Cool! This means I can fix mDNS now!
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
571–580 of 1001 posts
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#572Every 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 use distrobox (https://distrobox.it/) and move on with your life. At work I use multiple versions of Ubuntu seamlessly without messing with VMs on a host fedora box without issue. That includes building things like .deb packages.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#573Earlier quoted context omitted.
For the curious, the protondb front page gives a pretty good overview of the state of Linux gaming: https://www.protondb.com/ Scrolling to Medals, 50% of all 25.000+ games tracked by the site are playable, either working perfectly or mostly (Platinum or Gold ratings). Another 20% can be alright under specific circumstances, and with compromises (Silver rating).
AoE2:DE has a gold rating, but multiplayer doesn't work at all, and it's not even due to anticheat.
Did this change recently? I haven't played in a month or so but it's been working great for around a year now for me.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#574Every 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've lived in WSL for 3 years now, and have zero complaints. It has worked with no issues what so ever. In 2025, Windows is the best Linux UI.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#575Earlier 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…
Can you share more details of how you make that work well? What hypervisor, what backup/replication, for instance? I can only imagine that being a world of irritation.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#576Earlier 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
As everyone said, WSL2 is actually virtual machines and it is what most people are actually using now. That said, I feel the need to chime in and say I actually love WSL1 and I love Windows NT the kernel. It bums me out all the time that we probably won't get major portions of the NT kernel, even an out-of-date version, in some open source form. I like Linux, and I use Linux as my daily desktop, but it's not because…
Put another way: Worse is Better
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
What specifically about VS Code? I personally don’t use it, pretty much just cause I’m comfortable with my current development environment, and nothing has spurred me to migrate in a while. I’ve been vaguely suspicious to see Microsoft rapidly gain such a huge market share with VS Code, but I don’t know any specific criticisms about it.
VS code is designed to fracture. https://ghuntley.com/fracture/
Sounds like the argument is while it’s technically open source, trickiness with the licenses makes it basically impossible to legally fork it into a usable software. That sounds plausible to me, I’m no lawyer.
But isn’t Cursor a wildly successful VS Code fork, done legally? (I assume if it were in violation of licenses, Microsoft would have already destroyed them.) Seems like a glaring exception to this argument.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#578Earlier quoted context omitted.
AoE2:DE has a gold rating, but multiplayer doesn't work at all, and it's not even due to anticheat.
Did this change recently? I haven't played in a month or so but it's been working great for around a year now for me.
It's been waffling back and forth but always had a "gold" rating even when I verified it was broken. I haven't tried recently (haven't really played video games in years), but there's a comment from 5 days ago saying it's broken again.
At some point, Proton users reported success using some patch, then that stopped working, then there was a different patch... A lot of user reports say "thumbs up" then have a comment explaining how it goes out-of-sync unless you fiddle with it, so it's hard to trust.
Seems the root of the problem is this game's picky netcode, which is similar to the original 1998 game I played as a kid. If your game state diverges from the other players' at all, it goes oos and ends the game for everyone. And yes this happened often enough that people had an abbreviation for it.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#579Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the same spirit if "it depends", there are other options that may work for people with different Linux/Windows balance points: * Wine is surprisingly good these days for a lot of software. If you only have an app or two that need Windows it is probably worth trying Wine to see if it meets your needs. * Similarly, if gaming is your thing Valve has made enormous strides in getting the majority of games to work flawl…
I'm struggling to find an option for running x86 Windows software on MacOS/Apple Silicon performantly. (LiDAR point cloud processing.) The possibilities seem endless and kinda confusing with Windows on ARM vs Rosetta and Wine, think there's some other options which use MacOS's included virtualization frameworks.
Have you tried CloudCompare? Native Mac ARM support.
(Edit: just so you know, the UI is a bit weird, there is a bit of a learning curve. But the app behaves in a very sane manner, with every step the previous state is maintained and a new node is created. It takes time to get used to it, but you'll learn to appreciate it.
May your cloud have oriented normals, and your samples be uniformely distributed. Godspeed!)
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#580Every 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…
Still somewhat janky. I use it on my work machine (since it at least seems a bit faster than using VirtualBox) and regularly run into issues where npm won't build my project due to the existence of symlinks [1,2]. wslg windows also don't yet have first-party support from the windowing system [3]. I also remember having trouble setting up self-signed certs and getting SSL working.
1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57580420/wsl-using-a-wsl... 2. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5118 3. https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/22