Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
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Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#2> He further mentions that unzipping tarbars could see a 20 times performance increase.
Boy, do I love unzipping tarbars! On a more serious note, it’s great that WSL has gotten much faster, although it’s a little disappointing that they threw out the older, more interesting architecture to get it and just used a VM.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#3> He further mentions that unzipping tarbars could see a 20 times performance increase. Boy, do I love unzipping tarbars! On a more serious note, it’s great that WSL has gotten much faster, although it’s a little disappointing that they threw out the older, more interesting architecture to get it and just used a VM.
I agree wholeheartedly. I know it was probably a fool’s errand especially in a world where Docker for Windows was doing the same thing WSL2 does but worse, but WSL1’s design just satisfied me in a way that Hyper-V will not. Presumably, this also means you have to have Hyper-V enabled, crippling all other VM software. Hope the integration is impressive at least, to hopefully make up for it. I admittedly don’t run Windows these days but WSL is definitely one of the highlights of modern Windows and it’s hard to not follow its progress.
I also wonder how integration changes with sockets/networking, hardware access, Windows Firewall, etc. Last I checked, relations with Windows Firewall were strained by the lack of proper support for picoprocesses.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#4> He further mentions that unzipping tarbars could see a 20 times performance increase. Boy, do I love unzipping tarbars! On a more serious note, it’s great that WSL has gotten much faster, although it’s a little disappointing that they threw out the older, more interesting architecture to get it and just used a VM.
Boring tech is good tech :)
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#5I really hope apple implements something similar, would much prefer to have a well integrated linux vm than the not-quite-linux of macos
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#6> He further mentions that unzipping tarbars could see a 20 times performance increase. Boy, do I love unzipping tarbars! On a more serious note, it’s great that WSL has gotten much faster, although it’s a little disappointing that they threw out the older, more interesting architecture to get it and just used a VM.
I agree wholeheartedly. I know it was probably a fool’s errand especially in a world where Docker for Windows was doing the same thing WSL2 does but worse, but WSL1’s design just satisfied me in a way that Hyper-V will not. Presumably, this also means you have to have Hyper-V enabled, crippling all other VM software. Hope the integration is impressive at least, to hopefully make up for it. I admittedly don’t run Wind…
The integration is very impressive, latest builds even have access to the WSL2 file system from Windows.
Starting up VS Code on a machine with WSL2 immediately gives you the option to use it as the VS Code environment, it is pretty great.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#7I switched to WSL2 a month ago and it's been great. With WSL1 I'd regularly run into subtle compatibility problems but haven't seen anything like that with 2. Despite a handful of annoyances, the Win10+WSL2+Visual Studio Code Dev environment has been a lot more pleasant than OSX.
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#8I really hope apple implements something similar, would much prefer to have a well integrated linux vm than the not-quite-linux of macos
Docker is on macOS using the native hypervisor framework, what would be the point?
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#9I really hope apple implements something similar, would much prefer to have a well integrated linux vm than the not-quite-linux of macos
This is an interesting take considering Linux is Unix-like and macOS is technically a BSD derivative. I don’t think macOS will ever have a Linux syscall translation layer/subsystem (WSL1) nor a lightweight VM with special integration (WSL2) but you can do sort of similar things in third party software, I think. Docker for Mac is using the native VM framework and includes a filesystem integration called osxfs, but despite mentioning the source code in documentation it does not appear to be open source at this time?
Re: Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 Moving into General Availability
#10Is there a shell+terminal+font combo that folks really like for WSL? I've tried the new terminal beta with zsh and--for reasons I can't quite articulate right now--it feels "off" and I invariably proceed to boot up virtualbox for my debian, i3, kitty, fira code setup to get work done. Maybe it's the break in filesystems and $HOME?
Edit: learning that WSL2 does away with the syscall-translating tech and mandates Hyper-V, the question of whether to look into this further becomes thornier!