Every time I praise WSL on hn I pay the karma tax but I will die on this hill. WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously. It's as powerful as Linux with some janky custom local docker wrappers for device support, local storage mapping, and network mapping. Except it's not janky at all. It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop or laptop, with no configuration required.
Edit: for clarity, by "multiple OS" I mean multiple Linux versions. Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24. You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"
jchw · 3h ago
"More powerful than Linux" is silly. It's a VM. The most useful thing is that it does a bunch of convenience features for you. I am not suggesting that it is not extremely convenient, but it's not somehow more powerful than just using Linux.
You know what's even more convenient than a VM? Not needing a VM and still having the exact same functionality. And you don't need a bunch of janky wrapper scripts, there's more than one tool that gives you essentially the same thing; I have used both Distrobox and toolbx to quickly drop into a Ubuntu or Fedora shell. It's pretty handy on NixOS if I want to test building some software in a more typical Linux environment. As a bonus, you get working hardware acceleration, graphical applications work out of the box, there is no I/O tax for going over a 9p bridge because there is no 9p bridge, and there is no weird memory balloon issues to deal with because there is no VM and there is no guest kernel.
I get that WSL is revolutionary for Windows users, but I'm sorry, the reason why there's no WSL is because on Linux we don't need to use VMs to use Linux. It's that simple...
ActorNightly · 2h ago
Yeah if you are working with Linux only, its better to go full linux.
WSL2 is really handy when you want to run other software though. For example, I use Solidworks, so I need to run windows. Forscan for Ford vehicles also has to run under Windows. Having WSL2 means that I can just have one laptop and run any software that I want.
yndoendo · 1h ago
My development is mainly Windows and I prefer Linux host with Windows VM guests. The experience is more stable and I can revert to a snapshot when Windows or Microsoft product update brakes something or new test configuration does. It also allows to backup and retain multiple QA environments that are rarely used, like a client's Oracle DB. It is nice being able to save the VM state at the end of the week and shut it all down so you can start the next right where you left off. Cannot do that when your development environment is the bare metal OS. Windows has known issues of waking a sleeping laptop.
dv_dt · 1h ago
I too think it would be definitely more stable Linux Host with Win VM guests, but I can see the other way around being more convenient to get support for commercially. Though with the VMWare licensing changes, I think what is by default easier for commercial support options may be changing too.
wpm · 57m ago
> Windows has known issues of waking a sleeping laptop.
Doesn't Linux as well?
edoceo · 51m ago
I'm on Lenovo Yoga 6, Gentoo, 6.12 kernel, 4.20 Xfce. Sleeps works perfect. Same on my Asus+AMD desktop. I've not had sleep related issues for years. And last time I did, it was an out-of-tree Wifi driver causing the whole mess.
I discovered over the weekend that only 1 monitor works over HDMI, DisplayPort not working, tried different drivers.
Suspend takes a good 5 minutes, and on resume, the UI is either turn or things barely display.
I might buy a Windows license, especially if I can't get multi-screen to work.
nix0n · 40m ago
> My development is mainly Windows and I prefer Linux host with Windows VM guests
I've tried this in the past but I was unable to get the debugger to work from within a VM.
Has this improved, or is there a trick, or are you just going without a debugger?
lolinder · 2h ago
In the same spirit if "it depends", there are other options that may work for people with different Linux/Windows balance points:
* Wine is surprisingly good these days for a lot of software. If you only have an app or two that need Windows it is probably worth trying Wine to see if it meets your needs.
* Similarly, if gaming is your thing Valve has made enormous strides in getting the majority of games to work flawlessly on Linux.
* If neither of the above are good enough, dual booting is nearly painless these days, with easy setup and fast boot times across both OSes. I have grub set to boot Linux by default but give me a few seconds to pick Windows instead if I need to do one of the few things that I actually use Windows for.
Which you go for really depends on your ratio of Linux to Windows usage and whether you regularly need to mix the two.
oasisbob · 13m ago
I'm struggling to find an option for running x86 Windows software on MacOS/Apple Silicon performantly. (LiDAR point cloud processing.)
The possibilities seem endless and kinda confusing with Windows on ARM vs Rosetta and Wine, think there's some other options which use MacOS's included virtualization frameworks.
bee_rider · 5m ago
That’s interesting; I’d expect something techie like that to have good Linux programs.
jacobr1 · 1h ago
And you also can just run a windows VM when needed for a few apps if that works for your use case.
0xfeba · 2h ago
> Forscan for Ford vehicles also has to run under Windows.
I've successfully run it with WINE. Thought, my Forscan executable was 3 years old or so and that may have changed, but I doubt it.
bunderbunder · 2h ago
The thing about WINE is that it's not necessarily solid enough to rely on at work. You never know when the next software upgrade will break something that used to work.
That's always true, of course. But, compared to other options, relying on WINE increases the chances of it happening by an amount that someone could be forgiven for thinking isn't acceptable.
amlib · 2m ago
You can fix this issue by using a wine "bottle manager" like... Bottles. These kinds of software not only have tons of tools and easy to use settings but also allow you to select across many system agnostic versions of wine that won't be upgraded automatically thus reducing the possibility of something that you rely breaking on you.
nrclark · 1h ago
In my mind, I almost feel like the opposite is true. Wine is getting better and better, especially with the amount of resources that Valve is putting into it.
If you want a stable, repeatable way to wrangle a Windows tool: Wine is it. It's easy to deploy and repeat, requires no licenses, and has consistent behavior every time (unless you upgrade your Wine version or something). Great integration with Linux. No Windows Updates are going to come in and wreck your systems. No licensing, no IT issues, no active directory requirements, no forced reboots.
the__alchemist · 2h ago
When I hear cases of using Wine etc as a substitute, I can't help but think of the "We have McDonald's at home" meme!
jchw · 1h ago
Wine is fantastic, but it is fantastic in the sense of being an amazing piece of technology. It's really lacking bits that would make it a great product.
It's possible to see what Wine as a great product would look like. No offense to crossover because they do good work, but Valve's Steam Play shows what you can really do with Wine if you focus on delivering a product using Wine.
Steam offers two main things:
- It pins the version of Wine, providing a unified stable runtime. Apps don't just break with Wine updates, they're tested with specific Proton versions. You can manually override this and 9 times out of 10 it's totally fine. Often times it's better. But, if you want it to work 10 out of 10 times, you have to do what Valve does here.
- It manages the wineserver (the lifecycle of the running Wine instance) and wine prefix for you.
The latter is an interesting bit to me. I think desktop environments should in fact integrate with Wine. I think they should show a tray icon or something when a Wineserver is running and offer options like killing the wineserver or spawning task manager. (I actually experimented with a standalone program to do this.[1]) Wine processes should show up nested under a wineserver in system process views, with an option to go to the wineprefix, and there should be graphical tools to manage wine prefixes.
To be fair, some of that has existed forever in some forms, but it never really felt that great. I think to feel good, it needs to feel like it's all a part of the desktop system, like Wine can really integrate into GNOME and KDE as a first-class thing. Really it'd be nice if Wine could optionally expose a D-Bus interface to make it so that desktop environments could nicely integrate with it without needing to do very nasty things, but Wine really likes to just be as C/POSIX/XDG as possible so I have no idea if something like that would have a snowball's chance in hell of working either on the Wine or desktop environment side.
Still, it bums me out a bit.
One pet peeve of mine regarding using Wine on Linux is that EXE icons didn't work out of the box on Dolphin in NixOS; I found that the old EXE thumb creator in kio-extras was a bit gnarly and involved shelling out to an old weird C program that wasn't all that fast and parsing the command line output. NixOS was missing the runtime dependency, but I decided it'd be better to just write a new EXE parser to extract the icon, and thankfully KDE accepted this approach, so now KDE has its own PE/NE parser. Thumb creators are not sandboxed on KDE yet, so enable it at your own risk; it should be disabled by default but available if you have kio-extras installed. (Sidenote: I don't know anything about icons in OS/2 LX executables, but I think it'd be cool to make those work, too.) The next pet peeve I had is that over network shares, most EXE files I had wouldn't get icons... It's because of the file size limit for remote thumbnails. If you bump the limit up really high, you'll get EXE thumbnails, but at the cost of downloading every single EXE, every single time you browse a remote folder. Yes, no caching, due to another bug. The next KDE frameworks version fixes most of this: other people sorted out multiple PreviewJob issues with caching on remote files, and I finally merged an MR that makes KIO use kio-fuse when available to spawn thumb creators instead of always copying to a temporary file. With these improvements combined, not just EXE thumbnails, but also video thumbnails work great on remote shares provided you have kio-fuse running. There's still no mechanism to bypass the file size limit even if both the thumbcreator and kio-fuse remote can handle reading only a small portion of the file, but maybe some day. (This would require more work. Some kio slaves, like for example the mpt one, could support partially reading files but don't because it's complicated. Others can't but there's no way for a kio-fuse client to know that. Meanwhile thumb creators may sometimes be able to produce a thumbnail without reading most of the file and sometimes not, so it feels like you would need a way to bail out if it turns out you need to read a lot of data. Complicated...)
I could've left most of that detail out, but I want to keep the giant textwall. To me this little bit of polish actually matters. If you browse an SMB share on Linux you should see icons for the EXE files just like on Windows, without any need to configure anything. If you don't have that, then right from the very first double-click the first experience is a bad one. That sucks.
Linux has thousands of these papercuts everywhere and easily hundreds for Wine alone. They seem small, but when you try to fix them it's not actually that easy; you can make a quick hack, but what if we want to do things right, and make a robust integration? Not as easy. But if you don't do that work, you get where we're at today, where users just expect and somewhat tolerate mediocre user experience. I think we can do better, but it takes a lot more people doing some ultimately very boring groundwork. And the payoff is not something that feels amazing, it's the opposite: it's something boring, where the user never really has any hesitation because they already know it will work and never even think about the idea that it might not. Once you can get users into that mode you know you've done something right.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Next time you have a minor pet peeve on Linux, please try to file a bug. The maintainers may not care, and maybe there won't be anyone to work on it, and maybe it would be hard to coordinate a fix across multiple projects. But honestly, I think a huge component of the problem is literally complacency. Most of us Linux users have dealt with desktop Linux forever and don't even register the workarounds we do (anymore than Windows or Mac users, albeit they probably have a lot less of them.) To get to a better state, we've gotta confront those workarounds and attack them at the source.
If you (or whoever is reading this) want(s) a more refined Wine, I highly recommend CodeWeavers. Their work gets folded back into open source WINE, no less.
> To get to a better state, we've gotta confront those workarounds and attack them at the source.
To my eye, the biggest problem with Linux is that so few are willing to pony up for its support. From hardware to software.
Buy Linux computers and donate to the projects you use!
realusername · 37m ago
Same about windows upgrades nowadays really, there's a ton of software which just stopped working.
russfink · 2h ago
They named it “Forscan?” They really named it that, not thinking it could sound close to something else entirely unrelated?
skyyler · 2h ago
Surely you don't think the executives at Ford expect us to Power Stroke without FORScan?
xxpor · 45m ago
Volkswagen's equivalent is VAG-COM
1oooqooq · 2h ago
why bring wine into a vm discussion? just run windows in a vm too. problem solved without entering the whining about wine not being better than windows itself
nrclark · 1h ago
I work in embedded systems. In that space, it's pretty common to need some vendor-provided tool that's Windows-only. I often need to automate that tool, maybe as part of a CI/CD pipeline or something.
If I were to do it with a Windows VM, I'd need to:
1. Create the VM image and figure out how to build/deploy it.
2. Sort out the Windows licensing concerns.
3. Figure out how to launch my tool (maybe put an SSH server into the VM).
4. Figure out how to share the filesystem (maybe rsync-on-SSH? Or an SMB fileshare?).
If I do it with Wine instead, all I need to do is:
1. Install some pinned version of Wine.
2. Install my tool into Wine.
3. Run it directly.
therein · 2h ago
Did you know that Forscan works flawlessly under Wine if you're not using Bluetooth?
0x457 · 3h ago
> "More powerful than Linux" is silly. It's a VM.
I don't think it's silly. Sure, it's a VM, but it's so nice that I barely reboot into Linux. You get the best of both worlds with WSL.
lxgr · 2h ago
For me, the best part of running Linux as the base OS is not having to deal with Windows.
No ridiculous start menu spam; a sane, non-bloated operating system (imagine being able to update user space libraries without a reboot, due to being able to delete files that other processes still have opened!); being able to back up my data at the file level without relying on weird block-level imaging shenanigans and so much more.
How is inverting the host/guest relationship an improvement on that?
phendrenad2 · 2h ago
I have a theory that 99.9% of preferring Windows or Linux comes down to "do ads in the start menu trigger my OCD".
lxgr · 1h ago
It runs much deeper than that for me.
Windows at its core just does not seem like a serious operating system to me. Whenever there are two ways to do something, its developers seem to have picked the non-reasonable one compared to Unix – and doing that for decades adds up.
But yes, first impressions undoubtedly matter too.
iLemming · 41m ago
I have used Windows for years, and I loved it. I never understood why Linux and Mac users kept bashing on it. I just didn't know any better.
These days I'm avoiding booting into Windows unless I really have no choice. The ridiculousness of it is simply limitless. I would open a folder with a bunch of files in it and the Explorer shows me a progress bar for nearly a minute. Why? What the heck is it doing? I just want to see the list of files, I'm not even doing anything crazy. Why the heck not a single other file navigator does that — not in Linux, not on Mac, darn — even the specialized apps built for Windows work fine, but the built-in thing just doesn't. What gives? I would close the window and re-open the exact same folder, not even three minutes later and it shows the progress bar again. "WTF? Can't you fucker just cache it? Da fuk you doing?"
Or I would install an app. And seconds after installing it I would try to search for it in the Start menu, and guess what? Windows instead opens Edge and searches the web for it. wat? Why the heck I can't remove that Edge BS once and for all? Nope, not really possible. wat?
Or like why can't I ever rebind Cmd+L? I can disable it but can't rebind it, there's just no way. Is it trying to operate my computer, or 'S' in 'OS' stands for "soul"?
Or for whatever reason it can't even get the time right. Every single time I boot into it, my clock time is wrong. I have to manually re-sync it. It just doesn't do it, even with the location enabled. Stupid ass bitch.
And don't even let me rant about those pesky updates.
I dunno, I just cannot not hate Windows anymore. Even when I need to boot in it "for just a few minutes", it always ends up taking more time for some absolute fiddlesticks made of bullcrap. Screw Windows! Especially the 11 one.
dsego · 15m ago
> Or for whatever reason it can't even get the time right. Every single time I boot into it, my clock time is wrong.
Dual booting will do that because linux & windows treat the system clock differently. From what I recall one of them will set it directly to the local time and the other always sets it to UTC and then applies the offset.
iLemming · 5m ago
Yeah, well, I use ntfs in Linux. It somehow knows how to treat the partitions. Even though it can't fix the issues when they arise (which almost never happens) — there's no chkdsk for Linux. So, I just don't understand why Windows can't automatically sync the clock (as it explicitly set to do it) when it boots? Why does one have to get creative to fix the darn clock? If I can't even trust the OS to manage the time correctly, what can I trust it with, if anything at all?
skydhash · 27m ago
I loved windows XP and Windows 7. They were a bit brittle regarding malware, but I was using a lot of pirated software at the times, so that may have been me. Win 8 was bad UX wise, but 8.1 resolved a lot of the issues. But since then, I barely touched windows.
I want a OS, not an entertainment center, meaning I want to launch a program, organize my files, and connect to other computers. Anything that hinders those is bad. I moved from macOS for the same reason, as they are trying to make those difficult too.
iLemming · 11m ago
> I want a OS, not an entertainment center
Exactomundo! I'm a software developer, not a florist. I don't care about all those animations, transitions, dancing emojis, styled sliding notifications, windings and dingleberries. If I want to rebind a fucking key I should be able to. If I want to replace the entire desktop with a tiling manager of my choosing — that should be possible. And definitely, absolutely, in no way, should just about any kind of app, especially a web-browser, be shoved in my face. "Edge is not that bad", they would say. And would be completely missing the whole point.
II2II · 1h ago
The reason varies by the decade. Microsoft has a tendency to fix one thing, then break another.
That said, a distaste for advertising goes beyond OCD. Advertisers frequently have questionable ethics, ranging from intruding upon people's privacy (in the many senses of the word) to manipulating people. It is simply something that many of us would rather do without.
sssilver · 1h ago
I would say in my case it’s less about OCD and more about, inexplicably, dignity.
specproc · 1h ago
Advertising triggers a lot more than OCD in me outside of my start menu. On my machine, where I spend most of my waking hours, it was certainly the last straw for me.
But there's also the thing where Microsoft stops supporting older machines, creating a massive pile of insecure boxes and normie-generated e-waste; and the thing where it dials home constantly; and the thing where they try and force their browser on you, and the expensive and predatory software ecosystem, and the insane bloat, and the requiring a Microsoft account just to use my own computer. Oh yeah, and I gotta pay for this crap?!
I went full Linux back when Windows 11 came out and will only use it if a job requires. Utterly disgusting software.
bigstrat2003 · 1h ago
> imagine being able to update user space libraries without a reboot
That's... a very weird criticism to level at Windows, considering that the advice I've seen for Linux is to reboot if you update glibc (which is very much a user space library).
lxgr · 1h ago
Why? It directly results in almost every Windows update requiring a reboot to apply, compared to usually only an application restart or at most desktop logout/login on Linux.
Having to constantly reboot my computer, or risk missing important security patches, was very annoying to me on Windows.
I've never had to reboot after updating glibc in years of using Linux, as far as I can remember.
ori_b · 1h ago
You got some moderately bad advice.
Running programs will continue to use the libc version that was on disk when they started. They won't even know glibc was upgraded. If something is broken before rebooting, it'll stay broken after.
samtheprogram · 20m ago
This is not true. Different programs on the same system that interoperate and use different versions of the same shared library can absolutely cause issues.
For a trivial change to glibc, it won't cause issues. But there's a lot of shared libraries and lots of different kinds of changes in different kinds of libraries that can happen.
I still haven't nailed if it was due to a shared library update, but just the other day, after running upgrades I was unable to su or sudo / authenticate as a user until after rebooting.
deepsun · 1h ago
The only time I need to reboot my Linux Mint is when the Linux kernel is updated. I understand why.
samtheprogram · 16m ago
I responded "This is not true" to a sibling comment about this same topic, but about "shared libraries", which is the opposite problem (multiple programs could load the same shared library and try to interact).
This is absolutely not true for Linux kernel updating. While you won't be using the new kernel before rebooting, there's 0 risk in not rebooting, because there's exactly 1 version of the kernel running on the machine -- it's loaded into memory when your computer starts.
There's of course rare exceptions, like when a dynamically linked library you just installed depends on a minimum specific version of the Linux kernel you also just installed, but this is extremely rare in Linux land, as backwards compatibility of programs with older kernels is generally a given. "We do not break userspace"
xnickb · 2h ago
But you still get the worst of the Windows world, which is more than many are willing to deal with. I was using windows for years as my main gaming OS, but after they announced W11 being the only way forward. Switching to Linux on the desktop was like a breath of fresh air. I'll leave it at that.
If I were to run an OS on a VM it's gonna be windows, not Linux
jchw · 22m ago
Similarly powerful would be totally fine. More powerful really is silly. Personally I couldn't make a lot of my workflows work very well with WSL2. Some of the stuff I run is very memory intensive and the behavior is pretty bad for this in WSL2. Their Wayland compositor is also pretty buggy and unpolished last I used it, and I was never able to get hardware acceleration working right even with the special drivers installed, but hopefully they've made some progress on that front.
Having Windows and Linux in the same desktop the way that WSL2 does obviously means that it does add a lot of value, but what you get in the box isn't exactly the same as the thing running natively. Rather than a strict superset or strict subset, it's a bit more like a Venn diagram of strengths.
zymhan · 1h ago
The integration between Windows and the WSL VM is far deeper than a typical VM hypervisor.
You cannot claim with a straight face that Virtualbox is easier to use.
cogman10 · 1h ago
It's deeper but let's not overblow it.
I think the two fairly deep integrations are window's ability to navigate WSL's filesystem and wslg's fairly good ability to serve up guis.
The filesystem navigation is something that AFAIK can't easily be replicated. wslg, however, is something that other VMs have and can do. It's a bit of a pain, but doable.
What makes WSL nice is the fact that it feels pretty close to being a native terminal that can launch native application.
I do wish that WSL1 was taken further. My biggest grip with WSL is the fact that it is a VM and thus takes a large memory footprint. It'd be nice if the WSL1 approach panned out and we instead had a nice clean compatibility wrapper over winapi for linux applications.
juancn · 1h ago
Technically it's not a VM, it's a subsystem, the same way Win32, Win64, Posix, OS/2, etc. are.
It's a feature of the NT-family of kernels where you can create many environments sharing the same underlying executive and HAL.
As everyone said, WSL2 is actually virtual machines and it is what most people are actually using now. That said, I feel the need to chime in and say I actually love WSL1 and I love Windows NT the kernel. It bums me out all the time that we probably won't get major portions of the NT kernel, even an out-of-date version, in some open source form.
I like Linux, and I use Linux as my daily desktop, but it's not because I think Linux or even UNIX is really that elegant. If I had to pick a favorite design it would be Windows NT for sure, even with all its warts. That said, the company behind Windows NT really likes to pile a lot of shit I hate on top of that pretty neat OS design, and now it's full of dubious practices. Automatic "malware submission" on by default, sending apps you download and compile yourself to Microsoft and even executing them in a VM. Forced updates with versions that expire. Unbelievable volumes of network traffic, exfiltrating untold amounts of data from your local machine to Microsoft. Ads and unwanted news all over the UI. Increasing insistence in using a Microsoft account. I could go on and on.
