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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

#721

Post by garylkz »

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…

Curious, if you don't mind answering, do you mainly uses Ubuntu or Nixos, and which one do you liked more ATM?

Regarding Steam, do you install it with distro provided or through Flatpak?

What is the spec of your machine that you do Linux gaming on? I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#723

Post by guappa »

gapan wrote: post #524
pathartl wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Superior hardware with terrible software. Also they straight up artificially limit their hardware so they don't cannibalize their sales, which is slightly understandable, but they do it in the dumbest ways. My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor, even though it has the same specs as her work Pro. Oh and good luck actually getting that external display to work, I swear only like 50% of USB-C docks work on…

> Superior hardware with terrible software. Funny how that was the other way around just a few years ago. Macs had inferior hardware, but they were supposed to have better software. At least that's what the Mac users claimed.

I fell for that, years ago. No the software wasn't superior either. I remember having to manually install codecs, which on linux had been a problem many many years before but had been solved already.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#725

Post by guappa »

const_cast wrote: post #475
resource_waste wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Macbooks are winning the laptop war because of superior hardware. No. This is just you repeating marketing. No Nvidia chip = B tier at best. I have a $700 Asus with a 3060 that is better. Go ahead and scale up to a $2000 computer with an Nvidia chip and its so obviously better, there is nothing to debate. No one cares about performance per watt, its like someone ran a 5k race, came in 3rd and said "Well at least I b…

> No Nvidia chip = B tier at best. Nvidia chip = 45 minutes of battery life

You know they can be turned on or off depending on need right?

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#726

Post by baq »

sertraline wrote: post #341
1oooqooq wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think everyone tried that. gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point. i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again. then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again. then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again. now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file…

It always infuriates me when people say Windows is all about games. Techies are so detached from reality they forget that people have creative hobbies and have to use industrial grade software. Doing creative hobbies on Linux is an act of sadomasochism. And on top of that, Linux and MacOS cannot run software from 3 years ago while Windows can run software from 35 years ago. And on top of that, Linux is completely unu…

And this is why wine/proton are so good: they’re implementing the only defacto stable API that exists.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#727

Post by guappa »

jopicornell wrote: post #470
resource_waste wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Macbooks are winning the laptop war because of superior hardware. No. This is just you repeating marketing. No Nvidia chip = B tier at best. I have a $700 Asus with a 3060 that is better. Go ahead and scale up to a $2000 computer with an Nvidia chip and its so obviously better, there is nothing to debate. No one cares about performance per watt, its like someone ran a 5k race, came in 3rd and said "Well at least I b…

Well, I'll have to hardly disagree. You want a laptop that its battery life is not 1 hour at best. That wasn't a thing in Windows/Linux laptops until M1 started using arm64. 6 Hours of intense work? Good luck with that. Not only that, but being able to run very intensive work (Pro Audio, Development...) seamlessly is an absolute pleasure. Its screen is one of the best screens out there. The trackpad (and some keyboar…

I can do 6 hours of work on my 10 years old thinkpad… It's nothing special really.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#728

Post by grishka »

udev4096 wrote: post #724

I still can't believe how people use windows as their main system with all the extremely invasive telemetry and bogus "AI" features that hogs a LOT of resources at idle

Some people don't know that computers can be fast. Others modify their system to remove/neutralize all this crap. There are even tools to automate that.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#729

Post by tuukkao »

WSL 2 is one of the biggest reasons I'm able to be productive as a blind software developer. With it I'm able to enjoy the best desktop screen reader accessibility (Windows and NVDA) as well as the best developer tools (Linux). I hate Microsoft's AI and ads force-feeding as much as anyone else but trust me, you'd do the same if you were in my shoes. Screen reader accessibility on Mac Os is stagnating even faster than the os itself and even though Linux / Gnome accessibility is being worked on, it's still ready only for enthusiasts who don't mind their systems being in a constant state of somewhat broken, as illustrated by this series of blog posts from just a few weeks ago: https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#730

Post by akho »

oblio wrote: post #337
juancn wrote: post #318

Earlier 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

They had to give that up because it was too slow, I think for IO. Unfortunate.

It also didn't have working fsync, and corrupted SQLite databases. I think that's more important.
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