Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 423 posts

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#101

Post by dragonwriter »

johnchristopher wrote: post #86

> Feel like booting Linux on a separate disk because of these issues. It always seemed strange to me that people would rather use WSL than the real thing when Windows doesn't bring much advantage. What am I missing ?

> It always seemed strange to me that people would rather use WSL than the real thing when Windows doesn't bring much advantage.

Windows brings lots of advantage to some things (including interfacing with the large number of people who rely on people having software that works only or best on Windows; in anything other than very tech-focussed firms this probably includes your employer, and even in such firms it often includes your customers, which can matter a lot even in tech roles), and not switching between physical machines or rebooting between different tasks brings advantages.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#102

Post by oblio »

uncledave wrote: post #95
ncphil wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Had a serious talk a Unix manager over a decade ago who was convinced Windows ops didn't require as much expertise as Unix/Linux. It was a common misconception that MS seemed to encourage. As someone who came over from Windows, I knew better. That attitude continues to influence standard practices, hiring and, most importantly, training and education opportunities for Windows admins -- to the detriment of all. I've a…

Agreed. I've done both and if you ask me Windows ops is vastly more difficult because everything is brittle, inconsistent and unreliable and rarely repeatable almost all of the time. It requires great skill, determination and persistence to navigate issues like this. Unfortunately as you suggest, the outcome is hiring as cheap as possible and fixing all issues by not changing anything other than replacing everything…

I don't know if I'd call it brittle, I would call it super complex (when you get into wmic & friends) and harder to get info online, compared to Linux, because everyone has to tinker with Linux while only a minority of power sysadmins dig that deep into Windows.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#103

Post by shawnz »

pydry wrote: post #98
cambalache wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I develop Rails in WSL1 just fine. > Postgres never worked for example natively. That's a minor incovenience at worst. I will stay put in WSL1. If I wished a VM I would have just installed VMWare and run some Linux ISO image from it.

I mean, why not do that? I tried WSL because I thought it would be faster than a heavyweight VM. Turned out it's dog slow in comparison. Honestly don't see a use for it.

I find the opposite, WSL1 is much faster for pretty much every usage except workloads that involve reading/writing lots of files.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#104

Post by larrik »

javajosh wrote: post #90
johnchristopher wrote: post #86

> Feel like booting Linux on a separate disk because of these issues. It always seemed strange to me that people would rather use WSL than the real thing when Windows doesn't bring much advantage. What am I missing ?

You are missing Office, Outlook, Visual Studio, and any enterprise nonsense IT requires on company computers. All of that requires Windows.

The web version of Outlook has come a long way, and in my opinion has become the superior product (for my use cases, at least).

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#105

Post by pydry »

umvi wrote: post #9
bserge wrote: post #3

I don't really understand the use case for WSL. What are the advantages? You could run a full Linux VM and do everything on it on any machine these days. Which is what I do, but I'm just an old school hack. Anyone who uses WSL care to enlighten me? Thanks!

When I launch my WSL2 Ubuntu shell, I have a CLI prompt in Getting that same quality of experience under VirtualBox was nightmarish. Longer boot times, shared clipboard/filesystems were always breaking, random stuff related to hardening made update difficult.

Other than the startup time (mitigated by starting the VM right after startup) I have no issues with virtualbox. File mounts, copy & paste... everything works more or less fine.

WSL, on the other hand, has been nothing but trouble.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#106

Post by shawnz »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #93
snarfy wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using WSL to do esp8266 development so I could use linux tools. The official esp8266 windows toolchain is based on cygwin. If I'm using something that needs a unix environment anyway, why use cygwin when you have WSL? I upgraded to WSL2 because well 2 is bigger than 1 so it must be better. But no, nothing worked. Serial ports are not supported in WSL2.

> why use cygwin when you have WSL? Well. Has cygwin ever corrupted get repos?

No, but WSL1 (which they are referring to in that quote) also has never done that.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#107

Post by archsurface »

sys_64738 wrote: post #77
crispyambulance wrote: post #23

I think calling it WSL2 was a mistake. The predecessor, WSL, "just worked" and it was more a less a linux experience for most practical purposes-- and certainly better than hoary old cygwin. This caused a lot of people to believe they could just transition to WSL2, lead on by the promise of an even more performant linux experience. The documentation didn't say anything about complications from attempting this, so a l…

If you drop WSL then you get confused branding of what they are. WSL1 and WSL2 make it pretty clear you're getting the Hyper-V thing for the latter and the former is a Linux sys call API layer. I'm actually surprised they can't be used together.

Agreed. Whatever the implementation the name indicates the next step in this solution. To do otherwise would be like naming windows95 something other than windows after windows3.1. Marketing.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#108

Post by shawnz »

pydry wrote: post #105
umvi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I launch my WSL2 Ubuntu shell, I have a CLI prompt in Getting that same quality of experience under VirtualBox was nightmarish. Longer boot times, shared clipboard/filesystems were always breaking, random stuff related to hardening made update difficult.

Other than the startup time (mitigated by starting the VM right after startup) I have no issues with virtualbox. File mounts, copy & paste... everything works more or less fine. WSL, on the other hand, has been nothing but trouble.

One downside there is the constantly huge RAM consumption of such a setup.

EDIT: At least compared to WSL1. However WSL2 also has some advantages in that it can reclaim unused memory and suspend the VM when not in use.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#109

Post by pydry »

shawnz wrote: post #103
pydry wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, why not do that? I tried WSL because I thought it would be faster than a heavyweight VM. Turned out it's dog slow in comparison. Honestly don't see a use for it.

I find the opposite, WSL1 is much faster for pretty much every usage except workloads that involve reading/writing lots of files.

The difference on I/O is enough to make WSL unusable.

I wasted a day trying to figure out if I had a problem with anti-virus or something that was blocking me before realizing that WSL I/O is just... well, slow.

People kept telling me to upgrade to WSL2 to solve that but the version of windows I had didn't allow it. Might have been a blessing in disguise given the data corruption bugs.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#110

Post by shawnz »

sam_lowry_ wrote: post #64
umvi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I launch my WSL2 Ubuntu shell, I have a CLI prompt in Getting that same quality of experience under VirtualBox was nightmarish. Longer boot times, shared clipboard/filesystems were always breaking, random stuff related to hardening made update difficult.

>Clipboard works perfectly Which one? Secondary? And the primary does not work at all?

Primary and secondary selections are specific to X11 which is not involved at all when running WSL command line apps in a Windows terminal
Post reply on HN