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Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

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Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#41

Post by nilkn »

ahupp wrote: post #7

I switched to WSL2 a month ago and it's been great. With WSL1 I'd regularly run into subtle compatibility problems but haven't seen anything like that with 2. Despite a handful of annoyances, the Win10+WSL2+Visual Studio Code Dev environment has been a lot more pleasant than OSX.

I never thought I’d say it but because of this exact setup with VS Code I’ve actually stopped using my MBP at home in favor of my desktop, which was really only built with gaming in mind. I’ve now gotten used to having all the extra computing power at hand and would struggle to go back to a laptop as my primary development machine.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#42

Post by d4mi3n »

sk5t wrote: post #10

Is there a shell+terminal+font combo that folks really like for WSL? I've tried the new terminal beta with zsh and--for reasons I can't quite articulate right now--it feels "off" and I invariably proceed to boot up virtualbox for my debian, i3, kitty, fira code setup to get work done. Maybe it's the break in filesystems and $HOME? Edit: learning that WSL2 does away with the syscall-translating tech and mandates Hyper…

Windows Terminal is made by the same guys working on WSL and works pretty well: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

You can get it via the Microsoft Store and it comes with support for connecting to WSL, Powershell, and cmd.exe out of the box.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#43

Post by pknopf »

totetsu wrote: post #16
riskyfive wrote: post #5

I really hope apple implements something similar, would much prefer to have a well integrated linux vm than the not-quite-linux of macos

I find that most of the linux-like versions of user-space tools can be installed via homebrew. What functionality would you been hoping for from a linux vm? would this VM be able to have any GPL v3 licensed tools?

Yeah, the drive for a "WSL" is really because Microsoft/Windows doesn't play nice with the *nix world of tools/commands that developers are falling in love with.

With OSX, the terminal experience is great, no need for a "WSL" over there!

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#44

Post by saagarjha »

riskyfive wrote: post #29
riskyfive wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

doesn't macOS put a BSD translation of some sort in their kernel? Theres a microkernel, a driver api (device kit) and then 'bsd'

random wikipedia image that somewhat supports what I was thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)#/med...

The actual API layers are nowhere near that clean ;)

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#45

Post by saagarjha »

riskyfive wrote: post #5

I really hope apple implements something similar, would much prefer to have a well integrated linux vm than the not-quite-linux of macos

Not by Apple, but here’s two:

https://github.com/ish-app/ish

https://github.com/linux-noah/noah

They have varying stages of support for Linux syscalls.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#46

Post by Ericson2314 »

saagarjha wrote: post #2

> He further mentions that unzipping tarbars could see a 20 times performance increase. Boy, do I love unzipping tarbars! On a more serious note, it’s great that WSL has gotten much faster, although it’s a little disappointing that they threw out the older, more interesting architecture to get it and just used a VM.

Part of my clings to hope that this is strictly because rewriting all those gazillion syscalls was a PITA, and they will eventually convert on something in between WSL1 and WSL2 where the Linux "front end" is used with NT, like the opposite of a rump kernel.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#47

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

d4mi3n wrote: post #42
sk5t wrote: post #10

Is there a shell+terminal+font combo that folks really like for WSL? I've tried the new terminal beta with zsh and--for reasons I can't quite articulate right now--it feels "off" and I invariably proceed to boot up virtualbox for my debian, i3, kitty, fira code setup to get work done. Maybe it's the break in filesystems and $HOME? Edit: learning that WSL2 does away with the syscall-translating tech and mandates Hyper…

Windows Terminal is made by the same guys working on WSL and works pretty well: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal You can get it via the Microsoft Store and it comes with support for connecting to WSL, Powershell, and cmd.exe out of the box.

Seconding Windows Terminal. I happen to also really like the font that comes with it -- Cascadia Code. But I'm a sucker for ligatures.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#49

Post by saagarjha »

d4mi3n wrote: post #42
sk5t wrote: post #10

Is there a shell+terminal+font combo that folks really like for WSL? I've tried the new terminal beta with zsh and--for reasons I can't quite articulate right now--it feels "off" and I invariably proceed to boot up virtualbox for my debian, i3, kitty, fira code setup to get work done. Maybe it's the break in filesystems and $HOME? Edit: learning that WSL2 does away with the syscall-translating tech and mandates Hyper…

Windows Terminal is made by the same guys working on WSL and works pretty well: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal You can get it via the Microsoft Store and it comes with support for connecting to WSL, Powershell, and cmd.exe out of the box.

I think that’s the “new terminal beta” they were talking about.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#50

Post by bitwize »

derekp7 wrote: post #14

Question -- from what I understand, WSL2 is closer to Linux running in a VM, whereas WSL1 was like a Windows kernel level version of Cygwin. Is that mostly correct? Regarding that, remember a number of years ago, prior to VMs there was a patch set for the Linux kernel porting it to user space -- so you could run Linux as a user process, which ended up functioning similar to running it in a VM. Would WSL2 be closer to…

WSL (1) was what the BSD people call a "kernel personality", which allows one kernel to emulate another at the syscall and ABI level.
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