> get unix tools to run natively on Windows.
I managed to run unix tools in cmd, so I can run both windows & unix commands togheter. It required adding msys2 into the environment variable.
Mutt on Windows Without WSL
71–78 of 78 posts
Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL
#72> 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?
WSL2 is Linux, running a kernel tweaked to co-exist with the Windows kernel instead of being a pure vm. It's a VM with some container-like features like using the host's gfx drivers (which are like 100x better validated than Linux, except for compute workloads).
Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL
#73> 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.
I can't say WSL2 eats host RAM or vRAM: I moved all my ML training and finetuning stuff (OSS LLMs, TTS, STT, Text2Img) to WSL2 and have only minimal overhead. A clean Win11 host eats away less than 2GB and I love how you can just use your cuda devices on WSL2, use something like micromamba and cmake your wheels while still being able to switch to Win tools whenever necessary. Idle Cuda devices use around 0.5GB vRAM.…
I'm using wsl2 and noticed general responsiveness drops way down during finetuning (comparing to any other heavy cpu+gpu usage natively) . How's that working in your setup?
Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL
#74Am 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.
I dropped Windows instead. I decided to splurge on RAM when I built my PC a couple years ago, because I like to run lots of VMs simultaneously to test things out. I also use source based package managers which can use a lot of RAM when compiling things in parallel. I have half as much RAM as you, and it feels endless.
Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL
#75I 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.
This comment just made me realize Cosmo rsync might fix my weird issues with getting Vagrant to sync files over to my Unix VMs on my corporate Windows laptop. Thanks!
It worked!
Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL
#76I'm sure it doesn't have the same features but you can send emails natively in CLI on windows with send-mailmessage https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/microsof...
I wish. "The Send-MailMessage cmdlet is obsolete. This cmdlet doesn't guarantee secure connections to SMTP servers. While there is no immediate replacement available in PowerShell, we recommend you do not use Send-MailMessage. For more information, see Platform Compatibility note DE0005."
This made me very, very sad in my last job as the de facto PowerShell expert.
Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL
#77The 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.
I was under the impression it was bust, but it is super good to know it isn't.
Re: Mutt on Windows Without WSL
#78> 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.
There is an experimental flag[0] in the .wslconfig which let's you set autoMemoryReclaim to gradual or dropcache. On my laptop I had good success with dropcache and on my countryside desktop with gradual. [0] https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl-config#exp...
You can do this manually by doing echo 1 > /proc/dropcaches or something along those lines