[GTALUG] WSL, threat or boon? [was Re:Surveillance Capitalism [was another thread]]

[o1bigtenor]

On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 8:28 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk
<talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>
> | From: Russell Reiter via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
>
> | I do have an interest in current events tho. What I see most recently is
> | that RMS called out canonical for surveillance capitalism and bashed WSL
> | for being a ploy to undermine free software.
>
> I missed or forgot that.  I guess he expressed this in 2017 (it seems like
> a lifetime ago).  I haven't found what he actually said (too lazy).
>
> Personally, I think that imitation is fair game.  GNU and LINUX
> certainly copied UNIX (and killed it but propagated many of its ideas).
>
> Evan's talk this month will be another step down that road.
>
> Fair competition is health for everyone (but not every thing).
>
> I see, for example, the competition between Intel and AMD on the X86
> front as killing Itanium, the favoured path of Intel.
>
> On the other hand, enclosure is scary to me.  Linux has been enclosed
> in the appliance world.  And those folks have rarely upstreamed any of
> their work.
>
> Is WSL enclosure?  It doesn't seem to be.
>
> Is WSL somehow better than Linux?  If so, we have work to do to catch
> up.---

I would posit from my corner of the world that Win10 is not an advancement.
Nor does WSL help much. If running win10 makes something wonderfully
easy - - - - then by all means run it but - - - -

Win10 insists on being a keystroke logger and updating a little bit like a
totally blotto individual wandering down the street. Neither activity is
actually a benefit for the user but does allow an extreme level of control
to be implemented by the OS.

As I still remember the slogan from in the early days of PCs : "computing
- - your way" and refuse to relinquish control to any other entity and
having found that my 'style' of using a system is quite unusual so would
be quite constricted in any such 'controlled' atmosphere (I won't touch
Ubuntu anymore either because of their also flying down this path) so
I will disagree, vehemently so in fact, that WSL is better.

If you needs are very very simple I doubt that there would be a
problem and if you don't care about intellectual freedom run WSL- - - - I
think that as your needs get more complex the more you need to have
computational organizational freedom. That computational organizational
freedom just doesn't exist in WSL (and a few other areas as well).

Regards