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

Mutt on Windows Without WSL

blog.djhaskin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 78 posts

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#41

Post by arinfaraj »

skrebbel wrote: post #28
anonymousDan wrote: post #5

Omg scoop looks awesome, how have I not heard of it before?

Just want to weigh in and say that scoop is fantastic. The genius insight behind Scoop is that Windows doesn't need a dependency manager because pretty much all programs ship with their dependencies included. So all you need is a way to download & run installers automatically, from the command line, into a Scoop-controlled directory.

i have seen dependencies being installed when using scoop for example an app might need ffmpeg in the system

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#42

Post by blueflow »

ggm wrote: post #15

The general case here would be that to be POSIX compliant doesn't demand the underlying OS is unix, only that the API/ABI and commands work in very narrow limits. If you write to libc and a small set of dependencies and if you are in C, it should be possible to do things. If you want curses, you are walking into hairy areas.

I don't see how curses is an extra problem - it is written against libc like the regular programs and the windows terminal(s) are supported by terminfo.

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#43

Post by juujian »

Am I the only one who said screw it, I'm getting 64GB of ram? The amount of concern about ram, it's not that much more expensive atm to get double or 4x if your already buying a laptop.

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#45

Post by butokai »

dataflow wrote: post #23

> WSL is nice, but it takes up a lot of RAM on my system. I prefer to use MSYS2. That's why you trash WSL2 and just stick with WSL1. I'm surprised they didn't mention it at all. Keep MSYS2 around for where WSL1 doesn't suffice, but that should be fairly infrequent.

WSL1 was what made me stick to Windows at the time, when I had a new laptop and didn't want to mess much with it. WSL2 was what convinced me to switch back to Linux, since I felt that WSL1 was going to be abandoned. What is its current situation? Is it still maintained?

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#46

Post by lsllc »

smusamashah wrote: post #2

I wonder if this author has tried Justin Tuney's Cosmopolitan to run Linux tools on Windows. Her last releases are shipping full set of multiplatfom compiled GNU tools. They do work on windows. Even bash works. They do break sometimes but work when they do still. I used cosmopolitan's rsync on windows to copy stuff from sdcard but it was terminating randomly sometimes and I ended up using wsl.

Justine with an `e` and two `n`s in Tunney.

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#47

Post by lsllc »

djha-skin wrote: post #7
xvilka wrote: post #4

Mutt is exactly something that would be nice to rewrite in Rust, moreover, splitting into various crates of working with email, so that it will be possible to reuse the same code for both TUI and GUI clients.

Already done: https://pimalaya.org/

So this looks like it might even support "cloud" based email services with OAuth2/MFA authentication such as Outlook/Exchange in the cloud:

https://pimalaya.org/himalaya/cli/latest/configuration/outlo...

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#49

Post by barfbagginus »

dataflow wrote: post #23

> WSL is nice, but it takes up a lot of RAM on my system. I prefer to use MSYS2. That's why you trash WSL2 and just stick with WSL1. I'm surprised they didn't mention it at all. Keep MSYS2 around for where WSL1 doesn't suffice, but that should be fairly infrequent.

3 months ago I trashed windows and hopped over to Ubuntu Budgie for my CAD and Dev workstation running 16GB RAM, after 18 months of somewhat hating life in Win11+WSL2. This dropped my full crashe requiring reboot - from 5/week to less than 1/week.

I'm much happier for general browsing and dev - both have much fewer spontaneous crashes with reboot, and enjoy lower chance of OOM crisis thanks to the lighter OS and WM.

My windows requirement, Rhino 3D 7, runs in a Win11 VM with 5GB RAM and 25 GB of storage. The VM can crash violently without taking down my host OS, so CAD BSODs impact me like a regular app crash. The VM RAM use is a bit higher than WSL, requiring me to close the browser when I do CAD to reduce the risk of OOM. But in windows I often had to close WSL2 and the browser, for the same reason.

OOM will still lead to a gut wrenching lockup that require a reboot with 30% likelihood. That's probably because I don't run swap, out of a possibly unwarranted worry about NVME wear. To improve this, I'm looking at 3 solutions:

1) 4 GB of swap might give me a gradual OOM failure mode with plenty of time to kill apps as things slow down. It might even lower NVME wear by letting the OS swap static memory pages for pages of heavily used disk write cache.

2) CGroups can kill the Browser and VM if the system is near OOM. This is my favorite solution, since it would be nice to have this OOM behavior even if I adopt solutions 1 and 3.

3) A cheap upgrade to 32GB RAM would fix the problem, and also double my memory bandwidth. I can probably live without this, though.

TLDR; Even with ample room for improvement, my best "Windows + WSL2" experience comes from Linux + a Windows VM! The most mysterious crashes are so rare it's a little freaky, and the remaining crashes have clear solutions. I am happy!

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#50

Post by w0m »

butokai wrote: post #45
dataflow wrote: post #23

> WSL is nice, but it takes up a lot of RAM on my system. I prefer to use MSYS2. That's why you trash WSL2 and just stick with WSL1. I'm surprised they didn't mention it at all. Keep MSYS2 around for where WSL1 doesn't suffice, but that should be fairly infrequent.

WSL1 was what made me stick to Windows at the time, when I had a new laptop and didn't want to mess much with it. WSL2 was what convinced me to switch back to Linux, since I felt that WSL1 was going to be abandoned. What is its current situation? Is it still maintained?

WSL1 was kind of amazing, IIRC it attempted to map all unix calls to their windows equivalencies. But there were edge cases and bugs when it just had serious problems. WSL2 came in, and is basically a simple local container. it isn't a buggy mapping, it is Ubuntu (or whatever you want to run).

Once i moved over; 99% of my (non time SKU related) quirks went away, and it's only vaguely heavier. Honestly, as a terminal-creature, I prefer WSL2 + Apt to OSX + Homebrew as my macs always tend to turn into a local package nightmare and I'd end up wasting a day/mo untangling. My WSL feels pristine still ~20mo later, and I know i could wipe and recreate it in ~30m if I needed to (but i haven't felt a need).

Post reply on HN