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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

#161

Post by ActorNightly »

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.

The big difference is hardware access.

I used to do VFIO with hardware passthrough so I could have linux but still run windows software like CAD that takes advantage of the gfx card. That was a pain to set up and use.

The other way, its very simple. WSL2 can run ML tasks with just a tiny bit of overhead in moving the data to the card.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#162

Post by randunel »

bsnnkv wrote: post #51
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 will also die on this hill - NixOS on WSL + Windows + komorebi[1] for tiling window management is peak productivity for me. [1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

Why not a Linux distro with i3wm, instead? What could possibly hold you back from upgrading?

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#163

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#164

Post by NelsonMinar »

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.

That works pretty well except for gaming. A lot of games detect if they are running in a VM and refuse to let you play, as an anti-cheat measure.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#165

Post by baq »

JonChesterfield wrote: post #116
Flamentono2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you might want to give more context. I use linux. I don't need WSL at all. Not at work nor at home. So you praise WSL because you use Windows as your main system? Than yes its great. It definitly makes the Windows experience a lot better. OpenSSH for Windows was also a game changer. Honestly, i have no clue why Microsoft needed so long for that.

putty is longer necessary? That would be a wild upgrade in usability for the work laptop, shall go try it

openssh has been an optional windows component for... almost a decade now? including the server, so you can ssh into powershell as easily as into any unix-like. (last time I set it up there was some fiddling with file permissions required for key auth to work, but it does work.)

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#166

Post by ghotli »

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.

Counterpoint: things like the Valve Index for VR simply don't behave well in this environment no matter how much I've worked on getting it there.

I'm not a novice either, $dayjob has me working on the lowest levels of Linux on a daily basis. I did linux from scratch on a Pentium 2 when I was 12. All that to say yes I happen to agree but edge cases are out there. The blanket statement doesn't apply for all use cases

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#167

Post by int_19h »

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.

If you're in a corporate environment, you often don't have a choice wrt Windows as your primary desktop OS.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#168

Post by tyushk »

randunel wrote: post #150
ThinkBeat wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Windows supports Linux because the latter is open source, it's a lot easier than the reverse. Linux, on the other hand, barely supports Windows because the latter is closed, and not just closed, windows issues component updates which specifically check if they run in wine and stop running, being actively hostile to a potential Linux host. The two are not equivalent, nobody in the Linux kernel team is actively sabotag…

> whereas Microsoft is actively sabotaging wine

Do you have a link to where I can read more about this? My understanding is that Microsoft saw Wine as inconsequential to their business, even offloading the Mono runtime to them [1] when they dropped support for it.

[1] https://www.mono-project.com/

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#169

Post by jollyllama »

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…

As of a couple of years ago the integration was not that great and I switched to just using a full-fledged VM instead. For example, trying to use binaries in WSL from within Visual Studio or vice versa was not great.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#170

Post by VikingCoder »

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…

It doesn't work on any of my 3 Windows machines, all completely different hardware. Jank factor 100% for me. I wish I was seeing what you're seeing.
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