Initial Impressions of WSL 2 • Hacker News Board

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#231

Post by tsar9x » Thu, May 07, 2020, 2:51 PM UTC

pashky wrote: post #144

tsar9x wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My view is that WSL2 will help developers who are stuck on Windows (many enterprises force Windows on users). I don't think Linux will be affected as much. Moreover, Linux is better than ever: - you can buy laptop with Linux from two companies: Dell and System76, soon from Lenovo - performance can't be beat (especially for development, with native docker and kvm for virtualization) - amazing package managers, with fw…

In reality enterprise users on have zero chances seeing WSL2 on their PCs in foreseeable future. Last two banks I worked for ran windows builds 1703 and 1803 respectively, more progressive of the two announced plans to update to 1903 not too long ago (yes, two first digits is year). Oh, and WSL1 was banned, of course, on the grounds of being "too expensive and uncertain to support". You could have a Linux VM though,…

You are right that enterprises are lagging 1-2 years behind current windows build, but in many of them WSL is seen as major improvement for developers. Fortunately I am allowed to run Linux, so I don't care :)

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#232

Post by electricEmu » Thu, May 07, 2020, 3:51 PM UTC

unicornfinder wrote: post #224

electricEmu wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's my understanding that MacOS requires extra setup for those shortcuts regardless of Karabiner. If you feel that extra setup is acceptable then any almost modern OS will fit your needs. There's something to be said for standardized shortcuts that work on every MS Windows instance.

All you need to do is enable full keyboard access in System Preferences -> Accessibility and it'll work.

Which keyboard combination moves windows around, the same as WIN+ArrowKey, after enabling "keyboard access" in MacOS?

Re: Initial Impressions of WSL 2

#233

Post by WorldMaker » Thu, May 07, 2020, 8:08 PM UTC

mycall wrote: post #223

WorldMaker wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, NTFS has very different (multi-file) ACID guarantees and transaction semantics compared to most POSIX file systems. A lot of performance differences between Windows and POSIX file APIs make some sense in a NoSQL versus SQL database analogy: they make very different guarantees about what the "atomic commit" level is, what is stored and how it is stored, what is locked and how and when it is locked. They both hav…

I thought ReFS was suppose to give Windows different atomics and I'm surprised they haven't push it further into their client OS.

The impression Microsoft gives to me is that ReFS is meaningfully only beneficial over NTFS in RAID configurations with multiple physical drives (otherwise NTFS and ReFS have very similar semantics on a single physical drive), so pushing it any further than "Windows Storage Spaces" sounds unlikely, and few consumer machines have more than one physical drive in any configuration much less a software RAID configuration.

In relation to the above conversation about WSL1 performance characteristics, my impression is that ReFS would be equal or worse to NTFS for what Linux/POSIX file operations expect. (ReFS is still very much on the "SQL Database" side of the analogy, like NTFS as it was of course designed to support much the same transactional semantics, and some additional ones as well at the "virtual storage space" level above the physical pool of drives.)

In danger of getting further aside into tangential spaces, Ubuntu's current experimentation with ZFS by default is probably one to watch to see if the user experience of complicated multi-physical disk file systems like ReFS can be made to fit and is useful to a broader user base than just power users. (Though arguably compared to the broader spectrum of casual Windows users, even some of the more casual Ubuntu users might be considered power users in comparison.)