Live data from Hacker News

WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

boxofcables.dev

121–130 of 178 posts

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#121
post #99
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…

Onedrive constantly trying to steal all my files, bing in the start menu, windows update hogging resources then rebooting at the worst time, offline updates taking fking forever even with a fast SSD, layers and layers of bloat and garbage we have to click through or remove on new installs, removing customisation features and taking a decade to half-ass a control panel rewrite, I could go on...

> Onedrive constantly trying to steal all my files

By default setting, windows defender will upload "suspicious files" to Microsoft.

A while back I caught it trying to nab my OpenVPN installer which also contains the certificates.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#122
post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Onedrive constantly trying to steal all my files, bing in the start menu, windows update hogging resources then rebooting at the worst time, offline updates taking fking forever even with a fast SSD, layers and layers of bloat and garbage we have to click through or remove on new installs, removing customisation features and taking a decade to half-ass a control panel rewrite, I could go on...

> Onedrive constantly trying to steal all my files By default setting, windows defender will upload "suspicious files" to Microsoft. A while back I caught it trying to nab my OpenVPN installer which also contains the certificates.

Basically the Apple and Google stuff that others like so much.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#123

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.

People who run WSL are not normal users. The filesystem problems make Windows+WSL feel like a Trabant when you're used to a Porsche.

Not really, I only care about WSL for containers, zero filesystem problems.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#124

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.

There is ffmpeg for Windows.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#125

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.

For one, the game developers that don't care about SteamDeck.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, you know, about 70+% of the global desktop/laptop market. Nearly every F500 company. But yeah sure, no one runs windows these days.

Because Windows is the operating system of Not Getting Fired. Fear is a stronger motivator than creativity or productivity.

Nah, some of us gave up on The Year of Desktop Linux, especially on laptops, and decided to make use of desktop VMs instead.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#127
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Believe it or not, there's plenty of people that specifically choose windows, not just out of fear of getting fired or inertia. The idea that all devs use a mac and that windows is garbage for any kind of development is purely a silicon valley bubble thing. And there's still a big niche that Windows is your only choice since the move to Apple silicon. If you need both a dGPU and access to commercial software, its lit…

Windows _is_ garbage for a lot of modern development (except thise targeting Win32). But that does not matter to the ICT department tasked with controlling and securing all endpoints, preferring a single, very well known and controllable OS over freedom and performance.

At least it isn't Wayland, or having to mix and match configurations until hardware video decoding on Chrome finally works.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#128
post #16

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.

Not my experience. I installed the IoT version of Windows 11 and have changed exactly one setting (put the start menu back on the left where it rightfully belongs). Nothing else has required any changes at all to get sanity, which is more than you can say for Mac (which requires half a dozen extra apps to make it same - SteerMouse, Karabina, Spectacle, etc.), or Linux, where the UI is mostly sane - if you're using KDE anyway - but you're beset by bugs and jank.

And don't say "it works for me". We know some people get very lucky with Linux and stuff just works. In my experience the typical experience is that stuff works much better on Windows than Linux.

E.g. something Windows figured out in 2000 - what happens when your system is low on ram or overloaded? Simple! Press ctrl-alt-del, it will pause other apps and allow you to open the task manager and choose one to kill.

On Linux? There's no task manager in the ctrl-alt-del menu (on KDE anyway), and even if there was it isn't a specially privileged UI so it wouldn't respond. Running low on RAM? No problem we'll just kill a random process and if that doesn't work (it usually doesn't), completely freeze and then hard-reboot. Yeay.

Re: WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

#130

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.

People who run WSL are not normal users. The filesystem problems make Windows+WSL feel like a Trabant when you're used to a Porsche.

Yes well I felt the same way with how slow Docker file systems were on Mac but I think that's fixed now.
Post reply on HN