Lack of support for GUI apps such as MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc. It was actually workable with wine a few years back, but that was before everything went to an auto-updating subscription model.
> Lack of support for GUI apps such as MS Office, not the same but you have Office 365 that does a reasonable job for most documents out there. On the other hand, not having Office is kind of a feature, it makes you learn better tools :)
Lack of support for GUI apps such as MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc. It was actually workable with wine a few years back, but that was before everything went to an auto-updating subscription model.
So make these apps work on Linux. They go instead inventing VMs and hypervisors to extend their walled gardens.
Exactly. All these software companies could probably make their apps run on Linux at a minimal development cost. They just don't want to. Microsoft because they want people to use Windows, Adobe for whatever reason.
"Windows programs for Linux"? It doesn't really have any better filesystem integration. The filesystem is stored on a disk image on WSL2 as on any other VM. You can mount other host filesystems from inside the VM in any hypervisor I know of. Ack on XQuartz being crap (thought it does have Retina support these days, at least for non-rootless mode), but this is not really a problem of the VM.
"Windows programs for Linux"? Whoops, typo. Windows programs from Linux , I'll fix that. You can mount other host filesystems from inside the VM in any hypervisor I know of. In most hypervisors you can't do a notepad.exe foo.txt or TextEdit.app foo.txt for that matter in a Linux VM,
With virtio-fs I think this is becoming more doable. Of course, it's not quite as fast as running a guest filesystem on virtio-blk yet, but maybe it'll get there.
WSL2 is a simple virtual machine. Nothing you couldn’t do on macOS with e.g. multipass.
It's really not. With WSL2 the kernel runs in a VM, but user-space programs do not. As a result, CPU-bound programs suffer close to zero overhead compared to running natively on linux. AFAIK, there's no way to achieve anything like this on macOS.
You got it completely wrong. WSL1 was a system call translation layer, and everything worked directly on the Windows kernel, like Windows programs do under WINE.
WSL2 is an standard Hyper-V virtual machine, no more no less, with a custom Linux kernel build and a ext4 root filesystem stored in a .vhdx image. Every process runs as a native Linux process under the Microsoft's Linux kernel, _inside_ the VM. What makes it more convenient than simply opening the Hyper-V manager and creating a VM is ease of installation, maintenance and integration with Windows (using the 9p protocol to allow file access).
Lack of support for GUI apps such as MS Office, Adobe Creative Suite, etc. It was actually workable with wine a few years back, but that was before everything went to an auto-updating subscription model.
So make these apps work on Linux. They go instead inventing VMs and hypervisors to extend their walled gardens.
How does this extend their walled garden? The kernel doesn’t just accept patches willy nilly.
The only reason I am still using windows is MS office. I might give it a try myself... My home machine is running Arch linux and works flawlessly for more then two years already. Just my work is still stucked with a lot of documentations sharing between some other people and I need MS office programs which have no alternative in open-source word. well, the office.com looks promising these days and I hope to switch co…
Wine runs older Office versions fine. I heard Crossover works even better if you're willing to pay for it.
I would say that these days the exotic components are the ones that DO work on Linux, and various common components just don't, or work "on paper" but with debilitating bugs.
I really feel this. I manage about a hundred computers for scientists/students. Total free reign. Some want to use linux. I’m sorry, you will never have working audio. Oh. It looks like the available linux drivers don’t play nice with this sandy bridge mobo and the dm will fail to initialize. The list goes on. Never have I seen lack of hardware support on windows. I think that’s the essence of “just works” here.
"you will never have working audio" - what you mean by that? Some specific software not working on Linux or complete lack of audio?
I run into some cases of software refusing to run on Linux (though curiously, I switched to Linux due to software refusing to work on Windows).
I run into wifi/printer issues (but both on Linux and Windows) and I managed Linux to Work, while Windows remained resistant to debugging and kept failing with contentless errors.