Remove note on WSL for Windows

[dicksonlaw583]

Grace Fishbein and I were helping out at a Unix Shell workshop today, and the students using WSL bash were having a very hard time following along. Here are a number of incompatibilities that we noticed:

• The desktop directory is completely different
• Tab completion didn't work for everyone
• nano is not available
• man is not available

I would like to remove the note about using WSL as an alternative, in order to avoid such incompatibilities during lessons. By the virtue of the lesson, we cannot assume that they are the "advanced user" that the note assumes.

[deppen8]

Thanks for the PR. It is always useful to get direct feedback from lessons when they are taught.

Before we drop the WSL option completely, I think this needs further exploration. I don't have access to a Windows machine, but I had a friend test with WSL2. nano and man were available there, so I think there is more complexity to it.

[gcapes]

I think the problems reported might be a WSL vs WSL2 issue. If anything I'd encourage a move towards WSL because in doing do the lesson would avoid many of the problems associated with using Git Bash.

[AndreasBilke]

In my experience a wsl(2) is way more comfortable for Windows user since this environment mirrors a real Unix (which is close to the lesson material).

[milodubois]

Chiming in to gently nudge and agree with comment from @gcapes, after looking into WSL vs WLS2. Also, please excuse the perhaps uninformed or naive question, but why is Oracle VBox not suggested as the primary environment? I ask this as a data scientist (computational and molecular biology, host-pathogen interactions) and as someone who dabbles in developmental personal projects in the biopharma/genomics arena. Certain FOSS applications critical for comp & mol bio are only available for Linux systems and given the questionable reliability of Windows for this sort of work, perhaps others may have noticed this. I have personally benefited from a course, btw.

Thank you all for the work you do!

Cheers!
@milodubois

P.S.

In follow-up, also, per my colleagues in the US, most are familiar with Linux to some degree (proficient at the least). Unix was mandatory as an undergraduate aeons ago for me, so I am curious why there is not a heavier push for VMs running distros/spins/flavors that especially support the science we do, e.g. Fedora Scientific, et al. (updated 1258 EDT, 12-Sep-22).

[bkmgit]

People using WSL should be able to use man and nano since the default installed Linux is Ubuntu https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/setup/environment - nano may need a separate install. Have not tested it myself though. A virtual machine has more overhead than WSL so needs a reasonable high spec computer, especially if one is also doing video conferencing. If it mostly causes confusion, it is ok to drop it and remain with GitBash which does not have man but does have --help.

@dicksonlaw583 What versions of Windows were used?

[bkmgit]

Maybe more explanation similar to https://docs.pace.gatech.edu/gettingStarted/windows_subsystem_linux/ would be helpful to have.

[dicksonlaw583]

@bkmgit

They are all Windows 10, though I did not have time during the sessions in May to ask them which subversion it is.

One persistent issue is the desktop directory on Windows, which for many people with institutional machines (but not all) are completely different from the Unix-standard ~/Desktop and the two Window-standards /c/Documents and Settings/USERNAME/Desktop (XP) and /c/Users/USERNAME/Desktop (7, 8, 10, 11) expected in unit 2. Desktops mounted on network drives are a frequent sighting, and there would be an institution-specific prefix that must be found for each participant in this situation and what it maps to in the shell before being able to proceed. Sometimes we are able to get by if it's Git Bash (create a directory, double-click it, right-click > Git Bash, then pwd), but we didn't have established routines for easily determining it on WSL as none of the instructors have used it.

[bkmgit]

I think this section should be update to encourage use of WSL2, and encourage instructors or those setting up the environment to test things out beforehand.

[bkmgit]

Closing this, will revisit later. #1379

[bkmgit]

Need to close unresolved pull requests to update to new format.