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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

#221
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My git status/add/commit/push cycle has gone from seconds to minutes in length. It's unbearable and I'm going to abandon wsl as a result. Shame, it was really good.

why not use git natively? I've never understood why people use git in WSL since the IO performance isn't great

Unfortunately Git on Windows is also extremely slow. Especially using Magit in emacs, which does a lot of git calls, works much, much faster for me if it's sshing to a Linux VM for each call then running natively on Windows.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#222
post #76

Out of curiosity, what do most people use this for? (I tried rewording this question a few times to not sound snarky, but failed.)

Easy interplay between linux and windows programs on the same files.

WSL2 in particular lets me use a BTRFS partition and expose it to windows with a lot less awkwardness than the VM I had before.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#223

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

That's not my experience with VS Code on WSL 2. I have been using it for months using the remote extension, hosting my git repos in the Ubuntu subsystem, it works like a charm and feels very responsive.

Maybe wait for an IDE update that handles properly WSL 2?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#224

Earlier 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?

- Bind mount performance is appalling, even with the delegated/cached modes. I understand the reasons for this, but it's still a major issue for some workloads. To use PHP development as an example, where a popular framework boot-up can read hundreds of files per request (as well as writing out to caches), it's not uncommon to see 5 second response times for a page that displays "hello world" and nothing else. Thankfully there are tools like docker-sync and Mutagen which, while it's one extra thing to set up, get you back to nearly native performance.

- com.docker.hyperkit is nuts. I can have a single container idling in the background doing nothing, hear my laptop fans spin up, and know without checking that com.docker.hyperkit is using 200% CPU for no discernible reason. Restarting the daemon brings things back down...for a while.

At the office we use Linux, but since I've been working from home on my Mac I've gone back to Vagrant for as many projects as I can. Heavier and far less easy to orchestrate yes, but I've found I actually end up with better and more predictable performance (and far less time with my laptop doing double duty as a space heater).

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#225
post #159
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.

None, as I stay away from them as far I can avoid them, Java and .NET are perfectly fine and IDEs have docker support in case I really need to deal with it.

Oh cool, we can just abandon all other languages and toolchains so we can switch to windows native. Why didn't I think of that?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#226
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Presumably, this also means you have to have Hyper-V enabled, crippling all other VM software How does hyper-V cripple other VM software? I just had to enable it to use a prebuilt VM I need, now I’m a little worried

Last time I checked (months ago) VirtualBox just couldn't run under Hyper-V. If you Google around you'll see lots of threads, e.g. https://superuser.com/q/1208850 Apparently they claim that as of February 19, 2020, they've "Restored the ability to run VMs through Hyper-V, at the expense of performance". https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.1

Restored? That's a weird line. I don't think it ever lost it since the feature was added in 6.0 (released December 18 2018), it was just annoying to activate.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last time I checked (months ago) VirtualBox just couldn't run under Hyper-V. If you Google around you'll see lots of threads, e.g. https://superuser.com/q/1208850 Apparently they claim that as of February 19, 2020, they've "Restored the ability to run VMs through Hyper-V, at the expense of performance". https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.1

Restored? That's a weird line. I don't think it ever lost it since the feature was added in 6.0 (released December 18 2018), it was just annoying to activate.

I couldn't get it work, so it was broken as I saw it... not sure who could actually get it to work then.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#228
post #53
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree wholeheartedly. I know it was probably a fool’s errand especially in a world where Docker for Windows was doing the same thing WSL2 does but worse, but WSL1’s design just satisfied me in a way that Hyper-V will not. Presumably, this also means you have to have Hyper-V enabled, crippling all other VM software. Hope the integration is impressive at least, to hopefully make up for it. I admittedly don’t run Wind…

Stop blaming Hyper-V for "crippling other VM software". You ever tried to run VBox and KVM together? It's a limitation of the processor's virtualization extension.

The complaint is not necessarily with Hyper-V itself, it is with WSL2 requiring Hyper-V, thus stopping you from using WSL2 and VBox (or VMware) on the same machine - though apparently they have very recently fixed this.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Has that changed from wsl 1? I've seen bad things about directly trying to modify the files within wsl.

It's not the appdata folder right?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#230

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.

Been running some flavour of Debian for > 10 years. Now on my dell XPS 13 9350. Upgraded to Debian 10, a kernel regression broke the brcfmac driver for my Broadcom wireless. Now I need to disable power saving on the WiFi card. Still, sometimes the WiFi card just dies. Sometimes reloading the kernel module works, sometimes only a hard reset will do. Bluetooth has never worked.

Broadcom unfortunately has never been well supported on Linux. I've always used ThinkPads for running Linux and have never had these sorts of hardware issues (and I keep laptops for at least 8 years). You need to buy a machine with running Linux in mind (or more specifically, Debian, which has even less out-of-the-box hardware support for laptops).
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