From a technical standpoint I do not think the Linux OS design is superior. I think Linux has some amazing tools and APIs. dmabufs are sweet. Namespaces and cgroups are cool. BPF and it's various integrations are borderline insane. But at its core, ... It's kinda ugly. These things don't all compose nicely and the kernel is an enormous hard-to-tame beast. Windows NT has its design warts too, all over, like the amount of involvement the kernel has in the GUI for historical reasons, and the enormous syscall surface area, and untold amounts of legacy cruft. But all in all, I think the core of what they made is really cool, the subsystems concept is super cool, and it is an OS design that has stood up well to time. I also think the PE format is better than ELF and that it is literally better for the capabilities it doesn't have w.r.t. symbols. Sure it's ugly, in part due to the COFF lineage, but it's functionally very well done IMO.
I feel the need to say this because I think I probably came off as a hater, and tbh I'm not even a hater of WSL2. It's not as cool as WSL1 and subsystems and pico processes, but it's very practical and the 9p bridge works way better than it has any right to.
Thanks for pointing this out.
ori_b · 1h ago
It used to be. They moved to a VM.
Turns out that it's easier to emulate a CPU than syscalls. The CPU churns a lot less, too, which means that once things start working things tend to keep working.
enragedcacti · 1h ago
WSL 2 is actually virtualized despite the name
zargon · 1h ago
WSL1 was a subsystem. WSL2 is mostly a VM.
speed_spread · 9m ago
You're thinking of the POSIX personality of Windows NT of old. This was based on Interix and has been deprecated about two decades ago and is now buried so deep that it couldn't be revived.
The new WSL1 uses kernel call translation, like Wine in reverse and WSL2 runs a full blown Linux kernel in a Hyper-V VM. To my knowledge neither of these share anything with the aforementioned POSIX subsystem.
oblio · 1h ago
They had to give that up because it was too slow, I think for IO. Unfortunate.
Dylan16807 · 1h ago
It's complicated. WSL1 is much faster at accessing the drives mounted in Windows, but much slower at accessing its own emulated drive.
If you have control over where you put your git repo, WSL2 will hit max speed. If you want it shared between OSes, WSL2 will be slower.
nottorp · 1h ago
> I get that WSL is revolutionary for Windows users
It is... I'm working these days on bringing a legacy windows only application to the 21st century.
We are throwing a WSL container behind it and relying on the huge ecosystem of server software available for Linux to add functionality.
Yes that stuff could run directly on windows, but you'd be a lot more limited in what's supported. Even for some restricted values of supported. And you'd have to reinvent the wheel for a few parts.
codr7 · 1h ago
I definitely prefer working in Linux.
But having Windows tightly integrated when needed is nice.
If only I could run replace the Windows shell with a Linux DE...
pjmlp · 1h ago
The last time I deployed Linux servers on bare metal was about 2010.
Apparently Linux VMs on other people's computers is very much appreciated.
high_na_euv · 1h ago
So, how you run Windows on Linux like WSL does?
zakki · 1h ago
Methods I know are using qemu/Wine/proxmox/VirtualBox.
fsloth · 3h ago
This is very much YMMV thing. There is no objectively best platform. There are different users and requirements.
I’ve been a software developer for 20 years and in _my_ opinion Windows is the best platform for professional software development. I only drop of to linux when need some of the excellent posix tools but my whole work ergonomy is based on Windows shortcuts and Visual Studio.
I’ve been forced to use Mac for the past 1.5y but would prefer not to.
Why would Windows be superior for me? Because that’s where the users are (for the work stuff I did before this latest gig). I started in real time graphics and then spent over a decade in CAD for AEC (developing components for various offerings including SketchUp). The most critical thing for the stuff I did was the need to develop on the same platform as users run the software - C++ is only theoretically platform independent.
Windows API:s are shit for sure for the most part.
But still, from this pov, WSL was and will be the best Linux for me as well.
YMMV.
folkrav · 2h ago
I fully agree with you - "YMMV" is the one true take. Visual Studio has never been particularly attractive to me, my whole workflow is filled with POSIX tools, and my code mostly runs on Docker and Linux servers. Windows is just another thing to worry about for me, be it having to deal with the subtle quirks of WSL not running on raw metal or having to deal with running UNIX-first tooling (or finding alternatives) on Windows. If it wasn't for our work provided machines being Windows by default, and at home, being into VR gaming and audio production (mostly commercial plugins), I'd completely ditch Windows in a heartbeat.
ComplexSystems · 1h ago
Is it a VM? It seems to be much faster than most VMs I've used.
cogman10 · 1h ago
Literally built on top of MS's Hyper-V.
IDK how many VMs you've used, but there has been a lot of work specifically with x86 to make VMs nearly as fast as native. If you interact with cloud services everything you do is likely on a VM.
adamc · 3h ago
It's handy if you have other services that are Windows-based, though. And, being a VM, it's fairly convenient to have multiple versions and to back up.
sweeter · 3h ago
And if they think that this version of Linux "isn't janky" but regular Linux is, than idk what to say.
PaulHoule · 3h ago
With WSL you can use “Linux the good parts” (command line tools, efficient-enough paradigms for fork() servers) and completely avoid X Windows, the Wayland death spiral, 100 revisions of Gnome and KDE that not so much reinvent the wheel but instead show us why the wheel is not square or triangular…
ahartmetz · 1h ago
>the Wayland death spiral
That sounds like Wayland getting worse, but it's actually been slowly improving and it's pretty good now. Only took a decade+ to get there.
pelorat · 35m ago
Mir was good from year one.
xnickb · 2h ago
After having used i3 and Sway, Windows is surprisingly bad at handling windows for an OS called Windows.
It requires a bit of work to setup to your liking of course, but hey, at least you have an option to set it up to your liking
williamscales · 1h ago
Agreed. I used tiling WMs for a long while (ion3, XMonad) and it was such a productivity boost.
Then I was forced to use a Mac for work, so I was using a floating WM again. On my personal machine, ion3 went away and I never fully got around to migrate to i3.
By the time I got enough free time to really work on my personal setup, it had accumulated two huge monitors and was a different machine. I found I was pretty happy just scattering windows around everywhere. Especially with a trackball's cursor throw. This was pretty surprising to me at first.
Anyway this is just my little personal anecdote. If I go back to a Linux install I'll definitely have to check out i3 again. Thanks for reminding me :)
the__alchemist · 2h ago
Compiling and testing cross-platform software for Linux lately (Ubuntu and similar)... You can't even launch an application or script without CLI. Bad UX, IMO. For these decisions, There are always reasons, a justification, something about security. I don't buy it.
folkrav · 2h ago
> You can't even launch an application or script without CLI.
Care to elaborate? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here.
the__alchemist · 1h ago
I compile my program using WSL, or Linux native. It won't launch; not an executable. So, into the CLI: chmod +x. Ok. It's a compiled binary program, so semantically I don't see the purpose of this. Probably another use case bleeding into this. (I think there's a GUI way too). Still can't double click it. Nothing to launch from the right-click menu. After doing some research, it appears you used to be able to do it (Ubuntu/Gnome[?]), but it was removed at some point. Can launch from CLI.
I make a .desktop file and shell script to move it to the right place. Double click the shell file. It opens a text editor. Search the right click menu; still no way. To the CLI we go; chmod +x, and launch if from the CLI. Then after adding the Desktop icon, I can launch it.
On windows, you just double click the identified-through-file-extension executable file. This, like most things in Linux, implies the UX is designed for workflows I don't use as a PC user. Likely servers?
ThinkBeat · 3h ago
Your comment that you can do Linux things on Linux missed the
point entirely.
Where is the reverse WSL on Linux, where Windows is deeply embedded
and you have all the Windows features in your hands?
You can use Wine/Crosseover, which is cool, but even now the number of software products it supports is tiny. Steam has a lot of games.
You can run a virtual machine with Windows on it.
That is identical to what you can do on Windows with Linux.
WSL2-> is a virtual machine with unique tooling around it that makes
it easier to use and integrates well with Windows.
randunel · 2h ago
Windows supports Linux because the latter is open source, it's a lot easier than the reverse.
Linux, on the other hand, barely supports Windows because the latter is closed, and not just closed, windows issues component updates which specifically check if they run in wine and stop running, being actively hostile to a potential Linux host.
The two are not equivalent, nobody in the Linux kernel team is actively sabotaging WSL, whereas Microsoft is actively sabotaging wine.
tyushk · 2h ago
> whereas Microsoft is actively sabotaging wine
Do you have a link to where I can read more about this? My understanding is that Microsoft saw Wine as inconsequential to their business, even offloading the Mono runtime to them [1] when they dropped support for it.
> Until 2020, Microsoft had not made any public statements about Wine. However, the Windows Update online service will block updates to Microsoft applications running in Wine. On 16 February 2005, Ivan Leo Puoti discovered that Microsoft had started checking the Windows Registry for the Wine configuration key and would block the Windows Update for any component.[125] As Puoti noted: "It's also the first time Microsoft acknowledges the existence of Wine."
This. Windows needs to open source its operating system. End of story.
ChocolateGod · 58m ago
I doubt it would happen, large projects that aren't open source from the onset and are decades old can have licensed or patented code, Microsoft would have to verify line by line that they can open source it.
PaulHoule · 1h ago
Wait long enough and it will happen, the question is just "how long". (Microsoft has open-sourced OS and languages from the 1980s) Some days it seems like Microsoft is more interested in Azure, Copilot and GAME PASS and Windows is an afterthought.
bigstrat2003 · 1h ago
I would certainly love it if Microsoft stopped trying to sell Windows and just open sourced it. I think Windows is a much more pleasant desktop operating system than Linux, minus all the ads and mandatory bloat Microsoft has put in lately. But if Windows was open source the community could just take that out.
I really don't see it happening any time in the next decade at least, though. While Windows might not be Microsoft's biggest focus any more it's still a huge income stream for them. They won't just give that up.
rounce · 24m ago
> You can use Wine/Crosseover, which is cool, but even now the number of software products it supports is tiny. Steam has a lot of games.
This isn't really the case, and hasn't been for some years now, especially since Valve started investing heavily in Wine. The quality of Wine these days is absolutely stunning, to the point that some software runs better under Wine than it does on Win11. Then there's the breadth of support which has has moved the experience from there being a slight chance of something running on Wine, to now it being surprising when something doesn't.
alex_smart · 2h ago
I preferred WSL to running linux directly even though I had no need for any windows only software. Not having to spend time configuring my computer to make basic things work like suspend/wake on lid down/up, battery life, hardware acceleration for video playback on the browser, display scaling on external monitor and so on was reason enough.
jraph · 2h ago
All this usually works out of the box now, especially if you pick your hardware accordingly.
davrosthedalek · 45m ago
On Windows, I don't have to pick my hardware accordingly.
I have to onboard a lot of students to work on our research. The software is all linux (of course), and mostly distribution-agnostic. Can't be too old, that's it.
If a student comes with a random laptop, I install WSL on it, mostly ubuntu. apt install <curated list of packets>. Done. Linux laptops are OK too, I think, but so far only had one student with that. Mac OS used to be easy, but gets harder with every release, and every new OS version breaks something (mainly, CERN root) and people have to wait until it's fixed.
jraph · 32m ago
> On Windows, I don't have to pick my hardware accordingly.
Fair enough. I think the best way to run Linux if you want to be sure you won't have tweak to stuff is to buy hardware with linux preinstalled. That your choice is more limited is another matter than "linux can't suspend".
Comparing a preinstalled Windows with a linux installed on random laptop whose manufacturer can't be bothered to support is a bit unfair.
Linux on a laptop where the manufacturer did their work runs well.
alex_smart · 1h ago
That was certainly not the case ~2 years ago, the last time I installed linux on a laptop.
It also doesn't appear to be the case even now. I searched for laptops available in my country that fit my budget and for each laptop searched "<laptop name> linux reddit" on google and filtered for results <1 year old. Each laptop's reports included some or other bug.
The laptop with the best reported linux support seemed to be Thinkpad P14s but even there users reported tweaking some config to get fans to run silently and to make the speakers sound acceptable.
You are going to find issues for any computer for any OS by looking things up like this.
And yeah, it's best to wait a bit for new models, as support is sorted out, if the manufacturer doesn't support Linux itself. Or pick a manufacturer that sells laptops with Linux preinstalled. That makes the comparison with a laptop with Windows preinstalled fair.
alex_smart · 29m ago
> You are going to find issues for any computer for any OS by looking things up like this
I wasn't cherry-picking things. I literally searched for laptops available in my budget in my country and looked up what was the linux support like for those laptops as reported by people on reddit.
> Or pick a manufacturer that sells laptops with Linux preinstalled
I suppose you are talking about System76, Tuxedo etc. These manufacturers don't ship to my country. Even if I am able to get it shipped, how am I supposed to get warranty?
jraph · 16m ago
You weren't cherry picking but the search query you used would lead to issue reports.
HP, Dell and Lenovo also sell Linux laptops on which Linux runs well.
I sympathize with the more limited availability and budget restrictions, but comparisons must be fair: compare a preinstalled Windows and a preinstalled linux, or at least a linux installed on hardware whose manufacturer bothered to work on Linux support.
When the manufacturer did their homework, Linux doesn't have the issues listed earlier. I've seen several laptops of these three brands work flawlessly on Linux and it's been like this for a decade.
I certainly choose my laptops with Linux on mind and I know just picking random models would probably lead me to little issues here and there, and I don't want to deal with this. Although I have installed Linux on random laptops for other people and fortunately haven't run into issues.
alex_smart · 4m ago
As a buyer, how am I supposed to know which manufacturer did their homework and on which laptops?
> it's been like this for a decade
Again, depends on the definition of "flawlessly". Afaik, support for hardware accelerated videoplayback on browsers was broken across the board only three years ago.
lproven · 2h ago
> Where is the reverse WSL on Linux, where Windows is deeply embedded and you have all the Windows features in your hands?
Windows has many useful software that is not available on Linux.
So, for me Windows + WSL is more productive than just using Linux.
The UI is still better on Windows(basic utilities like File Explorer and Config Management is better on Windows). No Remoting Software beats RDP. When I remote to a Windows workstation through RDP, I can't tell the difference. VNC is always janky. Of course there is Word/Excel/Illustrator which is simply not available on Linux
a2128 · 45m ago
File Explorer is better on Windows? How? I tried Windows 11 for the first time a month ago and it takes several seconds for file explorer to open, it's asynchronously loading like 3 different UI frameworks as random elements pop in with no consistency, there's two different rightclick menus because they couldn't figure out how to make the new one have all the functionality of the old one so they decided to just keep the old one behind "Show More Options", and it's constantly pushing OneDrive in your face. I'm offended that this is what they thought is good enough to ship to a billion users.
qwertox · 33m ago
The File Explorer on Windows 11 is the worst experience ever. Windows 7 was snappy as hell, but I don't know what they did to damage it that badly. I use XYplorer, which is written in Visual Basic (so a 32 bit application), but is so much faster the native explorer (and is full with features).
thewebguyd · 3h ago
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 silicon to get us hardware with no compromises like the Macbooks
I'm on Mac now, and I jump back and forth between Mac laptop and a Linux desktop. I actually prefer Windows + WSL, but ideologically I can't use it. It has potential - PowerToys is fantastic, WSL is great, I actually like PowerShell as a scripting language and the entire new PC set up can now be done with PowerShell + Winget DSC. But, I just can't tolerate the user hostile behavior from Microsoft, nor the stop the world updates that take entirely too long. They should probably do what macOS and Silverblue, etc. do and move to an immutable/read-only base and deploy image based updates instead of whatever janky patching they do now.
Plus, I can't get a laptop that's on par with my M4 Pro. The Surface Laptop 7 (the arm one) comes close, but still not good enough.
nightski · 3h ago
I'm not saying it's a perfect solution, but with Windows 11 Pro and group policy I was able to disable all of the annoying stuff, and because it is group policy it has persisted through several years of updates. It is annoying you have to do this, and it does take some time to get set up right. But it's a solution.
That said I'd pay for a dev edition as you described it, that would be fantastic.
I get customers and most people don't know about it but it's kind of ridiculous that techy people in a tech forum don't know how to do it.
danieldk · 1h ago
it's kind of ridiculous that techy people in a tech forum don't know how to do it.
Why? HN has traditionally always largely been a macOS and Linux crowd. Why do we have to care about fixing an OS that is broken out of the box (that most of us don't use anyway)?
oblio · 1h ago
Because someone cannot make informed comments about the "other" party unless they have a reasonably deep knowledge of it, too.
Far too many Linux users, especially, make fun of Windows and if you dig a bit you see that most of their complaints are things that are solved with 5 minutes of googling. Some complaints are philosophical, and those I agree with, but even in that case, I'd be curious how consistent they are with their philosophy when for example Linux desktop environments due weird things.
Summarizing a bit: Linux users with years or decades of experience of tinkering as sysadmins with Linux frequently make junior-level user complaints about Windows usage, frequently based on outdated information about it.
I say this who has been using both Linux and Windows for a few decades now and has a fairly decent level of sysadmin skills on both.
CamperBob2 · 1h ago
This seems pretty useful, thanks! I had certainly never heard of it.
airstrike · 2h ago
There is no flavor of Windows 11 that is acceptable. Even the UI itself is a disaster. A cornucopia of libraries and paradigms from React Native to legacy APIs as if an interdimensional wave function of bad ideas had collapsed into an OS, but with ads.
No comments yet
baq · 2h ago
> I can't get a laptop that's on par with my M4 Pro.
This is the only reason I have not requested a windows laptop from my company. WSL is better for docker development in basically every way than a mac can be (disclaimer: haven't tried orbstack yet, heard good things, but my base assumption is it can't be better than WSL2) except it is literally impossible to get hardware as good as the M3 or M4 for any other OS than macOS.
lodovic · 1h ago
I replaced my m1 with a snapdragon laptop running Win11 and upgraded that to pro. For what I do with it, it runs great with very long battery times, for less than Apple quoted to repair the m1. I don't use the copilot features and haven't seen any ads so far, except maybe for office during setup.
chrsw · 2h ago
This would be fantastic. But Microsoft doesn't have to do this. Their users are captives.
oblio · 1h ago
Some of them are.
But the increasing market share of Macs and even Linux these days plus the ever increasing of OSS initiatives from Microsoft points out that Microsoft knows a lot fewer of their users are as captive as they were in the 90's, for example.
KingOfCoders · 2h ago
(Used 15ys OSX, now Win11)
The biggest difference between OSX and Windows is, Apple adds (some say steal) functionality from competition, and open source. They make it neat. On windows to have something working, you need a WezTerm, Everything for search, Windhawk for a vertical taskbar on the right, Powertoys for an app starter, Folder Size for disc management etc. If you spend a lot of time, Win11 can be ok to work with.
If Powerpoint and Affinity would work on Linux, I'd use Linux though.
p_ing · 48m ago
Oh running Ice to wrangle the menu bar app icons or Rectangle to properly manage windows ('cause Apple screwed that one up) must be unnecessary.
Each OS is going to have extension applications to improve on the OOTB experience. This is an invalid argument to choosing one over the other.
pathartl · 1h ago
Maybe just for your specific preferences. Terminal is plenty fine. Vertical taskbar on the right is straight up user preference. PowerToys for an app starter? Like Alfred? The start search does a decent enough job of that. Folder Size is nice, but enumerating all files is very taxing.
GoblinSlayer · 1h ago
>Windhawk for a vertical taskbar on the right
Huh? Windows supports vertical taskbar.
bialpio · 57m ago
Last time I checked, Windows 11 lost this capability and 3p solutions like Windhawk are needed. I'd be very happy if they brought this back though, feel free to share a link to some info about how to do it natively.
alex_smart · 2h ago
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.
pathartl · 1h ago
Superior hardware with terrible software. Also they straight up artificially limit their hardware so they don't cannibalize their sales, which is slightly understandable, but they do it in the dumbest ways. My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor, even though it has the same specs as her work Pro. Oh and good luck actually getting that external display to work, I swear only like 50% of USB-C docks work on the platform.
danieldk · 1h ago
My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor,
The MacBook Air M4 supports two external displays now (with the lid open):
My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor, even though it has the same specs as her work Pro.
The MacBook Pro with the non-Pro/Max chip (i.e. MacBook Pro M3) has the same limitations as the corresponding MacBook Air (i.e. MacBook Air M3).
resource_waste · 13m ago
>Macbooks are winning the laptop war because of superior hardware.
No. This is just you repeating marketing.
No Nvidia chip = B tier at best.
I have a $700 Asus with a 3060 that is better. Go ahead and scale up to a $2000 computer with an Nvidia chip and its so obviously better, there is nothing to debate.
No one cares about performance per watt, its like someone ran a 5k race, came in 3rd and said "Well at least I burned fewer calories than the winner!"
jsmith99 · 2h ago
There's a dedicated settings page for quickly setting popular dev settings such as showing extensions and full paths. Getting rid of the rest just involves tweaking a few other settings like don't show tips or welcome screen. I also hide the weather and news widget because it's tabloid rubbish but many people seem to love it.
zczc · 2h ago
> a version of windows without all the crap
LTSC is a version like that
chrsw · 2h ago
> "Microsoft doesn't make any release from the Long-Term Servicing Channel available for regular consumers. The company only makes it available to volume licensing customers, typically large organizations and enterprises. This means that individual users cannot purchase or download Windows 11 LTSC from Microsoft's website."
as far as MS are concerned, that crap is their business.
Or, possibly, that crap is the multitude of little software empires build by the management layer now in control..
GuB-42 · 16m ago
> WSL is more powerful than Linux
This is the kind of statement that makes you pay the karma tax. WSL is great, I use it on a day to day basis. I also use Linux on a day to day basis. And as great as WSL is, for running Linux software on supported hardware, Linux beats WSL hands down. And I mean, of course it does, do you expect a VM to beat native? In the same way that Windows software runs better on Windows. (with a few exceptions on both sides).
Compared to Linux, WSL I/O is slow, graphics is slow and a bit janky, I sometimes get crashes, memory management is suboptimal, networking has some quirks, etc... These problems are typical of VMs as it is hard for the host and guest OS to coordinate resource use. If you have an overpowered computer with plenty of RAM, and are mostly just using the command line, and don't do anything unusual with your network, then sure it may be "better" than Linux. But the truth is that it really depends on your situation.
Conscat · 15m ago
I'm sure that feature is important for whatever works you're doing, but that's a feature I've _never_ desired, and WSL is missing plenty of features that are important for my work.
