91–100 of 233 posts
Big fan of WSL, get power of Windows and the full power of Linux combined. Can easily switch between gaming and development.
One caveat is that WSL2 needs Hyper-V, and many anti-cheats won't work with it (many CS:GO anticheats, I think it will be true for many multiplayer shooters).
I think you can't play inside a VM (like Hyper-V), which is a different story.
It's using the 9P Filesystem to sync the two between systems... that's interesting.
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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.
My (casual, not work) use relies heavily on Nix, which is built around a centralized SQLite file. I did not enjoy that experience.
Big fan of WSL, get power of Windows and the full power of Linux combined. Can easily switch between gaming and development.
All this on AMD graphics with standard open source drivers btw, did not install either proprietary drivers or "special" open source versions.
(Card is this in case anyone cares:)
0c:00.0 VGA … [AMD/ATI] Baffin [Radeon RX 550 640SP / RX 560/560X] (rev cf)
OpenGL renderer string: Radeon RX 560 Series (POLARIS11, DRM 3.36.0, 5.6.2+, LLVM 9.0.1)
OpenGL core profile version string: 4.6 (Core Profile) Mesa 20.0.2
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> 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.
Personally I never had a problem with filesystem performance on WSL 1. I certainly don't think it was so bad that the whole thing needed to be scrapped in favor of a virtual machine.
> 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.
Yeah don't get too excited, it's just a VM. The disk usage doesn't automatically shrink with usage, and I'm not sure if RAM does either (interested in knowing if they've done anything related to that), which were what I found most useful about WSL1. I wish they'd instead put all their effort from this into legitimately fixing the issues in WSL1 instead.
That's possible in theory, I've done it with libvirt/KVM. You have to enable discard on all filesystems and swap on the guest, use a virtual disk interface which can pass the discard requests to the host, and configure the host to release the corresponding blocks on a discard request. I don't know if WSL2 comes configured to do all that, but if not, it shouldn't be too hard for them to add this functionality.
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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.
To be fair, I read that as "NT (kernel) filesystem performance" and didn't assume it meant NT File System as in NTFS.
But in any case, I think the component you want to refer to in that case it the "I/O subsystem".
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You could already do that with WSL1. Source: I have Arch and Ubuntu on WSL1. Those didn't change. Other things did.
WSL1 managed to corrupt SQLite dbs. Which is really annoying, and does not happen with WSL2. My (casual, not work) use relies heavily on Nix, which is built around a centralized SQLite file. I did not enjoy that experience.
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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 f…
Why not just move to Linux?