What are some use cases that would cause a person to choose Windows as their primary OS, but require WSL? At what point do you just move to a *nix OS and virtualize Windows on the rare occasion that it’s truly needed?
Initial Impressions of WSL 2
31–40 of 233 posts
Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2
#32Since this is based on Hyper-V, I guess it is a Windows 10 Professional-only feature ? Or did they enable a trim down version of Hyper-V which can be used on Home licenses ?
Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2
#33I must say WSL2 has genuinely been huge for me, to the point where I've finally been able to ditch macOS for a desktop with a Ryzen CPU. Honestly it's mindblowing how far Windows has come - if I were Apple I'd genuinely be scared of losing a large proportion of power-users as Windows becomes an increasingly viable platform for development.
I really like WSL. And Windows 10, well, it's not awful. I don't hate it anymore than I hate Mac OS's GUI. I find things especially nice with the new Windows Terminal.
But the piece missing is still first class support for X (or Wayland) Linux applications. Without GUI Emacs, for example, or some way of integrating the Windows Emacs well, I find the WSL experience not as productive as booting into my actual Linux partition. But it's like... 90% there.
One thing I really like is that the Windows version of CLion will use SSH to connect into your WSL installation and use the Linux toolchain. So you can develop both Linux and Windows applications using the CLion GUI IDE on Windows, it's quite seamless.
Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2
#34Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2
#35No free lunch, of course. Faster file access with WSL2 (vs WSL1), if you stay in the Linux world. But if you point it at Windows files (/mnt/c, etc), it's pretty slow. WSL2 just moved the slowness from one side to the other. Accessing the Linux FS from Windows (\\wsl$\) is also slow. That said, I am a fan, and get a lot of use out of WSL1. Since I don't use the Windows interop much, WSL2 should be a performance win f…
Yep. With WSL I can seamlessly access files from both Linux and Windows. I use the Terminal (Windows) and various Unix tools for a lot of stuff (compiling & testing on Posix, objdump, debugging). And I use Windows GUI tools for editing (Sublime), diffing (BeyondCompare), and so on. I get the best of both worlds. But WSL2 file access in `/mnt/c/` is now unbearably slow. So I just stick with WSL1. From what I've read,…
"Microsoft intends to support both WSL1 and WSL2"
I'm not sure I believe them. Maintaining a whole tricky "fake" kernel/translation shim must be a lot of work.
Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2
#36Since this is based on Hyper-V, I guess it is a Windows 10 Professional-only feature ? Or did they enable a trim down version of Hyper-V which can be used on Home licenses ?
The latter
Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2
#37Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2
#38What are some use cases that would cause a person to choose Windows as their primary OS, but require WSL? At what point do you just move to a *nix OS and virtualize Windows on the rare occasion that it’s truly needed?
I need Windows for Unity dev and VR.
Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2
#39I must say WSL2 has genuinely been huge for me, to the point where I've finally been able to ditch macOS for a desktop with a Ryzen CPU. Honestly it's mindblowing how far Windows has come - if I were Apple I'd genuinely be scared of losing a large proportion of power-users as Windows becomes an increasingly viable platform for development.
The Mac is 10% of Apple’s revenue. How much of that 10% do you really think are developers that would switch just because Microsoft supports Linux? Especially considering that macOS is a real certified Unix not just tacked on.
Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2
#40What are some use cases that would cause a person to choose Windows as their primary OS, but require WSL? At what point do you just move to a *nix OS and virtualize Windows on the rare occasion that it’s truly needed?
Developing linux software on windows is actually pretty painful.
Actually, running any linux software in general such as middleman or Jekyll is pretty painful on Windows- I recently had a horrible time trying to get git-crypt working for a colleague of mine who was using Windows..
There's a lot of value in being able to just run "linux" (with bash, grep, sed, awk, gcc, python) while being able to access your normal files on a Windows desktop.
You _can_ do this with VirtualBox but it's janky, slow, buggy and generally awkward.