Sounds like you were just doing it wrong Either you run npm install from Windows if you are operating on the Windows file system or you run it on WSL if you are operating on the WSL file system both cases will be very fast
The entire Windows operating system is doing it wrong. Seriously who daily drives windows these days. lol.
Oh, you know, about 70+% of the global desktop/laptop market. Nearly every F500 company.
I was always disappointed with the design of wsl2. The wsl1 design of a syscall layer atop NT had greater architectural purity. They way I heard it, they introduced a virtual machine into the design specifically in order to bypass poor NT filesystem performance. I'm sure it's easier said than done, but it would have been nice if they instead fixed the issues on the NT side, rather than side step them with a VM.
I had no idea they used the Plan 9 file server for accessing files in WSL. I wonder what the original reasoning for choosing 9P was.
9P is in the kernel and provides a simple, fast networked VFS without many of the drawbacks of NFS. In particular, 9P-over-virtio is already used in Linux virtualization environments to expose parts of the host file systems to the guest. Since this solution was widely adopted and lying around, Microsoft's WSL2 solution also used 9P-over-virtio to expose the Windows file system to the guest Linux.
Tangentially , I was a heavy used of wsl and moved to linux a few months ago and LLMs made most of the downsides of using linux as a desktop go away for me. I chatted with claude about the migration to find the best distro, decided on Fedora. After the install I asked everything I wanted to configured and got straight answers. In 3 or 4 hours I had an even more comfortable experience than I had on windows. AI made th…
On the other side, I am a lifelong Linux user, and even with advanced LLMs, trying to get Microsoft Windows to behave sanely takes hours every month for years on end (thanks, day job). Things Linux figured out in 2003 are still magic or completely undoable on Windows.
> Just copy it into the WSL file system Yea bro totally. Totally. I'm gonna copy 2TB of media into the WSL virtual disk just so ffmpeg can run a little faster but still way slower than simply running linux. (I beta tested the shit out of WSL1 and 2) before I wised up and just installed Gentoo forever.
You can run that directly on Windows. But either way yeah most people aren't dealing with large media libraries that's obviously a little more difficult. But if you are primarily operating on them with WSL then you would just keep them in the WSL file system and you could access them from Windows whenever you need to...
Indeed. I have my agent edited files in podman in Lima, under two layers, and it's fine, because I do most stuff within my podman VMs. (I have shared volumes so I can review things before pushing the changes to my forge in separate containers that the agent can't access. When I need stuff on my mac, which is the exception, not the rule, I just copy them, putting them in a tar or zip if it's a lot of files.