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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

#311

Post by kds3 »

sieabahlpark wrote: post #193
sz4kerto wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WSL2 is really not designed for using Linux tools on your NTFS-based filesystem. Store everything on the WSL filesystem, that works perfectly. If you need GUI tools try VcXsrv.

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

You can also run your (cross-platform) IDE inside WSL. With WSL1 and Xming it worked fast enough for me.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#312

Post by mattbee »

AaronFriel wrote: post #140

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…

My understanding was that there were some hard-to-impossible problems to solve to really accelerate the filesystem access from the Linux side under WSL1.

That meant that people doing disk-intensive workloads on the Linux side noticed a big slowdown compared to a native Linux system - certainly e.g. running a big test suite, or a git checkout felt really incredibly slow.

The switch to a VM flipped this relationship round - so now the formerly native / NTFS side is the second-class citizen, but you get the expected performance when putting your files on the "Linux side". For me (doing fs-intensive Rails development), this was a big win.

WSL2 will also quite happily gobble so much memory that Windows slows to a crawl (especially filling Linux's disk buffers on file copies) - that seemed like an odd default, - you just have to pop a .wslconfig in to restrict its usage.

I agree with the other posters here that the WSL1 approach seemed far more elegant, and probably the only way to "not see the joins"- with WSL2 we're worrying about filesystem boundaries _and_ memory now, probably forever. So I hope someone still working that nice seamless syscall layer for a future WSL3.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#313

Post by trasz »

bitwize wrote: post #50
derekp7 wrote: post #14

Question -- from what I understand, WSL2 is closer to Linux running in a VM, whereas WSL1 was like a Windows kernel level version of Cygwin. Is that mostly correct? Regarding that, remember a number of years ago, prior to VMs there was a patch set for the Linux kernel porting it to user space -- so you could run Linux as a user process, which ended up functioning similar to running it in a VM. Would WSL2 be closer to…

WSL (1) was what the BSD people call a "kernel personality", which allows one kernel to emulate another at the syscall and ABI level.

The fundamental difference is that BSD compat layers are mostly about ABI, and not the functionality itself - because it’s common for all of them.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#314

Post by tilolebo »

rfoo wrote: post #244
tilolebo wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not my experience with VS Code on WSL 2. I have been using it for months using the remote extension, hosting my git repos in the Ubuntu subsystem, it works like a charm and feels very responsive. Maybe wait for an IDE update that handles properly WSL 2?

> using the remote extension Then there is no WSL 2 handling in your editor. VSCode remote extension works in the same way for either WSL 2, or a full-fledged Linux VM, or even a remote Linux server. As someone who run a Linux VM side by side all times, I really don't get WSL 2.

You're just playing with the words here...

It's the same as saying: " As a person who runs containers all the time, I really don't get Docker".

The point is VS Code handles my code hosted in WSL 2 out of the box. I don't care that I could use a VM or a remote server instead.

I just suggested that the parent commenter waits for is IDE to implement a similar integration...

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#315

Post by fredzel »

mcny wrote: post #92
simplicio wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a MS employee on twitter the other day (sorry, I forgot who) saying it was because there were legal issues with naming something with a title that has someone else's trademark as the first word.

That completely makes sense in my mind just because my favorite reddit app is called slide for reddit. I think reddit forced everyone to use x for Reddit in their name as opposed to Reddit X.

It was the case with 'reddit is fun' for android, now it's 'rif is fun'

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#316

Post by RMPR »

zxexz wrote: post #116
abhishekjha wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have used docker on MacOS. I don’t know about windows but it ran fine on my mac. Is there something particular that didn’t work for you?

I use Docker on macOS daily for work. I love it, and am grateful for it, but the experience is NOTHING like using Docker on Linux. Docker for macOS runs in a virtual machine, and requires dedicating RAM to the daemon. You aren’t directly using the host OS’ kernel either, which can lead to wonky behavior, especially in regards to networking (IME).

Have you tried podman (https://podman.io/whatis.html)?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#317

Post by smitty1e »

pjmlp wrote: post #276
smitty1e wrote: post #254

Windows seems to be gradually trending toward an OSX-style desktop experience riding on top of a Linux kernel.

Except it isn't, that Linux kernel runs on top of a Hyper-V instance, alongside the NT kernel which is managing the whole show. More z/OS and less UNIX.

For now.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#318

Post by Talanes »

mcny wrote: post #92
simplicio wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a MS employee on twitter the other day (sorry, I forgot who) saying it was because there were legal issues with naming something with a title that has someone else's trademark as the first word.

That completely makes sense in my mind just because my favorite reddit app is called slide for reddit. I think reddit forced everyone to use x for Reddit in their name as opposed to Reddit X.

Reddit did exactly that, like five or six years ago. A bunch of apps had to change their names, which is how you end up with apps like "rif is fun for Reddit," where the first part stands for "Reddit is Fun."

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#319

Post by mikkelam »

Slightly off topic but, I've been a mac user for some 6 years now and was recently forced to switch to either linux or windows for a deep learning desktop experience. I'm wondering how complete the windows experience will feel as a long-time unix user? Windows seems to have everything these days with WSL, great programming, gaming, media/rendering environments as well as super stable. What's bad?

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability

#320

Post by tilolebo »

mehrdadn wrote: post #188
eropple wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've never looked as to whether it shrinks it, but I assume not (that would be hard). OTOH, storage is cheap, so I've never really worried. I never used WSL1 in anger, but accessing WSL2 over the \\wsl$ is not particularly slow. It's not as fast as native, but I don't notice it. I do almost all of my access of files on the Linux image via a terminal and VSCode-over-WSL-Remote, though.

Well "storage is cheap" for you but why assume my money and everyone else's is cheap? I'm low on space and I need to shell out hundreds of dollars to get a larger version of what I have just to use WSL2. Or I could just keep using WSL1 and save my money, especially in this economy. Why in the world would I get a new SSD just for WSL2? This isn't about using it "in anger". I'm not pushing it to some kind of corner cas…

That has been my experience as well.

WSL2 is much much faster.

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