Giving Linux in Windows a bash – Part 1: Why bother?

For over a decade, Apple Macs have been the computer of choice for many of my professional colleagues in geophysics. Although there is an element of tribalism in the choice for some (especially among the Californian lifestyle set), and perhaps appreciation for the pretty hardware design carries rather more weight than it ought to for others, I suspect neither is the main consideration. For many, it's all about the operating system.

Mac OS X. Yesterday.

Mac OS X, launched in 2001, was revolutionary in that its back end (the guts of the operating system, behind the scenes) was based on BSD, a variant of Unix, the operating system beloved of scientists, sysops and servers in the 90s and earlier. (My undergraduate research, Masters research and early PhD research – all in geophysics – were all conducted on Sun workstations running a version of Unix.)  And Apple provided a terminal app, a native C compiler and an implementation of X-Windows, making people in the know very excited indeed. 

Suddenly, full-on techy types could do all of their programming, testing and running of their command-line based programs on a machine that could also run Microsoft Word and Powerpoint, and Adobe Illustrator! That's what sold me, back in 2003, when I bought my first Mac, a 12-inch aluminium PowerBook. And again several more times –when I started my faculty job, when my students needed new machines last year. As we approach the 12th version of OS X, Macs remain the best all-round machines for my work. But the advantage is not as clear as it might once have been.

Why, you might ask? Apple in recent years have not been the powerhouses of development and fancy hardware that they were in the past. The pro-level machines have become expensive, essentially unexpandable dustbins, with neither the aesthetics or upgrade path of my cherished 2010 Mac Pro desktop. The laptops have stagnated, with touchscreen technology passing them by, and the latest MacBook line is ridiculously undersupplied with ports (but overprovisioned with scandalously expensive dongles). Really, now, it's getting to the point where the obvious flaws in the hardware are starting to overwhelm the benefits of the software.

So, when my opportunity to get a new laptop through work came along, I bought myself a Surface Pro 3 which, minor foibles aside, has been a great purchase – light, flexible, speedy, with reasonable battery life and a stylus! I even managed to get it to dual boot, so that I can do proper work when travelling (although having to reboot it to run PowerPoint is annoying). And when I had money to spend on a desktop machine, I spent $2000 on PC components and built myself a awesome Linux-toting thunderbastard of a machine that can run all my research codes at express speed for a fraction of the price of a lesser-specced Mac Pro dustbin. If it could run professional application software (rather than the fairly weak sauce Linux alternatives), I wouldn't need anything else.

Which is why Microsoft's announcement that they are teaming with Canonical to produce an Ubuntu style bash terminal in Windows 10 is so exciting. It raises the possibility of doing everything on one machine again, but that machine could be a Windows machine. The tool is actually in beta right now, and if you enable Insider Previews on your Windows 10 install, you could have it today! I'll be giving that a go to see if it really is a solution to the 'one machine' problem... watch this space.