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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

#871

Post by b3lvedere »

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 hear you. I don't like that ecosystem as well.

I have more than 2000 games on Steam and i love my Steam Deck which i got for pretty cheap. It's a very fun game system and you can tinker a lot with it. Upgrading (bigger disk capacity) is very easy.

Just bought Black Mesa for two bucks. Works almost flawlessly. Ten year old game , but much fun to be had. Most games i buy on the very very cheap. Bought Skyrim couple of weeks ago for five bucks.

Sure, i click on the free thursday game on the Epic Games store, but i hate that interface with great passion.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#872

Post by yoda222 »

avestura wrote: post #114
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.

Microsoft can't name a project leading with a trademark (Linux ), hence why it's called WSL. Source: https://x.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610?s=19

Subsystem Linux for Windows.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#874

Post by BlarfMcFlarf »

herbst wrote: post #842
ozgrakkurt wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the same experience. Even installing linux is easier for me now. And with new spyware features of windows, there is really no incentive to use it

Could have written the exact same sentence when Vista came out. I still wonder when it's finally enough for the poor souls still stuck in windows

It’s finally enough for me at least. I’m skipping windows 11 and going to Linux instead.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#875

Post by seniorThrowaway »

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/…

>But WSL2 is freaking incredible

It's good. But if/when you start using it as your main work platform nagging issues start cropping up. The native linux filesystem inside it cannot actually reclaim space. This isn't very noticeable if you aren't doing intensive things in it, or if you are using it as a throwaway test bed. But if you are really using it, you have to do things like zero out a bunch of space on the WSL disk and then compact it from outside in the Windows OS. Using space from your NTFS partition / drive isn't very usable, the performance is horrible and you can't do things like put your docker graph root in there as it is incompatible. It also doesn't respect capitalization or permissions and I've had to troubleshoot very subtle bugs because of that. Another issue is raw network and device access, it basically isn't possible. Some of these things are likely beyond the intended use of WSL2, in its defense. Just be aware before you start heavily investing your workflow in it. For these use cases a traditional dual boot will work far better and save you much frustration.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#876

Post by seniorThrowaway »

p_ing wrote: post #857
miroljub wrote: post #794

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I totally agree with what's being said here. It's a tough pill to swallow when you realize just how entrenched Microsoft is in the business world, and how difficult it would be to get everyone to make the switch to Linux. I mean, think about it - most companies are still stuck on Windows 10 or 11, and they're using all those Microsoft services like Teams, Outlook, and Exchange. It's like they're trapped in this…

They're "trapped" because there is no answer to the Exchange/Outlook combo for business purposes and it's very inexpensive for the value it provides. There are of course alternatives to Teams until you pair Teams with SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot/Exchange/3rd party market. > A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing. Well, this is true throughout IT, even tho…

For larger orgs and enterprises, it is Active Directory/Entra. That is the true Microsoft killer app and lock-in driver. There is no comparable Linux solution that I am aware of.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#877

Post by skobes »

gloosx wrote: post #835
skobes wrote: post #821

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll say it too! There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features. You can't just edit Excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets, or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.

Can you give me an example of such advanced features? I really don't understand what outstanding feature did they pack in this "Excel" which has no alternative? If the only problem is migrating from XLSX to some other format I'm sure this is trivial and some tooling must be available.

VBA is the famous example, but Power Query deserves a shout out. I use it to make tables that pull their data from other tables with custom transformation logic.

Google Sheets didn't even support tables until fairly recently.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#878

Post by stopthe »

CoolCold wrote: post #687
stopthe wrote: post #344

A lot of people here are saying nice things about having dev environment on WSL. Honest question: how do you deal with with those minor but insufferable Windows' quirks like 0d0a line endings, selective Unicode support, byte-order-marks and so on. While right now I enjoy the privilege to develop on Linux, things may change.

may be you missed the point - in WSL, you are with Linux/unix based env. So your Vim or other editors and tools just work like in regular Linux, Windows part until needed can be invisible and uninvolved. Other tools like VSCode IDE, has special handling (extension) to work _inside_ WSL and only keep GUI frontend on the Windows side (very close to how it works over SSH). On the other hand, I quite often use "explorer.…

Well that gives some hope, unless they (I'm speculating about future possible employer) just disable WSL

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#879

Post by xeonmc »

whizzter wrote: post #818
pjc50 wrote: post #782

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> (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).

I thought you could do it using ntdll functions, no?

https://www.jeremyong.com/winapi/io/2024/11/03/windows-memor...

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#880

Post by elif »

yellowapple wrote: post #704
thewebguyd wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can accomplish the same with Distrobox on Linux, but there's definitely something to be said about having the best of both worlds by running Windows + WSL. I honestly think Microsoft could win back some mind share from Apple if they: * Put out a version of windows without all the crap. Call it Dev edition or something and turn off or down the telemetry, preinstalled stuff, ads, and Copilot. * Put some effort into…

Windows LTSC already exists, but Microsoft, in all their wisdom, restricts it to enterprise licensees only, and seems to actively discourage using it as a desktop OS. The first problem is of course fixable with some KMS server shenanigans, but the second can be kinda painful when it comes to keeping drivers up-to-date, installing apps that rely on features LTSC excludes (and doesn't provide an easy way to install man…

Ya I totally get that. The way I view it is that windows is a glorified driver support layer and any actual work i do is almost exclusively in the Linux container.

When I used to have free time it was great for games too

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