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Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

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Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#441

Post by nickjj »

reissbaker wrote: post #440
nickjj wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's fair enough. I have a 2560x1440 display but I run it at 1:1 native scaling, everything updates quickly with no flickering or tearing. I've found in general using display scaling anywhere is always a questionable experience since not every app is developed to take advantage of it.

That's doable on 1440p, but IMO it's a dealbreaker on 4k.

Absolutely. That's why I bought and recommend[0] a 1440p monitor unless you plan to use a 32-36" 4k display which IMO is a bit too big. The 1440p monitor I use is 25" and feels just right because it requires minimal head / eye movement to see everything.

[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo...

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#442

Post by mmerlin »

lobocinza wrote: post #427
alex_smart wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So even if a windows build is available, sometimes the user experience of linux-first software on windows can be subobtimal because of differences in filesystem and process model of the two operating systems. I much prefer using git and emacs within WSL than their windows builds. > The only reason I run windows in the first place is for a few apps, mostly games Another reason to use windows is if you are on a laptop…

> Another reason to use windows is if you are on a laptop and care about battery life. Browsers on Linux still don't have hardware accelerated video playback. That's just not true. Might be a problem with some GPUs but not with all. At least I got hardware accelerated video playback on Chromium with my AMD GPU.

I happily found Chromium-VAAPI almost 2 years ago and it works great with Intel integrated GPU video acceleration on Arch Manjaro Xfce

https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/chromium-vaapi

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#443

Post by ripley12 »

modeless wrote: post #126

> Please note that for the first release of WSLg, vGPU interops with the Weston compositor through system memory. If running on a discrete GPU, this effectively means that the rendered data is copied from VRAM to system memory before being presented to the compositor within WSLg, and uploaded onto the GPU again on the Windows side. This is a pretty big limitation. Hopefully it can be addressed soon.

This talk (from November last year) discusses a pretty detailed design for a zero-copy architecture. Sounds like it will be addressed soon. https://youtu.be/EkNBsBx501Q?t=1438

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#444

Post by hnick »

the8472 wrote: post #380
chx wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With WSL v2 , you can run Windows and all Linux apps. WSL v1 had limitations but WSL v2 is a VM -- a more integrated VM than usual but still.

> With WSL v2 , you can run Windows and all Linux apps. Can it run perf yet? I.e. are they passing through hardware performance counters from the host?

iptables doesn't fully work either (I was trying to setup a game proxy), and I suppose a few other things.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#445

Post by sterlind »

ineedasername wrote: post #277
scandinavian wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Accessing the Windows filesystem from WSL and vice versa is extremely slow, so running for example your IDE in WSL and having your code etc. stored in WSL is useful. I think that is one of the big usecases. It's already kinda supported in vscode, where it runs a vscode server in WSL and Windows just runs the frontend. It's useful for me when developing dotnet intended for Linux as I can store the code in WSL and be a…

Why is it so slow? I use VMware player and swapping files is fine. WSL2 seems like it's just using a lightweight VM over HyperV... is Hyper V really that much worse than VMware (and VBox) in this?

WSL2 uses 9P (of the venerable Plan 9 pedigree, I assume because Erick Smith is a nerd!) to remote the filesystems. I don't think that's part of HyperV (though it could be a custom VSP/VSC, and that channel is ridiculously slow.)

Personally I haven't run into slowness other than Windows sucking at copying lots of small files, which is NT's fault for allowing FS filter drivers and their ridiculous locking scheme.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#446

Post by ImaCake »

rashil2000 wrote: post #356
ImaCake wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Windows terminal + wsl is good, but I think the native terminal in MacOS is still much better to use. In the Win 11 beta the ease of use is pretty similar, but the unix terminal is just better integrated into MacOS. Probably my favourite terminal command is `open` which on MacOS lets me open any file in the associated application. I haven't found the same for WSL yet.

` ` from Windows, or `explorer.exe ` from WSL. As simple as that.

Hah, I was kinda hoping someone would know a trick I just hadn't found yet! Thanks for this. I set an alias so `open='explorer.exe'` which saves me some typing and muscle memory.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#447

Post by numpad0 »

zbentley wrote: post #426
numpad0 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m speculating it was supposed to let them drop Meltdown patches. Doing so easily creates “20% performance gain over Windows 10 on same machine”. Aligns with the statement that they “block” “security” updates. But this is clearly coming from someone who’s not actively in coding role and without consultation with developers, as some of CPUs(namely Ryzen 2k) to be supported don’t have the required but not very well de…

> I’m speculating Was that a pun?

There is the path that that could be TRUE, and the path that that could be FALSE :p

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#448

Post by reissbaker »

nickjj wrote: post #441
reissbaker wrote: post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's doable on 1440p, but IMO it's a dealbreaker on 4k.

Absolutely. That's why I bought and recommend[0] a 1440p monitor unless you plan to use a 32-36" 4k display which IMO is a bit too big. The 1440p monitor I use is 25" and feels just right because it requires minimal head / eye movement to see everything. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo...

Fonts look much better on 4k screens with 2x scaling than on 1440p: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/

If you stare at text all day, 4k is pretty nice. The difference between 4k and 1440p is easily noticeable to me even on very small displays, like 15" laptops. I have a 1440p gaming laptop, and the less-sharp text is slightly annoying; I otherwise love it as a laptop, though, so I live with 1440p since it's a fairly small screen anyway. On larger displays like an external monitor I definitely wouldn't use 1440p.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#449

Post by nickjj »

reissbaker wrote: post #448
nickjj wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. That's why I bought and recommend[0] a 1440p monitor unless you plan to use a 32-36" 4k display which IMO is a bit too big. The 1440p monitor I use is 25" and feels just right because it requires minimal head / eye movement to see everything. [0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/how-to-pick-a-good-monitor-fo...

Fonts look much better on 4k screens with 2x scaling than on 1440p: https://tonsky.me/blog/monitors/ If you stare at text all day, 4k is pretty nice. The difference between 4k and 1440p is easily noticeable to me even on very small displays, like 15" laptops. I have a 1440p gaming laptop, and the less-sharp text is slightly annoying; I otherwise love it as a laptop, though, so I live with 1440p since it's a fairly sm…

From what I understand 200% 4k is the same screen real estate as 1080p. It's a trade off I suppose. I would much prefer 1440p on a smaller monitor (like a 25") which offers pretty good DPI. I can read HN's text at 1:1 scaling from around 3 feet away and I wear glasses, 4 feet is doable too but it starts to get blurry. In my day to day I stand a little further than an arm's length away.

Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux GUI

#450

Post by Jnr »

reissbaker wrote: post #430
Jnr wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No lags for me with GTX 970. And I use Firefox, it has Wayland support.

"It works for me on very specific, ancient hardware, and also don't use " isn't a great selling point for people who just want their machine to work and aren't bought into Linux On The Desktop as a philosophical ideal. That's why people use WSL2! Popular software works, popular hardware works, you can run Linux programs from the command line without installing and managing a separate VM yourself (yes, yes, it's virtu…

If you want a great Linux desktop experience, don’t buy Nvidia GPU’s. Intel and AMD has very good open source drivers, while Nvidia has only the proprietary ones and they are known to have all kinds of issues. There is a good reason Linus Torvalds said the famous words “fuck you Nvidia”.

And major problem that still persists with WSL is the NFTS mounts in Linux. At work we can’t have decent compile times on Windows because of the file system.

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