591–600 of 1001 posts
Shame for all of the people who worked hard on WSL1 only to be virtualized into nonexistence.
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Running a Linux VM on Windows is nicer than just booting into Linux? That's quite a take. Windows is so user-hostile these days that I feel bad for those who have to deal with it. Calling it delightful must be symptomatic of some sort of Stockholm syndrome.
> Running a Linux VM on Windows is nicer than just booting into Linux Indeed, it does. Having stable system and not dealing with Linux on Desktop, clear tradoffs (like "just add another 16gb RAM stick in laptop/desktop and you are golden") is great for peace of mind. The average uptimes on my laptops (note for plural) is ~3 weeks, until next Windows Update to be applied. I don't have nostalgia on the days of using Li…
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…
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Methods I know are using qemu/Wine/proxmox/VirtualBox.
But he was acting as if Linux didnt need VMs ;)
For many software engineers, a lot of our work is Linux, and it wouldn't be atypical to spend most of the time doing Linux development. I work on Linux and deploy to Linux, it's just a no-brainer to run Linux, too, aside from the fact that I simply loathe using modern Windows to begin with.
(Outside of that, frankly, most people period live inside of the web browser, Slack, Discord, and/or Steam, none of which are Windows-exclusive.)
My point isn't that Linux is better than Windows, it's that WSL2 isn't better than literally running Linux. If you need to do Linux things, it is worse than Linux at basically all of them.
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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.
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…
WSL2 has been such a pain. You're basically managing a VM with VMWare Tools somewhat more integrated. I gave up on WSL2 after a few months and went back to booting my arch installation most of the time. Now I'm on a mac for the first time in a long time because windows has gotten so bad.
This is doubly sad because the NT kernel is so well designed to host multiple OSes due to the OS/2 stuff decades ago. All wasted.
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…
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.
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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…
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People throw around the ideas of VMs or WINE like it's trivial. It's really not.
On linux it's quite trivial. KVM is part of the kernel. Installing libvirt and virt-manager makes it really easy to create vms. I'd say even passing through a GPU is not that hard these days though maybe that depends on hardware configuration more.
“ or a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”[1] vibes.
Convenience features in software are huge and even if a system is well designed a system that abstracts it all away and does it for you is easier, and most new users want that, so it often wins. Worse is better etc