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The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

blogs.windows.com

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Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#181

Post by arcastroe »

liendolucas wrote: post #107

I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux. If you are in Windows and have the urge to use Linux, do the proper switch once and for all. You will never look back. I haven't in almost 15 years. Given what Windows has become and already discussed here on HN I would even hesitate to run it in a virtual machine. Edit: more than 15 years.

I've considered it, but there are two Windows features I need that sound like they'd require some time investment to set up correctly on linux.

1. I use UWF on windows (Education Edition). All disk writes to C:/ are ephemeral. On every single reboot, all changes are discarded and my pc is back to the exact same state as when I first set it up. I do keep a separate partition for documents that need persistence.

2. Miracast for screen mirroring.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#182

Post by int_19h »

behnamoh wrote: post #8

meanwhile Apple won't even make it easy to boot Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon.

On the macOS side, https://github.com/lima-vm/lima is the closest equivalent to WSL.

Parallels also has a commercial offering that does some nice GUI-level integration with both Windows and Linux VMs.

My understanding is that these are both built on top of some Apple API, and Parallels actually collaborates with Apple on making it work for their use case. So it's not the first-class support that you get from Microsoft with WSL, but it's still pretty good.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#183

Post by alex_smart »

ThinkBeat wrote: post #139
jchw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More powerful than Linux" is silly. It's a VM. The most useful thing is that it does a bunch of convenience features for you. I am not suggesting that it is not extremely convenient, but it's not somehow more powerful than just using Linux. You know what's even more convenient than a VM? Not needing a VM and still having the exact same functionality. And you don't need a bunch of janky wrapper scripts, there's more…

Your comment that you can do Linux things on Linux missed the point entirely. Where is the reverse WSL on Linux, where Windows is deeply embedded and you have all the Windows features in your hands? You can use Wine/Crosseover, which is cool, but even now the number of software products it supports is tiny. Steam has a lot of games. You can run a virtual machine with Windows on it. That is identical to what you can d…

I preferred WSL to running linux directly even though I had no need for any windows only software. Not having to spend time configuring my computer to make basic things work like suspend/wake on lid down/up, battery life, hardware acceleration for video playback on the browser, display scaling on external monitor and so on was reason enough.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#184

Post by nxobject »

liendolucas wrote: post #107

I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux. If you are in Windows and have the urge to use Linux, do the proper switch once and for all. You will never look back. I haven't in almost 15 years. Given what Windows has become and already discussed here on HN I would even hesitate to run it in a virtual machine. Edit: more than 15 years.

I always have Windows on Parallels on a Mac, too – unfortunately VirtualBox for arm64 Mac isn't quite there yet.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#186

Post by rao-v »

elif wrote: post #7

Every 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'm with you - after years of messing with dualboot Linux, including (foolishly) running multiday Gentoo builds, WSL + Windows now gives me everything I want from Linux with zero friction.

In fact, I'm a little annoyed that I can't get a comparably smooth experience on my MacBook without spinning up a full QEMU VM. I know it's a bit hypocritical since, like most people, I run WSL2 (which is container/VM-based), not WSL1 (the original magic syscall translation vision).

Does anyone know why there's no lightweight solution on macOS - something like LXC plus a filesystem gadget - that would let me run stuff like "apt-get install chromium"?

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#187

Post by cma »

arghwhat wrote: post #101
wkat4242 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

NTFS is not the problem. The problem is Windows IO filters and whatnot, Microsoft Defender trying to lazily intercept every file operation, and if you're crossing between windows and Linux land, possibly 9pfs network shares. WSL2's own disk is just a VM image and fairly fast - you're just accessing a single file with some special optimizations. Usually far, far more responsive than anything done by windows itself. Do…

>The problem is Windows IO filters

Not the biggest issue of them, 'find' and 'git status' on WSL2 in a big project is still >100 times slower on windows dev drive which avoids those filters than it is with WSL 1 on dev drive.

WSL 1 on regular ntfs with defender disabled is about 4x slower than WSL1 on dev drive, so that stuff does cause some of it, but WSL2 feels hopelessly slow. And wsl 2 can't share memory as well or take as much advantage of the filesystem cache (doubling it if you use the windows drive in both places I think, unless the network drive representation of it doesn't get cached on the WSL2 drive.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#189

Post by zczc »

thewebguyd wrote: post #105
elif wrote: post #7

Every 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…

You can accomplish the same with Distrobox on Linux, but there's definitely something to be said about having the best of both worlds by running Windows + WSL. I honestly think Microsoft could win back some mind share from Apple if they: * Put out a version of windows without all the crap. Call it Dev edition or something and turn off or down the telemetry, preinstalled stuff, ads, and Copilot. * Put some effort into…

> a version of windows without all the crap

LTSC is a version like that

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#190

Post by RKFADU_UOFCCLEL »

elif wrote: post #7

Every 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…

For me it was slow, full of compatibility issues, and glitchy. Some simple packages wouldn't even install in the official Ubuntu WSL distro. To be honest I don't know what the use case for this is, other than to run some one-off Linux thing once in a while without having to use another box.
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