Hardware performance counters basically do not work in WSL2, which among other issues, makes it extremely difficult to use rr.
https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr/issues/2506#issuecomment-2...
Some people say they got it working, but I and many other users encounter esoteric blockers.
The Dozen driver is never at feature parity with native Linux Vulkan drivers, and that's always going to be the case.
gWSL is also a terrible X11 server that makes many very basic window management configurations impossible, and while I prefer VcXsrv, it has its own different terrible issues.
I can imagine that WSL2 looks attractive if all you want to do is run command line apps in multiple isolated environments, but it is miserable for anything graphical or interactive.
wkat4242 · 3h ago
Well, WSL is Linux. It's really just a VM of it (since WSL2, WSL1 was actually running on the windows kernel which was pretty cool).
The big drawback to WSL to me is the slow filesystem access because NTFS sucks. And having to deal with Windows in the first place.
Ps I wouldn't worry about your karma. It's just a number :P
arghwhat · 3h ago
NTFS is not the problem.
The problem is Windows IO filters and whatnot, Microsoft Defender trying to lazily intercept every file operation, and if you're crossing between windows and Linux land, possibly 9pfs network shares.
WSL2's own disk is just a VM image and fairly fast - you're just accessing a single file with some special optimizations. Usually far, far more responsive than anything done by windows itself. Don't do your work in your network-shared windows home folder.
cma · 2h ago
>The problem is Windows IO filters
Not the biggest issue of them, 'find' and 'git status' on WSL2 in a big project is still >100 times slower on windows dev drive which avoids those filters than it is with WSL 1 on dev drive.
WSL 1 on regular ntfs with defender disabled is about 4x slower than WSL1 on dev drive, so that stuff does cause some of it, but WSL2 feels hopelessly slow. And wsl 2 can't share memory as well or take as much advantage of the filesystem cache (doubling it if you use the windows drive in both places I think, unless the network drive representation of it doesn't get cached on the WSL2 drive.
arghwhat · 1h ago
WSL2, in my testing, is orders of magnitude faster at file heavy operations than anything outside WSL, dev drive or not. We have an R&D department that's using WSL2 and jumping through hurdles of forwarding hardware because it's night and day compared to trying under windows on the same machine. It provided other benefits too, but the sheer performance was the main selling point.
WSL2 does not take less advantage of filesystem caches. Linux's block cache is perfectly capable. HyperV is a semi-serious hypervisor, so it should be using a direct I/O abstraction for writing to the disk image. Memory is also balloning, and can dynamically grow and shrink depending on memory pressure.
Linux VM's is something Microsoft has poured a lot of money into optimizing as that's what the vast majority of Azure is. Cramming more out of a single machine, and therefore more things into a single machine, directly correlates with profits, so that's a heavy investment.
I wonder why you're seeing different results. I have no experience with WSL1, and looking into a proprietary legacy solution with known issues and limited features would be a purely academic exercise that I'm not sure is worth it.
(I personally don't use Windows, but I work with departments whose parent companies enforce it on their networks,
Dylan16807 · 1h ago
> Linux's block cache is perfectly capable. HyperV is a semi-serious hypervisor, so it should be using a direct I/O abstraction for writing to the disk image.
Files on the WSL2 disk image work great. They're complaining about accessing files that aren't on the disk image, where everything is relayed over a 9P network filesystem and not a block device. That's the part that gets really slow in WSL2, much slower than WSL1's nearly-native access.
> Memory is also balloning, and can dynamically grow and shrink depending on memory pressure.
In my experience this works pretty badly.
> a proprietary legacy solution with known issues and limited features
Well at least at the launch of WSL2 they said WSL1 wasn't legacy, I'm not sure if that has changed.
But either way you're using a highly proprietary system, and both WSL1 and WSL2 have significant known issues and limited features, neither one clearly better than the other.
teruakohatu · 3h ago
I use it, I am required to use Windows, and it’s a huge improvement over doing Data Science on native Windows, but the terrible filesystem access ruins what otherwise would be a seamless experience.
It’s fine for running small models but when you get to large training sets that don’t fit in RAM it becomes miserable.
There is a line where the convenience of training or developing locally gives way to a larger on demand cloud VM, but on WSL the line is much closer.
deetz · 3h ago
still use WSL1 also because VMWare runs so dreadfully slow with any kind of Hyper-V enabled - if so, VMWare must also use it, so you get a Type-2 running under a Type-1 the lag is untennable lag and performance.
xPaw · 3h ago
Slow IO is why I still use wsl1.
psyclobe · 3h ago
This. WSL was SO much more interesting in v1 times.
ohashi · 3h ago
I liked the networking in WSL1 more too
brewmarche · 1h ago
Corporate networking is why I still use WSL1 (I didn’t spend enough time to check why it doesn’t with WSL2, zScaler could be the culprit maybe).
>The big drawback to WSL to me is the slow filesystem access because NTFS sucks
Thats if you are going from VM/host. If you use the allocated space for VM, its pretty fast.
phendrenad2 · 2h ago
Where are you experiencing filesystem slowness? I've been using WSL in some advanced configurations (building Win32 apps by cross-compiling from Linux CLANG and dropping the .exe into a Windows folder, copying large files from Linux->Windows and vice versa, automating Linux with .BAT files, etc.) and I haven't seen this slowness at all.
JackSlateur · 3h ago
Is it really a NTFS issue ?
The culprit would be the plan9 bits (think of smb or nfs but .. wilder ? why are they using 9P again ?)
garblegarble · 2h ago
I'm guessing they use plan9 because distros already ship support for it, and it's super simple compared to NFS? It doesn't seem like CIFS/NFS would be any faster, and they introduce a lot more complexity.
While I can see the subtle distinction you're trying to draw people's attention to (NTFS is not the problem, filesystem operations generally on Windows are the problem) I have to say it seems like a distinction without a difference in real terms. They made a range of changes that seem to produce more complicated code everywhere because the overhead of various filesystem tasks are substantially higher on this OS vs every other OS.
But in the end they had to get the OS vendor to bless their process name anyway, just so the OS would stop doing things that tank the performance for everybody else doing something similar but who haven't opened a direct line up with the OS vendor and got their process name on a list.
This seems like a pain point for the vendor to fix, rather than everybody shipping software to their OS
ndriscoll · 3h ago
I find it to be incredibly janky. Pretty much every every time my computer sleeps (so every morning, at least) I have to restart it because somehow the VM-host networking gets screwed up and VS code connections into the VM stop working. You also can't just put things in your Windows User directory because the filesystem driver is so slow that git commands will take multiple seconds, so now you have two home directories to keep track of. There were also some extremely arcane things I had to fix when setting it up involving host DNS and VPN adapter priority not getting propagated into the VM so networking was completely broken. IIRC time would also not match the host after a sleep and get extremely far out of sync, though I haven't run into that for a while since now I have to reboot Windows constantly anyway.
I don't have a need to run multiple OSes though. All of my tools are Linux based, and in companies that don't let people run Linux, the actual tools of the trade are almost all in a Linux VM because it's the only reasonable way to use them, and everything else is cross-platform. The outer OS just creates needless issues so that you now need to be a power user with two operating systems and their weird interactions.
phendrenad2 · 2h ago
> somehow the VM-host networking gets screwed up
> extremely arcane things I had to fix when setting it up involving host DNS and VPN adapter priority not getting propagated into the VM so networking was completely broken
Are you sure you set up the VPN properly? Messing around with Linux configs is a good way to end up with "somehow" bugs like that.
ndriscoll · 1h ago
I don't know how it's set up. That's kind of my point though. I have to now be an expert in Linux and Windows to debug this stuff, which is a waste of my time as someone who's job it is to develop (server, i.e. Linux) software. I had exactly zero issues when I was using Fedora. At one point my company made all of the Linux users move off (we do now have an IT-supported Linux image, but I haven't found the time to re-set up my laptop and don't fully trust that it will work without a bunch of trouble/IT back-and-forth because they also made Windows users start using passkeys), and since then I've seen way more issues with Windows than Linux (e.g. one day my start menu just stopped reacting to me clicking on programs), in addition to things like ads in the lock screen and popups for some XBox pass thing that I had to turn off, which is just insane in a "professional" OS. A lot of days I end up having to hold down the power button to reboot because it just locks up entirely.
OSX was a bit janky with docker filesystem slowness, homebrew being the generally recommended package manager despite being awful (why do I sometimes tap a cask and sometimes pour a bottle? Don't tell me; I don't care. Just make it be "install". Also, don't take "install" as a cue to go update all of my other programs with incompatible versions without asking), annoying 1+ second animations that you can't turn off that make it so the only reasonable way to use your computer is to never maximize a window (with no tiling support of course), and completely broken external monitor support (text is completely illegible IIRC), but Windows takes jank to another level.
By contrast, I never encounter the issues people complain about on Linux. Bluetooth works fine. Wifi works fine. nVidia GPUs and games work fine. Containers are easy to use because they're natively part of the OS. I prefer Linux exactly because I stopped enjoying "tinkering" with my computer like 10 years ago, and I want it to just quietly work without drawing attention to itself (and because Windows 8 and the flat themes that followed were hideous and I was never going to downgrade to that from Windows 7).
arcastroe · 2h ago
Thats odd. I have none of these problems. Sleep doesnt interrupt the VM. And I regularly use the git CLI through WSL on projects living within windows user directories. Both work fine.
Flamentono2 · 3h ago
I think you might want to give more context.
I use linux. I don't need WSL at all. Not at work nor at home.
So you praise WSL because you use Windows as your main system? Than yes its great. It definitly makes the Windows experience a lot better.
OpenSSH for Windows was also a game changer. Honestly, i have no clue why Microsoft needed so long for that.
raggi · 3h ago
Openssh should have been a game changer but they made a classic openssh porting bug (not reading all bytes from the channel on close) and have now been sat on the fix in “prerelease” for years. I prodded the VP over the group about the issue and they repeatedly made excuses about how the team is too small and getting updates over to the windows team is too hard. That was multiple windows releases ago. Over on GitHub if you look up git receive pack errors being frequent clone problems for windows users you’ll find constant reports ever since the git distribution stopped using its own ssh. I know a bunch of good people at Microsoft, but this leadership is incapable of operating in a user centric manner and shouldn’t be trusted with embedded OSS forks.
frollogaston · 2h ago
I'm a simple man, if I open the shell and `ssh foo@bar.com` doesn't work, I don't use that computer. Idk if Windows has fixed that yet or why it's so hard for them. Also couldn't even find the shell on a Chromebook.
JonChesterfield · 3h ago
putty is longer necessary? That would be a wild upgrade in usability for the work laptop, shall go try it
baq · 2h ago
openssh has been an optional windows component for... almost a decade now? including the server, so you can ssh into powershell as easily as into any unix-like. (last time I set it up there was some fiddling with file permissions required for key auth to work, but it does work.)
evanjrowley · 2h ago
OpenSSH on Windows is great for the odd connection and SFTP session, but I still feel strongly that any serious usage should just stick with PuTTY and WinSCP. The GUI capabilities these provide are what Windows users are used to. The only benefit of built-in SSH is if you're working with some minimal image stuff, like Windows Server Core or Tiny11. IMHO.
baq · 2h ago
IIRC (it's been a while) I used the server with vscode remote ssh extension.
johannes1234321 · 53m ago
imo the interesting part in opensssh into Windows.
On the other hand sometimes the GUI on WSL decides to break and you have to restart the whole thing.
MarkusWandel · 3h ago
My acid test for WSL2 was to install the Linux version of Google Chrome in it, and then play Youtube videos fullscreen with that. It worked. Somehow WSL1 was the more impressive hack but how can you argue with what works? WSL2 works fine.
Also 1980s style X11 widgets on the Windows desktop in their own windows? Cool.
MarkusWandel · 3h ago
I have to say too, though, once you get the hang of the way an EFI system boots, it's really good for dual boot. I let the Linux installer mount the undersized existing one as /boot/orig_efi and made a new, bigger EFI system partition. Not only was the UEFI on that particular laptop fine with it, scanning both EFI system partitions for bootable stuff, but also, grub2 installed in the new one automatically included the Windows boot in the old one as a boot option.
Cool because nothing about how Windows boots is intercepted; you can just nuke the new partitions (or overwrite them with a new Linux installation). I still prefer a native Linux boot with "just in case" Windows option to WSL.
phendrenad2 · 2h ago
I don't think people are using WSL to avoid problems with dual booting. Dual-booting has become about as simple as it can be, thanks to UEFI, but it's still not exactly fun to have to close all of your open apps to switch to another OS to run just one app.
efdee · 3h ago
But not having to dual boot and just get both worlds at the same time definitely beats having to dual boot.
ec109685 · 13m ago
Step it up a notch and see if Netflix works w/ its DRM.
smw · 3h ago
You get much nicer window decorations if you use the wayland support instead of X11.
hulitu · 3h ago
> You get much nicer window decorations if you use the wayland support instead of X11.
Wayland supports window managers ?
pton_xd · 3h ago
Running a Linux VM on Windows is nicer than just booting into Linux? That's quite a take. Windows is so user-hostile these days that I feel bad for those who have to deal with it. Calling it delightful must be symptomatic of some sort of Stockholm syndrome.
alex_smart · 2h ago
> symptomatic of some sort of Stockholm syndrome
I have since moved to macbooks for the hardware, but until not too long ago WSL was my linux "distro" of choice because I didn't want to spend time configuring my computer to make basic things work like suspend/wake on lid down/up, battery life, hardware acceleration for video playback on the browser, display scaling on external monitor and so on.
dismalaf · 2h ago
Who deals with this? All this is fine out of the box on a modern Linux distro.
okanat · 8m ago
Nothing works out of the box with Linux. They may "seem" to work out of the box but you realize how many little tweaks go into making a laptop/consumer device work fully when you work as an embedded dev. It is quite difficult to get to the same power consumption levels and same exact hardware / software driver capabilities under Linux. There are simply no APIs for many things. So the entire driver has to live in userspace using some ioctls to write random stuff to memory or it cannot exist. There are also algorithms that the hardware manufacturer wants to keep closed.
Note that NVIDIA drivers didn't get better since they are more open source now. They are not. GPUs are now entire independent computers with their own little operating system. Some significant parts of the driver now runs under that computer.
Yes the manufacturers may allocate some people to deal with it and the corrosiveness of the kernel community. But why? Intel and AMD uses that as a marketing and sales stragtegy. If the hardware manufacturer is the best one there is, where is the profit for supporting Linux? Even Thinkpads don't have 100% support of all the little sensors and PMICs.
HiDPI issue hasn't been solved yet completely. Bluetooth is still quite unreliable. MIPI support should be the best due to the number of devices, until you realize everybody did their own shitty external driver and there are no common good drivers for MIPI cameras so your webcam doesn't work. USB stack is still dodgy. Microsoft in 90s had a cart of random hardware populating the USB tree completely and they just fucked with the NT kernel plugging and unplugging until it didn't break anymore for love's sake. Who did that level of testing with Linux?
alex_smart · 1h ago
That was certainly not the case ~2 years ago, the last time I installed linux on a laptop.
It also doesn't appear to be the case even now. I searched for laptops available in my country that fit my budget and for each laptop searched "<laptop name> linux reddit" on google and filtered for results <1 year old. Each laptop's reports included some or other bug.
The laptop with the best reported linux support seemed to be Thinkpad P14s but even there users reported tweaking some config to get fans to run silently and to make the speakers sound acceptable.
Which Linux? Each distro is essentially a different operating system.
alex_smart · 54m ago
I thought you said everything should work seamlessly on any modern distro.
dismalaf · 49m ago
Not all distros that exist in the current year are "modern". Mint for example, still ships with X11 and old forks of Gnome. Lots of people are running Arch with weird components that don't work well for whatever reason. And so on...
Modern means systemd, pipewire, Wayland, Gnome, an up to date kernel, etc... So the current Ubuntu and Fedora releases.
I've had 100% working laptops for 15 years now. Because I always run the newest Ubuntu.
josephcsible · 38m ago
Other than an up to date kernel, your list of what "modern" means is entirely wrong. The rest of the entries are polarizing freedesktop-isms. There's nothing out of date about, e.g., KDE Plasma.
alex_smart · 39m ago
Afaict, all the reporters used the newest available Ubuntu/Fedora/Arch.
dismalaf · 23m ago
I read all the links, most of the problems weren't bugs (Fan runs loud? Fans run under Windows as well... Only modern suspend? Literally created for Windows...). From all those links the only thing that was a bug was an issue with a kernel regression and 4/5 distros he listed weren't one I listed.
Maybe I was too positive on Fedora (I was going by it's reputation, I use Ubuntu for work). Ubuntu is solid.
alex_smart · 9m ago
Issues reported:
Link 1: screen only updating every 2 seconds, visual glitches.
Link 2: brightness reset to full on screen unlock, fans turning on when charging.
Link 3: bluetooth troubles, speakers cant be muted if headphone jack is on mute.
Link 4: audio quality and low volume, wifi not coming back after sleeping.
Link 5: fans being too loud, poor sound quality.
Either your Stockholm syndrome is affecting your reading comprehension or you just take bugs like these as part of the normal "working perfectly" linux experience.
frollogaston · 26m ago
Aren't these issues almost always kernel-related?
encom · 2h ago
You need new reasons to hate Linux, because all those issues were solved a while ago.
JoshTriplett · 53m ago
There is a reason why 1) people whose main environment is Linux feel (correctly) that these problems have been solved a long time ago, and 2) people whose main environment is not Linux but who try Linux occasionally feel (correctly) that these problems still occasionally crop up.
People whose main environment is Linux intentionally buy hardware that works flawlessly with Linux.
People who try Linux occasionally do it on whatever hardware they have, which still almost always works with Linux, but there are occasional issues with sketchy Windows-only hardware or insufficiently tested firmware or flaky wifi cards, and that is enough for there to be valid anecdotes in any given comments section with several people saying they tried it and it isn't perfect. Because "perfect" is a very high bar.
okanat · 3m ago
> people whose main environment is Linux feel (correctly) that these problems have been solved a long time ago
There is also the quiet part to this. People who religiously use Linux and think that it is the best OS that can ever be, don't realize how many little optimizations go into a consumer OS. They use outdated hardware. They use the lower end models of the peripherals (people still recommend 96 DPI screens just for this). They use limited capabilities of that hardware. They don't rely on deeply interactive user interfaces.
alex_smart · 2h ago
I don't need new reasons to hate Linux. Like I said, I have moved to macbooks as my personal computing device because of the better hardware.
> solved a while ago
Can not be the case because I was facing these issues less than a couple of years ago.
I was responding to the "Stockholm syndrome" comment specifically because there are a number of hardware and software problems (e.g. https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...) with using linux as a desktop operating system that linux users have to find their way around, so I found the comment rather full of irony.
PS: I already know that the file-picker issue has been fixed. That does not take away from the fact that it was in fact broken for decades. It is only meant as an example.
fsflover · 1h ago
> Can not be the case because I was facing these issues less than a couple of years ago
Just like with Mac and Windows, you choose the supported hardware, and everything is flawless.
frollogaston · 1h ago
If there's some set of fully Linux-capable laptops out there, it's a small subset of the Windows-capable ones.
And it's not clear what the Linux ones are. Like, our dept ordered officially Linux-supported Thinkpads for whoever wanted them, and turns out they still have unsolved Bluetooth audio problems. Those people use wired headphones now.
alex_smart · 1h ago
And what is supported hardware here? What even is "support"?
frollogaston · 27m ago
As far as I can tell, Chromebooks are the only truly supported GNU/Linux laptops.
frollogaston · 2h ago
There's no way, especially if you include Bluetooth in that list.
frollogaston · 2h ago
If for some reason I could never use a MacBook again, it wouldn't be easy to decide between Windows or Linux as the host OS on a laptop. Do I want something that's intentionally user-hostile or something that's unintentionally broken a lot?
I'd at least try Linux cause I abhor Microsoft, but idk if it'd work out.
At least the nags in Windows look like modern web-based UI (so far that ‘use Electron’ seems to be the post-Win 8 answer to ‘how to make Windows apps’) in contrast to MacOS which drove my wife crazy with nag dialogs that look like a 1999 refresh of what modal dialogs looked like on the classic Mac in 1984.
LeFantome · 5m ago
If you want to “run multiple versions of Linux at once” and don’t like plain Docker, maybe check-out Podman Desktop.
rich_sasha · 2h ago
Forced to work on Windows for ++nth job, I was looking forward to WSL. Indeed, while it worked, it was magic. Sadly, I have had no end of bizarre bugs. The latest one almost crashed my whole desktop - as far as I can piece together, something crashed, leading to a core dump the size of my desktops entire memory - half the machine's RAM. This in turn put WSL in a weird state - it would neither run, not be uninstallable. Googling found bug reports with similar experiences, no responses from Microsoft and magic incantation that maybe worked for some people - but not for me.
It might be due to my corpo's particular setup etc. but for me 95% of the value of WSL would be the ability to run it on "corporate" Windows boxes. Alas.
connicpu · 3h ago
I think it really depends on what you do and whether the Linux side of it has hard dependencies on system packages. Personally, at work I much prefer working directly on my Linux workstation, and at home have even switched to using Linux for my gaming desktop. I really don't like the direction Windows has been trending for the past few years, and with the specter of a forced Windows 11 upgrade on the horizon I decided it's time to go all in. My system runs better and I can still play all my games. The jankiest thing I do is I have a mingw toolchain so I can compile some game mods into Windows DLLs to be loaded by Wine, but even that ended up being pretty seamless. Just install the toolchain and the project just compiled.
risho · 3h ago
I don't understand. Docker/podman/distrobox/lxc all allow you to do the exact same thing without the virtual machine overhead. I think the real win of WSL is that its a best of all worlds. You get to use Windows with access to every game ever made plus all of the proprietary apps everyone needs to use, with all of the upside of having a full and complete linux command line experience.
frollogaston · 2h ago
Because it's easier to set up a local dev environment in WSL than in any of those.
