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Initial Impressions of WSL 2

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Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#221

Post by WorldMaker »

jfkebwjsbx wrote: post #166
alkonaut wrote: post #161

> there was a glimmer of hope that Web Development on Windows would be viable. I wonder if the success of WSL this will risk making some tooling that is already less-than-stellar on windows (Git, for example) even worse when the group that actually has to work on windows proper shrinks.

Microsoft has been putting a lot of resources on Git for a while, improving and contributing back to the original project. I expect the Windows Git will keep improving if they keep this Windows+Linux trend.

Plus, the Windows team itself uses git day-to-day now and it would be silly for Windows developers to spin up Linux VMs to git commit on the Windows Kernel. (Windows being source controlled in git has contributed directly and indirectly to a lot of git performance upgrades/tweaks in the last couple of years, including and especially to git running well natively on Windows.)

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#222

Post by WorldMaker »

BiteCode_dev wrote: post #151

> It’s still weird to say it, but Windows Terminal is hands-down the best terminal on Windows. Windows terminal is pretty good, but no, it's not yet the best terminal on windows. cmder is. It has panel split, quake mode, git integration... Now the read map of Windows Terminal is pretty convincing, so let's see how it plays out.

Windows Terminal has picked up panel split since v0.7: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/windows-terminal-...

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#223

Post by mycall »

WorldMaker wrote: post #220
zlynx wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know it's a fundamental kernel architecture decision that Microsoft can't just "fix." From the original NT microkernel design, filesystem access is all asynchronous messaging, and it can be intercepted and modified by drivers at many points. A lot of software takes advantage of that. But it's also why caching isn't as effective as it could be, since you can't rely on all those unknown layers returning the…

Also, NTFS has very different (multi-file) ACID guarantees and transaction semantics compared to most POSIX file systems. A lot of performance differences between Windows and POSIX file APIs make some sense in a NoSQL versus SQL database analogy: they make very different guarantees about what the "atomic commit" level is, what is stored and how it is stored, what is locked and how and when it is locked. They both hav…

I thought ReFS was suppose to give Windows different atomics and I'm surprised they haven't push it further into their client OS.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#224

Post by unicornfinder »

electricEmu wrote: post #206
saagarjha wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS has full keyboard access and you don’t need Karabiner to enable it.

It's my understanding that MacOS requires extra setup for those shortcuts regardless of Karabiner. If you feel that extra setup is acceptable then any almost modern OS will fit your needs. There's something to be said for standardized shortcuts that work on every MS Windows instance.

All you need to do is enable full keyboard access in System Preferences -> Accessibility and it'll work.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#226

Post by mehrdadn »

jrockway wrote: post #101
shawnz wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Windows does something weird with the filesystem that I have never figured out. In a msys2 shell, git is incredibly incredibly slow. I actually don't even bother running git in msys2 anymore; I just use the native git in that directory. (I use msys2 to cross-compile AVR stuff.) This seems to be a known issue, but nobody knows how to fix it. (It's some UAC thing, apparently.) I imagine this is what WSL 1 used, and it…

MSYS2 git has its own overhead; what you're seeing there isn't the Windows or native git overheads (though those also exist).

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#227

Post by pjmlp »

teleforce wrote: post #68
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…

Back in those days, if Microsoft had seriously invested in the POSIX subsystem, I would never bothered again with Linux.

We were deploying into production with Windows, Aix, HP-UX and Solaris.

The Red-Hat Linux server that we had around was only for test purposes.

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#228

Post by pjmlp »

ken wrote: post #53
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.

How many developers care about "certified Unix", or can even say exactly what that means? Is anyone buying Macintosh computers in order to run their certified Unix software? Linux isn't certified , and none of developers using that seem to mind. If Microsoft got WSL "certified", would any Linux user consider it a better Linux than Linux?

Actually there are Linux distributions that are UNIX certified, namely Inspur K-UX and EulerOS 2.0.

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3617.htm

https://www.opengroup.org/openbrand/register/brand3622.htm

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#229

Post by mahalol »

akho wrote: post #94
mehrdadn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for that, I have hit this bug once with WSL1 in the past and didn't think much of it at the time. Good to know what caused the issue.
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