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The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

blogs.windows.com

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Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#631

Post by notpushkin »

jchw wrote: post #583
meta_ai_x wrote: post #392

Earlier 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…

> The UI is still better on Windows(basic utilities like File Explorer and Config Management is better on Windows). 5 years ago, we would be comparing old GNOME 3 or KDE Plasma 5 on X11 and Windows 10. I would be forced to agree. The Windows UI was better in many ways at that point. Today we have KDE Plasma 6.3 on Wayland and Windows 11. This is an entirely different ball game. It's hard to explain. Wayland feels lik…

> You can use an office alternative, like possibly WPS Office.

Or ONLYOFFICE, which is FOSS (and what I use personally). Or LibreOffice (also free/libre software, of course). I don’t miss MS Office one bit, the compatibility is nothing short of excellent nowadays, and the speed and UX both surpass it.

There are specialized software packages that are Windows-only, of course, but at least office programs ain’t it.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#632

Post by dataflow »

rizalp wrote: post #627
dataflow wrote: post #346

Anybody know what the deal is with neither Oracle nor Microsoft trying to make it possible for VirtualBox and WSL2 to coexist without severe performance impact? What the heck is the issue that neither side knows how to solve? Or is there a deliberate business decision not to solve it?

It's because WSL2 is using HyperV behind the scenes, and HyperV is a Type 1 (Native Hypervisor), running directly on top of hardware. When you activate it, it also makes you host windows OS virtualized as well, albeit with native access for some components like GPU etc. That's why all other Windows Hypervisor (Virtualbox, VMWare Workstation) will experience one issue or another when WSL2 is activated, because more ab…

That makes no sense. Are you actually familiar with the technical issues or are you hand-waving? WSL2 itself is a Linux VM running in top of Hyper-V. Heck, as far as I know other Hyper-V VMs run fine alongside WSL2 too. Why can't a VirtualBox Linux VM do the same?

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#633

Post by spartanatreyu »

throwaway148773 wrote: post #540
jjcm wrote: post #151

When WSL came out I was absolutely overjoyed - finally an actual linux shell on windows! I use windows for my gaming pc, and I wanted to have a unified gaming/dev box. It felt like the solution. Over time though more and more small issues with it came up. Packages working not quite right, issues with the barriers between the two, etc. It always felt like there was a little bit more friction with the process. With Val…

Except if you're on Nvidia...

No.

Their GTX series cards all used proprietary blobs that required unmanageable device specific interfaces.

Starting from the RTX series cards, they still have proprietary blobs but instead of having device specific interfaces, they all use a shared public interface which makes compatibility and performance much better.

It's not across the board, but there are instances of gaming benchmarks showing more performance under linux than windows.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#634

Post by bigyabai »

trollied wrote: post #99
behnamoh wrote: post #8

meanwhile Apple won't even make it easy to boot Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon.

What? Apple made changes to actually help them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578

Apple implementing iBoot is table stakes. They should have gone the extra mile actually, and implimented UEFI the same way Intel did; but that would have made it too easy to support Apple Silicon on Linux. Sticking to their proprietary bootloader forces reverse-engineers to painstakingly guess at DeviceTree drivers until a bare-minimum boot environment is possible.

If Apple hadn't opened iBoot in some way then I don't know how they would handle a secure reinstall process. If that's "to actually help them" then they very clearly didn't try too hard. Without driver code or UEFI support they're basically telling the community to pound sand, and modern Asahi efforts reflect that.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#635

Post by Vaslo »

sneak wrote: post #231

Microsoft doesn’t like open source software. This is cosplay. Microsoft releases the important parts of VS Code under proprietary licenses. Microsoft doesn’t release the source code for Windows or Office or the github.com web app under free software licenses. Don’t get it twisted. This is marketing, nothing more.

If you can do it better and use a very permissive open license, no one is stopping you.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#636

Post by bongodongobob »

makeitdouble wrote: post #551
ok123456 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My coworkers stubbornly try to use WSL instead of Linux directly. They constantly run into corner cases and waste time working around them compared to just using Linux. Some tooling detects that it is running on Windows, and some detects that it is running on Linux. In practice, it's the worst of both worlds.

Saying running full Linux avoids wasting time on fiddly workarounds kinda blows my mind. Full hardware support is still not a given, and Windows emulation is still need for so many cases (e.g. games, specialized software etc). Until I can choose any machine based on form factor and specs alone and just run Linux on it, WSL will the best version of Linux it can run.

What modern hardware isn't supported by Linux? I haven't had driver problems in probably over a decade. I don't even target Linux for my builds, it just works. Same with the pile of random laptops I've installed it on. Wifi out of the box etc.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#637

Post by braiamp »

makeitdouble wrote: post #551
ok123456 wrote: post #512

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My coworkers stubbornly try to use WSL instead of Linux directly. They constantly run into corner cases and waste time working around them compared to just using Linux. Some tooling detects that it is running on Windows, and some detects that it is running on Linux. In practice, it's the worst of both worlds.

Saying running full Linux avoids wasting time on fiddly workarounds kinda blows my mind. Full hardware support is still not a given, and Windows emulation is still need for so many cases (e.g. games, specialized software etc). Until I can choose any machine based on form factor and specs alone and just run Linux on it, WSL will the best version of Linux it can run.

> Full hardware support is still not a given

What may hap be your workload? The only thing that aren't working on Linux day 1 are GPU's, and it's mostly because kernel/distro timings (we haven't had a GPU release without support for mainline kernel in years).

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#638

Post by naikrovek »

Matl wrote: post #58

OT but the name irks me; Windows subsystem for Linux makes it sound like some sort of official Wine layer. It's a Linux subsystem for Windows if anything. It makes it sound like Microsoft is giving some capability to Linux whereas it's the other way around.

The name is good if you understand what the subsystems are on Windows and how they work.

The NT kernel was always designed to host multiple subsystems. This Windows subsystem is for Linux. And that’s why it’s named like that.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#639

Post by senlala »

boxfire wrote: post #422
mrpippy wrote: post #32

Note that this doesn't include lxcore.sys, the kernel side driver that powers WSL 1. (Also, I'm surprised that WSL 1 is still supported. It must be in maintenance mode though, right?)

That's the only part I care about dang. I still use WSL1 and have done a number of interesting hacks to cross the ABI and tunnel windows into "Linux" userspace and I'd like to make that easier/more direct

I'm very interested in knowing about your hacks! Would you mind sharing a bit more?

I'm also still using WSL1 and was hoping to be able to fix some of it's quirks :(

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#640

Post by naikrovek »

tacker2000 wrote: post #426
philshem wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to see the thread https://xcancel.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610?s...

Very interesting comment there: “ I still hope to see a true "Windows Subsystem for Linux" by Microsoft or a windows becoming a linux distribution itself and dropping the NT kernel to legacy. Windows is currently overloaded with features and does lack a package manager to only get what you need...”

People that comment things like this probably have their heart in the right place, but they do not understand just how aggressive Microsoft is about backwards compatibility.

The only way to get this compatibility in Linux would be to port those features all over to Linux and if that happened the entire planet would implode because everyone would say “I knew it! Embrace Extend Extinguish!” At the same time.

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