platforms. Its name might start with "Un".
Or use Vulkan to target Windows and GNU/Linux on day 1, macOS after you've shaken out launch bugs, and Nintendo Switch after you're seeing enough revenue to cover the certification.
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DirectX gets you Windows and XBox One which is much more lucrative
That depends on the cost in time and money for Microsoft to approve your company for an Xbox One devkit and subsequently to approve your game. If you have to use revenue from the Windows edition to pay for the materials and certification charges for the Xbox One edition, then DirectX gets you only Windows on launch day. So with DirectX it's Windows, then a delay, then Xbox One; with Vulkan it's Windows, then a delay, then Nintendo Switch.
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I believe Google is undergoing certification of some Chromebook models to run Windows 10, so that you can run Windows in a Chrome OS window side by side web, desktop Linux and Android apps each in their own sandbox.
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Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct (Score:2)
Components of WSL distributed as free software are subject to the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct [microsoft.com]. It's based on a combination of the same Contributor Covenant 1.4 that Linux uses and a (discontinued) TODO Group Code of Conduct [github.com].
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Ah. [looks at Windows 10] All is explained!!
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And in case you mean GNU, why would I run a professional OS on a toy OS?
Because the "toy OS" is the one that actually runs all the professional applications, the so-called "professional OS" is trash on a desktop which is why relatively nobody uses it, even macOS has multiple times the userbase that GNU/Linux has and the only way in which Linux has been made into a usable operating system for end users has been for Google to strip out the GNU bits.
GNU/Linux is good for embedded and server uses. If you want to run professional applications on the desktop then Windows is the way t
Re: Linux ... Ubuntu ... ERROR: Does not compute (Score:2)
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> why would I run a professional OS on a toy OS?
Running Linux on Windows allows for the full *nix ecosystem without having to reboot or fart around with Cygwin, can try-it-before-you-install, easier cross-platform development, etc.
Does it _really_ matter _why_ they want to do this?
Exactly backwards (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: Exactly backwards (Score:1)
Because it's just bad practise to use Windows period. You use it because you are forced to; because the world isn't perfect.
Turn on virtualization support in the BIOS, or RAM (Score:5, Informative)
Often hardware virtualization support defaults to off in the BIOS. With it on, there will generally be no noticable slowdown in a VM provided you give the VM a reasonable amount of RAM. You might see it called Intel VT-x or AMD-V in the BIOS. Enable it.
Sometimes people give a VM 256MB of RAM, then they are suprised that it's almost as slow as a machine with 256MB of RAM. If top performance is needed, a VM should have almost as much RAM assigned as you'd use in a bare-metal machine withh the same OS. IO buffer in the host reduce the RAM requirements a little bit.
The other thing that can happen is if you have a VM that does a ton of IO, you want to use virtio. Set the VM settings to use virtio rather than emulating a particular network card and hard drive. That can significantly faster, if the VM writes to disk a lot or it's pumping a hundreds of megabits through the network card.
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There's a noticeable slowdown when you stress the graphics card with intense rendering or even bitcoin mining.
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VMs can have direct access to hardware. Once I tried adding a Windows virtual machine on top of Linux (KVM) with a PCI graphics card dedicated to that machine. I was able to get almost 100% performance out of the card (tested with a mining software) and can even overclock it.
The issue is you need a separate PCI card for each virtual machine, (or purchase an extremely expensive server class GPU with multiple VM access). There are guides for similar setups, where you'd most likely to have the on board GPU for
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Often hardware virtualization support defaults to off in the BIOS. With it on, there will generally be no noticable slowdown in a VM provided you give the VM a reasonable amount of RAM. You might see it called Intel VT-x or AMD-V in the BIOS. Enable it.
Sometimes people give a VM 256MB of RAM, then they are suprised that it's almost as slow as a machine with 256MB of RAM. If top performance is needed, a VM should have almost as much RAM assigned as you'd use in a bare-metal machine withh the same OS. IO buffer in the host reduce the RAM requirements a little bit.
