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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

#341

Post by sertraline »

1oooqooq wrote: post #261
jjcm wrote: post #151

When WSL came out I was absolutely overjoyed - finally an actual linux shell on windows! I use windows for my gaming pc, and I wanted to have a unified gaming/dev box. It felt like the solution. Over time though more and more small issues with it came up. Packages working not quite right, issues with the barriers between the two, etc. It always felt like there was a little bit more friction with the process. With Val…

i think everyone tried that. gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point. i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again. then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again. then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again. now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file…

It always infuriates me when people say Windows is all about games. Techies are so detached from reality they forget that people have creative hobbies and have to use industrial grade software. Doing creative hobbies on Linux is an act of sadomasochism. And on top of that, Linux and MacOS cannot run software from 3 years ago while Windows can run software from 35 years ago. And on top of that, Linux is completely unusable to Japanese/Chinese speakers due to how hard it is to input the moon runes, and on top of that Wayland breaks the least painful setup that you could have earlier. And on top of that, Wayland people shown a middle finger to all the people who need accessibility features.

No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#342

Post by lxgr »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #325
lxgr wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, the best part of running Linux as the base OS is not having to deal with Windows. No ridiculous start menu spam; a sane, non-bloated operating system (imagine being able to update user space libraries without a reboot, due to being able to delete files that other processes still have opened!); being able to back up my data at the file level without relying on weird block-level imaging shenanigans and so much…

> imagine being able to update user space libraries without a reboot That's... a very weird criticism to level at Windows, considering that the advice I've seen for Linux is to reboot if you update glibc (which is very much a user space library).

Why? It directly results in almost every Windows update requiring a reboot to apply, compared to usually only an application restart or at most desktop logout/login on Linux.

Having to constantly reboot my computer, or risk missing important security patches, was very annoying to me on Windows.

I've never had to reboot after updating glibc in years of using Linux, as far as I can remember.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#343

Post by wging »

jleyank wrote: post #280
jcranmer wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The MIT license scrunches the first two clauses of the 3-clause BSD license into a single clause, and omits the third clause (the nonendorsement clause, which is already generally implied). As a practical matter, most of the basic "simple" open source licenses are functionally identical.

But who owns the copyright to changes, and how is it recorded? I just am suspicious as to what or how large companies who sell/rent software deal with open-source, free stuff...

You can answer those questions for yourself, it's all in the repo.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#344

Post by stopthe »

A lot of people here are saying nice things about having dev environment on WSL. Honest question: how do you deal with with those minor but insufferable Windows' quirks like 0d0a line endings, selective Unicode support, byte-order-marks and so on.

While right now I enjoy the privilege to develop on Linux, things may change.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#345

Post by oblio »

microtonal wrote: post #293
eahm wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can make your own clean version, legally, with this file. https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator . I get customers and most people don't know about it but it's kind of ridiculous that techy people in a tech forum don't know how to do it.

it's kind of ridiculous that techy people in a tech forum don't know how to do it. Why? HN has traditionally always largely been a macOS and Linux crowd. Why do we have to care about fixing an OS that is broken out of the box (that most of us don't use anyway)?

Because someone cannot make informed comments about the "other" party unless they have a reasonably deep knowledge of it, too.

Far too many Linux users, especially, make fun of Windows and if you dig a bit you see that most of their complaints are things that are solved with 5 minutes of googling. Some complaints are philosophical, and those I agree with, but even in that case, I'd be curious how consistent they are with their philosophy when for example Linux desktop environments due weird things.

Summarizing a bit: Linux users with years or decades of experience of tinkering as sysadmins with Linux frequently make junior-level user complaints about Windows usage, frequently based on outdated information about it.

I say this who has been using both Linux and Windows for a few decades now and has a fairly decent level of sysadmin skills on both.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#346

Post by dataflow »

Anybody know what the deal is with neither Oracle nor Microsoft trying to make it possible for VirtualBox and WSL2 to coexist without severe performance impact? What the heck is the issue that neither side knows how to solve? Or is there a deliberate business decision not to solve it?

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#347

Post by [deleted] »

phendrenad2 wrote: post #281
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You get all of Windows telemetry, vulnerabilities and backdoors, the always fun game of spot the new Advertising opportunity, AI “copilot” spyware I mean feature, updates that reset your machine at will, a terrible UAC model that encourages “just click OK already!”, and dependence on a company that has gone out of their way to prove how much of an unstoppable behemoth they are; and best of all you get to pay for the…

Yes, you get Windows telemetry which enabled fixing bugs without a bug report, you get minimal ads in the start menu (if you're playing "spot the new advertising opportunity" I found it. It's in the start menu. You can stop playing now), AI "copilot" which isn't spyware just because you think it is, updates that ASK you nicely multiple times to update (I don't want to be ableist, if you suffer from a Christopher Nola…

[deleted]

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#348

Post by nrclark »

bunderbunder wrote: post #217
0xfeba wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Forscan for Ford vehicles also has to run under Windows. I've successfully run it with WINE. Thought, my Forscan executable was 3 years old or so and that may have changed, but I doubt it.

The thing about WINE is that it's not necessarily solid enough to rely on at work. You never know when the next software upgrade will break something that used to work. That's always true, of course. But, compared to other options, relying on WINE increases the chances of it happening by an amount that someone could be forgiven for thinking isn't acceptable.

In my mind, I almost feel like the opposite is true. Wine is getting better and better, especially with the amount of resources that Valve is putting into it.

If you want a stable, repeatable way to wrangle a Windows tool: Wine is it. It's easy to deploy and repeat, requires no licenses, and has consistent behavior every time (unless you upgrade your Wine version or something). Great integration with Linux. No Windows Updates are going to come in and wreck your systems. No licensing, no IT issues, no active directory requirements, no forced reboots.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#349

Post by Dylan16807 »

oblio wrote: post #337
juancn wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically it's not a VM, it's a subsystem, the same way Win32, Win64, Posix, OS/2, etc. are. It's a feature of the NT-family of kernels where you can create many environments sharing the same underlying executive and HAL. It's a quite interesting way to build an OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT

They had to give that up because it was too slow, I think for IO. Unfortunate.

It's complicated. WSL1 is much faster at accessing the drives mounted in Windows, but much slower at accessing its own emulated drive.

If you have control over where you put your git repo, WSL2 will hit max speed. If you want it shared between OSes, WSL2 will be slower.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#350

Post by ori_b »

juancn wrote: post #318
jchw wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"More powerful than Linux" is silly. It's a VM. The most useful thing is that it does a bunch of convenience features for you. I am not suggesting that it is not extremely convenient, but it's not somehow more powerful than just using Linux. You know what's even more convenient than a VM? Not needing a VM and still having the exact same functionality. And you don't need a bunch of janky wrapper scripts, there's more…

Technically it's not a VM, it's a subsystem, the same way Win32, Win64, Posix, OS/2, etc. are. It's a feature of the NT-family of kernels where you can create many environments sharing the same underlying executive and HAL. It's a quite interesting way to build an OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT

It used to be. They moved to a VM.

Turns out that it's easier to emulate a CPU than syscalls. The CPU churns a lot less, too, which means that once things start working things tend to keep working.

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