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Initial Impressions of WSL 2

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Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#61

Post by gmueckl »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #33
unicornfinder wrote: post #2

I 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 par…

Have you tried using Emacs with an X server for Windows?

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#62

Post by k__ »

mehrdadn wrote: post #50
moomin wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, but the good news is you can literally run Arch, Debian and Fedora on the same machine with shared files.

You could already do that with WSL1. Source: I have Arch and Ubuntu on WSL1. Those didn't change. Other things did.

They didn't say that something changed.

But I'm intrigued, what did change?

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#63

Post by cmiles74 »

frankohn wrote: post #44

As a long time free software and linux supporter I am a little bit afraid of this. It seems like a very smart move from Microsoft. They get rid of the abysmal performance of windows's file system and spawning new processes by using... linux! Provide also an excellent terminal so that developers have the best experience with command line tools, all this without leaving the convenience of Windows! Not surprising since…

I think that people who really embrace the free software philosophy will continue to use Linux. I used Linux for years and I really enjoyed it on several levels.

In my opinion, WSL2 is leveling out the playing field between Windows and MacOS. If you were doing web development (and many people are) it had always been so much easier to get up and running on a Mac. MacOS had native versions of all the stuff web developers use (Python, Ruby, PHP, etc.), on Windows things were always surrounded with a haze of "unsupported" and "non-standard". WSL2 doesn't entirely resolve this issue but it goes a long way towards getting it done.

For myself, I have to do a lot more native Windows development and have had to switch from using Linux at work to Windows (running Visual Studio in a VM under Linux all day just wasn't cutting it). Having all the familiar tools available in WSL2 has made the transition much, much easier.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#64

Post by akjssdk »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #33
unicornfinder wrote: post #2

I 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 par…

You can run emacs on WSL and just pass the X output to windows using an X server like VcXsrv. This works pretty seamless for me, no noticeable lag or anything.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#65

Post by mehrdadn »

Tuna-Fish wrote: post #57
VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #18

> Those pain points were solved in WSL 2 by embedding a whole first-party Linux VM inside Windows Wait so now it's just a regular Linux virtual machine? I thought it was a thin translation layer between the kernels? Kinda not as impressive now.

> I thought it was a thin translation layer between the kernels? WSL1 was like that, but it was severely handicapped by NT filesystem performance, especially for small files or metadata operations. There are a lot of small operations that are more than 2 orders of magnitude slower on Windows than on Linux, and a lot of Linux software just expects them to be fast, so WSL1 is not a great experience for a lot of stuff.

Note that the performance didn't really have anything to do with NTFS. This is trivial to prove if you just try a different filesystem.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#66

Post by drewg123 »

tyingq wrote: post #35
drey08 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FreeBSD has a similar syscall translation layer (and has had it for over 20 years). They do it with a team of part-time volunteers. This is enough to maintain basic support, but FreeBSD still lack support for newer Linux syscalls which prevent things like the Linux binary version of Chrome from running on FreeBSD.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#67

Post by cmiles74 »

jtdev wrote: post #31

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?

I need Windows to continue to work on these lame old .Net Framework applications that I have to maintain. I'm working on migrating them to .Net Core but that's not a priority for the company, it's something I do as time and budget allows. Running Visual Studio under a VM in Linux is fine here and there but unpleasant all day long.

I also still need to maintain several Java projects and some tools that leverage Ruby. Using Java on Windows isn't a big deal, but the Ruby tools are aimed at Unix-ish platforms and I find it a lot easier to work with Ruby under WSL instead of messing around with native Ruby on Windows.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#68

Post by teleforce »

unicornfinder wrote: post #2

I 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.

Those of us who have been using Linux around the the year 2000 will remember the April fool joke on Slashdot about running Linux alongside Windows. The often repeated mantra, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you and then you win. The main reason of this seamless integration happening between Linux and Windows is most probably the fact that developers or the "cool kids" going to MacOS by the droves. Like what people normally say, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Only time will tell how many of the "developers" will come to Windows via the unthinkable Linux route, but correctly done Windows and Linux integration is a potent OS combination.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#69

Post by scarface74 »

michaelbuckbee wrote: post #58
scarface74 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There are tail wagging the dog incentives here. Part (not all) of the Mac resurgence was that you needed a Mac to develop iPhone apps. Part (not all) of the new Windows resurgence is that if you even really want to play around with ML or VR dev you need a Windows machine. I feel like it's about the possibilities - with WSL, Windows Terminal I get what's essentially the mac experience but can suddenly do so much more.

The Mac’s “resurgence” started around 1999 with the introduction of the iMac - 9 years before the App Store opened. Apple currently sells around 16-20 million Macs a year.

No matter how good WSL is, if you want to develop iOS apps, you still have to buy a Mac.

There are around 200 million consumer PCs sold a year. Do you really think any significant number or sold to develop VR apps - that market is minis use.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#70

Post by tyingq »

drewg123 wrote: post #66
tyingq wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

FreeBSD has a similar syscall translation layer (and has had it for over 20 years). They do it with a team of part-time volunteers. This is enough to maintain basic support, but FreeBSD still lack support for newer Linux syscalls which prevent things like the Linux binary version of Chrome from running on FreeBSD.

Yes, but translating syscalls across two Unix like systems is likely much easier. Big parts of it even just straight mapping one number to another.
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