SV_BubbleTime · 3h ago
You get all of Windows telemetry, vulnerabilities and backdoors, the always fun game of spot the new Advertising opportunity, AI “copilot” spyware I mean feature, updates that reset your machine at will, a terrible UAC model that encourages “just click OK already!”, and dependence on a company that has gone out of their way to prove how much of an unstoppable behemoth they are; and best of all you get to pay for the privileges above.
I know… every year is the year of the Linux desktop… but seriously the AI spyware included was enough to get me gone for good.
encom · 2h ago
It's hard to pick the Windows feature I hate the most, but floating around at the top is Defender. It can't be disabled, at least not easily, and it demolishes IO performance. And Windows update takes the computer hostage, and takes ages to do anything giving no feedback in the process, meanwhile APT can update to a new major version in like 5-10 minutes.
phendrenad2 · 1h ago
Yes, you get Windows telemetry which enabled fixing bugs without a bug report, you get minimal ads in the start menu (if you're playing "spot the new advertising opportunity" I found it. It's in the start menu. You can stop playing now), AI "copilot" which isn't spyware just because you think it is, updates that ASK you nicely multiple times to update (I don't want to be ableist, if you suffer from a Christopher Nolan Memento-like disability where you don't remember the warnings, you might think it's "resetting at will", but I assure you, it isn't), a great UAC model that's a lot better than "just type your root password into this terminal already, and just hope the binary wasn't hijacked in some way to keylog you, because unlike UAC, there is no visual evidence that you're not getting hacked", and dependence on a company that SV_BubbleTime thinks "has gone out of their way to prove how much of an unstoppable behemoth they are" with no evidence or clarity so they must just be making FUD, and best of all the OS costs so little you can pay it in 8 hours of working as a software developer.
SV_BubbleTime · 6m ago
Stockholm’s my man.
dboreham · 1h ago
with the virtual machine overhead.
tadfisher · 3h ago
Gnome (a linux desktop environment) ships a "Boxes" app [0] that is very impressive. You can, with a few clicks, install one of a huge number of Linux distros in an auto-provisioned VM, enable hardware passthrough for USB devices and host 3D acceleration, and manage files with drag-and-drop from the host system. I also use it for Windows and MacOS VMs (don't tell Apple), but you need to provide your own images.
You're right, it is incredibly nice. Just the other day I got a Windows-only developer to install and use the POSIX/*NIX toolkit we use for development/deployment. In 30 minutes he was editing and deploying left and right with our normal open source stack. No messing around with Cygwin or MSYS or anything, it all just worked in Ubuntu on WSL. It's fantastic.
trey-jones · 3h ago
Well, I'd still rather just use linux, but I take your meaning.
Theodores · 3h ago
Me too. Particularly after having to do Docker things a few years ago, destroying my productivity due to file system speed.
However, for those of us that went Linux many years ago, and like our free open source, in 2025, is it better to go back to the dark side, to run Windows and have things like a LAMP stack and terminals run with WSL?
I don't play games or run Adobe products, I use Google Docs and I don't need lots of different Linux kernels. Hence, is it better to run Linux in Windows now? Genuinely asking.
trey-jones · 2h ago
As someone who occasionally does use WSL, I definitely think it's not better no. But I'm still biased, because I know a lot more about using linux than I do about using windows, and WSL is still windows.
TiredOfLife · 3h ago
wsl2 is linux
johnisgood · 3h ago
I would rather use Linux, outside of VM.
tgma · 1h ago
While I mostly agree with this sentiment, sidestepping the power management and sleep issues as well as better driver support and touchpad handling on some laptops makes it quite a bit better.
preisschild · 3h ago
*on bare metal
not on a shitty wrapper running on an ad-platform.
yoyohello13 · 1h ago
Look I get it. I’m forced to use Windows at work and I thank the lord WSL is a thing. But I would switch to Linux base in a heartbeat if I could. WSL is jank as fuck compared to just using Linux.
theanonymousone · 23m ago
I agree with your opinion on WSL. I psy a similar "tax" when I defend ChromeOS, and I will not stop it, like you won't.
The Linux on Desktop is finally approaching, in more than one "shape", none of which is the shape some people expected/wanted.
brooke2k · 3h ago
I think it depends a lot on what you're trying to do. I found that anything GPU-related was a nightmare of drivers and configuration which was a show-stopper for me. Now I just run arch/kde and that all works fine out of the box
bsnnkv · 3h ago
I will also die on this hill - NixOS on WSL + Windows + komorebi[1] for tiling window management is peak productivity for me.
Why not a Linux distro with i3wm, instead? What could possibly hold you back from upgrading?
bsnnkv · 2h ago
I've yet to find anything comparable feature-wise on Linux - and they all come with the huge downside of having to roll your own cohesive settings widget ecosystem for basic everyday things like WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. I run Cosmic Epoch on my old Macbook which is better, but again, feature-wise, it's just not comparable for serious work.
randunel · 2h ago
Thanks for your reply, but as a Linux user for over 20 years, all I take away from your post is that you haven't really tried, probably because the variety of distros vastly exceeds the two classic options of mac vs windows.
I understand the "roll your own" argument very well. In my time, I've experienced quite the variety of configs and dotfiles, but I'm not young anymore so I've settled with using Regolith which is an opinionated set of tools, including my favourite i3wm, on top of Ubuntu, and I simply use defaults for the most things.
Anyway, it's much easier to use Linux as a daily driver than it's ever been. The choice of distro is simply which package manager to use, and everything else just works, as long as it's in the package manager's inventory.
I haven't compiled my own computer's kernel in 6 years (but I still cross compile for rpi and other IoT), and I haven't used my dotfiles in 3 years, just defaults.
bsnnkv · 2h ago
> Thanks for your reply, but as a Linux user for over 20 years, all I take away from your post is that you haven't really tried, probably because the variety of distros vastly exceeds the two classic options of mac vs windows.
A very big and very incorrect assumption. This reads like you asked the initial question without any actual curiosity behind it.
randunel · 2h ago
Thank you for the details!
Dylan16807 · 47m ago
> having to roll your own cohesive settings widget ecosystem
What gets you that on windows? The builtin stuff is far from cohesive.
ivanmontillam · 3h ago
I agree. Back in the day (10+ years ago), I used to argue with people about why I ran VMs instead of just partitioning the disk and booting up the OS I needed.
XAMPP did not work out of the box with me on Windows (skill issue on my part, I know), so my preferred setup was to run a Ubuntu Server VM (LAMP stack) and then develop whatever I had on a Windows IDE.
I could have done that under full Linux, I just did not want that. Then Vagrant came into existence, which I'd say was for my use case (but never came around to adopt it).
I'm really happy with my WSL2 setup. I stopped using VMware Workstation when WSL2 broke it, but WSL2 is exactly what I needed to match my use case.
JCattheATM · 3h ago
> XAMPP did not work out of the box with me on Windows (skill issue on my part, I know), so my preferred setup was to run a Ubuntu Server VM (LAMP stack) and then develop whatever I had on a Windows IDE.
Why wouldn't you have just spent 5 minutes to get XAMPP working?
rkagerer · 3h ago
I stopped using VMware Workstation when WSL2 broke it
Is it still broken?
petronio · 39m ago
Nope, VMWare added the capability to work as a sort of nested hypervisor atop Hyper-V (which WSL2 and newer Windows security features depend on).
That being said, there is a performance impact.
runjake · 1h ago
> WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously.
I'd venture to say this depends on which OS you're more comfortable with. I'm more comfortable with Linux, so I'd say it's easier/better/less janky to use Linux as a host OS.
> Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24. You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"
Once you're a developer who's been burned by this enough times, you do this with containers or dedicated dev VMs. You do not develop on your host OS and stay sane.
nickjj · 2h ago
> It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop or laptop, with no configuration required.
I have been using it since the beginning of WSL 1 with a very terminal heavy set up but it has some issues.
For example WSLg's clipboard sharing is buggy compared to VcXsrv. It doesn't handle pasting into Linux apps without introducing Windows CRs. I opened an issue for this https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1326 but it hasn't gotten a reply.
Also, systemd is still pretty sketchy. It takes over 2 minutes for systemd services to start and if you close a WSL 2 terminal for just a few minutes systemd will delay a new terminal from opening for quite some time. This basically means disabling systemd to use WSL 2 in your day to day.
Then there's this 6 year old issue with 1,000+ upvotes https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699 around WSL not reclaiming disk space. It means you need to routinely shut everything down and compress your VM's disk or you'll run out of space.
Beyond that is does work well so I'm happy it exists.
jraph · 2h ago
> Edit: for clarity, by "multiple OS" I mean multiple Linux versions. Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24. You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"
For this part, I just create systemd-nspawn containers.
Last time I wanted to test something in a very old version of WebKit, creating a Debian Jessie container takes a few minutes. Things run at native speed.
VikingCoder · 2h ago
It doesn't work on any of my 3 Windows machines, all completely different hardware. Jank factor 100% for me. I wish I was seeing what you're seeing.
rlpb · 1h ago
> Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24. You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"
Have you tried lxd? It's far less janky than Docker (IMHO) to achieve what you describe. Docker is uniquely unsuited to your use case.
jgd9dsv · 3h ago
I love WSL, but you can do these things with Distrobox.
1vuio0pswjnm7 · 2h ago
Perhaps "more powerful" is also a factor of who is the computer user. For example, Linux is not as "powerful" if the computer user is someone who knows little about how to use it.
For a person who will not invest the time to learn, e.g., how to avoid or minimise dependencies, indeed something like Windows with WSL may appear "more powerful".
The point of this comment is that "power" comes from learning and know-how as much as if not more than simply from choice of operating system. That said, some choices may ultimately spell the difference between limitations or possibilities.
ezekg · 3h ago
WSL gave me the push to switch from macOS to Windows. And I couldn't be happier, tbh. There was a lot lacking in my Hackintosh/Windows dual boot setup.
ksec · 3h ago
Now if they could only do Windows 12 by taking baby steps in yearly release of Windows 11.1, 11.2 etc.
Iterating on improvements and polishing on Screens and Design that they haven't touched in the past 30 years. Improving on ARM support etc. And STOP adding Ads on the OS.
And the Surface Laptop continues to push Hardware quality forward. From Speaker, Touchpad, Screen, Motherboard etc.
moshegramovsky · 1h ago
I'm a daily driver. It completely changed the way I work. Am I curious if something will compile? Open a terminal and type make. The files are all already there. You can even run graphics apps. It's wonderful.
rao-v · 2h ago
I'm with you - after years of messing with dualboot Linux, including (foolishly) running multiday Gentoo builds, WSL + Windows now gives me everything I want from Linux with zero friction.
In fact, I'm a little annoyed that I can't get a comparably smooth experience on my MacBook without spinning up a full QEMU VM. I know it's a bit hypocritical since, like most people, I run WSL2 (which is container/VM-based), not WSL1 (the original magic syscall translation vision).
Does anyone know why there's no lightweight solution on macOS - something like LXC plus a filesystem gadget - that would let me run stuff like "apt-get install chromium"?
fluidcruft · 1h ago
docker is pretty easy to use on linux (even rootless docker isn't particularly painful) and KVM using QEMU is also pretty easy for running Windows things. I used WSL quite a bit but ultimately have switched back to running Ubuntu as my main.
Here's the main difference between making Windows vs Linux the main OS from my POV: Windows is a lot of work and only the corporate editions can be converted into not-a-hot-mess-of-distractions (supposedly). Out of the box Linux doesn't have all of the bullshit that you have to spend time ripping out of Windows. You can easily re-install Linux to get the "powerwash" effect. But if you powerwash Windows you have to go back and undo all the default bullshit again.
Having said that Windows+WSL is a very nice lifeline if you're stuck in Windows-land. It's a much better combo than MacOS.
jm4 · 1h ago
WSL is great if you're on Windows, but I wouldn't say it's more powerful than Linux. Distrobox on Linux covers your "multiple OS" use case quite well.
rini17 · 3h ago
You don't stress about Windows updates? Hard to believe it.
chubot · 3h ago
Yeah exactly ... I want Windows running in Linux, not the other way around, so I actually control the software and the updates!
I actually just tried WINE for the FIRST time (surprisingly, I have been out of the Windows world for so long)
And as long as I installed the binaries from their repo, not Debian 12, it worked very well
Wine is an impressive project too. It's not a VM, which has upsides and downsides, but I was able to run GCC-TDM, Python 3, and git bash in it!
phendrenad2 · 1h ago
What do you mean by that?
NikolaNovak · 2h ago
Is it not the case that wsl2 is a vm; it requires hyperV enablement; and that turns your main windows OS into effectively a type of privileged vm, since hyperV is a type 1 bare metal hypervisor?
This is not often discussed, so it took me a lot of digging a couple of years ago, but I'm still surprised this is never discussed as a consequence / side effect / downside of wsl2. There are performance impacts to turning on hyper V, which may or may not be relevant to user (e.g. If this is also their gaming machine etc:)
phendrenad2 · 1h ago
I use WSL, but I'm actively looking for a way to move away from it. The only thing holding me back are languages like Ruby or Python, which are designed to work in a Unix-like environment. I briefly considered forking Ruby and stripping out all of the Unix-isms but in the end I gave up and just installed Linux (WSL).
NelsonMinar · 2h ago
I think WSL is great but if your only goal is to run several Linux OSes, any hypervisor will do. I think Proxmox is better suited to your use-case (hosted on Linux).
I love WSL because it lets me have the best of Windows and Linux.
No comments yet
ryao · 2h ago
> Edit: for clarity, by "multiple OS" I mean multiple Linux versions. Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24. You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"
You can run multiple Linux distributions in chroots or containers, such as docker containers. I have showed people how to build packages for Ubuntu 22.04 on Ubuntu 20.04 for example.
dismalaf · 2h ago
This is what tools like toolbx or distrobox solve. You can have easy to use containers with libs from any distro with a few commands, using podman or docker as the backend.
KingOfCoders · 2h ago
Using WSL on Win11. I would prefer Linux but I never got used to Open Office/Gimp/... and need to use PowerPoint / Affinity. But WSL mostly works, and added some tools and config to make it useful with WezTerm
My only big gripe with WSL right now is GUI applications. wslg is not good, and the only good experience is when applications have a good remote development UX such as vscode.
Another, smaller, gripe is networking. Because of how WSL is networked, I've run into edge-case issues with connecting to networked applications running in WSL from Windows.
0xbadcafebee · 20m ago
Run a rootless X server (XWin, Xming) on Windows, network the two (SSH tunnel), you have GUI Linux apps on Windows.
t_mann · 2h ago
Windows 10 with WSL(2) is/was peak Windows for me. You could build stuff and edit MS Office documents in the same place. Sadly, it wasn't meant to last. I have no intention of giving W11 a try, not yet decided what I'll be using come this fall.
asveikau · 3h ago
I'm old enough to remember that before docker there was chroot. It's fairly easy to put lots of different user mode portions of Linux distros into directories and chroot into them from the same kernel. It seems a bit like what you're asking for.
There's also debootstrap which is useful for this technique, not sure if it also works on Ubuntu.
bigfishrunning · 4m ago
debootstrap absolutely works in Ubuntu
201984 · 2h ago
WSL gives you no support for USB devices, which is a massive pain for embedded development when IT forces you to use Windows. Also, this might just be specific to my setup but WSL networking is very finicky with my company's VPN, and breaks completely if the VPN ever drops out requiring a full reboot.
I'll second you, WSL makes Windows a first class experience because now I can seamlessly have Linux and Windows apps in one laptop. Yes, I could run VMWare Workstation or HyperV, etc, but this is just better integrated.
have-a-break · 1h ago
The development experience is relatively cumbersome compared to using a native Linux distribution and containerizing application dependencies where needed.
sebtron · 2h ago
I agree it is a convenient way to run multiple Linux VMs, but it comes with the drawback of having to use Windows, which is a major impediment to anything I may want to do with my computer.
jasonthorsness · 2h ago
I totally agree and will join you on the hill. I used Linux exclusively at my job for two years straight and now do the same job but from Windows 11 with WSL 2 on the same physical ThinkPad T41 laptop. Windows gets the basics right more than Linux did (sleep states, display, printing). And as the OP notes; it makes it easy to run multiple distributions and never fear that something I install or reconfigure within the WSL2 terminal will screw up my host. Having a different OS improves isolation in this regard, not at a technical level but for me making mistakes and entering commands in the wrong place, since Windows does not accept Linux commands. JetBrains and VSCode both have great support for WSL2.
jollyllama · 2h ago
As of a couple of years ago the integration was not that great and I switched to just using a full-fledged VM instead. For example, trying to use binaries in WSL from within Visual Studio or vice versa was not great.
d--b · 20m ago
Well I guess now you just need to add WSL support to wine.
running101 · 3h ago
I heart WSL. Years ago I was going to switch to MAC OS to have a more unix like experience/workflow. Then WSL came out and I stayed because Linux is the environment I spend most of my time in.
Gud · 1h ago
Can do the same with FreeBSDs Linuxulator. I run Arch Linux on FreeBSD, emulated.
jxjnskkzxxhx · 2h ago
ELI5 does it allow me to run windows programs in Linux?
frollogaston · 2h ago
no
tuetuopay · 3h ago
It's a... VM? Like the Linux VMs running on Linux computers in the cloud?
Sorry but not sorry, it's not easier to run than on linux. It requires the Windows store to work, and to use Hyper-V (which breaks VMware workstation, among other things).
It's in a better package, to be sure, but it's not "easier to run multiple OS on the same computer". It's easier to use multiple OSes (no SSH, GUI forwarding, etc), as long as all those OSes are Linux flavors supported by WSL.
Want FreeBSD or Windows? Nope!
wkat4242 · 3h ago
Does it really need the store? I thought you could just go "wsl install" on the console.
WorldMaker · 3h ago
The files, including and especially the distro files, `wsl install` installs still originate from the Store's CDN, so the truly paranoid that distrust the Store (including some corporate environments) and just entirely block Store CDN access at the DNS and/or firewall level still break WSL installs.
kcb · 3h ago
There's a --web-download argument which helped with issues when I had limited access to the store.
tuetuopay · 3h ago
You're likely right, I haven't used it in ages. Though I recall that at one point you had to get distributions from the Store, but it may have been that long ago that it was still being called "Bash for Windows".
Firehawke · 3h ago
As of 24H2, you can just "wsl install" from the commandline and it'll do all necessary setup to get you up and running, including installation of Hyper-V components if needed.
goosedragons · 3h ago
You don't need the store.
wkat4242 · 3h ago
> Want FreeBSD or Windows? Nope!
Well, it is windows subsystem for Linux :) not windows subsystem for windows or FreeBSD for that matter :)
Ps I wonder if you can make your own image? After all its really just Hyper-V with some config candy.
Firehawke · 3h ago
It's a bit more than just some candy, there's substantial glue on both the Linux/Windows sides to get Plan9, WSLG, and the other components to work.
That said, the kernel they distribute is open source and you're not limited to just the distros they're working with directly. There are a number of third party (e.g. there's no Arch from Arch or Microsoft, but there's a completely compatible third party package that gives you Arch in WSL2)
Foxboron · 2h ago
>e.g. there's no Arch from Arch or Microsoft, but there's a completely compatible third party package that gives you Arch in WSL2
I'm shocked. They were adamant it wasn't going to happen for a long long time.
tuetuopay · 3h ago
Haha yes, I was being cheeky :)
I'm pretty sure that with the opensourcing, we'll see freebsd or more exotic systems popping up quite quickly. Heck, macOS would be fun!
chupasaurus · 3h ago
> Heck, macOS would be fun!
Especially in licensing! /sarcasm
tuetuopay · 13m ago
That would make it even funnier in my book!
725686 · 3h ago
I used to love WSL when I had a Windows machine because I used lots of docker containers, but now that I am in a Mac with Apple Silicon, there is no going back.
nhumrich · 2h ago
WSL is so incredible. But support for it from 3rd party dev tools is so terrible.
signal11 · 3h ago
qemu on Linux solves a bunch of these problems as well. But yeah, UX-wise WSL is pretty good at solving the problem of “provide Windows devs a POSIX environment”.
charcircuit · 3h ago
Qemu is nothing like wsl UX wise. The UX on windows is double click gimp and then a window for gimp opens. For qemu it opens a new window for the wm, has awkward input focus interactions, you probably have to log in to the vm, and it can not be easily setup to automatically open the app you want.
phkahler · 3h ago
Most people have little use for running multiple OSes, and that drops a lot when you just abandon Windows entirely.
jahy-notes · 3h ago
Previously, I had dual boot with ubuntu and windows. Sometime last year I just removed ubuntu, and haven't regretted it.
wsl works good enough.
gofreddygo · 3h ago
I want to know what limitations and tradeoffs am I embracing when using WSL vs booting linux off a usb stick.
TZubiri · 3h ago
The power of linux with the professionalism of paid MSFT engineers
trollbridge · 2h ago
I'll second this, and I'm someone who ran a certain alternative OS to Linux before Linux was viable instead of run Windows, worked as a developer of Win16 and Win32 apps early in my career which gave me a deep love-hate of the platform, couldn't stand Microsoft's monopoly tactics back in the 1990s and 2000s, and remain ever-sceptical of Microsoft's open source and Linux initiatives...
... but WSL is an excellent piece of work. It's really easy to deploy apps on. Frankly, it can be easier to a deployment there than on a Linux or macOS system, for example the reasons detailed above.
sneak · 2h ago
It’s a delight to use if you don’t mind your computer conducting 24/7 surveillance on you for a multinational corporation.
RKFADU_UOFCCLEL · 2h ago
For me it was slow, full of compatibility issues, and glitchy. Some simple packages wouldn't even install in the official Ubuntu WSL distro. To be honest I don't know what the use case for this is, other than to run some one-off Linux thing once in a while without having to use another box.
Firehawke · 34m ago
How long ago did you try that?
I use WSL2 to handle Linux (and Windows cross-) compilation regularly, along with running a number of native tools that are specific to Linux.
I've never had any issues with that, even to the point that I've been able to run MAME natively from Linux and have it show up like any other windowed app.
cess11 · 2h ago
Last time I used it they kept hogging some common keyboard shortcuts for whatever Windows stuff even though the VM-window was focused. Did they stop that?
rs_rs_rs_rs_rs · 3h ago
>WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously
Is VMWare more powerful than Linux?
hobs · 3h ago
And yet when I reboot my computer windows has shown me an entirely new place I can see ads - this week it was my lock screen.