The other thing that can happen is if you have a VM that does a ton of IO, you want to use virtio. Set the VM settings to use virtio rather than emulating a particular network card and hard drive. That can significantly faster, if the VM writes to disk a lot or it's pumping a hundreds of megabits through the network card.
When Ram prices come down, and the standard desktop cpu is 64gigs of ram, I will run virtual I/O
Thinking of virtio auto memory ballooning? (Score:2)
Are you thinking of virtio auto memory ballooning?
I was talking about IO (disk and network) through virtio.
It's faster and less resource intensive to just memory copy directly from the guest to the host rather than pretending to be an Ethernet chip, or a SATA card. It uses less memory, as the virtio driver is basically just a line of code - copy data from guest memory to host.
Memory auto ballooning lets the VM memory usage dynamically adapt. You CAN set it to allow the memory usage to go higher than you wo
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Why would I want to run Windows, AT ALL, even in a VM, even with a gun to my head, when there's GNU/Linux?
One possibility is that the hardware you have isn't very compatible, such as an ASUS Transformer Book T100TA [debian.org], and PC makers specializing in GNU/Linux (such as System76) don't offer replacement laptops in your preferred size range. WSL makes Windows into a hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for a GNU system.
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Games and specialty applications.
Unfortunately, developers pander to the masses precisely because they are the masses.
Microsoft strong-armed enough OEMs through the '90s and into the '00s that they won through ubiquity. Few people try alternatives when Windows comes "free", pre-installed, with every computer you buy.
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You might not want it, other people do.
Some people don't even like Linux, imagine that.
Re:logical conclusion (Score:5, Interesting)
Because some tools are just plain better on Windows. Quite some years ago I was developing software which needed to run on linux, and the software was multithreaded. The problem was that at the time, debugging multithreaded software on linux sucked donkey balls. Gdb simply could not cope with breakpoints in multithreaded code without crashing.
Visual studio otoh had no such problems, and was both a very handy tool for developing, debugging, and designing the unit tests. So I developed all infrastructure code with full test coverage on Windows, and then transferred it to a linux box and compiled everything with g++
Maybe these days, support for those use cases has improved, but at the time there was no reasonable linux based solution.
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Nobody needs those things you call games...
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Why windows ? (Score:2)
Why would I want to run Windows in the first place ?
even worse :
Why would I want to run Windows 10 in the first place ?
Re:Why windows ? (Score:5, Funny)
These days I mostly do it just to watch Slashdot heads explode.
Re:Exactly backwards (Score:4, Interesting)
_You_ can, others maybe cannot.
There is a large corporate world where people have to run Windows 10 for most of their work (corporate standard, applications etc), but need to do things on Linux side as well (not their main task though).
Putting all those people on Linux Desktop would be actually counter-productive.
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Linux support for self encrypting drives (OPALv2) is janky. It kinda works but isn't reliable, especially if you need to sleep your machine sometimes.
You can use software encryption but then you take the performance hit. So Windows host makes sense, and then the Linux VM benefits from the encryption transparently too.
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Because you prefer the performance on the Windows machine and the downsides for the VM in which you do a few tasks? Not all of us *prefer* or even *can* run Linux as our primary base system.
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If you're a corporate drone working at a shop where the IT department is run by goons, then you'll have been handed a Windows laptop and can't use anything else. Being able to run a VM gives you a chance to be productive where others aren't. This is as much an attempt by Microsoft to stay relevant as it is an aptitude test for techies everywhere.
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A few thoughts on this:
1) It might be that Linux running under Windows is faster than Windows running in Linux. This is especially important if you are using Windows for games where FPS matters.
1a) I suspect video game companies doing ports of games might want to operate this way since Visual Studio is their main development tool and corporate desktop environment.
2) Which VM? There's a variety of VMs that run in Linux.
