Earlier quoted context omitted.
You don't stress about Windows updates? Hard to believe it.
What do you mean by that?
As a reply to: You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
481–490 of 1001 posts
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#482Earlier quoted context omitted.
And if they think that this version of Linux "isn't janky" but regular Linux is, than idk what to say.
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…
I know you're saying you don't have to use it, but for any that didn't know, WSL2 does ship with it's own Wayland. And it does have some weird bugs.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#483I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux. If you are in Windows and have the urge to use Linux, do the proper switch once and for all. You will never look back. I haven't in almost 15 years. Given what Windows has become and already discussed here on HN I would even hesitate to run it in a virtual machine. Edit: more than 15 years.
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…
There is ongoing work on supporting paravirtualized GPUs with Windows drivers. This is not hardware-based GPU virtualization, and it supports Vulkan in the host and guest not just OpenGL; the host-based side is already supported within QEMU.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#484Every 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 can accomplish the same with Distrobox on Linux, but there's definitely something to be said about having the best of both worlds by running Windows + WSL. I honestly think Microsoft could win back some mind share from Apple if they: * Put out a version of windows without all the crap. Call it Dev edition or something and turn off or down the telemetry, preinstalled stuff, ads, and Copilot. * Put some effort into…
> nor the stop the world updates that take entirely too long
Interesting enough, that beyond release upgrades, happening may be once a year, all or may be 99% of updates took ~5 minutes of interruption of me, including needed reboot. I really wonder how others manage to have "entirely too long" updates.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#485Is it a good news for Wine or ReactOS (Can they learn something to improve their projects)?
No. WSL2 is a Linux VM. It doesn't expose Windows API internals or implementation details. It uses normal, already well-documented public ones. Wine and ReactOS can already use the publicly available documentation and they are still behind on many such APIs' implementation. Windows is a big OS. It takes serious man power to implement many things.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#486Earlier quoted context omitted.
Windows has many useful software that is not available on Linux. So, for me Windows + WSL is more productive than just using Linux. The UI is still better on Windows(basic utilities like File Explorer and Config Management is better on Windows). No Remoting Software beats RDP. When I remote to a Windows workstation through RDP, I can't tell the difference. VNC is always janky. Of course there is Word/Excel/Illustrato…
File Explorer is better on Windows? How? I tried Windows 11 for the first time a month ago and it takes several seconds for file explorer to open, it's asynchronously loading like 3 different UI frameworks as random elements pop in with no consistency, there's two different rightclick menus because they couldn't figure out how to make the new one have all the functionality of the old one so they decided to just keep…
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Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#487Earlier 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…
I have a theory that 99.9% of preferring Windows or Linux comes down to "do ads in the start menu trigger my OCD".
Seems sorta not cool toward people with OCD to use their condition for rhetorical effect.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#488I'm not be sarcastic or funny when I ask this. Why isn't this called the Linux subsystem for Windows? It seems like a Linux subsystem running on Windows. If it were the other way around, (ie, a Windows Subsystem for Linux) I'd think that Linux would be the primary OS, and something like WINE would the subsystem.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#489Every 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…
I won't downvote you, but I will die on the other hill - the one over there that has a guy sitting down with his arms folded sporting an angry face every time someone something positive about WSL. There's at least three of us on that hill. And we're not going anywhere.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#490Not a Windows user, but I think WSL is great. I see a lot of Windows user criticising Linux for... essentially not looking like Windows. "Linux Desktop will never reach mass adoption unless it [something that boils down to 'looks more like Windows']".
The thing is: I consider myself a real Linux user, and I don't want it to look like Windows. And I hate it when Windows people try to push Linux there, just because they want a free-with-no-ads version of Windows.
In that sense, if WSL can keep Windows users on Windows such that they don't come and bother me on Linux, I'm happy :-).