meanwhile Apple won't even make it easy to boot Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon.
Let's be honest, nobody earnestly expected them to care about running native Linux in the first place. You knew what you got into when you bought the Mac.
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
31–40 of 1001 posts
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#32Note that this doesn't include lxcore.sys, the kernel side driver that powers WSL 1.
(Also, I'm surprised that WSL 1 is still supported. It must be in maintenance mode though, right?)
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#33Every time I praise WSL on hn I pay the karma tax but I will die on this hill. WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously. It's as powerful as Linux with some janky custom local docker wrappers for device support, local storage mapping, and network mapping. Except it's not janky at all. It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop…
I agree. Back in the day (10+ years ago), I used to argue with people about why I ran VMs instead of just partitioning the disk and booting up the OS I needed.
XAMPP did not work out of the box with me on Windows (skill issue on my part, I know), so my preferred setup was to run a Ubuntu Server VM (LAMP stack) and then develop whatever I had on a Windows IDE.
I could have done that under full Linux, I just did not want that. Then Vagrant came into existence, which I'd say was for my use case (but never came around to adopt it).
I'm really happy with my WSL2 setup. I stopped using VMware Workstation when WSL2 broke it, but WSL2 is exactly what I needed to match my use case.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#34meanwhile Apple won't even make it easy to boot Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon.
Apple might not be releasing documentation on their peripherals, but they went out of their way in making it possible in the first place.
Apple could just have gone and do a straight port of the iOS boot procedure to their ARM Mac lineup... and we'd have been thoroughly screwed, given how long ago the latest untethered bootrom exploit was.
Or they could have pulled a Qualcomm, Samsung et al and just randomly change implementation details between each revision to make life for alt-os implementers hell (which is why so many Android BSP dumps are the way they are, with zero hope of ever getting anything upstream). Instead, to the best of my knowledge the UART on the M series SoCs dates back right to the very first iPod.
The fact that the Asahi Linux people were able to create a GPU driver that surpasses Apple's own in conformance tests [1], despite not having any kind of documentation at all is telling enough - and not just of the pure genius of everyone involved.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/08/22/linux-for-apple-s...
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#35meanwhile Apple won't even make it easy to boot Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon.
Buying Apple hardware with the intent on running anything but what Apple wants you to run is setting yourself up for a battle, including trying to use non-Apple hardware with the hardware you purchased. It's why I'm not spending any personal money on Apple hardware.
Could've been worse. At least they're not locking you out of your device like on iPhones and iPads. They don't stop you from running Asahi, they just aren't interested in helping anyone run Asahi.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sells laptops that actively prevent you from running Linux on them. Things get a little blurry once you hit the tablet form factor (Surface devices run on amd64, but are they really that different from an iPad?) where both companies suck equally, though Microsoft also sells tablets that will run Linux once someone bothers to write drivers for them.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#36Every time I praise WSL on hn I pay the karma tax but I will die on this hill. WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously. It's as powerful as Linux with some janky custom local docker wrappers for device support, local storage mapping, and network mapping. Except it's not janky at all. It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop…
My acid test for WSL2 was to install the Linux version of Google Chrome in it, and then play Youtube videos fullscreen with that. It worked. Somehow WSL1 was the more impressive hack but how can you argue with what works? WSL2 works fine.
Also 1980s style X11 widgets on the Windows desktop in their own windows? Cool.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#37Every time I praise WSL on hn I pay the karma tax but I will die on this hill. WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously. It's as powerful as Linux with some janky custom local docker wrappers for device support, local storage mapping, and network mapping. Except it's not janky at all. It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop…
qemu on Linux solves a bunch of these problems as well. But yeah, UX-wise WSL is pretty good at solving the problem of “provide Windows devs a POSIX environment”.
Qemu is nothing like wsl UX wise. The UX on windows is double click gimp and then a window for gimp opens. For qemu it opens a new window for the wm, has awkward input focus interactions, you probably have to log in to the vm, and it can not be easily setup to automatically open the app you want.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#38microsoft open sourcing a lot of things lately
I wonder if companies open-source stuff mainly as part of a bigger strategy which primarily benefits them. could it be a way to access to a pool of free, contributing talent?
why would companies not do things that benefit them? and if it's meant pessimistically, let me take you back to a much worse time when Microsoft didn't open source anything
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#39Every time I praise WSL on hn I pay the karma tax but I will die on this hill. WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously. It's as powerful as Linux with some janky custom local docker wrappers for device support, local storage mapping, and network mapping. Except it's not janky at all. It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop…
Well, WSL is Linux. It's really just a VM of it (since WSL2, WSL1 was actually running on the windows kernel which was pretty cool). The big drawback to WSL to me is the slow filesystem access because NTFS sucks. And having to deal with Windows in the first place. Ps I wouldn't worry about your karma. It's just a number :P
still use WSL1 also because VMWare runs so dreadfully slow with any kind of Hyper-V enabled - if so, VMWare must also use it, so you get a Type-2 running under a Type-1 the lag is untennable lag and performance.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#40Every time I praise WSL on hn I pay the karma tax but I will die on this hill. WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously. It's as powerful as Linux with some janky custom local docker wrappers for device support, local storage mapping, and network mapping. Except it's not janky at all. It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop…
WSL gave me the push to switch from macOS to Windows. And I couldn't be happier, tbh. There was a lot lacking in my Hackintosh/Windows dual boot setup.