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

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#921

Post by herbst » Tue, May 20, 2025, 4:57 PM UTC

xeromal wrote: post #894

herbst wrote: post #842

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

When we die off I guess lol. I've been using windows since I was 6 or 7. I currently work in a Mac environment and hate it. I worked in a linux one for 5 years. Nothing feels like the first language you learned I guess? My home computer is windows and it'll be that way until windows stops existing. Edit: when I say we I mean the people still on windows.

Definitely not for me. Was in Windows between 95 and XP, never looked back. Same for my first programming languages, glad I am not stuck still doing PHP and Java.

Switched my main Linux and desktop environment multiple times as well.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#922

Post by alex_smart » Tue, May 20, 2025, 5:01 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #765

alex_smart wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Microsoft losing the mind share has anything to do with software. Macbooks are winning the laptop war because of superior hardware.

Only on countries where people earn salaries big enough to pay for the Apple hardware tax.

What Apple hardware tax? The macbook air is the best value laptop there is. If the latest version is out of the budget, you can buy older generations used. Even m1 air would be better than any windows laptop at a comparable price point.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#923

Post by mbarria » Tue, May 20, 2025, 5:04 PM UTC

icemelt8 wrote: post #828

baq wrote: post #726

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

not a single EA game works on Wine/proton

On Protondb: Split Fiction is platinum, Sims 4 is gold, Most F1 games work with the exception of 2014 and 24

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#924

Post by troupo » Tue, May 20, 2025, 5:09 PM UTC

fsflover wrote: post #898

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.

> There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features. Which is 5% of its users probably.

Every advanced feature of MS Office is used by a different 5% of users. https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn... (The whole series is worth reading: https://web.archive.org/web/20080316101025/http://blogs.msdn...)

--- start quote ---

The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")

--- end quote ---

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#925

Post by blackoil » Tue, May 20, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

camtarn wrote: post #891

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.

Hm. I used Git on WSL1 for many years, with medium sized repos hosted on a Windows drive, and it worked great. When I moved to WSL2 Git became a whole lot slower - it now takes about 5-8 secs to execute 'git status' where before it was instant.

Are your git repos in ntfs? WSL1 Linux drives are slow and in WSL2 Ntfs.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#926

Post by mrguyorama » Tue, May 20, 2025, 5:25 PM UTC

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…

Linux on HN is always an example of https://xkcd.com/2501/

How many months can you use a Linux desktop to do daily externally mandated processes and not drop down to a bash shell at some point?

Average consumers and users do not want to use the unix utilities that Linux people love so much. Hell, developers barely want to use classic unix utilities to solve problems.

Users do not know what a "mount point" is. Users do not want a case sensitive file system. Users do not want an OOM killer that solves a poor design choice by randomly culling important applications at high utilization.

Users do not care for something that was designed in the 60s before we understood things like interface design and refuses to update or improve due to some weird insistence on unix purity.

Users do not care about ABI stability. They care about using the apps they need to use. That means your platform has to be very easy to support, Linux is not at all easy to support, and at least part of that is a weird entitlement Linux users feel and demonstrate in your support queue.

Hilariously, users DO WANT a centralized app repository for most day to day apps! Linux had this forever, though it had mediocre ergonomics and it was way too easy for an average computer user to manage to nuke their system as Linus Sebastian found out in a very unfortunate timing situation. Linux never managed to turn this potential victory into anything meaningful, because you often had to drop into a bash shell to fix, undo, modify, or whatever an install!

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#927

Post by CoolCold » Tue, May 20, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

palata wrote: post #817

CoolCold wrote: post #625

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :).

Nope, WSL is for operator machines desktops/laptops, pure Linux for servers.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#928

Post by graynk » Tue, May 20, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

garylkz wrote: post #918

graynk wrote: post #910

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I quite like CachyOS currently. I see no performance penalty (but I also have only a 75 Hz monitor and I haven't tested VR games all that much yet). Currently I'm playing through Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 on ultra with no issues. CachyOS provides packages for Steam, handles nvidia drivers for you and they even provide their own builds of proton and wine, allegedly compiled with flags for modern hardware + some patch…

I've been using Arch for 1-3 years now, as far as I can remember the only time that my system "break" was caused by pacman lock got stuck somehow. Aside of that it's pretty stable in general.

Good to know! It's my first Arch-based distro so I'm a bit wary for now

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#929

Post by mrguyorama » Tue, May 20, 2025, 5:41 PM UTC

MrPowerGamerBR wrote: post #458

teaearlgraycold wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite a lot of people have both integrated Intel graphics and a discrete AMD/NVidia card.

Sadly I'm not one of those people because I have a desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which does not have an integrated graphics card. However now that AMD is including integrated GPUs on every AM5 consumer CPU (if I'm not mistaken?), maybe VMs with passthrough will be more common, without requiring people to spend a lot of money buying a secondary GPU.

Yes, my Ryzen 7600 has an integrated GPU enabled. AMD's iGPUs are really impressive and powerful, but I do not have any idea what to do with it and despite that I moved to an Nvidia GPU (after 20 years of fanboyism) specifically because I was tired of AMD drivers being terrible on Windows, I STILL have to deal with AMD drivers because of that damn iGPU.

I could disable it I guess. It could provide 0.05% faster rendering if I ever get back into blender.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#930

Post by dblohm7 » Tue, May 20, 2025, 5:43 PM 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.

Win32 APIs like CreateProcess suck because they have to spend so much time setting up the stuff that allows Win32's application model to mimic that of 16-bit Windows, which was coopreratively multitasked. The NT kernel is much faster at creating processes when it doesn't need to worry about that stuff.

As for NTFS: it's not NTFS specifically, it's the way the I/O system is designed in the NT kernel. Imagine any call from outside that layer transitioning through a stack of filter drivers before actually reaching the implementation. Very powerful stuff, but also very bad for performance.