How well can bash be used on windows?

i've used it a bit now and it seems to work really well, but i'm wondering if it's possible to efficiently and fully work on it. Are there any drawbacks or missing functionallity that is a must for development but not implemented (yet) in bash ?

i'll be forced to work on windows and i'm wondering which option is better - VM or bash?

I started using bash on windows a few months back. It's pretty stable but you may have some problems depending on the packages you're using. For example, you can't run Heroku commands on it (even after installing toolbelt) - however you can run them from win CMD.

i developed the habit of using git bash for linux commands on windows, so far so good

I'd rate it around 7/10 at the minute. But I do genuinely think it'll improve. I can also see a time when it becomes the default CLI on Windows.

@CrankyOldDev how come? what kind of experiences made you lower the score?

@Anookas They're probably specific to the types of things I've been doing (mainly Node related). And me. I'm more used to Fedora than Ubuntu.

To be honest, it's been a while so my score could be unfair, but I just remember some funnies. Maybe 7 is harsh.

bash works well on windows. I have not tried network stuff like installing apache/mysql.

But I can export to MySQL running on the Windows localhost from the ubuntu terminal (.py/.php scripts).

Its pretty solid I'd say.

@CrankyOldDev Isn't Fedora also coming to the WSSL?

@jmclemo6 it is indeed

Bash on windows has sometimes its micro hiccups, but in a whole; its amazing, customizable (zsh 😍) etc. I use it mostly for ssh, but also for nodejs and alike. You really should give it a try.

I read earlier about your windows situation though; why not go full linux via VM? (since you did prefer it) theres really nice VM setups you can do to use full host resources and it would give you some advantages. (instant backups for example)

I've been using it since it became a thing and I think it's the best thing they ever added to Windows.

I use Linux a lot and using the Windows CMD is just cancer. PowerShell? No thanks.

Bash on Windows doesn't work properly with USB smart cards, which keeps me in a weird powershell/cygwin combo for now

I use cygwin often, but it's bizarre not having a ton of the underlying features as exposed by a Linux kernel, like most of the /dev files and such. Things like /dev/zero work, but you can't do stuff like back up partition tables.