So I left - I am willing to do more work to be spied on less, to be used as a product less, and to fight with my computer about who owns it less.
WorldMaker · 3h ago
Yeah, "Weather and More" is such a joke. I like the idea of Weather on my lock screen in theory, and I sometimes miss Windows 8's great support for Lock Screen live data, but I have huge problems with almost everything else in the "and More" (news, no thanks, ads, definitely no thanks, tips, maybe not). Thankfully it is still really easy to turn off "Weather and More", but I wish they'd give us a "Weather and Nothing Else". (Same reason one of the first things I do is disable the "Widgets" display on the taskbar in Windows 11. Weather is great, everything else I don't want and/or actively hate.)
wkat4242 · 3h ago
Yeah this is what pisses me off the most about windows. Telemetry that can't be turned off normally. Ads everywhere. Microsoft deciding when I must restart for updates. Microsoft trying to manage my behaviour telling me to try new features. Screw that. My computer is my own and must do what I choose.
This feature thing is really one of their strategies. At work they send us "adoption managers" that run reports to check whether people use feature xyz enough and set up stupid comms campaigns to push them to do so.
I really hate that. I decide how I use my computer. Not a vendor.
malux85 · 3h ago
> and to fight with my computer about who owns it less.
This is a great way of saying it and expresses the uneasy feeling windows has given me recently. I use Linux machines but I have 1 windows machine in my home as a media PC; and for the last several years windows has made me feel like I don’t own that computer but I’m just lucky to be along for the ride. Ramming ads on the task bar and start menu, forcing updates on me, forcing me to make a Microsoft account before I can login (or just having a dark UI pattern so I can’t figure out how to avoid it, for the pedantic).
With Linux I feel like the machine is a turing complete wonderbox of assistance and possibility, with windows it feels like Microsoft have forced their way into my home and are obnoxiously telling me they know best, while condescendingly telling me I’m lucky to be here at all. It’s a very different feeling.
daveguy · 2h ago
WSL is massively slower than Linux. Not just the 10% or so for VM, but probably 50-90% slower for disk access. It takes many times longer to start tmux. It has update bugs that crash open terminals and that's not even part of the regular windows forced-update fiasco. In short, it's garbage. It's one of the primary reasons I moved back to Linux for my daily driver.
lpcvoid · 3h ago
That may all very well be, but uuh, you're then forced to use Windows
stephenr · 2h ago
... You know that you can run VMs, or full-OS containers on a Linux desktop right?
Or on a macOS Desktop. Bonus: doing so on either platform doesn't also mean your host OS is running under a hypervisor, as it does with WSL2.
Bigger bonus: you don't have to run fucking Windows.
p_ing · 36m ago
> Bonus: doing so on either platform doesn't also mean your host OS is running under a hypervisor
Why do you think, technologically, this is some form of "bonus"?
adithyassekhar · 2h ago
Windows by default runs on a hypervisor since some Windows 11 version.
righthand · 3h ago
> WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously.
This is why you pay karma tax. This statement is so clearly representative of a falsity.
My linux can run multiple linuxes as well without VM overhead. Something Windows can’t do. Furthermore WINE allows me to forgo running any vm to run windows applications.
I developed on WSL for 3 years and consistently the biggest issue was the lack of ability to use tooling across the shared OSes.
Your karma depleting statements are biased, unfounded, and it shows as you do not really provide counter evidence. That’s why you lose karma.
dvtkrlbs · 3h ago
Except Wine cant cover all of Windows (partly due to fault of Windows). I can't run UWP apps for example. Windows is not a good operating system but if you need it. WSL creates way more intuitive working environment for you. So even if you can run multiple Linux OSes in Linux you can't run Windows as easily you can do linux on Windows. So OPs statement is not incorrect.
randunel · 2h ago
There are virtual machines for Linux with seamless window integration, so upgrading to Linux is still recommended imo.
OP's statement remains incorrect, because their assumption is that the WSL experience can't be reproduced in Linux.
encom · 2h ago
I've never seen a good UWP app. My biggest issue with Wine is that it can't run anything that needs a driver. That means any hardware with garbage Windows-only control software (hello Roboteq) needs a proper VM.
jjcm · 2h ago
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 Valve really pushing Proton and the state of linux gaming, I've recently swapped over to Ubuntu and Nixos. The friction point moved to the gaming side, but things mostly just work.
Things on linux are rapidly getting better, and having things just work on the development side has been a breath of fresh air. I now feel that it's a better experience than windows w/ WSL, despite some AAA titles not working on linux.
nickserv · 2h ago
Just curious, which games gave you problems?
zamadatix · 1h ago
Unfortunately many of the more popular multiplayer games with anti-cheat tend to consider "made working on Linux" a bug rather than a feature. E.g. Easy Anti-Cheat and Unreal Engine both support Linux natively but Epic still doesn't want to allow it for their own game, Fortnite. https://x.com/TimSweeneyEpic/status/1490565925648715781
npteljes · 1h ago
For the curious, the protondb front page gives a pretty good overview of the state of Linux gaming:
Scrolling to Medals, 50% of all 25.000+ games tracked by the site are playable, either working perfectly or mostly (Platinum or Gold ratings). Another 20% can be alright under specific circumstances, and with compromises (Silver rating).
frollogaston · 24m ago
AoE2:DE has a gold rating, but multiplayer doesn't work at all, and it's not even due to anticheat.
npteljes · 5m ago
Yeah there's a lot of random issues with the different games. In case user experience is the main goal, I always recommend going with the main supported ways, which in this case would be Windows 11. I personally try things first on my Linux, but I always keep a backup Windows just in case.
jjcm · 1h ago
Overwatch is the big one - lots of random issues with it. But basically any game with Denuvo DRM is extremely high risk, resulting in either a ban or the game not running at all.
zamalek · 1h ago
Denuvo counts each proton version as a unique activation, might help you avoid this issue going forward
delduca · 1h ago
For me, Red Dead Redemption 1 via Proton does not work on Pop_OS + NVIDIA.
2OEH8eoCRo0 · 49m ago
Escape from Tarkov and GTA V (online).
1oooqooq · 2h ago
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 because we run a psql container in a different way under wsl... let's see how long we endure until saying never again.
seventhtiger · 21m ago
It's the other way around. You can do very few productive things with Windows other than software development. Almost all other professional software assume Windows.
sertraline · 1h ago
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 unusable to Japanese/Chinese speakers due to how hard it is to input the moon runes, and on top of that Wayland breaks the least painful setup that you could have earlier. And on top of that, Wayland people shown a middle finger to all the people who need accessibility features.
No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.
frollogaston · 23m ago
Yeah, I really like my Mac, but third-party software isn't its strong suit. It's hilarious how often Apple will wholesale break like half the software in existence.
kmacdough · 1h ago
For consumers. A load of professional software still exists only for Windows, particularly as you do more niche.
mulmen · 1h ago
> gpu (games etc) are the only thing holding windows relevant at this point.
I actually switched to Linux full-time when Starfield wouldn’t run on Windows but worked in Proton. We are now in a world where Valve provides a more sable Windows API than Microsoft. The only limitation now is anti-cheat but that’s a political problem, not a technical one.
7bit · 1h ago
For me it's Adobe Phuckushop. But yeah, always that one thing holding one back from swapping
Dwedit · 43s ago
WSL1 was hobbled by needing to calculate Unix Permission numbers and hardlink counts for every file. On Windows, you need to create a handle to the file to get those things. That's a file open on every file whenever you list a directory.
liendolucas · 3h ago
I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux. If you are in Windows and have the urge to use Linux, do the proper switch once and for all. You will never look back. I haven't in almost 15 years.
Given what Windows has become and already discussed here on HN I would even hesitate to run it in a virtual machine.
Edit: more than 15 years.
KZerda · 43m ago
I used Linux as my daily driver for years, before finally switching back to Windows, and then to the Mac. I got tired of things like wine breaking on apps, I got tired of the half-assed replacements for software available on Windows, like GIMP compared to Photoshop. I got tired of the ugly desktop that inevitably occurs once you start needing to mix QT and GTK based apps. Linux is not a panacea.
MrPowerGamerBR · 2h ago
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 people want to use that does not run under WINE do require graphics acceleration.
I tried running Photoshop under a VM, but the performance of the QEMU QXL driver is bad, and VirGL does not support Windows guests yet.
VMWare and VirtualBox do have better graphics drivers that do support Windows. I tried using VMWare and the performance was "ok", but still not near the performance of Photoshop on "bare metal".
frollogaston · 18m ago
People throw around the ideas of VMs or WINE like it's trivial. It's really not.
hermitShell · 1h ago
I don’t know why there aren’t full fledged computers in a GPU sized package. Just run windows on your GPU, Linux on your main cpu. There’s some challenges to overcome but I think it would be nice to be able to extend your arm PC with an x86 expansion, or extend your x86 PC with an ARM extension. Ditto for graphics, or other hardware accelerators
Dylan16807 · 39m ago
There are computers that size, but I guess you mean with a male PCIe plug on them?
If the card is running its own OS, what's the benefit of combining them that way? A high speed networking link will get you similar results and is flexible and cheap.
If the card isn't running its own OS, it's much easier to put all the CPU cores in the same socket. And the demand for both x86 and Arm cores at the same time is not very high.
teaearlgraycold · 1h ago
Quite a lot of people have both integrated Intel graphics and a discrete AMD/NVidia card.
Aurornis · 1h ago
> I would do it the other way round: use Windows in a virtual machine from Linux.
Every Windows thread on HN is a reminder of the stark divide between people who need to use Windows for productivity apps and those who don’t.
The apps I need a Windows machine for are not the kind that virtualize nicely. Anything GPU related means Windows has to become the base OS for me.
If you’re running an occasional light tool you can get away with Windows in a VM, but it’s a no-go for things like CAD or games.
luyu_wu · 5m ago
If you can GPU passthrough (it's quite simple to set up), this is not a large issue. You're right that Linux is sorely lacking in native creative software though!
zargon · 12m ago
I prefer to just have two (or three) GPUs than have Windows as the base OS.
ghotli · 2h ago
Counterpoint: things like the Valve Index for VR simply don't behave well in this environment no matter how much I've worked on getting it there.
I'm not a novice either, $dayjob has me working on the lowest levels of Linux on a daily basis. I did linux from scratch on a Pentium 2 when I was 12. All that to say yes I happen to agree but edge cases are out there. The blanket statement doesn't apply for all use cases
ActorNightly · 2h ago
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.
kobalsky · 2h ago
Running Windows from a ZFS partition with its own dedicated GPU, viewed through looking-glass on the Linux host at 1440p@120Hz, has been super useful.
I set it up originally for gaming, but nowaways I install a lot of disposable software there.
I use Linux guests VMs too (a la Qubes), but sadly there's no guest support for looking-glass on Linux. Native rendering speeds on VMs are something hard to let go.
> We currently package our virtual machines for four different virtualization software options: Hyper-V (Gen2), Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMware. These virtual machines contain an evaluation version of Windows that expires on the date posted. If the evaluation period expires, the desktop background will turn black, you will see a persistent desktop notification indicating that the system is not genuine, and the PC will shut down every hour.
Edit: Oops, dead link -- the dev tools evaluation VM hasn't been released for 6+ months. But they do offer Windows evaluations ISO's after registration.
arcastroe · 2h ago
I've considered it, but there are two Windows features I need that sound like they'd require some time investment to set up correctly on linux.
1. I use UWF on windows (Education Edition). All disk writes to C:/ are ephemeral. On every single reboot, all changes are discarded and my pc is back to the exact same state as when I first set it up. I do keep a separate partition for documents that need persistence.
2. Miracast for screen mirroring.
NelsonMinar · 2h ago
That works pretty well except for gaming. A lot of games detect if they are running in a VM and refuse to let you play, as an anti-cheat measure.
nxobject · 2h ago
I always have Windows on Parallels on a Mac, too – unfortunately VirtualBox for arm64 Mac isn't quite there yet.
stephenr · 2h ago
It is slowly improving (albeit with some egregious bugs, like losing EFI data on export) but TBH even their x86 product pales in comparison to Parallels or VMWare Fusion, in terms of machine performance.
int_19h · 2h ago
If you're in a corporate environment, you often don't have a choice wrt Windows as your primary desktop OS.
Animats · 3h ago
That's sort of what Wine does. That's how I run the occasional Windows program on Linux.
rfoo · 1h ago
Okay. Then you had a Mac. Then you need to run Linux in a VM anyway because similar to Windows, macOS is also a dumpster fire. Then why bother? You are going to have a Linux VM anyway. I usually just sync my VM disk between all my laptops & desktops, no matter what host OS it runs.
RKFADU_UOFCCLEL · 2h ago
That's how I do it. I don't see the draw for Windows as the main OS, especially with Windows 10+ being dumbed down beyond belief and having seconds of lag to do anything at all. Seems even from this thread that people just want the convenience of a gaming rig in the same box as their work (which is a security issue because games are full of remote code execution vulnerabilities).
Matl · 3h ago
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.
avestura · 3h ago
Microsoft can't name a project leading with a trademark (Linux <something>), hence why it's called WSL.
“ I still hope to see a true "Windows Subsystem for Linux" by Microsoft or a windows becoming a linux distribution itself and dropping the NT kernel to legacy.
Windows is currently overloaded with features and does lack a package manager to only get what you need...”
whoopdedo · 2h ago
IBM marketed "OS/2 for Windows" which made it sound like a compatibility layer to make Windows behave like OS/2. In truth it was the OS/2 operating system with drivers and conversion tools that made it easier for people who were used to Windows.
loloquwowndueo · 53m ago
Untrue. OS/2 for windows leveraged the user’s existing copy of windows for os/2’s compatibility function instead of relying on a bundled copy of windows, like the “full”
Os/2 version.
Os/2 basically ran a copy of windows (either the existing one or bundled one) to then execute windows programs side by side with os/2 (and DOS) software.
ryao · 2h ago
It was previously called the Windows Subsystem for Android before it pivoted. It had a spiritual predecessor called Windows Services for UNIX. I doubt the name had been chosen for the reasons you say, considering the history.
That said, to address the grandparent comment’s point, it probably should be read as “Windows Subsystem for Linux (Applications)”.
avestura · 1h ago
>for the reasons you say
That's not what I say, that's what the former PM Lead of WSL said. To be fair, Windows Services for UNIX was just Unix services for Windows. Probably the same logic applied there back then: they couldn't name it with a leading trademark (Unix), so they went with what was available.
koakuma-chan · 2h ago
GNU/Linux Subsystem for Windows
rsynnott · 3h ago
There's history here; there was an old thing called Windows Subsystem for Unix. Again, not what you'd expect from the name.
zamadatix · 3h ago
Windows' Subsystem for Linux :p.
littlestymaar · 3h ago
It's a “Windows subsystem” for running Linux, but yeah the naming is pretty confusing.
Night_Thastus · 3h ago
I've been using WSL on and off for Linux development for the last few years.
When it works, it's great! When it doesn't....oh man it sucks. It has been non-stop networking and VPN problems, XServer issues, window scaling issues, hardware accelerated graphics not working, etc. this whole time. I've spent more time trying to fix WSL issues then actually developing software. It's never gotten better.
It's fast. It's powerful. But using it as a daily driver is very painful in my experience. I avoid it as much as possible and do most of my work in MSYS2 instead. Sure, it's much slower. But at least it works consistently and has for years.
stevenwoo · 3h ago
I think I'm still on a beta version because I'm afraid to update it and breaking all the stuff I have working.
pjmlp · 4h ago
Given the layoffs round from last week, in a record earnings year, I wonder if this is a side effect of those layoffs.
tgma · 3h ago
How would a 3% layoff in a big company affect anything unless they want to specifically axe some project? It’s just lubrication for the machine. 3% is less than nothing compared to the bloat in any bigco and let me tell you Microsoft’s reputation is not the leanest of the bunch.
jayd16 · 3h ago
They're not uniform across every team and project. Certain projects can be hit very hard while others are not. Outside looking in, all we can really do is speculate.
tgma · 3h ago
Sure we can speculate that 3% is not news. Again, it’s a one way conclusion: I concede if they want to axe a project deliberately, that could show up in the layoff, but projects won’t incidentally get impacted because of a 3%. The causal relationship would be the opposite.
bitmasher9 · 3h ago
Didn’t Microsoft use to have annual 10% layoffs? Just culling the lowest performers every year.
int_19h · 2h ago
If you mean stack ranking, the hard 20/70/10 bucketing was in force >15 years ago, but even then it didn't mean that those 10% automatically get fired.
littlestymaar · 3h ago
It's really hard to cut actual bloat when running layoffs, because the more you work the less time you have to do politics and save your ass, so the less productive type of people tend to be pretty resilient to layoffs.
tgma · 3h ago
Have you worked at any of these large companies? It’s really easy actually (practically, not emotionally). It’s usually very obvious and there’s consensus who the bottom 10% are. Politics would affect promotions much more than layoff.
magicalist · 3h ago
> It’s usually very obvious and there’s consensus who the bottom 10% are
But the latest layoffs were not performance based. Are you just confidently commenting without knowing about the event being discussed?
tgma · 3h ago
You believe what you want to believe. That’s the lie of the century. Every single layoff is performance based to some degree. Sure you want to consolidate a couple orgs or shut down a project or an office and you lump that together with your performance based stuff.
(Also I was responding to a more generic comment saying doing layoff is bad and makes org more political.)
littlestymaar · 3h ago
> It’s usually very obvious and there’s consensus who the bottom 10% are.
Sigh, and company keep them for sentimental reasons I guess…
tgma · 2h ago
You’re being sarcastic but it is for sentimental reasons (for the immediate manager and team who doesn’t want to make the hard choices and do the work) as well as the empire building reasons (managers’ universal dick measuring contest is org size [1]).
[1]: the real debate is not “who’s my lowest performer” for each manager. It is about why I should cut rather than my sibling manager. If you force everyone to cut one person they all know who it will be.
jayd16 · 4h ago
Can't help but be pessimistic about this or any news coming out of Build, given the circumstances.
90s_dev · 4h ago
Unless they're just flat out lying, no:
> This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this
pjmlp · 3h ago
People lie in court under oath, so excuse my sceptism when key people across .NET, Typescript, Python and AI frameworks have been let go.
mrpippy · 3h ago
Note that this doesn't include lxcore.sys, the kernel side driver that powers WSL 1.
(Also, I'm surprised that WSL 1 is still supported. It must be in maintenance mode though, right?)
boxfire · 21m ago
That's the only part I care about dang. I still use WSL1 and have done a number of interesting hacks to cross the ABI and tunnel windows into "Linux" userspace and I'd like to make that easier/more direct
charcircuit · 3h ago
No, both are still fully supported despite what the numbering may suggest.
jleyank · 3h ago
Check the license and its details. This might be great, or it might be MS looking to get free help. Especially with dev layoffs.
IANAL, but how is this license different from, say, the older BSD license - thought that was "have fun, do what you want, post a notice"? It doesn't say anything regarding ownership of changes, nor how to add copyright for such changes... Does this mean that MS is looking to own changes, or will there be a string of extra copyright notices for each (significant?) change?
jcranmer · 3h ago
The MIT license scrunches the first two clauses of the 3-clause BSD license into a single clause, and omits the third clause (the nonendorsement clause, which is already generally implied). As a practical matter, most of the basic "simple" open source licenses are functionally identical.
jleyank · 1h ago
But who owns the copyright to changes, and how is it recorded? I just am suspicious as to what or how large companies who sell/rent software deal with open-source, free stuff...
jcranmer · 1h ago
That's not covered by the license; that's covered by the CLA (Contributor License Agreement), and in the absence of one (I don't know if there is one or not for this repository), the author retains copyright to their code as usual.
wging · 1h ago
You can answer those questions for yourself, it's all in the repo.
mdtrooper · 9m ago
Is it a good news for Wine or ReactOS (Can they learn something to improve their projects)?
sigmonsays · 4m ago
what if this really is a long haul embrace, extend, extinguish. Guess time will tell
asim · 1h ago
Wow. In 2009, when it looked like Microsoft was the most closed company of all time, I was telling people at work, they should port windows to the linux kernel. What happened over the next 15 years, I don't think people would have believed it if you told them back then. Things have changed.. ALOT. Now granted, this isn't what I said they should do, but you know, eventually they might see the light.
loloquwowndueo · 51m ago
Never see anything Microsoft does in the direction of open source as “they have seen the light”. It’s a trap. Claiming open source friendliness is the bait, Windows is the trap itself.
frollogaston · 15m ago
Yeah I remember when they bought Github and my coworker was telling me how they've turned a new leaf and want to support foss... nope, they wanted to train an AI on all the code there.
Not only open source, but extremely well documented.
behnamoh · 3h ago
meanwhile Apple won't even make it easy to boot Asahi Linux on Apple Silicon.
jeroenhd · 3h ago
Buying Apple hardware with the intent on running anything but what Apple wants you to run is setting yourself up for a battle, including trying to use non-Apple hardware with the hardware you purchased. It's why I'm not spending any personal money on Apple hardware.
Could've been worse. At least they're not locking you out of your device like on iPhones and iPads. They don't stop you from running Asahi, they just aren't interested in helping anyone run Asahi.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sells laptops that actively prevent you from running Linux on them. Things get a little blurry once you hit the tablet form factor (Surface devices run on amd64, but are they really that different from an iPad?) where both companies suck equally, though Microsoft also sells tablets that will run Linux once someone bothers to write drivers for them.
OsrsNeedsf2P · 3m ago
It's easier to dual boot Asahi than Windows. Secure boot and disk partitioning are two examples of roadblocks that are streamlined in the Asahi installation, but quite difficult on Windows
Parallels also has a commercial offering that does some nice GUI-level integration with both Windows and Linux VMs.
My understanding is that these are both built on top of some Apple API, and Parallels actually collaborates with Apple on making it work for their use case. So it's not the first-class support that you get from Microsoft with WSL, but it's still pretty good.
rfoo · 1h ago
Nah, the closest thing to WSL on macOS is OrbStack.
