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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

#321

Post by codr7 »

jchw wrote: post #56
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…

"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…

I definitely prefer working in Linux.

But having Windows tightly integrated when needed is nice.

If only I could run replace the Windows shell with a Linux DE...

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#322

Post by airstrike »

[deleted] wrote: post #308
airstrike wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no flavor of Windows 11 that is acceptable. Even the UI itself is a disaster. A cornucopia of libraries and paradigms from React Native to legacy APIs as if an interdimensional wave function of bad ideas had collapsed into an OS, but with ads.

[deleted]

There are literal ads for apps in the Windows 11 start menu. That's unacceptable. Even if one day they roll it back, it will still have been unacceptable. The fact that anyone ever green-lit that decision is unforgivable for a corporation.

macOS isn't perfect but the issue you point out is more of a docker problem, not an OS one. I'm told https://orbstack.dev/ is the solution.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#323

Post by zamadatix »

nickserv wrote: post #244
jjcm wrote: post #151

When WSL came out I was absolutely overjoyed - finally an actual linux shell on windows! I use windows for my gaming pc, and I wanted to have a unified gaming/dev box. It felt like the solution. Over time though more and more small issues with it came up. Packages working not quite right, issues with the barriers between the two, etc. It always felt like there was a little bit more friction with the process. With Val…

Just curious, which games gave you problems?

Unfortunately many of the more popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat tend to consider "made working on Linux" a bug rather than a feature. E.g. Easy Anti-Cheat and Unreal Engine both support Linux natively but Epic still doesn't want to allow it for their own game, Fortnite. https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#325

Post by bigstrat2003 »

lxgr wrote: post #243
0x457 wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "More powerful than Linux" is silly. It's a VM. I don't think it's silly. Sure, it's a VM, but it's so nice that I barely reboot into Linux. You get the best of both worlds with WSL.

For me, the best part of running Linux as the base OS is not having to deal with Windows. No ridiculous start menu spam; a sane, non-bloated operating system (imagine being able to update user space libraries without a reboot, due to being able to delete files that other processes still have opened!); being able to back up my data at the file level without relying on weird block-level imaging shenanigans and so much…

> imagine being able to update user space libraries without a reboot

That's... a very weird criticism to level at Windows, considering that the advice I've seen for Linux is to reboot if you update glibc (which is very much a user space library).

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#326

Post by enragedcacti »

juancn wrote: post #318
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…

Technically it's not a VM, it's a subsystem, the same way Win32, Win64, Posix, OS/2, etc. are. It's a feature of the NT-family of kernels where you can create many environments sharing the same underlying executive and HAL. It's a quite interesting way to build an OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT

WSL 2 is actually virtualized despite the name

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#327

Post by hermitShell »

MrPowerGamerBR wrote: post #220
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.

Except that if you require anything that is GPU-related (like gaming, Adobe suite apps, etc) you'll need to have a secondary GPU to passthrough it to the VM, which is not something that everyone has. So, if you don't have a secondary GPU, you'll need to live without graphics acceleration in the VM... so for a lot of people the "oh you just need to use a VM!" solution is not feasible, because most of the software that…

I don’t know why there aren’t full fledged computers in a GPU sized package. Just run windows on your GPU, Linux on your main cpu. There’s some challenges to overcome but I think it would be nice to be able to extend your arm PC with an x86 expansion, or extend your x86 PC with an ARM extension. Ditto for graphics, or other hardware accelerators

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#328

Post by mulmen »

1oooqooq wrote: post #261
jjcm wrote: post #151

When WSL came out I was absolutely overjoyed - finally an actual linux shell on windows! I use windows for my gaming pc, and I wanted to have a unified gaming/dev box. It felt like the solution. Over time though more and more small issues with it came up. Packages working not quite right, issues with the barriers between the two, etc. It always felt like there was a little bit more friction with the process. With Val…

i think everyone tried that. gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point. i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again. then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again. then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again. now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file…

> gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point.

I actually switched to Linux full-time when Starfield wouldn’t run on Windows but worked in Proton. We are now in a world where Valve provides a more sable Windows API than Microsoft. The only limitation now is anti-cheat but that’s a political problem, not a technical one.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#330

Post by arghwhat »

cma wrote: post #187
arghwhat wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

WSL2, in my testing, is orders of magnitude faster at file heavy operations than anything outside WSL, dev drive or not. We have an R&D department that's using WSL2 and jumping through hurdles of forwarding hardware because it's night and day compared to trying under windows on the same machine. It provided other benefits too, but the sheer performance was the main selling point.

WSL2 does not take less advantage of filesystem caches. Linux's block cache is perfectly capable. HyperV is a semi-serious hypervisor, so it should be using a direct I/O abstraction for writing to the disk image. Memory is also balloning, and can dynamically grow and shrink depending on memory pressure.

Linux VM's is something Microsoft has poured a lot of money into optimizing as that's what the vast majority of Azure is. Cramming more out of a single machine, and therefore more things into a single machine, directly correlates with profits, so that's a heavy investment.

I wonder why you're seeing different results. I have no experience with WSL1, and looking into a proprietary legacy solution with known issues and limited features would be a purely academic exercise that I'm not sure is worth it.

(I personally don't use Windows, but I work with departments whose parent companies enforce it on their networks,

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