Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

blogs.windows.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

401–410 of 1001 posts

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#401

Post by nix0n »

yndoendo wrote: post #297
ActorNightly wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if you are working with Linux only, its better to go full linux. WSL2 is really handy when you want to run other software though. For example, I use Solidworks, so I need to run windows. Forscan for Ford vehicles also has to run under Windows. Having WSL2 means that I can just have one laptop and run any software that I want.

My development is mainly Windows and I prefer Linux host with Windows VM guests. The experience is more stable and I can revert to a snapshot when Windows or Microsoft product update brakes something or new test configuration does. It also allows to backup and retain multiple QA environments that are rarely used, like a client's Oracle DB. It is nice being able to save the VM state at the end of the week and shut it…

> My development is mainly Windows and I prefer Linux host with Windows VM guests

I've tried this in the past but I was unable to get the debugger to work from within a VM.

Has this improved, or is there a trick, or are you just going without a debugger?

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#402

Post by petronio »

rkagerer wrote: post #86
ivanmontillam wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. Back in the day (10+ years ago), I used to argue with people about why I ran VMs instead of just partitioning the disk and booting up the OS I needed. XAMPP did not work out of the box with me on Windows (skill issue on my part, I know), so my preferred setup was to run a Ubuntu Server VM (LAMP stack) and then develop whatever I had on a Windows IDE. I could have done that under full Linux, I just did not wa…

I stopped using VMware Workstation when WSL2 broke it Is it still broken?

Nope, VMWare added the capability to work as a sort of nested hypervisor atop Hyper-V (which WSL2 and newer Windows security features depend on).

That being said, there is a performance impact.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#403

Post by Dylan16807 »

hermitShell wrote: post #327
MrPowerGamerBR wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that if you require anything that is GPU-related (like gaming, Adobe suite apps, etc) you'll need to have a secondary GPU to passthrough it to the VM, which is not something that everyone has. So, if you don't have a secondary GPU, you'll need to live without graphics acceleration in the VM... so for a lot of people the "oh you just need to use a VM!" solution is not feasible, because most of the software that…

I don’t know why there aren’t full fledged computers in a GPU sized package. Just run windows on your GPU, Linux on your main cpu. There’s some challenges to overcome but I think it would be nice to be able to extend your arm PC with an x86 expansion, or extend your x86 PC with an ARM extension. Ditto for graphics, or other hardware accelerators

There are computers that size, but I guess you mean with a male PCIe plug on them?

If the card is running its own OS, what's the benefit of combining them that way? A high speed networking link will get you similar results and is flexible and cheap.

If the card isn't running its own OS, it's much easier to put all the CPU cores in the same socket. And the demand for both x86 and Arm cores at the same time is not very high.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#404

Post by realusername »

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.

Same about windows upgrades nowadays really, there's a ton of software which just stopped working.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#405

Post by bubblethink »

Boogie_Man wrote: post #368

Why isn't it "Linux Subsystem for Windows" as it is a Linux subsystem running on a Windows os?

There may also be some trademark law precedent that forces this naming convention. Even on the google play store, if you have 3rd party apps for something, it's always "App for X", the name cannot be "X app".

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#406

Post by qwertox »

I despise Windows 11 so much, but have to use it. I have a 24/7 box with Ubuntu running a couple of Linux and Windows VMs and that's the way I like it. I don't touch the Ubuntu host except for when I need to reconfigure it.

All development is done on Windows laptop via SSH to those VMs. When I tried using Ubuntu via WSL, something didn't feel right. There were some oddities, probably with the filesystem integration, which bothered me enough to stop doing this.

Nevertheless, I think it's really great what they now did.

Now all what's missing is that they do it the other way around, that they create a 100% windows compatible Wine alternative.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#407

Post by Firehawke »

Foxboron wrote: post #272
Firehawke wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a bit more than just some candy, there's substantial glue on both the Linux/Windows sides to get Plan9, WSLG, and the other components to work. That said, the kernel they distribute is open source and you're not limited to just the distros they're working with directly. There are a number of third party (e.g. there's no Arch from Arch or Microsoft, but there's a completely compatible third party package that giv…

>e.g. there's no Arch from Arch or Microsoft, but there's a completely compatible third party package that gives you Arch in WSL2 No longer true since last month. https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...

I'm shocked. They were adamant it wasn't going to happen for a long long time.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#408

Post by p_ing »

stephenr wrote: post #216
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…

... You know that you can run VMs, or full-OS containers on a Linux desktop right? Or on a macOS Desktop. Bonus: doing so on either platform doesn't also mean your host OS is running under a hypervisor, as it does with WSL2. Bigger bonus: you don't have to run fucking Windows.

> Bonus: doing so on either platform doesn't also mean your host OS is running under a hypervisor

Why do you think, technologically, this is some form of "bonus"?

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#409

Post by Hilift »

jve wrote: post #398

Sec guy (who was mainly a linux guy) was never happy to let people use WSL in corp due to security bugs. Can anyone chime in - is this still a concern? Was it ever a concern?

WSL is an easy compliance trick when you want to run your own Postfix/Dovecot installation.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#410

Post by pelorat »

ahartmetz wrote: post #377
PaulHoule wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With WSL you can use “Linux the good parts” (command line tools, efficient-enough paradigms for fork() servers) and completely avoid X Windows, the Wayland death spiral, 100 revisions of Gnome and KDE that not so much reinvent the wheel but instead show us why the wheel is not square or triangular…

>the Wayland death spiral That sounds like Wayland getting worse, but it's actually been slowly improving and it's pretty good now. Only took a decade+ to get there.

Mir was good from year one.
Post reply on HN