Exactly same experience to WSL - great out of the box experience, easy to use, and insist on using their own patched kernel.
lenerdenator · 3h ago
Apple's opinion is probably that if you want to run a *NIX-like OS on their hardware, you should use MacOS.
Which is... not necessarily wrong.
frollogaston · 13m ago
Eh, I have a Mac but end up SSHing into some Linux machine pretty often. There are too many differences between the two unless I'm using something like Python or JS. Docker helps too, but that's Linux.
Also, it's really annoying that macOS switched to zsh. Yeah you can change it back to bash, but when all team docs and online help assumes zsh, good luck.
tgma · 3h ago
Apple has gone out of their way to build first party virtualization APIs in their OS to boot a Linux VM directly by specifying kernel and initrd on disk. That would be a direct point of comparison to WSL, not Asahi. What are you talking about?
P.S. They also specifically built Rosetta for Linux to compile x64 Linux binaries into aarch64 to run inside Linux VMs on their machines.
frollogaston · 11m ago
I don't know about any of that, just that as a user, I cannot run Linux on my Mac easily.
tgma · 11m ago
You can’t? Just install UTM for a full VM one-click install (easier than wsl /install and two reboots) or any number of docker thingies that people build for the Mac.
Apple might not be releasing documentation on their peripherals, but they went out of their way in making it possible in the first place.
Apple could just have gone and do a straight port of the iOS boot procedure to their ARM Mac lineup... and we'd have been thoroughly screwed, given how long ago the latest untethered bootrom exploit was.
Or they could have pulled a Qualcomm, Samsung et al and just randomly change implementation details between each revision to make life for alt-os implementers hell (which is why so many Android BSP dumps are the way they are, with zero hope of ever getting anything upstream). Instead, to the best of my knowledge the UART on the M series SoCs dates back right to the very first iPod.
The fact that the Asahi Linux people were able to create a GPU driver that surpasses Apple's own in conformance tests [1], despite not having any kind of documentation at all is telling enough - and not just of the pure genius of everyone involved.
Macs are almost universally seen as developer computers. If you are going to be developer friendly, then you need to do things that are developer friendly. Asahi project is 80% reverse engineering stuff.
bigyabai · 3h ago
Let's be honest, nobody earnestly expected them to care about running native Linux in the first place. You knew what you got into when you bought the Mac.
Sec guy (who was mainly a linux guy) was never happy to let people use WSL in corp due to security bugs.
Can anyone chime in - is this still a concern? Was it ever a concern?
Hilift · 36m ago
WSL is an easy compliance trick when you want to run your own Postfix/Dovecot installation.
qwertox · 37m ago
I despise Windows 11 so much, but have to use it. I have a 24/7 box with Ubuntu running a couple of Linux and Windows VMs and that's the way I like it. I don't touch the Ubuntu host except for when I need to reconfigure it.
All development is done on Windows laptop via SSH to those VMs. When I tried using Ubuntu via WSL, something didn't feel right. There were some oddities, probably with the filesystem integration, which bothered me enough to stop doing this.
Nevertheless, I think it's really great what they now did.
Now all what's missing is that they do it the other way around, that they create a 100% windows compatible Wine alternative.
anticensor · 33m ago
WSL1 is the good one, WSL2 just runs Linux simultaneously alongside Windows.
Boogie_Man · 1h ago
Why isn't it "Linux Subsystem for Windows" as it is a Linux subsystem running on a Windows os?
aaronbaugher · 1h ago
I think it's because WSL refers to the Windows subsystem that allows you to run Linux, not to the Linux system itself. You still have to download and install Linux on top of it, or at least you did the last time I used it a few years ago.
transpostmeta · 55m ago
I always assumed it was because it was a Subsystem for Linux that allowed it to be run as a guest on a Windows host. But your version works too.
Microsoft ist really terrible at naming things, that's for sure.
bubblethink · 37m ago
There may also be some trademark law precedent that forces this naming convention. Even on the google play store, if you have 3rd party apps for something, it's always "App for X", the name cannot be "X app".
CivBase · 1h ago
It's hard to argue it's even a subsystem anymore. More like "Integrated Linux VM for Windows".
throwaway48476 · 1h ago
The title is misleading and ambiguous as to whether this applies to WSL1 or WSL2.
dbacar · 1h ago
I have to use Windows as my main box after nearly 6 years of MacOS (and before that Mint) and WSL2 helps me keep my sanity.
nsxwolf · 2h ago
I still don’t understand the naming. It’s a Windows subsystem that runs in Linux? But it’s a way to run a Linux environment on Windows?
bni · 1h ago
Every time I read this product name I think that the words come in the wrong order.
Zambyte · 1h ago
(Windows subsystem) for (Linux)
jay_kyburz · 5m ago
A Windows Subsystem for running Linux
ryanhecht · 3h ago
Maybe someone will finally build my dream: a WSL distro that I can also dual-boot natively. I'd love to switch between bare-metal Windows with WSL and bare-metal Linux with virtualized Windows at my leisure!
maccard · 3h ago
Parallels on Mac did this in reverse a decade ago. You could dual boot windows and MacOS, or you could boot into your windows OS while running MacOS and access both file systems properly.
OsrsNeedsf2P · 2m ago
Ok but MacOS is the worst of the 3 worlds. It can't run Linux or Windows apps
micw · 2h ago
At least with VirtualBox and VMWare it is possible (not actually WSL but still).
mikojan · 2h ago
When you use WSL2, Windows itself is running virtualized on Hyper-V.
hugo1789 · 3h ago
Nice but where is the code? Is it just very, very incomplete or a joke?
coldblues · 1h ago
Copying files between Windows and WSL is EXTREMELY slow. I really wanted to give Windows a chance but the slowness completely destroyed that chance, along with the lack of hardware acceleration for GUI applications.
shutterstock · 2h ago
WSL caused me to just install Ubuntu right over my Windows installation. That is how useful it was for me.
abhisek · 3h ago
Not sure about the impact of WSL because personally did not use it but I do know couple of friends who stopped spinning up Kali VM because of WSL.
mosfets · 3h ago
WSL is the main reason I switched from Mac/Linux to Windows two years ago. Excited to see this move!
misano · 2h ago
so they gotch you
abshkbh · 2h ago
Amazing, I briefly worked on WSL v1 in 2015!
10 years and going
Animats · 3h ago
Does this mean Microsoft is abandoning it as end of life? It's hard to tell intent here.
wiseowise · 42m ago
And written in C#!
Right?
Right?…
candiddevmike · 3h ago
Can I use a vanilla kernel with it yet?
rfoo · 1h ago
I think you always can. In the past you may lose some features / have some bugs. For recent kernel versions (>= 6.6) the only patches WSL kernels have is dxgkrnl + some hacky fixes for clock sync. Others are all in upstream already. So you'll just lose WSLg / CUDA passthrough and nothing else now.
Of course, there might be some regressions. They are usually only fixed (upstream) after WSL kernel gets upgraded and it starts to repro in WSL.
jeroenhd · 3h ago
Their kernel modifications and patches are public, and some of them have been upstreamed long ago. You'll need to compile your own to get the benefit, but I don't see why you wouldn't be able to use your kernel of choice.
Of course, if you want the native integration WSL offers, you'll need to upgrade the Linux driver/daemon side to support whatever kernel you prefer to run if it's not supported already. Microsoft only supports a few specific kernels, but the code is out there for the Linux side so you can port the code to any OS, really.
With some work, this could even open up possibilities like running *BSD as a WSL backend.
risho · 3h ago
What does the native wsl kernel not offer that you need?
candiddevmike · 3h ago
A version that tracks the underlying distro better, or even closer to mainline. Current WSL2 kernel is 6.6, kernel is 6.12 or 6.15. Debian Trixie will be 6.12.
azatom · 3h ago
sleep?
strace shows that the sleep program uses clock_nanosleep, which is theoretically "passive." However, if the host suspends and then wakes up after the sleep period should have ended, it continues as if it were "active."
stopthe · 1h ago
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.
attah_ · 1h ago
Still named backwards.
dataflow · 1h ago
Anybody know what the deal is with neither Oracle nor Microsoft trying to make it possible for VirtualBox and WSL2 to coexist without severe performance impact? What the heck is the issue that neither side knows how to solve? Or is there a deliberate business decision not to solve it?
nottorp · 1h ago
That page has no mention of the actual license though.
Are they ashamed, if they didn't mention it in the announcement?
open-paren · 2h ago
What distros are y'all using on WSL?
badmonster · 1h ago
big news
xyst · 2h ago
Internal WSL maintainers must have been hit particularly hard by the quarterly layoffs.
crawsome · 3h ago
M$ contributing to open source is great, but I switch to Linux because I don't trust Windows, the OS. Not because of accessibility.
megous · 2h ago
Microsoft is cancer.
lenerdenator · 3h ago
Killer.
Now do NT.
p_ing · 33m ago
Too much 3rd party code in Windows to make that feasible.
gjvc · 4h ago
microsoft open sourcing a lot of things lately
behnamoh · 3h ago
I wonder if companies open-source stuff mainly as part of a bigger strategy which primarily benefits them. could it be a way to access to a pool of free, contributing talent?
ThrowawayR2 · 3h ago
You mean like StarOffice being open sourced as OpenOffice to attempt to undermine Microsoft Office revenue a couple of decades ago? To quote Bugs Bunny, "Myeah, could be..."
beanjuiceII · 3h ago
why would companies not do things that benefit them? and if it's meant pessimistically, let me take you back to a much worse time when Microsoft didn't open source anything
cokeandpepsi · 3h ago
I mean yeah, the money and growth these days is pulling people into choose their cloud/services platforms
DaSHacka · 3h ago
Why was this flagged? This isn't even a secret, a lot of SaaS companies will open source parts of their offerings to increase adoption, making the money back when larger orgs now want to use it, and are willing to pay for enterprise support plans to get the service straight from the horse's mouth.
I think it's a fair exchange too, even as an individual I pay for plenty of smaller open-source SaaS services—even if they're more expensive than proprietary competitors—for the very reason that I could always selfhost it without interruption if SHTF and the provider goes under.
DaSHacka · 3h ago
Would really be curious to hear the reason why, from an internal perspective.
I've seen a number of theories online that boil down to young tech enthusiasts in the 2000's/early-2010's getting hands-on experience with open source projects and ecosystems since they're more accessible than enterprise tech that's typically gated behind paywalls, then translating into what they use when they enter the working world (where some naturally end up at M$).
This somewhat seems to track, as longtime M$ employees from the Ballmer-era still often hold stigmas against open source projects (Dave's garage, and similar), but it seems the current iteration of employees hold much more favorable views.
But who knows, perhaps it's all one long-winded goal from M$ of embracing, extending, and ultimately extinguishing.
Grimeton · 2h ago
- becomes open source under MS control
- three years later it's left in the hands of the powerful community that was built around it with MS help
- MS doesn't have to provide support and it's not their problem anymore
SV_BubbleTime · 3h ago
>Would really be curious to hear the reason why,
My guess…
The same reason Rome didn’t fall. It simply turned into the Church.
MS isn’t battling software mfgs because they have the lock on hardware direction and operating systems so strongly that they can direct without having to hold the territory themselves.
sneak · 2h ago
Microsoft doesn’t like open source software. This is cosplay.
Microsoft releases the important parts of VS Code under proprietary licenses. Microsoft doesn’t release the source code for Windows or Office or the github.com web app under free software licenses.
Don’t get it twisted. This is marketing, nothing more.
singularity2001 · 3h ago
couldn't they have saved millions of dollars if they open sourced it earlier?
pasc1878 · 3h ago
No.
To get something substantial to work you need to have some (if not most) development work done by people who are being paid.
In this case who except Microsoft would have paid for development here.
Edit: for clarity, by "multiple OS" I mean multiple Linux versions. Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24. You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"
You know what's even more convenient than a VM? Not needing a VM and still having the exact same functionality. And you don't need a bunch of janky wrapper scripts, there's more than one tool that gives you essentially the same thing; I have used both Distrobox and toolbx to quickly drop into a Ubuntu or Fedora shell. It's pretty handy on NixOS if I want to test building some software in a more typical Linux environment. As a bonus, you get working hardware acceleration, graphical applications work out of the box, there is no I/O tax for going over a 9p bridge because there is no 9p bridge, and there is no weird memory balloon issues to deal with because there is no VM and there is no guest kernel.
I get that WSL is revolutionary for Windows users, but I'm sorry, the reason why there's no WSL is because on Linux we don't need to use VMs to use Linux. It's that simple...
WSL2 is really handy when you want to run other software though. For example, I use Solidworks, so I need to run windows. Forscan for Ford vehicles also has to run under Windows. Having WSL2 means that I can just have one laptop and run any software that I want.
Doesn't Linux as well?
I discovered over the weekend that only 1 monitor works over HDMI, DisplayPort not working, tried different drivers. Suspend takes a good 5 minutes, and on resume, the UI is either turn or things barely display.
I might buy a Windows license, especially if I can't get multi-screen to work.
I've tried this in the past but I was unable to get the debugger to work from within a VM.
Has this improved, or is there a trick, or are you just going without a debugger?
* Wine is surprisingly good these days for a lot of software. If you only have an app or two that need Windows it is probably worth trying Wine to see if it meets your needs.
* Similarly, if gaming is your thing Valve has made enormous strides in getting the majority of games to work flawlessly on Linux.
* If neither of the above are good enough, dual booting is nearly painless these days, with easy setup and fast boot times across both OSes. I have grub set to boot Linux by default but give me a few seconds to pick Windows instead if I need to do one of the few things that I actually use Windows for.
Which you go for really depends on your ratio of Linux to Windows usage and whether you regularly need to mix the two.
The possibilities seem endless and kinda confusing with Windows on ARM vs Rosetta and Wine, think there's some other options which use MacOS's included virtualization frameworks.
I've successfully run it with WINE. Thought, my Forscan executable was 3 years old or so and that may have changed, but I doubt it.
That's always true, of course. But, compared to other options, relying on WINE increases the chances of it happening by an amount that someone could be forgiven for thinking isn't acceptable.
If you want a stable, repeatable way to wrangle a Windows tool: Wine is it. It's easy to deploy and repeat, requires no licenses, and has consistent behavior every time (unless you upgrade your Wine version or something). Great integration with Linux. No Windows Updates are going to come in and wreck your systems. No licensing, no IT issues, no active directory requirements, no forced reboots.
It's possible to see what Wine as a great product would look like. No offense to crossover because they do good work, but Valve's Steam Play shows what you can really do with Wine if you focus on delivering a product using Wine.
Steam offers two main things:
- It pins the version of Wine, providing a unified stable runtime. Apps don't just break with Wine updates, they're tested with specific Proton versions. You can manually override this and 9 times out of 10 it's totally fine. Often times it's better. But, if you want it to work 10 out of 10 times, you have to do what Valve does here.
- It manages the wineserver (the lifecycle of the running Wine instance) and wine prefix for you.
The latter is an interesting bit to me. I think desktop environments should in fact integrate with Wine. I think they should show a tray icon or something when a Wineserver is running and offer options like killing the wineserver or spawning task manager. (I actually experimented with a standalone program to do this.[1]) Wine processes should show up nested under a wineserver in system process views, with an option to go to the wineprefix, and there should be graphical tools to manage wine prefixes.
To be fair, some of that has existed forever in some forms, but it never really felt that great. I think to feel good, it needs to feel like it's all a part of the desktop system, like Wine can really integrate into GNOME and KDE as a first-class thing. Really it'd be nice if Wine could optionally expose a D-Bus interface to make it so that desktop environments could nicely integrate with it without needing to do very nasty things, but Wine really likes to just be as C/POSIX/XDG as possible so I have no idea if something like that would have a snowball's chance in hell of working either on the Wine or desktop environment side.
Still, it bums me out a bit.
One pet peeve of mine regarding using Wine on Linux is that EXE icons didn't work out of the box on Dolphin in NixOS; I found that the old EXE thumb creator in kio-extras was a bit gnarly and involved shelling out to an old weird C program that wasn't all that fast and parsing the command line output. NixOS was missing the runtime dependency, but I decided it'd be better to just write a new EXE parser to extract the icon, and thankfully KDE accepted this approach, so now KDE has its own PE/NE parser. Thumb creators are not sandboxed on KDE yet, so enable it at your own risk; it should be disabled by default but available if you have kio-extras installed. (Sidenote: I don't know anything about icons in OS/2 LX executables, but I think it'd be cool to make those work, too.) The next pet peeve I had is that over network shares, most EXE files I had wouldn't get icons... It's because of the file size limit for remote thumbnails. If you bump the limit up really high, you'll get EXE thumbnails, but at the cost of downloading every single EXE, every single time you browse a remote folder. Yes, no caching, due to another bug. The next KDE frameworks version fixes most of this: other people sorted out multiple PreviewJob issues with caching on remote files, and I finally merged an MR that makes KIO use kio-fuse when available to spawn thumb creators instead of always copying to a temporary file. With these improvements combined, not just EXE thumbnails, but also video thumbnails work great on remote shares provided you have kio-fuse running. There's still no mechanism to bypass the file size limit even if both the thumbcreator and kio-fuse remote can handle reading only a small portion of the file, but maybe some day. (This would require more work. Some kio slaves, like for example the mpt one, could support partially reading files but don't because it's complicated. Others can't but there's no way for a kio-fuse client to know that. Meanwhile thumb creators may sometimes be able to produce a thumbnail without reading most of the file and sometimes not, so it feels like you would need a way to bail out if it turns out you need to read a lot of data. Complicated...)
I could've left most of that detail out, but I want to keep the giant textwall. To me this little bit of polish actually matters. If you browse an SMB share on Linux you should see icons for the EXE files just like on Windows, without any need to configure anything. If you don't have that, then right from the very first double-click the first experience is a bad one. That sucks.
Linux has thousands of these papercuts everywhere and easily hundreds for Wine alone. They seem small, but when you try to fix them it's not actually that easy; you can make a quick hack, but what if we want to do things right, and make a robust integration? Not as easy. But if you don't do that work, you get where we're at today, where users just expect and somewhat tolerate mediocre user experience. I think we can do better, but it takes a lot more people doing some ultimately very boring groundwork. And the payoff is not something that feels amazing, it's the opposite: it's something boring, where the user never really has any hesitation because they already know it will work and never even think about the idea that it might not. Once you can get users into that mode you know you've done something right.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Next time you have a minor pet peeve on Linux, please try to file a bug. The maintainers may not care, and maybe there won't be anyone to work on it, and maybe it would be hard to coordinate a fix across multiple projects. But honestly, I think a huge component of the problem is literally complacency. Most of us Linux users have dealt with desktop Linux forever and don't even register the workarounds we do (anymore than Windows or Mac users, albeit they probably have a lot less of them.) To get to a better state, we've gotta confront those workarounds and attack them at the source.
[1]: https://github.com/jchv/winemon just an experiment though.
> To get to a better state, we've gotta confront those workarounds and attack them at the source.
To my eye, the biggest problem with Linux is that so few are willing to pony up for its support. From hardware to software.
Buy Linux computers and donate to the projects you use!
If I were to do it with a Windows VM, I'd need to:
If I do it with Wine instead, all I need to do is:I don't think it's silly. Sure, it's a VM, but it's so nice that I barely reboot into Linux. You get the best of both worlds with WSL.
No ridiculous start menu spam; a sane, non-bloated operating system (imagine being able to update user space libraries without a reboot, due to being able to delete files that other processes still have opened!); being able to back up my data at the file level without relying on weird block-level imaging shenanigans and so much more.
How is inverting the host/guest relationship an improvement on that?
Windows at its core just does not seem like a serious operating system to me. Whenever there are two ways to do something, its developers seem to have picked the non-reasonable one compared to Unix – and doing that for decades adds up.
But yes, first impressions undoubtedly matter too.
These days I'm avoiding booting into Windows unless I really have no choice. The ridiculousness of it is simply limitless. I would open a folder with a bunch of files in it and the Explorer shows me a progress bar for nearly a minute. Why? What the heck is it doing? I just want to see the list of files, I'm not even doing anything crazy. Why the heck not a single other file navigator does that — not in Linux, not on Mac, darn — even the specialized apps built for Windows work fine, but the built-in thing just doesn't. What gives? I would close the window and re-open the exact same folder, not even three minutes later and it shows the progress bar again. "WTF? Can't you fucker just cache it? Da fuk you doing?"
Or I would install an app. And seconds after installing it I would try to search for it in the Start menu, and guess what? Windows instead opens Edge and searches the web for it. wat? Why the heck I can't remove that Edge BS once and for all? Nope, not really possible. wat?
Or like why can't I ever rebind Cmd+L? I can disable it but can't rebind it, there's just no way. Is it trying to operate my computer, or 'S' in 'OS' stands for "soul"?
Or for whatever reason it can't even get the time right. Every single time I boot into it, my clock time is wrong. I have to manually re-sync it. It just doesn't do it, even with the location enabled. Stupid ass bitch.
And don't even let me rant about those pesky updates.
I dunno, I just cannot not hate Windows anymore. Even when I need to boot in it "for just a few minutes", it always ends up taking more time for some absolute fiddlesticks made of bullcrap. Screw Windows! Especially the 11 one.
Dual booting will do that because linux & windows treat the system clock differently. From what I recall one of them will set it directly to the local time and the other always sets it to UTC and then applies the offset.
I want a OS, not an entertainment center, meaning I want to launch a program, organize my files, and connect to other computers. Anything that hinders those is bad. I moved from macOS for the same reason, as they are trying to make those difficult too.
Exactomundo! I'm a software developer, not a florist. I don't care about all those animations, transitions, dancing emojis, styled sliding notifications, windings and dingleberries. If I want to rebind a fucking key I should be able to. If I want to replace the entire desktop with a tiling manager of my choosing — that should be possible. And definitely, absolutely, in no way, should just about any kind of app, especially a web-browser, be shoved in my face. "Edge is not that bad", they would say. And would be completely missing the whole point.
That said, a distaste for advertising goes beyond OCD. Advertisers frequently have questionable ethics, ranging from intruding upon people's privacy (in the many senses of the word) to manipulating people. It is simply something that many of us would rather do without.
