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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

#741

Post by rcleveng »

garylkz wrote: post #721
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.

I try to use debian, since it's a bit older (read: stable) than ubunutu and I've found that if something compiles and runs on debian it'll run on ubunutu and others but the inverse is not true.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#744

Post by zygentoma »

frollogaston wrote: post #434
lenerdenator wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple's opinion is probably that if you want to run a *NIX-like OS on their hardware, you should use MacOS. Which is... not necessarily wrong.

Eh, I have a Mac but end up SSHing into some Linux machine pretty often. There are too many differences between the two unless I'm using something like Python or JS. Docker helps too, but that's Linux. Also, it's really annoying that macOS switched to zsh. It's not a drop-in for bash. Yeah you can change it back to bash, but then any Mac-specific help/docs assume zsh because defaults matter. Pretty fundamental thing…

You can also use zsh in Linux ;)

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#745

Post by rossy »

zamadatix wrote: post #323
nickserv wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, which games gave you problems?

Unfortunately many of the more popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat tend to consider "made working on Linux" a bug rather than a feature. E.g. Easy Anti-Cheat and Unreal Engine both support Linux natively but Epic still doesn't want to allow it for their own game, Fortnite. https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781

There are even games like Infinity Nikki with anti-cheat that allows the Steam Deck but specifically detects and blocks desktop Linux. You have to wonder if that gets them any real security since the method they use to detect the Deck is probably spoofable.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#746

Post by TeMPOraL »

jjcm wrote: post #509
sertraline wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A fair comment, but the argument I'd make against that is a lot of those creative tools are moving to the web. I personally work for Figma, and have seen that first hand. UI/UX design was entirely OSX/Windows centric for the last 40 years, and now it's platform agnostic. Even video editors are just at the nacent stage of looking at the web as an editor surface. Totally hear you though for things like CNC milling soft…

Software moving to the web is not a win for Linux, it's a loss for everyone.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#747

Post by ruszki »

grishka wrote: post #728
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.

It’s not even that difficult to manually remove these from Windows. It’s like a handful of configs. It’s way easier to do that than make (probably) any Linux distro to work with my current and previous setups. Which btw I could never achieve even with considerable amount of tinkering.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#748

Post by reisse »

rcleveng wrote: post #739
hypercube33 wrote: post #647

Earlier 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.

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/…

Why not just use Linux then?

The whole point of Windows right now is having a kernel that a) does not shove GPL down the device manufacturer's throat and b) care about driver API stability so that drivers actually work without manufacturer or maintaner intervention every kernel upgrade.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#749

Post by la_oveja »

delduca wrote: post #336
nickserv wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just curious, which games gave you problems?

For me, Red Dead Redemption 1 via Proton does not work on Pop_OS + NVIDIA.

i play rdr1 via proton on opensuse + amd and i get better frames than windows

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#750

Post by kasabali »

arcastroe wrote: post #181
liendolucas wrote: post #107

I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux. If you are in Windows and have the urge to use Linux, do the proper switch once and for all. You will never look back. I haven't in almost 15 years. Given what Windows has become and already discussed here on HN I would even hesitate to run it in a virtual machine. Edit: more than 15 years.

I've considered it, but there are two Windows features I need that sound like they'd require some time investment to set up correctly on linux. 1. I use UWF on windows (Education Edition). All disk writes to C:/ are ephemeral. On every single reboot, all changes are discarded and my pc is back to the exact same state as when I first set it up. I do keep a separate partition for documents that need persistence. 2. Mir…

(1) can be done with little to no configuration on default live images of like, every single distribution.
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