Live data from Hacker News

Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

infoq.com

251–260 of 420 posts

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#251

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

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?

> the remote extension

Then you could as well run your stuff in a regular docker container, WSL becomes redundant.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#252
I have a MacBook Pro that I wanted to turn into a Windows laptop.

Unfortunately if you install Windows from scratch, without going through Bootcamp to install it side by side with MacOS, Hyper-V support is disabled.

This means that I cannot use WSL2. Or Windows, since without a working Linux environment it's useless to me and I don't want to invest in WSL v1. Might as well go for Ubuntu 20.04.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#253
post #100

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…

WSL1 can do graphics just fine, if you run the X server in your Windows environment (which is the right way to do this, in any case). There's implementations - forks of Xming, I assume - that are set up to work like that with minimum hassle, e.g. https://x410.dev/

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#255
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Technically, there should be more HiDPI monitors on the market. I'm using now 24" monitor with 4k resolution, scaled 200%, and fonts are perfect :)

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#256

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

For wsl2, Vscode has integrations that let you do exactly that. I use python primarily and it lets you use the python interpreter installed on wsl. I assume other IDEs would have something similar or at least let you develop using a remote machine, but in this case you would configure it to point at your VM instead. As long as your processes and files are from the wsl vm, it is extremely fast. I rather use the wsl sh…

The problem is that special integration is required.

Personally I don't like VS Code, I too use IntelliJ IDEA, which will probably end up having support, but it didn't last time I tried.

On my Macbook I also use Emacs and GUI versus terminal shouldn't be an issue. I'd want Emacs from inside a WSL bash, I'd want it from the Windows GUI too. So that's going to be a headache.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#257
post #172

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…

> and is so close to feature parity That was not my experience with WSL1; I was regularly running into unimplemented features. Some examples: the Z3 solver used clock_gettime for timeouts, and their specific usage was broken in WSL1 so you'd get random failures depending on how long the solve took. And don't get me started on running Chromium. It felt like WSL1 would be running into the long tail of compatibility iss…

Some useful network related stuff wasn't implemented either in WSL1 (NETLINK_ROUTE\RTM_GETROUTE, AF_PACKET family). This meant even good ol' nmap was out.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#258
post #236
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I have fairly linux friendly laptop (Thinkpad T480) with Fedora, and GPU driver was broken for whole 5.3 kernel tree...

I have a T480 as well and both the nvidia (closed source) and intel drivers work for me on Kubuntu.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#259

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…

Have you tried using cygwin? I found cygwin worlds better than WSL, as it always worked correctly on arbitrary disks and folders.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#260

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

WSL never really got the cross compatible filesystems working though: I eventually found myself giving up on it and just using cygwin. I honestly don't understand why WSL gets so much attention when cygwin is just so much more compatible with everything and includes essentially every package I have ever wanted?
Post reply on HN