But there's also the thing where Microsoft stops supporting older machines, creating a massive pile of insecure boxes and normie-generated e-waste; and the thing where it dials home constantly; and the thing where they try and force their browser on you, and the expensive and predatory software ecosystem, and the insane bloat, and the requiring a Microsoft account just to use my own computer. Oh yeah, and I gotta pay for this crap?!
I went full Linux back when Windows 11 came out and will only use it if a job requires. Utterly disgusting software.
That's... a very weird criticism to level at Windows, considering that the advice I've seen for Linux is to reboot if you update glibc (which is very much a user space library).
Having to constantly reboot my computer, or risk missing important security patches, was very annoying to me on Windows.
I've never had to reboot after updating glibc in years of using Linux, as far as I can remember.
Running programs will continue to use the libc version that was on disk when they started. They won't even know glibc was upgraded. If something is broken before rebooting, it'll stay broken after.
For a trivial change to glibc, it won't cause issues. But there's a lot of shared libraries and lots of different kinds of changes in different kinds of libraries that can happen.
I still haven't nailed if it was due to a shared library update, but just the other day, after running upgrades I was unable to su or sudo / authenticate as a user until after rebooting.
This is absolutely not true for Linux kernel updating. While you won't be using the new kernel before rebooting, there's 0 risk in not rebooting, because there's exactly 1 version of the kernel running on the machine -- it's loaded into memory when your computer starts.
There's of course rare exceptions, like when a dynamically linked library you just installed depends on a minimum specific version of the Linux kernel you also just installed, but this is extremely rare in Linux land, as backwards compatibility of programs with older kernels is generally a given. "We do not break userspace"
If I were to run an OS on a VM it's gonna be windows, not Linux
Having Windows and Linux in the same desktop the way that WSL2 does obviously means that it does add a lot of value, but what you get in the box isn't exactly the same as the thing running natively. Rather than a strict superset or strict subset, it's a bit more like a Venn diagram of strengths.
You cannot claim with a straight face that Virtualbox is easier to use.
I think the two fairly deep integrations are window's ability to navigate WSL's filesystem and wslg's fairly good ability to serve up guis.
The filesystem navigation is something that AFAIK can't easily be replicated. wslg, however, is something that other VMs have and can do. It's a bit of a pain, but doable.
What makes WSL nice is the fact that it feels pretty close to being a native terminal that can launch native application.
I do wish that WSL1 was taken further. My biggest grip with WSL is the fact that it is a VM and thus takes a large memory footprint. It'd be nice if the WSL1 approach panned out and we instead had a nice clean compatibility wrapper over winapi for linux applications.
It's a feature of the NT-family of kernels where you can create many environments sharing the same underlying executive and HAL.
It's a quite interesting way to build an OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT
I like Linux, and I use Linux as my daily desktop, but it's not because I think Linux or even UNIX is really that elegant. If I had to pick a favorite design it would be Windows NT for sure, even with all its warts. That said, the company behind Windows NT really likes to pile a lot of shit I hate on top of that pretty neat OS design, and now it's full of dubious practices. Automatic "malware submission" on by default, sending apps you download and compile yourself to Microsoft and even executing them in a VM. Forced updates with versions that expire. Unbelievable volumes of network traffic, exfiltrating untold amounts of data from your local machine to Microsoft. Ads and unwanted news all over the UI. Increasing insistence in using a Microsoft account. I could go on and on.
From a technical standpoint I do not think the Linux OS design is superior. I think Linux has some amazing tools and APIs. dmabufs are sweet. Namespaces and cgroups are cool. BPF and it's various integrations are borderline insane. But at its core, ... It's kinda ugly. These things don't all compose nicely and the kernel is an enormous hard-to-tame beast. Windows NT has its design warts too, all over, like the amount of involvement the kernel has in the GUI for historical reasons, and the enormous syscall surface area, and untold amounts of legacy cruft. But all in all, I think the core of what they made is really cool, the subsystems concept is super cool, and it is an OS design that has stood up well to time. I also think the PE format is better than ELF and that it is literally better for the capabilities it doesn't have w.r.t. symbols. Sure it's ugly, in part due to the COFF lineage, but it's functionally very well done IMO.
I feel the need to say this because I think I probably came off as a hater, and tbh I'm not even a hater of WSL2. It's not as cool as WSL1 and subsystems and pico processes, but it's very practical and the 9p bridge works way better than it has any right to.
Thanks for pointing this out.
Turns out that it's easier to emulate a CPU than syscalls. The CPU churns a lot less, too, which means that once things start working things tend to keep working.
The new WSL1 uses kernel call translation, like Wine in reverse and WSL2 runs a full blown Linux kernel in a Hyper-V VM. To my knowledge neither of these share anything with the aforementioned POSIX subsystem.
If you have control over where you put your git repo, WSL2 will hit max speed. If you want it shared between OSes, WSL2 will be slower.
It is... I'm working these days on bringing a legacy windows only application to the 21st century.
We are throwing a WSL container behind it and relying on the huge ecosystem of server software available for Linux to add functionality.
Yes that stuff could run directly on windows, but you'd be a lot more limited in what's supported. Even for some restricted values of supported. And you'd have to reinvent the wheel for a few parts.
But having Windows tightly integrated when needed is nice.
If only I could run replace the Windows shell with a Linux DE...
Apparently Linux VMs on other people's computers is very much appreciated.
I’ve been a software developer for 20 years and in _my_ opinion Windows is the best platform for professional software development. I only drop of to linux when need some of the excellent posix tools but my whole work ergonomy is based on Windows shortcuts and Visual Studio.
I’ve been forced to use Mac for the past 1.5y but would prefer not to.
Why would Windows be superior for me? Because that’s where the users are (for the work stuff I did before this latest gig). I started in real time graphics and then spent over a decade in CAD for AEC (developing components for various offerings including SketchUp). The most critical thing for the stuff I did was the need to develop on the same platform as users run the software - C++ is only theoretically platform independent.
Windows API:s are shit for sure for the most part.
But still, from this pov, WSL was and will be the best Linux for me as well.
YMMV.
IDK how many VMs you've used, but there has been a lot of work specifically with x86 to make VMs nearly as fast as native. If you interact with cloud services everything you do is likely on a VM.
That sounds like Wayland getting worse, but it's actually been slowly improving and it's pretty good now. Only took a decade+ to get there.
It requires a bit of work to setup to your liking of course, but hey, at least you have an option to set it up to your liking
Then I was forced to use a Mac for work, so I was using a floating WM again. On my personal machine, ion3 went away and I never fully got around to migrate to i3.
By the time I got enough free time to really work on my personal setup, it had accumulated two huge monitors and was a different machine. I found I was pretty happy just scattering windows around everywhere. Especially with a trackball's cursor throw. This was pretty surprising to me at first.
Anyway this is just my little personal anecdote. If I go back to a Linux install I'll definitely have to check out i3 again. Thanks for reminding me :)
Care to elaborate? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here.
I make a .desktop file and shell script to move it to the right place. Double click the shell file. It opens a text editor. Search the right click menu; still no way. To the CLI we go; chmod +x, and launch if from the CLI. Then after adding the Desktop icon, I can launch it.
On windows, you just double click the identified-through-file-extension executable file. This, like most things in Linux, implies the UX is designed for workflows I don't use as a PC user. Likely servers?
Where is the reverse WSL on Linux, where Windows is deeply embedded and you have all the Windows features in your hands?
You can use Wine/Crosseover, which is cool, but even now the number of software products it supports is tiny. Steam has a lot of games.
You can run a virtual machine with Windows on it. That is identical to what you can do on Windows with Linux.
WSL2-> is a virtual machine with unique tooling around it that makes it easier to use and integrates well with Windows.
Linux, on the other hand, barely supports Windows because the latter is closed, and not just closed, windows issues component updates which specifically check if they run in wine and stop running, being actively hostile to a potential Linux host.
The two are not equivalent, nobody in the Linux kernel team is actively sabotaging WSL, whereas Microsoft is actively sabotaging wine.
Do you have a link to where I can read more about this? My understanding is that Microsoft saw Wine as inconsequential to their business, even offloading the Mono runtime to them [1] when they dropped support for it.
[1] https://www.mono-project.com/
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wine_(software)
I really don't see it happening any time in the next decade at least, though. While Windows might not be Microsoft's biggest focus any more it's still a huge income stream for them. They won't just give that up.
This isn't really the case, and hasn't been for some years now, especially since Valve started investing heavily in Wine. The quality of Wine these days is absolutely stunning, to the point that some software runs better under Wine than it does on Win11. Then there's the breadth of support which has has moved the experience from there being a slight chance of something running on Wine, to now it being surprising when something doesn't.
I have to onboard a lot of students to work on our research. The software is all linux (of course), and mostly distribution-agnostic. Can't be too old, that's it.
If a student comes with a random laptop, I install WSL on it, mostly ubuntu. apt install <curated list of packets>. Done. Linux laptops are OK too, I think, but so far only had one student with that. Mac OS used to be easy, but gets harder with every release, and every new OS version breaks something (mainly, CERN root) and people have to wait until it's fixed.
Fair enough. I think the best way to run Linux if you want to be sure you won't have tweak to stuff is to buy hardware with linux preinstalled. That your choice is more limited is another matter than "linux can't suspend".
Comparing a preinstalled Windows with a linux installed on random laptop whose manufacturer can't be bothered to support is a bit unfair.
Linux on a laptop where the manufacturer did their work runs well.
It also doesn't appear to be the case even now. I searched for laptops available in my country that fit my budget and for each laptop searched "<laptop name> linux reddit" on google and filtered for results <1 year old. Each laptop's reports included some or other bug.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1hfqptw/linu...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1esntt3/leno...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1j3983j/hp_o...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1k1nsm8/audi...
The laptop with the best reported linux support seemed to be Thinkpad P14s but even there users reported tweaking some config to get fans to run silently and to make the speakers sound acceptable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1c81rw4/thinkpad_...
And yeah, it's best to wait a bit for new models, as support is sorted out, if the manufacturer doesn't support Linux itself. Or pick a manufacturer that sells laptops with Linux preinstalled. That makes the comparison with a laptop with Windows preinstalled fair.
I wasn't cherry-picking things. I literally searched for laptops available in my budget in my country and looked up what was the linux support like for those laptops as reported by people on reddit.
> Or pick a manufacturer that sells laptops with Linux preinstalled
I suppose you are talking about System76, Tuxedo etc. These manufacturers don't ship to my country. Even if I am able to get it shipped, how am I supposed to get warranty?
HP, Dell and Lenovo also sell Linux laptops on which Linux runs well.
I sympathize with the more limited availability and budget restrictions, but comparisons must be fair: compare a preinstalled Windows and a preinstalled linux, or at least a linux installed on hardware whose manufacturer bothered to work on Linux support.
When the manufacturer did their homework, Linux doesn't have the issues listed earlier. I've seen several laptops of these three brands work flawlessly on Linux and it's been like this for a decade.
I certainly choose my laptops with Linux on mind and I know just picking random models would probably lead me to little issues here and there, and I don't want to deal with this. Although I have installed Linux on random laptops for other people and fortunately haven't run into issues.
> it's been like this for a decade
Again, depends on the definition of "flawlessly". Afaik, support for hardware accelerated videoplayback on browsers was broken across the board only three years ago.
https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps
Enjoy.
So, for me Windows + WSL is more productive than just using Linux. The UI is still better on Windows(basic utilities like File Explorer and Config Management is better on Windows). No Remoting Software beats RDP. When I remote to a Windows workstation through RDP, I can't tell the difference. VNC is always janky. Of course there is Word/Excel/Illustrator which is simply not available on Linux
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 silicon to get us hardware with no compromises like the Macbooks
I'm on Mac now, and I jump back and forth between Mac laptop and a Linux desktop. I actually prefer Windows + WSL, but ideologically I can't use it. It has potential - PowerToys is fantastic, WSL is great, I actually like PowerShell as a scripting language and the entire new PC set up can now be done with PowerShell + Winget DSC. But, I just can't tolerate the user hostile behavior from Microsoft, nor the stop the world updates that take entirely too long. They should probably do what macOS and Silverblue, etc. do and move to an immutable/read-only base and deploy image based updates instead of whatever janky patching they do now.
Plus, I can't get a laptop that's on par with my M4 Pro. The Surface Laptop 7 (the arm one) comes close, but still not good enough.
That said I'd pay for a dev edition as you described it, that would be fantastic.
I get customers and most people don't know about it but it's kind of ridiculous that techy people in a tech forum don't know how to do it.
Why? HN has traditionally always largely been a macOS and Linux crowd. Why do we have to care about fixing an OS that is broken out of the box (that most of us don't use anyway)?
Far too many Linux users, especially, make fun of Windows and if you dig a bit you see that most of their complaints are things that are solved with 5 minutes of googling. Some complaints are philosophical, and those I agree with, but even in that case, I'd be curious how consistent they are with their philosophy when for example Linux desktop environments due weird things.
Summarizing a bit: Linux users with years or decades of experience of tinkering as sysadmins with Linux frequently make junior-level user complaints about Windows usage, frequently based on outdated information about it.
I say this who has been using both Linux and Windows for a few decades now and has a fairly decent level of sysadmin skills on both.
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This is the only reason I have not requested a windows laptop from my company. WSL is better for docker development in basically every way than a mac can be (disclaimer: haven't tried orbstack yet, heard good things, but my base assumption is it can't be better than WSL2) except it is literally impossible to get hardware as good as the M3 or M4 for any other OS than macOS.
But the increasing market share of Macs and even Linux these days plus the ever increasing of OSS initiatives from Microsoft points out that Microsoft knows a lot fewer of their users are as captive as they were in the 90's, for example.
The biggest difference between OSX and Windows is, Apple adds (some say steal) functionality from competition, and open source. They make it neat. On windows to have something working, you need a WezTerm, Everything for search, Windhawk for a vertical taskbar on the right, Powertoys for an app starter, Folder Size for disc management etc. If you spend a lot of time, Win11 can be ok to work with.
If Powerpoint and Affinity would work on Linux, I'd use Linux though.
Each OS is going to have extension applications to improve on the OOTB experience. This is an invalid argument to choosing one over the other.
Huh? Windows supports vertical taskbar.
The MacBook Air M4 supports two external displays now (with the lid open):
https://support.apple.com/guide/macbook-air/use-an-external-...
My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor, even though it has the same specs as her work Pro.
The MacBook Pro with the non-Pro/Max chip (i.e. MacBook Pro M3) has the same limitations as the corresponding MacBook Air (i.e. MacBook Air M3).
No. This is just you repeating marketing.
No Nvidia chip = B tier at best.
I have a $700 Asus with a 3060 that is better. Go ahead and scale up to a $2000 computer with an Nvidia chip and its so obviously better, there is nothing to debate.
No one cares about performance per watt, its like someone ran a 5k race, came in 3rd and said "Well at least I burned fewer calories than the winner!"
LTSC is a version like that
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/what...
as far as MS are concerned, that crap is their business.
Or, possibly, that crap is the multitude of little software empires build by the management layer now in control..
This is the kind of statement that makes you pay the karma tax. WSL is great, I use it on a day to day basis. I also use Linux on a day to day basis. And as great as WSL is, for running Linux software on supported hardware, Linux beats WSL hands down. And I mean, of course it does, do you expect a VM to beat native? In the same way that Windows software runs better on Windows. (with a few exceptions on both sides).
Compared to Linux, WSL I/O is slow, graphics is slow and a bit janky, I sometimes get crashes, memory management is suboptimal, networking has some quirks, etc... These problems are typical of VMs as it is hard for the host and guest OS to coordinate resource use. If you have an overpowered computer with plenty of RAM, and are mostly just using the command line, and don't do anything unusual with your network, then sure it may be "better" than Linux. But the truth is that it really depends on your situation.
Hardware performance counters basically do not work in WSL2, which among other issues, makes it extremely difficult to use rr. https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr/issues/2506#issuecomment-2... Some people say they got it working, but I and many other users encounter esoteric blockers.
The Dozen driver is never at feature parity with native Linux Vulkan drivers, and that's always going to be the case.
By default, WSL security mitigations cause GCC trampolines to just not work, which partly motivated the opt-in alternative implementations of trampolines last year. https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=commit;h=28d8c680aaea46...
gWSL is also a terrible X11 server that makes many very basic window management configurations impossible, and while I prefer VcXsrv, it has its own different terrible issues.
I can imagine that WSL2 looks attractive if all you want to do is run command line apps in multiple isolated environments, but it is miserable for anything graphical or interactive.
The big drawback to WSL to me is the slow filesystem access because NTFS sucks. And having to deal with Windows in the first place.
Ps I wouldn't worry about your karma. It's just a number :P
The problem is Windows IO filters and whatnot, Microsoft Defender trying to lazily intercept every file operation, and if you're crossing between windows and Linux land, possibly 9pfs network shares.
WSL2's own disk is just a VM image and fairly fast - you're just accessing a single file with some special optimizations. Usually far, far more responsive than anything done by windows itself. Don't do your work in your network-shared windows home folder.
Not the biggest issue of them, 'find' and 'git status' on WSL2 in a big project is still >100 times slower on windows dev drive which avoids those filters than it is with WSL 1 on dev drive.
WSL 1 on regular ntfs with defender disabled is about 4x slower than WSL1 on dev drive, so that stuff does cause some of it, but WSL2 feels hopelessly slow. And wsl 2 can't share memory as well or take as much advantage of the filesystem cache (doubling it if you use the windows drive in both places I think, unless the network drive representation of it doesn't get cached on the WSL2 drive.
WSL2 does not take less advantage of filesystem caches. Linux's block cache is perfectly capable. HyperV is a semi-serious hypervisor, so it should be using a direct I/O abstraction for writing to the disk image. Memory is also balloning, and can dynamically grow and shrink depending on memory pressure.
Linux VM's is something Microsoft has poured a lot of money into optimizing as that's what the vast majority of Azure is. Cramming more out of a single machine, and therefore more things into a single machine, directly correlates with profits, so that's a heavy investment.
I wonder why you're seeing different results. I have no experience with WSL1, and looking into a proprietary legacy solution with known issues and limited features would be a purely academic exercise that I'm not sure is worth it.
(I personally don't use Windows, but I work with departments whose parent companies enforce it on their networks,
Files on the WSL2 disk image work great. They're complaining about accessing files that aren't on the disk image, where everything is relayed over a 9P network filesystem and not a block device. That's the part that gets really slow in WSL2, much slower than WSL1's nearly-native access.
> Memory is also balloning, and can dynamically grow and shrink depending on memory pressure.
In my experience this works pretty badly.
> a proprietary legacy solution with known issues and limited features
Well at least at the launch of WSL2 they said WSL1 wasn't legacy, I'm not sure if that has changed.
But either way you're using a highly proprietary system, and both WSL1 and WSL2 have significant known issues and limited features, neither one clearly better than the other.
It’s fine for running small models but when you get to large training sets that don’t fit in RAM it becomes miserable.
There is a line where the convenience of training or developing locally gives way to a larger on demand cloud VM, but on WSL the line is much closer.
However it’s not perfect, for example I hit this bug when trying to run node a few days ago https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8219#issuecomment-10... and I don’t think they’re fixing bugs in WSL1 anymore
Thats if you are going from VM/host. If you use the allocated space for VM, its pretty fast.
The culprit would be the plan9 bits (think of smb or nfs but .. wilder ? why are they using 9P again ?)
Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8 please.
But in the end they had to get the OS vendor to bless their process name anyway, just so the OS would stop doing things that tank the performance for everybody else doing something similar but who haven't opened a direct line up with the OS vendor and got their process name on a list.
This seems like a pain point for the vendor to fix, rather than everybody shipping software to their OS
I don't have a need to run multiple OSes though. All of my tools are Linux based, and in companies that don't let people run Linux, the actual tools of the trade are almost all in a Linux VM because it's the only reasonable way to use them, and everything else is cross-platform. The outer OS just creates needless issues so that you now need to be a power user with two operating systems and their weird interactions.
> extremely arcane things I had to fix when setting it up involving host DNS and VPN adapter priority not getting propagated into the VM so networking was completely broken
Are you sure you set up the VPN properly? Messing around with Linux configs is a good way to end up with "somehow" bugs like that.
OSX was a bit janky with docker filesystem slowness, homebrew being the generally recommended package manager despite being awful (why do I sometimes tap a cask and sometimes pour a bottle? Don't tell me; I don't care. Just make it be "install". Also, don't take "install" as a cue to go update all of my other programs with incompatible versions without asking), annoying 1+ second animations that you can't turn off that make it so the only reasonable way to use your computer is to never maximize a window (with no tiling support of course), and completely broken external monitor support (text is completely illegible IIRC), but Windows takes jank to another level.
By contrast, I never encounter the issues people complain about on Linux. Bluetooth works fine. Wifi works fine. nVidia GPUs and games work fine. Containers are easy to use because they're natively part of the OS. I prefer Linux exactly because I stopped enjoying "tinkering" with my computer like 10 years ago, and I want it to just quietly work without drawing attention to itself (and because Windows 8 and the flat themes that followed were hideous and I was never going to downgrade to that from Windows 7).
I use linux. I don't need WSL at all. Not at work nor at home.
So you praise WSL because you use Windows as your main system? Than yes its great. It definitly makes the Windows experience a lot better.
OpenSSH for Windows was also a game changer. Honestly, i have no clue why Microsoft needed so long for that.
Also 1980s style X11 widgets on the Windows desktop in their own windows? Cool.
Cool because nothing about how Windows boots is intercepted; you can just nuke the new partitions (or overwrite them with a new Linux installation). I still prefer a native Linux boot with "just in case" Windows option to WSL.
Wayland supports window managers ?
I have since moved to macbooks for the hardware, but until not too long ago WSL was my linux "distro" of choice because I didn't want to spend time configuring my computer to make basic things work like suspend/wake on lid down/up, battery life, hardware acceleration for video playback on the browser, display scaling on external monitor and so on.
Note that NVIDIA drivers didn't get better since they are more open source now. They are not. GPUs are now entire independent computers with their own little operating system. Some significant parts of the driver now runs under that computer.
