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Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

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Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you propose if you want to use a windows program to edit those files? For example I use intellij on Windows but want to compile and test on the Linux machine. If it takes 30 seconds longer than wsl 1, why would I bother changing? What is the actual point of wsl if not for the cross compatible filesystems

For wsl2, Vscode has integrations that let you do exactly that. I use python primarily and it lets you use the python interpreter installed on wsl. I assume other IDEs would have something similar or at least let you develop using a remote machine, but in this case you would configure it to point at your VM instead. As long as your processes and files are from the wsl vm, it is extremely fast. I rather use the wsl sh…

IntelliJ IDEA 2020.1 now supports wsl$ paths[1]. You can vote on supporting other features here[2].

[1] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-197573?p=IDEABKL-7...

[2] https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/IDEA-171510

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It needs a VHD, which requires setting aside a partition of your disk, meaning you can't dynamically share space with your Windows files. That's a huge downside for me. (By "partition" here I'm just referring to the English sense, not the MBR/GPT per se.) You also can't nor search/modify your Linux files directly from Windows like I mentioned. The 9P server with WSL1 has been so slow as to be unusable for some direct…

It's a resizable VHD that handles its business in the background, so I don't understand the complaint. And you can access your Linux files in Windows just fine when using WSL2. Just go to `\\wsl$`. WSL2 is the first thing to legit make me reconsider my daily-driver Fedora setup in...well, since I started using it in ~2016. I just do not think about it, it's great.

> resizable VHD

Just like what you normally use with a Hyper-V VM. A resizable VHD which grows but not shrinks, and with a size limit. Heck they even have a document on what to do when you exceed the default 256GB limit: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-ux-changes...

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Been running some flavour of Debian for > 10 years. Now on my dell XPS 13 9350. Upgraded to Debian 10, a kernel regression broke the brcfmac driver for my Broadcom wireless. Now I need to disable power saving on the WiFi card. Still, sometimes the WiFi card just dies. Sometimes reloading the kernel module works, sometimes only a hard reset will do. Bluetooth has never worked.

Broadcom unfortunately has never been well supported on Linux. I've always used ThinkPads for running Linux and have never had these sorts of hardware issues (and I keep laptops for at least 8 years). You need to buy a machine with running Linux in mind (or more specifically, Debian, which has even less out-of-the-box hardware support for laptops).

You’re right. A new WiFi card is cheap, apparently. Just not available anywhere near where I am :/

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#264
post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web development primarily

Web development with node and ruby it seems. Java and .NET Web development has been perfectly fine the last decades.

Node, PHP, anything Docker all seem to work better under WSL2 than windows itself.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#265
post #250

In WSL1, running "wsl git status" on a moderately sized repo on an NTFS (Windows side) drive or SMB file share is nearly instantaneous. In WSL2, running the same command takes over 30 seconds. WSL2 is a massive hit to the seemless experience between the two operating systems with filesystem performance from Linux to Windows files orders of magnitude worse. Yes, unzipping tarballs or manipulating and stat syscalls are…

Clearly the best solution is for Microsoft to (a) write a proper ext4 driver for Windows and (b) find some way of embedding SIDs into ext4, then you could just format the drive as ext4, boot off it, and have the improved performance. (This is mostly a joke, but the performance of NTFS for certain operations has always been abysmal, and having a virus scanner injecting itself into all the operations only makes it wors…

Well, native access to my Ubuntu partition from Windows would be welcome.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#266
post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and is so close to feature parity That was not my experience with WSL1; I was regularly running into unimplemented features. Some examples: the Z3 solver used clock_gettime for timeouts, and their specific usage was broken in WSL1 so you'd get random failures depending on how long the solve took. And don't get me started on running Chromium. It felt like WSL1 would be running into the long tail of compatibility iss…

Some useful network related stuff wasn't implemented either in WSL1 (NETLINK_ROUTE\RTM_GETROUTE, AF_PACKET family). This meant even good ol' nmap was out.

The lack of network stuff killed it for me

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#267
post #67
post #59

I am giving up. WSL1 was a great invention but Microsoft gave up on it, either because of the filesystem performance problems or because of the debuggers. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028 (lldb, rr, delve all affected). This looks like a dreaded case of the first 90% is easy, it's the second 90% that is hard. Imagine implementing a translator for a vast majority of Linux syscalls just to find certain flav…

WSL was very cool from a pure tech standpoint, but I've never been clear what the actual use case for it was. WSL2 seems to be more along the lines of coLinux, which I felt the same way about when it was new.

I use it as Terminal on files stored in windows under /mnt/c (php dev environment in xampp), plus ssh and python for notebooks running in vscode

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#268
post #157
post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you want to use multimedia and do web development on the same machine, what are you going to do? Linux support is somewhere between nonexistent and utterly broken for the first one and the same can be said for the second on Windows. So your choices are, 1. run Linux primary, put Windows in a VM 2. run Windows primary and put Linux in a VM 3. Give up and just run a separate Linux server.

Web development on Windows has been like surfing for those of us doing Java and .NET web development, since like ever. 2006 was for me the turning point where Linux was only used via VMs or some remote box. WSL2 is just fine, I don't need to mess with VMWare any longer. And if I am not doing Linux deployments, I can do plain Windows development, like I have done since Windows 3.0. For the Linux desktop experience I h…

> Web development on Windows has been like surfing for those of us doing Java and .NET web development, since like ever.

This similitude baffles me. Do you mean "had to wear protective equipment, had to drive constantly between locations, we were knocked over every few seconds, and we risked drowning several times"...?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#269
I've been a happy user of WSL2 since 2 months, and I absolutely love it. After switching to it, I completely stopped using Mac Mini and Linux.

It has made my life so easier. All the Linux stuff + development work gets done inside Windows Terminal + WSL2 + NeoVim, and I still get to keep Windows for Gaming, Designing, Office work, other random programs etc.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#270
post #217
post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth broke on me: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=204875 2015 November https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=206032 2015 December https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=210685 2016 March. And these were times when I needed community help, most of the time I could get it working by pairing again or some such nonsense. It never worked reliably, in general. Note I switched to Windows as my daily…

If you things to just keep on working Arch might not be the distro for you. Have you tried something like ubuntu?

Canonical broke wlan and OpenGL for many of us when they decided to replace fully working closed source drivers, with work in progress open source replacements.

So even Ubuntu isn't necessarily a guarantee of stability.

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