Hacker News Reader

Comment by andix | Hacker News Reader

I've tried it, it's not a 1.0 release. This is more like an early tech preview.

Can you elaborate on this?

Most of the features are undocumented. I think because most of the behavior is not really defined and varies greatly between the different backends.

The backends are also not documented, you need to try out what's working and what isn't working. It doesn't explain the supported and unsupported features of each backend, neither their quirks.

A lot of behavior is surprising. For example if you have powershell in path on windows inside MXC it will just silently add the whole C drive with read-only permissions. Circumventing all other policies. https://github.com/microsoft/mxc/issues/1455

A lot of common error cases regularly happen and don't provide reasonable error messages. No documentation how to deal with them.

Check the issues on GitHub, there are many things that are expected to just work and they don't. One would at least expect some documentation why it doesn't work and where the limitations are: https://github.com/microsoft/mxc/issues

Thanks!

This actually confirms my guess: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50018898

I disagree with that. MXC seems generally useful, but it's just poorly executed. I don't know about any cross-platform sandboxes that promise this kind of flexibility. There are always going to be differences between the backends, that's what makes it so complex, but equally useful if someone manages to deal with that complexity.

> I don't know about any cross-platform sandboxes that promise this kind of flexibility.

But if it doesn't deliver...?

And maybe no other tools tried to do this because it's not a good idea in the first place (and I have plenty to say about that)?

Then people should try harder, not give up.

PS: velocity of the project is much lower than you would expect from a Microsoft project. It feels more like some hobbyist project, that deals with major bugs whenever the maintainer has time off.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com