honestly, i use WSL to ssh into servers in a pinch and get things taken care of... my experience actually trying to develop things (python/django/node) has been poor otherwise.
Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
111–120 of 420 posts
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#112Out of curiosity, what do most people use this for? (I tried rewording this question a few times to not sound snarky, but failed.)
Web development primarily
Or most open source non-windows software work. So many tools run great (or only run) under Linux, and dev tooling for these projects is also heavily Linux-centric. Often you might be able to get a package working under Windows, but support is thin and it's prone to breakage. Easier to just run it under Linux in a VM, like what WSL2 is doing.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#113Earlier 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.
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.
The Linux multimedia story improves significantly if you avoid Nvidia GPU hardware. My work desktop (AMD Radeon) and laptop (Intel HD Graphics) work fine, and perform as the hardware should.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#114I 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.
But why could not you do the same before? Even before WSL there was MSYS, which IMO is great, unless you need to compile a C program, that directly uses Linux headers.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#115I 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.
I use it all the time. I develop software for Windows but being able to use various Linux utilities and software is super convinient.
Many of them have ports to Windows but it's just easier when it's all already available. Some days ago I needed to run some penetration test software and while supposedly I should be able to download the code myself and build in Windows, just installing using apt is a lot easier.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
I use Docker on macOS daily for work. I love it, and am grateful for it, but the experience is NOTHING like using Docker on Linux. Docker for macOS runs in a virtual machine, and requires dedicating RAM to the daemon. You aren’t directly using the host OS’ kernel either, which can lead to wonky behavior, especially in regards to networking (IME).
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#117VMWare [0] will also support the Hypervisor Platform Api [1] allowing it to run besides WSL2 which uses Hyper-V. VirtualBox is still struggling and runs slow if at all with WSL2 and Hyper-V [2] This of course has implications on how you setup Docker on a Windows machine, each way having pros and cons. [0] https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2020/01/vmware-workstat... [1] https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/virtualizati…
Thanks. This information is important to me. I abbandoned WSL2 because it couldn't work along VMWare but the tide seems to have changed.
Ever since Docker became a popular tech, VMware has had little choice: I need docker for my job, so I can't use VMware. That doesn't get them the dollars they want.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
But why could not you do the same before? Even before WSL there was MSYS, which IMO is great, unless you need to compile a C program, that directly uses Linux headers.
It’s possible I could have and I just wasn’t sufficiently in the know about which tools to use. I hadn’t used MSYS. I’ve taken my current workflow so far as to even use nix as my primary package manager. Would this have been easily possible before? I ask in earnest. My setup right now is such that even mildly arcane things like that just seem to work for the most part.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#119I just used VirtualBox by Oracle with Linux Mint. Seems less buggier and I can share files with Dropbox, etc.