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WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

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Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#211
post #33

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…

Wasn't the main purpose of WSL2 to make WSL finally usable because before v2 it had really bad IO perf?

It didn't have bad IO performance. It had the same IO performance as Windows.

The problem is software that is badly written and does bad assumptions, like that continuing opening/closing files is good just because in Linux is good, that maybe true on most UNIX systems but nobody said that.

I think that WSL2 is a very very bad idea, you are no longer making a POSIX subsystem of Windows, a way to use the POSIX API in the Windows kernel, without any emulation (basically the same thing as WINE), you are running a virtual machine.

I would say that WSL2 performance is very bad if you work in the Windows filesystem. Sure, if you work from the WSL home directory that is mounted in a ext4 virtual filesystem performance is good, it's a VM.

But this is useless, you see the main advantage of WSL over having a VM or a dual boot was integration with Windows, the ability to use bash scripts to manipulate your Windows files, the ability to launch Windows executables and pipe the output into a POSIX executable.

All of that is useful if there is a strong connections between the two systems, if I can work with WSL in the same home directory as Windows where I have all my files. How is useful if before working on something (that could be a stupid thing like running a script to rename a bunch of files) I have to first copy the files that I intend to work on in the WSL home, run what I have to turn, and copy them back? And what if I want my IDE in execution in Windows with the project in Windows and I want to launch on the project bash scripts?

I hope they will not discontinue WSL1! If they will discontinue WSL1, unfortunately I will have to go back to cygwin that was not great but worked mostly fine, since I need integration between Windows and Linux.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#212
post #155
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hyper-V is VMs not containers. When you enable Hyper-V it's actually the 'operating system' and Windows is a guest VM believe it or not.

This is how every type 1 hypervisor works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor

But it's not how type 2 hypervisors work, and traditionally when you used virtual machines on a desktop it was type 2.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#213
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Was that incorrect somehow? WSL2 fixed a ton of issues for me.

It's a true statement but it's quite unhelpful to tell people that a problem they have is fixed in a different semi-compatible piece of software.

It probably depends a lot on your specific use patterns, but I expect for most people this was a change that basically fixed a bunch of bugs, introduced negligible new issues, and had an identical interface.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd buy affinity designer, photo and publisher again if they ship a Linux version. I have it both for Windows and Mac.

Absolutely, I would too. They are fantastic products. I did some Googling yesterday and the last word on the matter is that Photo would cost $500k alone, which they couldn't see recuperating.[1] [1]: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/626-affini...

I'm pretty sure they could recoup the cost if they made sure their installer could install on ChromeOS's Linux container. The number of Chromebooks out there is staggering, and is starving for great graphics software. This would also be a great way to get ahead of Adobe in the education space, as it appears Chromebooks have taken over education (at least k-12 in the US).

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#215
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rushing half-finished products out, offering little/zero support is the new Microsoft. The reason $MSFT loves open source is because they can get press hype over projects that are 75% complete (which is the main goal), and they don't even need to support it, document it, or make it actually work.

New? Windows 95 comes to mind.

DOS 3.0 comes to mind as well.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#216
post #166

> Mind that I come from a Ubuntu distro, Windows is the most energy efficient solution at the moment and allows me to run my Dev tools and work on battery for 4 hours straight. Ubuntu (or any Debian-based distro) destroy my battery in 40 minutes and there's no solution or optimization for that. I know this is not a solution, but the Librem laptops from Purism hold up for hours straight. I also used to run Windows on…

I quadrupled battery life when I switched form Windows to Ubuntu. No idea why. I'm using a Dell XPS 15 which has factory support for Linux. I didn't do a lot of digging into why... was just happy to be able to go 4 hours instead of one.

As far as I can tell, and I am not an expert, it has always boiled down to hardware/driver parity. Laptops ship with proprietary hardware and drivers that Windows can tap into to optimize battery life, things like turning off hard drives and stuff, but that a Linux doesn't have access to. Provided hardware/driver parity, a Linux environment should generally be more lightweight and last longer. Maybe that was your experience with the XPS; those guys also ship with Linux out of the box like you said, so the hardware should lend itself just as well to Linux distributions.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#217
post #166

> Mind that I come from a Ubuntu distro, Windows is the most energy efficient solution at the moment and allows me to run my Dev tools and work on battery for 4 hours straight. Ubuntu (or any Debian-based distro) destroy my battery in 40 minutes and there's no solution or optimization for that. I know this is not a solution, but the Librem laptops from Purism hold up for hours straight. I also used to run Windows on…

I quadrupled battery life when I switched form Windows to Ubuntu. No idea why. I'm using a Dell XPS 15 which has factory support for Linux. I didn't do a lot of digging into why... was just happy to be able to go 4 hours instead of one.

If you were only getting a single hour on a laptop, I’m almost certain your battery management settings weren’t configured correctly (brightness on max, etc)

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#218
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is how every type 1 hypervisor works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor

But it's not how type 2 hypervisors work, and traditionally when you used virtual machines on a desktop it was type 2.

That was long time ago, most people using VMware also use ESXi, and mainframes use type 1 as well.

Just those using Virtual Box for free not.

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#219

MS is ridiculous, corrupting the filesystem is an OS mistake of the first order. Any systems developer should view corruption of a persistent storage system of any kind as totally unacceptable. And in this case the whole filesystem is open source! Meanwhile the open source people built a decent NTFS driver for linux years ago, I haven't seen what specs are released but I assume they needed to fill a few doc gaps to m…

Not sure how an issue like this doesn’t make it into the test suite. Probably another symptom of them firing their QA team [1]. https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...

Things can’t go into the test suite if they don’t know what causes it

Re: WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

#220
post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then again why they don't support GNU/Linux vendors?

So if someone installs Linux themselves they don't meet this bar you're setting? That seems pretty far from the normal open source ethos.

Ah, so using evil commercial OSes is part of that so called ethos?
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