Yes the manufacturers may allocate some people to deal with it and the corrosiveness of the kernel community. But why? Intel and AMD uses that as a marketing and sales stragtegy. If the hardware manufacturer is the best one there is, where is the profit for supporting Linux? Even Thinkpads don't have 100% support of all the little sensors and PMICs.
HiDPI issue hasn't been solved yet completely. Bluetooth is still quite unreliable. MIPI support should be the best due to the number of devices, until you realize everybody did their own shitty external driver and there are no common good drivers for MIPI cameras so your webcam doesn't work. USB stack is still dodgy. Microsoft in 90s had a cart of random hardware populating the USB tree completely and they just fucked with the NT kernel plugging and unplugging until it didn't break anymore for love's sake. Who did that level of testing with Linux?
It also doesn't appear to be the case even now. I searched for laptops available in my country that fit my budget and for each laptop searched "<laptop name> linux reddit" on google and filtered for results <1 year old. Each laptop's reports included some or other bug.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1hfqptw/linu...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1esntt3/leno...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1j3983j/hp_o...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1k1nsm8/audi...
The laptop with the best reported linux support seemed to be Thinkpad P14s but even there users reported tweaking some config to get fans to run silently and to make the speakers sound acceptable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1c81rw4/thinkpad_...
Which Linux? Each distro is essentially a different operating system.
Modern means systemd, pipewire, Wayland, Gnome, an up to date kernel, etc... So the current Ubuntu and Fedora releases.
I've had 100% working laptops for 15 years now. Because I always run the newest Ubuntu.
Maybe I was too positive on Fedora (I was going by it's reputation, I use Ubuntu for work). Ubuntu is solid.
Link 1: screen only updating every 2 seconds, visual glitches. Link 2: brightness reset to full on screen unlock, fans turning on when charging. Link 3: bluetooth troubles, speakers cant be muted if headphone jack is on mute. Link 4: audio quality and low volume, wifi not coming back after sleeping. Link 5: fans being too loud, poor sound quality.
Either your Stockholm syndrome is affecting your reading comprehension or you just take bugs like these as part of the normal "working perfectly" linux experience.
People whose main environment is Linux intentionally buy hardware that works flawlessly with Linux.
People who try Linux occasionally do it on whatever hardware they have, which still almost always works with Linux, but there are occasional issues with sketchy Windows-only hardware or insufficiently tested firmware or flaky wifi cards, and that is enough for there to be valid anecdotes in any given comments section with several people saying they tried it and it isn't perfect. Because "perfect" is a very high bar.
There is also the quiet part to this. People who religiously use Linux and think that it is the best OS that can ever be, don't realize how many little optimizations go into a consumer OS. They use outdated hardware. They use the lower end models of the peripherals (people still recommend 96 DPI screens just for this). They use limited capabilities of that hardware. They don't rely on deeply interactive user interfaces.
> solved a while ago
Can not be the case because I was facing these issues less than a couple of years ago.
I was responding to the "Stockholm syndrome" comment specifically because there are a number of hardware and software problems (e.g. https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...) with using linux as a desktop operating system that linux users have to find their way around, so I found the comment rather full of irony.
PS: I already know that the file-picker issue has been fixed. That does not take away from the fact that it was in fact broken for decades. It is only meant as an example.
Just like with Mac and Windows, you choose the supported hardware, and everything is flawless.
And it's not clear what the Linux ones are. Like, our dept ordered officially Linux-supported Thinkpads for whoever wanted them, and turns out they still have unsolved Bluetooth audio problems. Those people use wired headphones now.
I'd at least try Linux cause I abhor Microsoft, but idk if it'd work out.
At least the nags in Windows look like modern web-based UI (so far that ‘use Electron’ seems to be the post-Win 8 answer to ‘how to make Windows apps’) in contrast to MacOS which drove my wife crazy with nag dialogs that look like a 1999 refresh of what modal dialogs looked like on the classic Mac in 1984.
It might be due to my corpo's particular setup etc. but for me 95% of the value of WSL would be the ability to run it on "corporate" Windows boxes. Alas.
I know… every year is the year of the Linux desktop… but seriously the AI spyware included was enough to get me gone for good.
[0]: https://apps.gnome.org/Boxes/
However, for those of us that went Linux many years ago, and like our free open source, in 2025, is it better to go back to the dark side, to run Windows and have things like a LAMP stack and terminals run with WSL?
I don't play games or run Adobe products, I use Google Docs and I don't need lots of different Linux kernels. Hence, is it better to run Linux in Windows now? Genuinely asking.
not on a shitty wrapper running on an ad-platform.
The Linux on Desktop is finally approaching, in more than one "shape", none of which is the shape some people expected/wanted.
[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi
I understand the "roll your own" argument very well. In my time, I've experienced quite the variety of configs and dotfiles, but I'm not young anymore so I've settled with using Regolith which is an opinionated set of tools, including my favourite i3wm, on top of Ubuntu, and I simply use defaults for the most things.
Anyway, it's much easier to use Linux as a daily driver than it's ever been. The choice of distro is simply which package manager to use, and everything else just works, as long as it's in the package manager's inventory.
I haven't compiled my own computer's kernel in 6 years (but I still cross compile for rpi and other IoT), and I haven't used my dotfiles in 3 years, just defaults.
A very big and very incorrect assumption. This reads like you asked the initial question without any actual curiosity behind it.
What gets you that on windows? The builtin stuff is far from cohesive.
XAMPP did not work out of the box with me on Windows (skill issue on my part, I know), so my preferred setup was to run a Ubuntu Server VM (LAMP stack) and then develop whatever I had on a Windows IDE.
I could have done that under full Linux, I just did not want that. Then Vagrant came into existence, which I'd say was for my use case (but never came around to adopt it).
I'm really happy with my WSL2 setup. I stopped using VMware Workstation when WSL2 broke it, but WSL2 is exactly what I needed to match my use case.
Why wouldn't you have just spent 5 minutes to get XAMPP working?
Is it still broken?
That being said, there is a performance impact.
I'd venture to say this depends on which OS you're more comfortable with. I'm more comfortable with Linux, so I'd say it's easier/better/less janky to use Linux as a host OS.
> Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24. You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"
Once you're a developer who's been burned by this enough times, you do this with containers or dedicated dev VMs. You do not develop on your host OS and stay sane.
I have been using it since the beginning of WSL 1 with a very terminal heavy set up but it has some issues.
For example WSLg's clipboard sharing is buggy compared to VcXsrv. It doesn't handle pasting into Linux apps without introducing Windows CRs. I opened an issue for this https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1326 but it hasn't gotten a reply.
Also, systemd is still pretty sketchy. It takes over 2 minutes for systemd services to start and if you close a WSL 2 terminal for just a few minutes systemd will delay a new terminal from opening for quite some time. This basically means disabling systemd to use WSL 2 in your day to day.
Then there's this 6 year old issue with 1,000+ upvotes https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699 around WSL not reclaiming disk space. It means you need to routinely shut everything down and compress your VM's disk or you'll run out of space.
Beyond that is does work well so I'm happy it exists.
For this part, I just create systemd-nspawn containers.
Last time I wanted to test something in a very old version of WebKit, creating a Debian Jessie container takes a few minutes. Things run at native speed.
Have you tried lxd? It's far less janky than Docker (IMHO) to achieve what you describe. Docker is uniquely unsuited to your use case.
For a person who will not invest the time to learn, e.g., how to avoid or minimise dependencies, indeed something like Windows with WSL may appear "more powerful".
The point of this comment is that "power" comes from learning and know-how as much as if not more than simply from choice of operating system. That said, some choices may ultimately spell the difference between limitations or possibilities.
Iterating on improvements and polishing on Screens and Design that they haven't touched in the past 30 years. Improving on ARM support etc. And STOP adding Ads on the OS.
And the Surface Laptop continues to push Hardware quality forward. From Speaker, Touchpad, Screen, Motherboard etc.
In fact, I'm a little annoyed that I can't get a comparably smooth experience on my MacBook without spinning up a full QEMU VM. I know it's a bit hypocritical since, like most people, I run WSL2 (which is container/VM-based), not WSL1 (the original magic syscall translation vision).
Does anyone know why there's no lightweight solution on macOS - something like LXC plus a filesystem gadget - that would let me run stuff like "apt-get install chromium"?
Here's the main difference between making Windows vs Linux the main OS from my POV: Windows is a lot of work and only the corporate editions can be converted into not-a-hot-mess-of-distractions (supposedly). Out of the box Linux doesn't have all of the bullshit that you have to spend time ripping out of Windows. You can easily re-install Linux to get the "powerwash" effect. But if you powerwash Windows you have to go back and undo all the default bullshit again.
Having said that Windows+WSL is a very nice lifeline if you're stuck in Windows-land. It's a much better combo than MacOS.
I actually just tried WINE for the FIRST time (surprisingly, I have been out of the Windows world for so long)
https://www.winehq.org/
And as long as I installed the binaries from their repo, not Debian 12, it worked very well
Wine is an impressive project too. It's not a VM, which has upsides and downsides, but I was able to run GCC-TDM, Python 3, and git bash in it!
This is not often discussed, so it took me a lot of digging a couple of years ago, but I'm still surprised this is never discussed as a consequence / side effect / downside of wsl2. There are performance impacts to turning on hyper V, which may or may not be relevant to user (e.g. If this is also their gaming machine etc:)
I love WSL because it lets me have the best of Windows and Linux.
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You can run multiple Linux distributions in chroots or containers, such as docker containers. I have showed people how to build packages for Ubuntu 22.04 on Ubuntu 20.04 for example.
https://www.amazingcto.com/upgrading-wsl-with-zsh-and-comman...
Another, smaller, gripe is networking. Because of how WSL is networked, I've run into edge-case issues with connecting to networked applications running in WSL from Windows.
There's also debootstrap which is useful for this technique, not sure if it also works on Ubuntu.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/connect-usb
I regularly run ADB through WSL2 using this.
https://askubuntu.com/a/1533361
Sorry but not sorry, it's not easier to run than on linux. It requires the Windows store to work, and to use Hyper-V (which breaks VMware workstation, among other things).
It's in a better package, to be sure, but it's not "easier to run multiple OS on the same computer". It's easier to use multiple OSes (no SSH, GUI forwarding, etc), as long as all those OSes are Linux flavors supported by WSL.
Want FreeBSD or Windows? Nope!
Well, it is windows subsystem for Linux :) not windows subsystem for windows or FreeBSD for that matter :)
Ps I wonder if you can make your own image? After all its really just Hyper-V with some config candy.
That said, the kernel they distribute is open source and you're not limited to just the distros they're working with directly. There are a number of third party (e.g. there's no Arch from Arch or Microsoft, but there's a completely compatible third party package that gives you Arch in WSL2)
No longer true since last month.
https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...
I'm pretty sure that with the opensourcing, we'll see freebsd or more exotic systems popping up quite quickly. Heck, macOS would be fun!
Especially in licensing! /sarcasm
wsl works good enough.
... but WSL is an excellent piece of work. It's really easy to deploy apps on. Frankly, it can be easier to a deployment there than on a Linux or macOS system, for example the reasons detailed above.
I use WSL2 to handle Linux (and Windows cross-) compilation regularly, along with running a number of native tools that are specific to Linux.
I've never had any issues with that, even to the point that I've been able to run MAME natively from Linux and have it show up like any other windowed app.
Is VMWare more powerful than Linux?
So I left - I am willing to do more work to be spied on less, to be used as a product less, and to fight with my computer about who owns it less.
This feature thing is really one of their strategies. At work they send us "adoption managers" that run reports to check whether people use feature xyz enough and set up stupid comms campaigns to push them to do so.
I really hate that. I decide how I use my computer. Not a vendor.
This is a great way of saying it and expresses the uneasy feeling windows has given me recently. I use Linux machines but I have 1 windows machine in my home as a media PC; and for the last several years windows has made me feel like I don’t own that computer but I’m just lucky to be along for the ride. Ramming ads on the task bar and start menu, forcing updates on me, forcing me to make a Microsoft account before I can login (or just having a dark UI pattern so I can’t figure out how to avoid it, for the pedantic).
With Linux I feel like the machine is a turing complete wonderbox of assistance and possibility, with windows it feels like Microsoft have forced their way into my home and are obnoxiously telling me they know best, while condescendingly telling me I’m lucky to be here at all. It’s a very different feeling.
Or on a macOS Desktop. Bonus: doing so on either platform doesn't also mean your host OS is running under a hypervisor, as it does with WSL2.
Bigger bonus: you don't have to run fucking Windows.
Why do you think, technologically, this is some form of "bonus"?
This is why you pay karma tax. This statement is so clearly representative of a falsity.
My linux can run multiple linuxes as well without VM overhead. Something Windows can’t do. Furthermore WINE allows me to forgo running any vm to run windows applications.
I developed on WSL for 3 years and consistently the biggest issue was the lack of ability to use tooling across the shared OSes.
Your karma depleting statements are biased, unfounded, and it shows as you do not really provide counter evidence. That’s why you lose karma.
OP's statement remains incorrect, because their assumption is that the WSL experience can't be reproduced in Linux.
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 Valve really pushing Proton and the state of linux gaming, I've recently swapped over to Ubuntu and Nixos. The friction point moved to the gaming side, but things mostly just work.
Things on linux are rapidly getting better, and having things just work on the development side has been a breath of fresh air. I now feel that it's a better experience than windows w/ WSL, despite some AAA titles not working on linux.
https://www.protondb.com/
Scrolling to Medals, 50% of all 25.000+ games tracked by the site are playable, either working perfectly or mostly (Platinum or Gold ratings). Another 20% can be alright under specific circumstances, and with compromises (Silver rating).
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 because we run a psql container in a different way under wsl... let's see how long we endure until saying never again.
No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.
I actually switched to Linux full-time when Starfield wouldn’t run on Windows but worked in Proton. We are now in a world where Valve provides a more sable Windows API than Microsoft. The only limitation now is anti-cheat but that’s a political problem, not a technical one.
Given what Windows has become and already discussed here on HN I would even hesitate to run it in a virtual machine.
Edit: more than 15 years.
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 people want to use that does not run under WINE do require graphics acceleration.
I tried running Photoshop under a VM, but the performance of the QEMU QXL driver is bad, and VirGL does not support Windows guests yet.
VMWare and VirtualBox do have better graphics drivers that do support Windows. I tried using VMWare and the performance was "ok", but still not near the performance of Photoshop on "bare metal".
If the card is running its own OS, what's the benefit of combining them that way? A high speed networking link will get you similar results and is flexible and cheap.
If the card isn't running its own OS, it's much easier to put all the CPU cores in the same socket. And the demand for both x86 and Arm cores at the same time is not very high.
Every Windows thread on HN is a reminder of the stark divide between people who need to use Windows for productivity apps and those who don’t.
The apps I need a Windows machine for are not the kind that virtualize nicely. Anything GPU related means Windows has to become the base OS for me.
If you’re running an occasional light tool you can get away with Windows in a VM, but it’s a no-go for things like CAD or games.
I'm not a novice either, $dayjob has me working on the lowest levels of Linux on a daily basis. I did linux from scratch on a Pentium 2 when I was 12. All that to say yes I happen to agree but edge cases are out there. The blanket statement doesn't apply for all use cases
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.
I set it up originally for gaming, but nowaways I install a lot of disposable software there.
I use Linux guests VMs too (a la Qubes), but sadly there's no guest support for looking-glass on Linux. Native rendering speeds on VMs are something hard to let go.
> We currently package our virtual machines for four different virtualization software options: Hyper-V (Gen2), Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMware. These virtual machines contain an evaluation version of Windows that expires on the date posted. If the evaluation period expires, the desktop background will turn black, you will see a persistent desktop notification indicating that the system is not genuine, and the PC will shut down every hour.
Edit: Oops, dead link -- the dev tools evaluation VM hasn't been released for 6+ months. But they do offer Windows evaluations ISO's after registration.
1. I use UWF on windows (Education Edition). All disk writes to C:/ are ephemeral. On every single reboot, all changes are discarded and my pc is back to the exact same state as when I first set it up. I do keep a separate partition for documents that need persistence.
2. Miracast for screen mirroring.
It makes it sound like Microsoft is giving some capability to Linux whereas it's the other way around.
Source: https://x.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610?s=19
https://xcancel.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610?s...
“ I still hope to see a true "Windows Subsystem for Linux" by Microsoft or a windows becoming a linux distribution itself and dropping the NT kernel to legacy. Windows is currently overloaded with features and does lack a package manager to only get what you need...”
Os/2 basically ran a copy of windows (either the existing one or bundled one) to then execute windows programs side by side with os/2 (and DOS) software.
That said, to address the grandparent comment’s point, it probably should be read as “Windows Subsystem for Linux (Applications)”.
That's not what I say, that's what the former PM Lead of WSL said. To be fair, Windows Services for UNIX was just Unix services for Windows. Probably the same logic applied there back then: they couldn't name it with a leading trademark (Unix), so they went with what was available.
When it works, it's great! When it doesn't....oh man it sucks. It has been non-stop networking and VPN problems, XServer issues, window scaling issues, hardware accelerated graphics not working, etc. this whole time. I've spent more time trying to fix WSL issues then actually developing software. It's never gotten better.
It's fast. It's powerful. But using it as a daily driver is very painful in my experience. I avoid it as much as possible and do most of my work in MSYS2 instead. Sure, it's much slower. But at least it works consistently and has for years.
But the latest layoffs were not performance based. Are you just confidently commenting without knowing about the event being discussed?
(Also I was responding to a more generic comment saying doing layoff is bad and makes org more political.)
Sigh, and company keep them for sentimental reasons I guess…
[1]: the real debate is not “who’s my lowest performer” for each manager. It is about why I should cut rather than my sibling manager. If you force everyone to cut one person they all know who it will be.
> This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this
(Also, I'm surprised that WSL 1 is still supported. It must be in maintenance mode though, right?)
Could've been worse. At least they're not locking you out of your device like on iPhones and iPads. They don't stop you from running Asahi, they just aren't interested in helping anyone run Asahi.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sells laptops that actively prevent you from running Linux on them. Things get a little blurry once you hit the tablet form factor (Surface devices run on amd64, but are they really that different from an iPad?) where both companies suck equally, though Microsoft also sells tablets that will run Linux once someone bothers to write drivers for them.
Parallels also has a commercial offering that does some nice GUI-level integration with both Windows and Linux VMs.
My understanding is that these are both built on top of some Apple API, and Parallels actually collaborates with Apple on making it work for their use case. So it's not the first-class support that you get from Microsoft with WSL, but it's still pretty good.
Exactly same experience to WSL - great out of the box experience, easy to use, and insist on using their own patched kernel.
Which is... not necessarily wrong.
Also, it's really annoying that macOS switched to zsh. Yeah you can change it back to bash, but when all team docs and online help assumes zsh, good luck.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzl...
P.S. They also specifically built Rosetta for Linux to compile x64 Linux binaries into aarch64 to run inside Linux VMs on their machines.
Apple could just have gone and do a straight port of the iOS boot procedure to their ARM Mac lineup... and we'd have been thoroughly screwed, given how long ago the latest untethered bootrom exploit was.
Or they could have pulled a Qualcomm, Samsung et al and just randomly change implementation details between each revision to make life for alt-os implementers hell (which is why so many Android BSP dumps are the way they are, with zero hope of ever getting anything upstream). Instead, to the best of my knowledge the UART on the M series SoCs dates back right to the very first iPod.
The fact that the Asahi Linux people were able to create a GPU driver that surpasses Apple's own in conformance tests [1], despite not having any kind of documentation at all is telling enough - and not just of the pure genius of everyone involved.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/08/22/linux-for-apple-s...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578
Can anyone chime in - is this still a concern? Was it ever a concern?
All development is done on Windows laptop via SSH to those VMs. When I tried using Ubuntu via WSL, something didn't feel right. There were some oddities, probably with the filesystem integration, which bothered me enough to stop doing this.
Nevertheless, I think it's really great what they now did.
Now all what's missing is that they do it the other way around, that they create a 100% windows compatible Wine alternative.
Microsoft ist really terrible at naming things, that's for sure.
Right?
Right?…
Of course, there might be some regressions. They are usually only fixed (upstream) after WSL kernel gets upgraded and it starts to repro in WSL.
Of course, if you want the native integration WSL offers, you'll need to upgrade the Linux driver/daemon side to support whatever kernel you prefer to run if it's not supported already. Microsoft only supports a few specific kernels, but the code is out there for the Linux side so you can port the code to any OS, really.
With some work, this could even open up possibilities like running *BSD as a WSL backend.
strace shows that the sleep program uses clock_nanosleep, which is theoretically "passive." However, if the host suspends and then wakes up after the sleep period should have ended, it continues as if it were "active."
While right now I enjoy the privilege to develop on Linux, things may change.
Now do NT.
I think it's a fair exchange too, even as an individual I pay for plenty of smaller open-source SaaS services—even if they're more expensive than proprietary competitors—for the very reason that I could always selfhost it without interruption if SHTF and the provider goes under.
I've seen a number of theories online that boil down to young tech enthusiasts in the 2000's/early-2010's getting hands-on experience with open source projects and ecosystems since they're more accessible than enterprise tech that's typically gated behind paywalls, then translating into what they use when they enter the working world (where some naturally end up at M$).
This somewhat seems to track, as longtime M$ employees from the Ballmer-era still often hold stigmas against open source projects (Dave's garage, and similar), but it seems the current iteration of employees hold much more favorable views.
But who knows, perhaps it's all one long-winded goal from M$ of embracing, extending, and ultimately extinguishing.
- three years later it's left in the hands of the powerful community that was built around it with MS help
- MS doesn't have to provide support and it's not their problem anymore
My guess…
The same reason Rome didn’t fall. It simply turned into the Church.
MS isn’t battling software mfgs because they have the lock on hardware direction and operating systems so strongly that they can direct without having to hold the territory themselves.
Microsoft releases the important parts of VS Code under proprietary licenses. Microsoft doesn’t release the source code for Windows or Office or the github.com web app under free software licenses.
Don’t get it twisted. This is marketing, nothing more.
In this case who except Microsoft would have paid for development here.