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Mutt on Windows Without WSL

blog.djhaskin.com

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Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#51

Post by maxerickson »

barfbagginus wrote: post #49
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.…

If you are worried about the swap eating the drive, why not put it on a dedicated disk and just let it?

If you are doing anything vaguely interesting, the time you are spending is costing a lot more than the drive would.

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#52

Post by malfist »

barfbagginus wrote: post #49
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.…

Are you worried about swap in the guest os? You can configure the swapiness of the OS, if you set it to 10 or something it will only swap when you're out of memory or when an application explicit says it wants swap memory (pretty rare). That can preserve your SSD and prevent your hard crashes.

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#54

Post by w0m »

barfbagginus wrote: post #49
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 best "Windows + WSL2" experience comes from Linux + a Windows VM

tbf; your problem is you're running a buggy app that wants more hardware than you have and handles it poorly. I spend 90% of my day at a unix prompt; but you'd likely see similar HostOS stability irmprovement going Windows -> Windows VM` as you did `Linux -> Windows VM`.

A few comments: 1) Ignore NVME wear; the drive controllers are smart enough nowadays to wear level; it will likely die sooner, but still outlive any machine you'll probably want to keep it in. 3) Buy the Ram. Whatever your motherboard fits, max it out.

tldr; Your time is more valuable than dealing with pain to try and min/max your hardware life cycle (and honestly, your wallet). The time you lost switching Base OS is likely worth more than the cost of a ram upgrade; not counting that you're still dealing with (30%?%??!) crashes over it. Value yourself and your time.

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#55

Post by throwaway0665 »

barfbagginus wrote: post #49
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.…

It's unintuitive but you could consider using compressed ram (zram/zswap) for swap

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#56

Post by ParetoOptimal »

consp wrote: post #25
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.

> so that it will be possible to reuse the same code for both TUI and GUI clients. Why must a generaly good improvement these days always start on HN with "rewrite in rust" like it's the only language which still matters. Leave that up to the developer to what they prefer for the job.

> Why must a generaly good improvement these days always start on HN with "rewrite in rust" like it's the only language which still matters.

I'm guessing so that its likely to 1) be safer by default, 2) likely to get more contributors, 3) more likely to work cross-platform, and 4) more likely to get attention and survive as a project.

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#57

Post by c-hendricks »

jessekv wrote: post #21
madspindel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you heard about WinGet? It's the official package manager for Windows: https://github.com/microsoft/winget-cli

I tried WinGet out when it came out, but ended up sticking with scoop. What would you say are the advantages of WinGet over scoop?

Copying from a comment I made on Ars:

Where scoop differs, which might be good or bad depending on your point of view, is that it installs software to its own location, and self-updating apps don't self update. So, tutorials and programs have to take Scoop into account[1] since they won't be installed to their usual locations (bonus: scoop itself can be installed to your users home directory, or to C:\ProgramData\scoop).

Another wart is that maintainers of scoop recommend using scoop + winget[2].

I think it's neat, but personally, I just use winget to install things, and a variety of portable apps on a secondary drive (in fact, winget supports installing one-off programs to random locations). Another nice thing about winget is being able to update and manage software that wasn't installed with it too.

[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/123205#issuecomme...

[2]: https://github.com/ScoopInstaller/Scoop/issues/3691#issuecom...

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#58

Post by Karellen »

mimotomo2009 wrote: post #40
djha-skin wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Already done: https://pimalaya.org/

It took only a second to see what I would miss as like on most of the mail clients: why isn't it possible to configure the list of mails to see not only the sender but the e-mail address? I only know three e-mail clients where I can configure it: mutt, betterbird and evolution. But maybe I'm old and no one would like to see that "bill gates " is not from bill gates before opening the mail (and render the contents). T…

You can do it in Claws Mail (also available on Windows):

Configuration -> Preferences -> Display/Summaries -> Message List -> Displayed in From Column: Name | Address | Name and Address

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#59

Post by dataflow »

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?

> What is its current situation? Is it still maintained?

It still works for me on Windows 10. No idea what it'll be like beyond then.

Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL

#60

Post by klodolph »

juujian wrote: post #43

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.

Yes, since I can afford it. I feel bad for all the people out there who are students or otherwise under budget constraints. I go on Reddit or Discord and hear stories from people who are stuck on computers with 4GB RAM dating back to 2015 or earlier.

These people are being left behind, which is a shame. Part of the justification is that anyone who has such old hardware can’t afford to buy your products or services anyways, but that’s a very narrow capitalist lens. These are motivated, intelligent people who could better contribute to our society if we made sure that you could do good development work on old hardware.

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