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Oh and don't worry, before too much longer Microsoft will start trying to make moves to prevent any computer from booting any OS other than Windows, and when Linux users complain they can't built new machines that exclusively run Linux, Microsoft will say "You can run your little Linux OS in a VM, why do you need to boot it directly?" and ignore the complaints.
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Why wait?
What does Windows 8.1 actually give you that's worth keeping? That's worth the risk of making your VMs vulnerable to viruses, spyware, and other malware running on the host OS?
BTW, if you want a GUI to create & manage VMs, you can use libvirt's virt-manager.
I'm doing the exact opposite. (Score:1)
Windows 10's update system and the complete lack of control over it has me going the other way. Some of us run simulations that can take days to complete. Some of these machines are on private networks and do not require constant updates. Microsoft has not accounted for this AT ALL. We're moving away completely...
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What he/she said...
What do you mean by "Windows 10 Pro Host?" (Score:2)
Doesn't the host become a baremetal Hyper V and your Windows 10 Pro instance then becomes a guest? I haven't used Gen 2 Hyper V yet so forgive my ignorance.
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That's the general gist of it, yes. Something similar happens if you are using CredentialGuard or other Virtualization based security features.
source code? (Score:2)
Do they provide complete source code, including any required compilation scripts and data that can be used to build this exact binary image that they're distributing?
Because that's what the GPL **requires** them to do.
Enable source debs (Score:2)
Your comment echoes WSL issue 107 [github.com]. The solution is to enable source debs or source RPMs or whatever in the distribution that you install in WSL, and you will get complete corresponding source code for all packages provided by the distribution.
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Do they provide complete source code, including any required compilation scripts and data that can be used to build this exact binary image that they're distributing?
Because that's what the GPL **requires** them to do.
Requires
Kernel Side
hv_* kernel modules (hv_sock.ko) from kernel tree, or if you are using an older RH derivative kernel use Linux Integration Services [github.com]
Userspace
XRDP [github.com] / XORGXRDP [github.com]
And something to help you along - linux-vm-tools [github.com]
VirtualBox (Score:2)
Features that VirtualBox has had for many years.
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Virtualbox is not a Type-1 Hypervisor which is what this article is about.
Compatibility (Score:1)
Double the attack surface (Score:1)
My Experience with Hyper-V (Score:1)
It wasn't a good experience. You would think, after all this time, that Microsoft could create a VM package that could run a linux distro without all the massive input lag from the mouse. It's performance was abysmal.
Secondly, Hyper-V causes a few unacceptable conflicts with it just installed on the machine. There was the ATI Radeon Re-Live overlay problem. It took quite some time troubleshooting that issue down to something that isn't even remotely related. Not being able to run other VM software is a
can anyone use curses on a windows SSH session? (Score:2)
still not sure (Score:2)
I'm still not sure what canonical (ubuntu) thinks they will get out of this deep corporation with microsoft.
Did MS make them some promises (that we're not aware of)?
If there is one thing that history has taught us, it's that those who work with MS hardly get any benefit (to put it lightly), still people keep thinking - this time it will be different!
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How about a lot of users and exposure?
I work in a Windows centric enterprise at the moment. But we do have some linux systems. And while I don't have one running at the moment, if I need to test or develop linux software, I need to run linux. What is the likely choice for me: a) deploy an ubuntu VM with a couple of mouse clicks and VMS settings, or b) futz around for possibly hours or days with a generic distro and hope I can get everything to work reliably as expected?
Also, I do think it's a bit silly to l
I hate them both (Score:2)
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... Let him post it once so he's heard, then delete any reposting in the same article.
I don't like it either, but I wouldn't want to see anything deleted unless it's libelous or illegal. Free speech shouldn't stop for the sensitivity du jour. I suggest per-user filter options to render a post in 1px font if it matches any of a list of regular expressions. Not deleted; not censored; not hidden, just hard to read.
Desperation (Score:2)
but does it run IN FAST KERNEL mode?