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WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

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Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#111

Post by Fire-Dragon-DoL »

mzajc wrote: post #105
Fire-Dragon-DoL wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't Garuda an arch distribution? It could be that (less common, so more issues). Running SteamOS likely has better chance of running games, but yeah the linux experience is not streamlined at times (but it is functional!)

SteamOS is also an Arch distribution, though I'm not sure how significant the changes are. AFAIK Lutris uses Ubuntu's libraries for better compatibility across distributions, maybe Steam does something similar.

kinda, SteamOS is an arch distribution but it's locked down by default (you can access stuff) and it's run by the company selling games on PC, so they make it work. On a normal arch distribution, you have to deal with installing dependencies yourself, so more of a pain.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#112

Post by pdantix »

rdwrrr wrote: post #106

Give me one good reason why anyone would bother with any of this at all?

as terrible as windows has gotten, i'm not switching my desktop to linux until it has perfect game + nvidia driver support, something that will probably never happen due to anti-cheat. until then, WSL is great.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#113

Post by wahern »

0x1d7 wrote: post #64
omcnoe wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

/mnt/c is a mounted C: drive in WSL2, that allows WSL2 guests to read/write files on the Windows host. The mount is fine and speedy enough, but the underlying reads/writes turn into native NTFS reads/writes through Windows. NTFS file API is incredibly slow - high fixed overhead for initial file access. So patterns like node_modules with many small individual files (or compiling code in general) are much much slower o…

It's the file system filters that are an issue on Windows. It trades performance for extensibility. NTFS itself is a fast file system.

eBPF has opened the door to such bloatware on Linux. Previously there was no easy, stable way for enterprise bloatware vendors to maintain complex file and subsystem filter and analytic modules. Now that market is exploding because of eBPF, and it's a big reason there's so much work around growing eBPF's capabilities.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#114

Post by [deleted] »

rahkiin wrote: post #88
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One example is that if you have a node modules folder on Windows and you try to delete it from WSL it can take 10 plus minutes whereas if you deleted it directly in Windows it would have just taken a few seconds Also if you try running Next js from files on Windows from WSL it takes minutes for each page to compile to the point that any local development is impossible so you would have to either run the Next JS serve…

Anything with node_modules takes ages on my Windows machine, whether it is through WSL, Docker or direct, largely in part due to corporate filters, checks, anti-virus and malware protectors and endpoint control.

[deleted]

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#115

Post by satvikpendem »

rdwrrr wrote: post #106

Give me one good reason why anyone would bother with any of this at all?

Windows is good for gaming, especially multiplayer, and coding via WSL which is what many people use it for, there's really not much need to run desktop Linux.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#116

Post by satvikpendem »

hparadiz wrote: post #21
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can access them from the rest of the system. For normal usage the performance is completely acceptable but for development tasks it matters.

> 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 are very far from the average WSL user, especially with that Gentoo mention.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#117

Post by satvikpendem »

hparadiz wrote: post #15
weird-eye-issue wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really find these takes hilarious. HN users are so far removed from the average person it's comical.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#119

Post by saint_yossarian »

keithnz wrote: post #69
avaer wrote: post #18

Proton, Copilot, and literally this single issue are what pushed people to Linux. If I were in charge there would be a team devoted to fixing this a decade ago. WSL singlehandedly stemmed much of tide of developers moving away from Windows, but WSL native filesystem performance gave devs that magical experience when they boot into Linux the first time and see that the filesystem doesn't have to be ass. There's always…

Just a comment on Proton... I've recently shifted to linux (garuda ) as a native OS for gaming (still dual booting, but linux is my main OS now, I used to run linux VMs in windows). My experience with Proton is that only ~30% of my games work out of the box. Some games like dota2, and factorio are native linux and work MUCH better (faster/higher fps) in linux. A bunch of windows games work fine, other's semi work, an…

Outside of games using anti cheat, for me the most common fix is to just select Proton Hotfix or Proton Experimental in the game's compatibility settings.

For some reason certain games default to specific older Proton versions. And then of course there are a bunch of older games with a native Linux port that is now unmaintained and stopped working at some point, but they still work just fine with Proton :)

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#120

Post by epolanski »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #107
rdwrrr wrote: post #106

Give me one good reason why anyone would bother with any of this at all?

Can't run bare metal Linux at work, can run WSL on Windows. That's probably 80+% of use cases.

Also lack of specific software on the Linux side.

Adobe suite (I used Figma and Adobe tools in my webdev career), PDF editing is a huge issue and lackluster on Linux, most of the office suite is not available natively on Linux (no, there's no valid replacements when your company is deep into VBA tooling, etc), PowerBI, but also many specific internal tools that many businesses have and have been developed as Windows-only applications, I had anything ranging from specific VPNs to screen sharing utils. But there's also more dev-focused tooling, from game development frameworks like Unreal Engine (for which I had to develop UIs in the past) and the related Visual Studio to FPGA tooling and USB debugging.

The list is long and generally based on your domain, but in a career I had almost always moments where I could not avoid having a Windows machine.

WSL allows you to generally have both of the words.

I don't dislike Windows in general to be honest, Power Toys, WSL, a great Terminal, it's an okay machine to develop and I like it better than MacOS from which I still have nightmares for being locked out of my hardware for 2 months due to an apple account issue.

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