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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

#91

Post by richjdsmith »

nilkn wrote: post #41
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.

I'm in the same boat.

I'm looking at selling my Mac and just getting an iPad to replace it - running Windows 10 + WSL + VSCode on my desktop pc is more pleasant for me to code at home with than my macbook.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#92

Post by mcny »

simplicio wrote: post #78
aspaceman wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Totally agree. Feels like a “windows has to be first” type of thing.

There was a MS employee on twitter the other day (sorry, I forgot who) saying it was because there were legal issues with naming something with a title that has someone else's trademark as the first word.

That completely makes sense in my mind just because my favorite reddit app is called slide for reddit. I think reddit forced everyone to use x for Reddit in their name as opposed to Reddit X.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#93

Post by mehrdadn »

kyriakos wrote: post #82
mehrdadn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The things I liked the most about WSL were the ability to share the same file system (and RAM, etc.) and not have to care about partitioning any resources. And to search the Linux files on the Windows side and even modify them with tools that can handle them (yes, I know what I'm doing). Now all of that goes out the window(s)... so I'm pretty unenthusiastic about WSL2. And the 9P server has been next to useless for m…

You still don't need to manage all those things. Wsl2 does it all automatically as far as I ve seen from the current version I tried

It needs a VHD, which requires setting aside a partition of your disk, meaning you can't dynamically share space with your Windows files. That's a huge downside for me. (By "partition" here I'm just referring to the English sense, not the MBR/GPT per se.)

You also can't nor search/modify your Linux files directly from Windows like I mentioned. The 9P server with WSL1 has been so slow as to be unusable for some directories when I try to use it. Does it feel native SSD-speed on WSL2?

As for RAM, does it really share RAM with Windows? That's great news if it does, but I don't think I've seen any VMs do this, though I've never tried it with Hyper-V... if it does, I'm guessing that's what lets it use memory ballooning?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#94

Post by saagarjha »

robocat wrote: post #56
bitwize wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So WSL1 on Windows is similar to Wine on Linux?

Right.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#95

Post by tasogare »

waheoo wrote: post #83
juped wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL was very cool from a pure tech standpoint, but I've never been clear what the actual use case for it was. WSL2 seems to be more along the lines of coLinux, which I felt the same way about when it was new.

The usecase was Apple has Terminal.app, Windows has MS-DOS. Tell me which you would rather use for node and or docker development.

There is so much confusion and technical inaccuracies in this little post it’s hard to know where to start...

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#96

Post by chx »

juped wrote: post #67
chx wrote: post #59

I am giving up. WSL1 was a great invention but Microsoft gave up on it, either because of the filesystem performance problems or because of the debuggers. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028 (lldb, rr, delve all affected). This looks like a dreaded case of the first 90% is easy, it's the second 90% that is hard. Imagine implementing a translator for a vast majority of Linux syscalls just to find certain flav…

WSL was very cool from a pure tech standpoint, but I've never been clear what the actual use case for it was. WSL2 seems to be more along the lines of coLinux, which I felt the same way about when it was new.

Well, if you want to use multimedia and do web development on the same machine, what are you going to do? Linux support is somewhere between nonexistent and utterly broken for the first one and the same can be said for the second on Windows. So your choices are, 1. run Linux primary, put Windows in a VM 2. run Windows primary and put Linux in a VM 3. Give up and just run a separate Linux server.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#97

Post by jdsully »

I've been running this in the insider branch for the last 3 months and it's been amazing. You can even recompile your own kernel if you want.

Your essentially getting the "real thing" with pretty seamless integration to the rest of windows. I'd never want to go back to WSL1.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#98

Post by abhishekjha »

dboreham wrote: post #89
waheoo wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usecase was Apple has Terminal.app, Windows has MS-DOS. Tell me which you would rather use for node and or docker development.

Windows with git and its bash installed works surprisingly well for node development. Docker doesn't work on either MacOS nor Windows, right?

I have used docker on MacOS. I don’t know about windows but it ran fine on my mac. Is there something particular that didn’t work for you?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#99

Post by _bxg1 »

rozab wrote: post #90
_bxg1 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What Electron-related problems have you had with VSCode? I've been using it as my primary for a few years now and it's been nothing but stellar. And that integration sounds incredibly cool.

The electron hate really is getting old. vscode and some other electron apps run far faster than many comparable programs with a more traditional architecture. Yes electron could be considered inelegant, but so can a great many things in computing. If it works, we should use it.

Yep. If anything, "old-school" Visual Studio is the one that feels bloated by comparison, despite being a native app. Software quality cannot be reduced to the choice of language or framework.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#100

Post by rossy »

bayesian_horse wrote: post #28

We need a Linux subsystem for Windows... Though Wine is quite good.

While similar in concept, Wine is better than WSL1 in a lot of ways due to supporting sound, graphics, and GPU acceleration.

I've always been suspicious of WSL because it follows a narrative that benefits Microsoft - that Linux is primarily a command-line/server environment, and the graphical and audio applications for Linux are not worthwhile. It doesn't have to be like this. WSL1 was based on an Android environment for Windows Phone called Project Astoria, which did support graphics.

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