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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

#981

Post by ActorNightly »

lostmsu wrote: post #602
ActorNightly wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference is hardware access. I used to do VFIO with hardware passthrough so I could have linux but still run windows software like CAD that takes advantage of the gfx card. That was a pain to set up and use. The other way, its very simple. WSL2 can run ML tasks with just a tiny bit of overhead in moving the data to the card.

PyTorch and most of other ML stuff have native Windows ports.

Yes but the point is to not do dev on windows, because window "terminal" sucks

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#982

Post by yellowapple »

elif wrote: post #880
yellowapple wrote: post #704

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

IMO Linux is better even as that glorified driver support layer these days, at least on x86 hardware (I can't attest to anything ARM-based besides various SBCs). I have to fiddle with drivers much more often on Windows (usually because of Windows Update shenanigans, like "lmao let's silently downgrade the manually-installed AMD GPU driver for no fucking reason at all").

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#983

Post by joseda-hg »

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.

Power Pivot is one I encounter on the regular, you can't even use it on Excel for Mac, Windows or Bust

CFO was/is an excel wiz, so he would whip up crazy Rube Goldbergs with Power Pivot (And Power Query), that couldn't be modified by mac users (They can open the files, but they can't interact with it, not even changing filters

PowerQuery is another one, also not available outside of Excel for Windows, not Mac or Web

A lot of it is stuff that should be handled by SQL more properly, but the data people usually can't keep up with the Excel wiz

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#984

Post by joseda-hg »

mrguyorama wrote: post #926
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…

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 d…

It depends, a lot (I use Bluefin, so I'll grab that one as an example)

Assumming everything is setup the way I usually do when someone asks me for a new Windows PC (Setup an account, install basic utilities, Office suite, automatic updates, etc)

More or less everything

- ThunderBird + OnlyOffice is close enough for regular usage (Coming from Outlook + Office)

- Flatpaks and system updates are on the background by default and only take when you restart, so they're more or less invisible (And for someone else, I'll usually do the oldest channel available, maybe even the CentOS based LTS when that's out of beta)

- Discord, Teams, Stuff like that is electron based anyway

- Steam for games is reasonably good (Depending on your library, Everything in mine works, but not everything in my wishlist)

- Windows only utilities are on a case by case basis (Depending on the program, they'll usually call me to procure it, because god knows, no sane person wants to deal with the likes of adobe)

For the sake of transparency, I would use the CLI to setup quite a lot, but I wouldn't expect them to use it for anything

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#985

Post by flykespice »

behnamoh wrote: post #8

meanwhile Apple won't even make it easy to boot Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon.

Really, the only thing that is saving their reputation is their hardware being top notch compared to competition, whose hardware is more "open".

That must be the reason hackers(even here) still insist on buying apple hardware.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#986

Post by vrighter »

0xEF wrote: post #789
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.

Businesses would. The problem with that is you have decision makers in said businesses who don't know any better, so Microsoft-all-the-things gets pushed down the line. Offices are all trapped on Windows 10/11 and using Teams/Outlook with Exchange/Entra/Azure chugging along in all its misconfigured glory. Heck, half the MSPs I work side-by-side with seem to only offer support on Windows machines. It gets worse. When…

The higher up have such a hardon for Microsoft, I think it could actually be used as a bridge across the Atlantic ocean. We've already spent years migrating shit off of microsoft platforms onto the newest and latest microsoft platforms.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#987

Post by odie5533 »

Brian_K_White wrote: post #701
odie5533 wrote: post #696

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use WSL as daily drive for dev. Never had any issues. Love it. I use it from VS Code.

I still can't use usb-serial devices from within wsl2. It was possible under wsl1, but wsl1 is an entirely different thing. "never had any issues" is a meaningless statement. I "never had any issues" with infinite things I never tried to do in the first place.

I don't do anything like USB pass through. I use it purely for the linux tooling to support software development. I find it a perfectly suitable system for that purpose and would recommend it.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#988

Post by dabockster »

gexla wrote: post #973
seniorThrowaway wrote: post #875

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

Or just go straight to Hyper-V, without all the WSL stuff.

Hyper-V for a cheap solution.

But VMware still excels at running desktop Linux on Windows. Especially for distros that use 3D accelerated desktops (aka literally anything that uses a recent GNOME or KDE release).

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#989

Post by dabockster »

bayindirh wrote: post #759
reisse wrote: post #748

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People like to talk like GPL is evil, but it's underpinning more of the world than many people see. And thanks to no ABI/API stability guarantees, Linux can innovate and doesn't care about what others might say. Considering Linux is developed mostly by companies today, the standard upkeep of a driver is not a burden unless you want to shove planned obsolescence down the throats of the consumers ( cough Win11 TPM requ…

I wouldn’t call the GPL “evil”, but I do think it’s more unrealistic given current western economics and mooching practices. Some copyright here and there does help keep food and water on the table.

Re: The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

#990

Post by dabockster »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #537
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…

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

I’m actually going long on Windows now after learning about how the Linux kernel is a monolithic kernel, whereas Windows is a “hybrid” microkernel design. It explains so much about some program behavior in Linux (eg crashing Gnome would often cause kernel panics) that you don’t see at all on Windows.

Yeah, the spyware is annoying and stupid. But once you strip it out (it can be removed/blocked), Windows 11 is absolutely rock solid.

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