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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

#211

Post by sullyj3 »

rossy wrote: post #100
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…

The graphical and audio applications for linux aren't worthwhile, or at least they're not competitive with the top proprietary offerings. It's not really about the theoretical capacity of of linux to support audio and graphics. The low market share of desktop linux makes it not economically worthwhile for top proprietary software companies to port to linux. That's just an unfortunate fact. I don't really want to edit graphics with Gimp when Photoshop exists, and I don't really want to produce music in Ardour when Ableton Live exists.

I think the only real way to fix this is to change the economic incentives by increasing desktop Linux market share, which is a long and uphill battle.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#212

Post by hunter2_ »

saagarjha wrote: post #136
9wzYQbTYsAIc wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows has Windows Terminal and PowerShell, too. Apple and Linux also have PowerShell.

Presumably the draw is UNIX, not the Terminal app itself.

POSIX is probably the best way to put it. This would cover Unix, Gnu/Linux, Darwin, BSD... the whole family tree.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#213

Post by dleslie »

nindalf wrote: post #201
dleslie wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I need them available to Windows tools, like Visual Studio and Unity.

I think the popular Windows development tools will get support for remote development with WSL. JetBrains is working on it for IntelliJ and I can't imagine Visual Studio will be far behind.

I need it working fast now. I won't upgrade to WSL2 until its speed is improved.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#214

Post by Dylan16807 »

veesahni wrote: post #164
AaronFriel wrote: post #140

In WSL1, running "wsl git status" on a moderately sized repo on an NTFS (Windows side) drive or SMB file share is nearly instantaneous. In WSL2, running the same command takes over 30 seconds. WSL2 is a massive hit to the seemless experience between the two operating systems with filesystem performance from Linux to Windows files orders of magnitude worse. Yes, unzipping tarballs or manipulating and stat syscalls are…

I believe WSL2 was designed to keep your files inside on ext4 instead of outside on NTFS.

Yes, but it sure would be nice to get native speeds on both.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#215

Post by wutwutwutwut »

sieabahlpark wrote: post #193
sz4kerto wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL2 is really not designed for using Linux tools on your NTFS-based filesystem. Store everything on the WSL filesystem, that works perfectly. If you need GUI tools try VcXsrv.

What do you propose if you want to use a windows program to edit those files? For example I use intellij on Windows but want to compile and test on the Linux machine. If it takes 30 seconds longer than wsl 1, why would I bother changing? What is the actual point of wsl if not for the cross compatible filesystems

You can access files on the Linux file system from Windows.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#216

Post by deburo »

sieabahlpark wrote: post #193
sz4kerto wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL2 is really not designed for using Linux tools on your NTFS-based filesystem. Store everything on the WSL filesystem, that works perfectly. If you need GUI tools try VcXsrv.

What do you propose if you want to use a windows program to edit those files? For example I use intellij on Windows but want to compile and test on the Linux machine. If it takes 30 seconds longer than wsl 1, why would I bother changing? What is the actual point of wsl if not for the cross compatible filesystems

It seems WSL1 isn't going away for now, so you can keep using that. WSL1 and 2 can be run side-by-side, isn't that pretty good?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq#what-w...

Also, it seems the Intellij team is working on supporting WSL2 in some ways. Check their issue tracker.

Ex: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-197573

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#217

Post by dman »

chx wrote: post #202
jmiskovic wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems like comment from early 2000s. I don't remember last time I head problems with BT or sound, and I went through dozen of installations in last 3 years (for me and others). I had to give up on Nvidia drivers but Intel graphics serves me great.

Bluetooth broke on me: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=204875 2015 November https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206032 2015 December https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=210685 2016 March. And these were times when I needed community help, most of the time I could get it working by pairing again or some such nonsense. It never worked reliably, in general. Note I switched to Windows as my daily…

If you things to just keep on working Arch might not be the distro for you. Have you tried something like ubuntu?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#218

Post by Dylan16807 »

mehrdadn wrote: post #93
kyriakos wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 direct…

Supposedly it can release memory, as of October. It wasn't working in January when I last tried it, but I guess it's worth putting it back on auto to see what happens.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#219

Post by iknowstuff »

_bxg1 wrote: post #146
mcovalt wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Font rendering is a bit blurry.

I haven't experienced this, but I mostly use it on a Mac. What OS are you on?

Technically, on Macs, all font rendering is blurry. :) https://pandasauce.org/post/linux-fonts/

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#220

Post by CJefferson »

m0zg wrote: post #51
saagarjha wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean Wine?

They mean MS replacing the Windows kernel with Linux kernel. Which doesn't sound as crazy as it did just a couple of years ago. Just put all the Windows crap in a VM, similar to WSL2.

I dont understand how that would provide any benefit. First problem, all those lovely windows drivers for every piece of hardware and laptop ever made would need porting to Linux.
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