why is not called Linux subsystem for windows??? or its just programmer bad naming things
It's just HN commenters not knowing how to read
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
731–740 of 1001 posts
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#732Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the WSL 1 ended up working, it would have been one of the best historical coincidences in MS's history. A long forgotten feature in the NT kernel, unique to pretty much any other OS out there, used to push it's dominance in the 90's, is revived almost 30 years later, to fight for relevance with Unix based OS, once again. To quote Gorge Lucas, It's like poetry, it rhymes.
That would not be unique, as is what BSD has done for Linux compatibility basically forever.
BSD and Linux are in the same bucket, so that doesn't count, not any more than MacOS compatibility with Linux. Windows is the odd one out.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#733Earlier quoted context omitted.
WSL 1 was supposed to be like "Windows on NT" where it emulated the Linux kernal to the NT one. they skipped a ton of features then dumped the whole thing for a containerized virtual machine thing for version 2. Wish the NT one worked out but I get it being complicated.
For anyone curious (as I was) the basic difference is that WSL1 implemented the Linux syscall table directly whereas WSL2 actually runs Linux on top of some virtual drivers (hypervisor).
WSL 2 runs a full Linux kernel under Hyper-V. There are some out-of-tree or staging drivers included in Microsoft's Linux kernel derivative and they publish their kernel sources at https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#734Earlier 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
I bought an iphone and then got angry it didn't run android
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#735WSL going open source is a huge win for devs. Can’t wait to see what the community builds with it!
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#736[dead]
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#737When 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.
> 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.
I don't mean to dismiss your comment at all, but I'm surprised that such a low overhead would be the primary reason holding you back from switching. The difference between, say, 100 FPS and 91 FPS seems so negligible in my mind that it would be pretty near the bottom on the list of reasons not to switch to Linux.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#738Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The problem is Windows IO filters Not the biggest issue of them, 'find' and 'git status' on WSL2 in a big project is still >100 times slower on windows dev drive which avoids those filters than it is with WSL 1 on dev drive. WSL 1 on regular ntfs with defender disabled is about 4x slower than WSL1 on dev drive, so that stuff does cause some of it, but WSL2 feels hopelessly slow. And wsl 2 can't share memory as well…
Running WSL2 on Dev Drive means that you're effectively doing network I/O (to localhost); of course it's slow. It's also very pointless since your WSL2 FS is already a separate VHD.
Not pointless if you are working on a windows project but using unix tools to search code, do commits, etc. WSL2 just isn't usable for it in large projects. git status can take 5 minutes on unreal engine.
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#739When 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…
WSL 1 was supposed to be like "Windows on NT" where it emulated the Linux kernal to the NT one. they skipped a ton of features then dumped the whole thing for a containerized virtual machine thing for version 2. Wish the NT one worked out but I get it being complicated.
I know -- I was super excited to see WSL1 and wished it worked. NT when started was the OS/2 personality and back at that time was excited to see NT as the OS to end all OSes (by running them all as a personality).
But WSL2 is freaking incredible, I'm super excited to see this and just wish the rest of windows would move to a Linux kernel and support bash natively everywhere. I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine
Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
#740Earlier quoted context omitted.
MIT License: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/blob/master/LICENSE
Are they ashamed, if they didn't mention it in the announcement?
I think they have been using that license for a while when releasing stuff. Windows Terminal, the new PowerShell, etc.