Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability • Hacker News Board

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#371

Post by wayneftw » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

LeonM wrote: post #235

chmln wrote: post #197

In genuine amazement at a lot of the comments here - why not just dual boot Linux instead of using it in a VM? Productivity on a Linux machine can be so far ahead of Windows, especially if you've got a terminal-based workflow an maybe a tiling WM

My workflow is mostly terminal based, and I used to use tiling WMs, yet I am now back to Windows + WSL. Why? Because GPU driver compatibility is still so bad on Linux that I can't get any of the popular distros to work properly on my setup (laptop with hybrid Intel/nVidia GPU setup, thunderbolt dock, external display with different scaling than laptop display). And yes, if I spend a weekend fiddling with Nouveau driv…

I have been on Manjaro with XFCE for the past couple of years and it's a dream. Haven't had one driver problem. Zoom, Slack and Beyond Compare all work without issue as does VS Code. Installing and updating all software via the package manager UI is so much better than Windows that I'll never go back. Furthermore, I think that XFCE provides a better Windows experience for developers than Windows does - at least I don't have to find, download and install 7+ taskbar tweaker or hack the system configuration registry to get the features I want out of it.

Mixing business and gaming on the same machine caused problems for me even when I was fully on Windows, so I've always kept separate machines for that.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#372

Post by hiram112 » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 3:25 PM UTC

kyriakos wrote: post #349

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.

I have my projects in WSL and IDE (jetbrains) in Windows. Works fine, obviously IDE file system responsiveness is lower than native but the execution / build performance of project in WSL makes up for it.

I tried this on WSL1 and it absolutely didn't work for any project larger than the typical Hello World example. Trying to use a polyglot project with a bunch of Java, Scala, Go, various plugins like DB views, etc. would grind Jetbrains on Windows to a halt as it simply couldn't sync with the project files on Linux due to slow IO.

I've used Linux VMs on Windows before - VMWare Workstation has been around for over a decade and has a lot of bells and whistles that make the experience tolerable, but again, the IO is too slow to share Windows and Linux apps between filesystems, so you're basically forced to develop 100% in the VM, IDE included. If you're locked to a Windows laptop because of your employee's IT rules, it's better than nothing, but not optimal, and I wonder why people are so excited for WSL2 when VMs that have more features have been around for over a decade.

I've been trying to find a non-Apple solution for a decade, and it just doesn't exist. And as Apple has been ignoring developers and MacOS itself for the last 5 years, and Linux is still riddled with the same problems it has had for 20 years, the options for developers are becoming less and less.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#373

Post by hiram112 » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 3:32 PM UTC

saurik wrote: post #260

sieabahlpark wrote: post #193

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

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?

I've wondered the same. A lot of it is PR from Microsoft, including this post here probably.

There is a Reddit sub for WSL (/r/bashonubuntuonwindows) and it's apparent that MS has PR people on it pimping each new release. Reminding these mostly new developers that Cygwin has been around (with all its problems) for years, brings on a flood of downvotes.

And now it's exactly the same with WSL2; when someone has an issue with some esoteric networking feature that is still not supported on WSL2 beta versions, I'll often remind them that VMWare Player and VirtualBox have been around for a decade and will solve their problem, while also including all sorts of nice features like shared folders, drag & drop, copy and paste integration, etc. But they don't want to hear it. They've been fed so much marketing that WSL and WSL2 are really something incredible...

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#374

Post by RMPR » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 3:41 PM UTC

_bxg1 wrote: post #360

RMPR wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two doesn't even play in the same category: "source code editor" vs full fledged IDE It doesn't make much sense to compare the two in general imho.

VSCode is truly a full-fledged IDE for TypeScript at least, and via plugins it can play the part for several other languages, including Rust. Mostly those depend on the quality of their Language Server implementations.

Which was exactly my point, I said "in general" but for some precise use cases, the comparison actually makes sense.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#375

Post by nailer » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

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.

What are the annoyances?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#376

Post by littlestymaar » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 4:02 PM UTC

mattbee wrote: post #312

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…

My understanding was that there were some hard-to-impossible problems to solve to really accelerate the filesystem access from the Linux side under WSL1. That meant that people doing disk-intensive workloads on the Linux side noticed a big slowdown compared to a native Linux system - certainly e.g. running a big test suite, or a git checkout felt really incredibly slow. The switch to a VM flipped this relationship ro…

Long bet: WSL3 will just be Microsoft dropping the NT kernel altogether and replace it with the opposite compatibility layer (like Wine) running on top of the Linux kernel.

It probably won't happen anytime soon, but to me it looks pretty inevitable in the long run : because of Azure they already spend tons of engineering time on the Linux kernel nowadays, and maintaining their own proprietary kernel won't make much economic sense for long, exactly like maintaining their own browser engine.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#377

Post by GordonS » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 4:07 PM UTC

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?

Git for Windows with all the Unix tools it installs works great for me. It's nice for working with Docker, writing and running bash scripts etc.

I have WSL1 installed, but very seldom feel the need to actually use it.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#378

Post by chx » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 4:10 PM UTC

dman wrote: post #217

chx wrote: 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…

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

Yes. Yes, I did. At least with Arch I could keep on working because only one of BT / printer / scanner broke on update, most of the production bits kept working. When I ran Ubuntu the system shattered every six months so badly I couldn't work for 2-3 days.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#379

Post by WhyNotHugo » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

littlestymaar wrote: post #376

mattbee wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My understanding was that there were some hard-to-impossible problems to solve to really accelerate the filesystem access from the Linux side under WSL1. That meant that people doing disk-intensive workloads on the Linux side noticed a big slowdown compared to a native Linux system - certainly e.g. running a big test suite, or a git checkout felt really incredibly slow. The switch to a VM flipped this relationship ro…

Long bet: WSL3 will just be Microsoft dropping the NT kernel altogether and replace it with the opposite compatibility layer (like Wine) running on top of the Linux kernel. It probably won't happen anytime soon, but to me it looks pretty inevitable in the long run : because of Azure they already spend tons of engineering time on the Linux kernel nowadays, and maintaining their own proprietary kernel won't make much e…

I'd be very happy to see that happen one day. I've a really hard time grasping anything windows, and the more *nix it becomes, the better! <3

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#380

Post by Rusky » Wed, Apr 15, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #250

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…

Clearly the best solution is for Microsoft to (a) write a proper ext4 driver for Windows and (b) find some way of embedding SIDs into ext4, then you could just format the drive as ext4, boot off it, and have the improved performance. (This is mostly a joke, but the performance of NTFS for certain operations has always been abysmal, and having a virus scanner injecting itself into all the operations only makes it wors…

Much of the performance problem comes from layers on top of NTFS itself- it's not just the virus scanner. Ext4 might be faster but I doubt it would be enough to ditch WSL2 for those use cases that need it.