71–80 of 93 posts
I tried looking around but didn't see anything about it. What makes this optimized for WSL?
We alter dozens of settings to defaults that make sense for the WSL environment. Unlike the other distributions available for WSL, Pengwin is designed for WSL first.
Can someone please enumerate how this is different from Ubuntu 18.04 (from Canonical) on WSL? Other than distro differences, I see a LOT of marketing speak in the Github ReadMe, but I can't tell if they really offer any advantage over competing offerings.
On a technical level Ubuntu 18.04 is based on a mix of Debian stable and testing with Canonical's additions. Pengwin is primarily Debian testing, with some stable and some unstable here and there. Pengwin configures dozens of settings for WSL and has optional WSL-specific features. Settings are delivered by pengwin-base and features can be configured with pengwin-setup. You could probably spend hours implementing the…
The readme is very vague about what Pengwin's features and differences actually are, and gives me no solid reasons to switch from Ubuntu, which already seems well-suited to WSL. Am I correct that trying Pengwin requires paying and installing through the Microsoft Store, even though it's open source?
I'm so confused right now. I looked at the various links and cant believe I still can't figure this out. The kernel is windows or linux? How do I get or run this? I install windows and then this? Someone help me out here!
Essentially WSL is to Linux what WINE has been for years to Windows: it translates Linux system calls natively to Windows ones so that Linux binaries can be executed on Windows without any recompiling or virtualization. Technically is a great milestone, but there are some risks: suppose one day Microsoft implements a way to use Windows GUI elements or other resources directly from Linux binaries and people starts wri…
This is fundamentally the wrong direction to go. The clue is that MSWin running in a VM on Linux is faster than on hardware. The way forward is to boot Linux, or even something else, to manage hardware, memory, and filesystems, and cut down MSWin to run in a container on it. That way MSWin relies on the underlying OS to do things MSWin has proven to be just not very good at. MSWin runs programs written for it, reliab…
As I have a corporate laptop running Win10 I can't install anything except use Cygwin or WSL. It doesn't allow me to run a Linux VM as it has networking issues upon installing Hyper-V or Virtualbox.
So I'm stuck with WSL on Win 10 and appreciate the efforts of others to get X apps running on it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I noticed file IO was slow too. My solution is to do most of my work in headless Linux VMs, using WSL as the interface to manage and connect to those VMs. This way I get the bash shell and ssh client I love but get isolated environments for my projects/clients. I run samba on the Linux VMs, with mapped drives on the Windows host so that I can edit files using VS Code. Outwardly it might look a little convoluted but I…
What do you use as your VM software? I take it VMWare has a pretty decent IO performance to host's files through HGFS when VirtualBox isn't as performing.
I'm not running a Windows Insider build, and the current version of WSL doesn't accurately represent the posix permissions on files seen via the /mnt/c mount (DrvFs). The next version resolves this by storing posix permissions and other meta data. In my case, being unable to manipulate the permissions causes us some problems. It makes a lot of sense to work on the files within the VM, in a native ext4 volume.
I'm a paying customer that's been running my main dev system on WSL and Pengwin for four months now. I've got it on my ThinkPad and my beefy desktop and sync the two environments using .dotfiles. There is a bit of an I/O slowdown compared to native (most noticable when npm installing a billion tiny modules), but generally everything is quite functional. No driver issues as when I've run Linux. No terrible Mac keyboar…
This is fundamentally the wrong direction to go. The clue is that MSWin running in a VM on Linux is faster than on hardware. The way forward is to boot Linux, or even something else, to manage hardware, memory, and filesystems, and cut down MSWin to run in a container on it. That way MSWin relies on the underlying OS to do things MSWin has proven to be just not very good at. MSWin runs programs written for it, reliab…
There are no good desktop os's in 2019, so they're all 'wrong'. Being 'wrong' therefore cannot be a good argument against their use. All we can do is find the best compromise for our purposes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
File IO can be vastly improved by excluding the WSL OS directory from Windows Defender real-time protection. Here's a gist that has powershell and GUI instructions for accomplishing this: https://gist.github.com/noelbundick/9c804a710eb76e1d6a234b14...
This is possible but not recommended unless you are very cautious. Windows Defender protects from Windows malware entering via WSL and Linux malware as well. For example Windows Defender has caught comprimised npm modules inside WSL.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume you are limiting your definition of "system-taxing" to playing games specifically? As other people have noted, filesystem performance is often better under Linux. I also will point out that at least some rendering tasks can be faster under Linux as well: http://blog.thepixelary.com/post/167616662857/improving-perf... Just like with the filesystem performance discrepancy, this article seems to point out WDDM…
Using git as a filesystem performance metric is horribly flawed -- git was written from the beginning to perform perfectly on Linux. It's the most native linux application I can think of. (Not because it's using secret system calls, but because its design was vetted and performance tailored for Linux.)
https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Linux-4....
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/linux-transfer-files-faster-wi...
https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ubuntu-oneiric-ocelot-b...
https://superuser.com/questions/1124472/why-is-linux-30x-fas...
I also want to point out that just because NTFS isn't the fastest filesystem on the block doesn't mean it is a bad one. From what I can gather just casually googling it seems like NTFS emphasizes safety at the cost of performance at times. So depending on your workload and desired behavior NTFS might be the file system of choice for you. It's also worth noting that IF NTFS is intended to be more user-safe it sort of makes sense why may be the choice for the most common OS which aims to serve all users (not just technical ones).