The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source • Hacker News Board

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#811

Post by voidUpdate » Tue, May 20, 2025, 10:01 AM UTC

vvpan wrote: post #466

MrPowerGamerBR wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that if you require anything that is GPU-related (like gaming, Adobe suite apps, etc) you'll need to have a secondary GPU to passthrough it to the VM, which is not something that everyone has. So, if you don't have a secondary GPU, you'll need to live without graphics acceleration in the VM... so for a lot of people the "oh you just need to use a VM!" solution is not feasible, because most of the software that…

Tried doing 3d modeling in a Windows VM - couldn't get acceleration to pass through.

What 3D modelling were you doing that couldn't be done on linux?

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#812

Post by gloosx » Tue, May 20, 2025, 10:02 AM UTC

Peanuts99 wrote: post #790

gloosx wrote: post #781

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I truly believe if AAA titles would not release for windows exclusively no-one would have a good reason to use windows really besides inertia.

I think you're underestimating how many businesses rely on Excel alone.

You're saying it like there is no alternative and you can't just open and edit same excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#813

Post by designerarvid » Tue, May 20, 2025, 10:03 AM UTC

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

Few people know what Linux is. Most only know that there are "macs" and "pc" and haven't used a personal computer privately at all since they got their first ipad in 2016.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#814

Post by gloosx » Tue, May 20, 2025, 10:07 AM UTC

bayindirh wrote: post #795

b3lvedere wrote: post #791

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The market is getting more diverse (mobile, steam deck alikes, laptops, consoles, etc), but i guess if you want to quickly earn the most money on your (huge) development investment, you better try and take the biggest piece of the pie first. Personally i don't really believe in AAA (or UbiSoft's AAAA) titles that much anymore. Strange exclusivity for some console or device may bring some money early on, but i have pl…

AAA and AAAA games became (expensive) gateways to microtransaction based money extraction application, in my opinion. I enjoy older, smaller games nonproportionately more when compared to big titles which require much more resources and time. Yes they look nice, yes they use every documented and undocumented feature of my GPU, yes "it's so fluffy", but it is not enjoyable, esp. with shoved down microtransactions. If…

I have arm Mac and it's the most painful machine you can own as someone who likes games... Supreme Commander FAF I miss the most, unfortunately unplayable online due to floating-point calculation differences between ARM and x64 which are apparently untranslatable.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#815

Post by dbacar » Tue, May 20, 2025, 10:15 AM UTC

your_challenger wrote: post #683

WSL is a landmine of bad design. I lost all my data once, and that incident made me switch to a Mac. Here's how you can lose all your data - and Microsoft engineers won’t care: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8992 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9830 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9049#issuecomment-26...

Mac IS the Sotate of the Art at the developer experience. The only annoyance was the virtualisation on Arm but having UTM/Multipass/Virttualbox now, it is the best. If you are up to too many containers, a linux box would be more preferable.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#816

Post by barrkel » Tue, May 20, 2025, 10:15 AM UTC

RussianCow wrote: post #737

garylkz wrote: post #721

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pr…

If you don't have an adaptive sync +variable refresh rate) monitor and everything set up to use it, and don't like screen tearing (you enable vsync wait), overrunning the frame budget (e.g 16ms for 60hz) can mean dropping down to half the frame rate.

But I'm hunting for reasons here. A gaming setup should be using adaptive sync so those concerns mostly go away. But there may be problems with Linux support.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#817

Post by palata » Tue, May 20, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

CoolCold wrote: post #625

tryauuum wrote: post #557

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a Windows user, but I hate WSL. Looks like microsoft realizing they will lose a generation of developers to linux so they implemented linux inside their OS. Now people won't see the joys of recompiling kernel :)

I've stopped seeing joys of recompiling kernel [and consequence reboots of servers which easily could take 10 minutes and that's without IPMI /KVM] since 2009-2010

Fortunately, Desktop users never need to recompile their kernel, it's really just a choice.

And I hope that you don't use WSL for servers :).

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#818

Post by whizzter » Tue, May 20, 2025, 10:31 AM UTC

pjc50 wrote: post #782

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.

The essential problem was that critical Windows APIs like CreateProcess and the NTFS file system were far too slow to be used in UNIX-like ways. If you tried to run git or build things in WSL1 - a key use case - it was way slower than doing so on native or VM Linux.

Performance was one problem, but imho the biggest was that MMAP semantics were inherited from the NT side and made a lot of applications crash (mmap's created could only be as large as the file's current size as in Windows, while Linux/BSD semantics allows for a mmap larger than the file that's usable without constant remapping as the file grows).

They didn't prioritize it until fixing at a late stage, barely before WSL 2 came out. Sometimes i do wonder if they made a premature decision to move to WSL2 since there was quite a lot of basic applications/runtimes that were crashing due to this fix lacking (Naturally a lot of other new Linux API's like io_uring probably would have made it an api chasing treadmill that they just wanted to circumvent).

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#819

Post by k8sToGo » Tue, May 20, 2025, 10:35 AM UTC

TrackerFF wrote: post #808

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

I mainly use a computer for: - Work (heavy usage of Microsoft office apps) - Audio / recording studio - Some gaming - Software development Unfortunately for me, that's three uses where Windows excels, versus one for Linux.

Three out of four would also work on a Mac though

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#820

Post by arzig » Tue, May 20, 2025, 10:37 AM UTC

margorczynski wrote: post #775

delduca wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In general you want to avoid Nvidia if you want to play games on Linux, but maybe things will get better.

Isn’t pop_os shipping ancient components at this point due to their hate brained idea to try and create their own de and pinning their next release to it?