The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

https://blogs.windows.com/windowsdeveloper/2025/05/19/the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-is-now-open-source/

by pentagrama • 1 year ago

1613 1185 1 year ago

blogs.windows.com

pjmlp12• 1 year ago

Given the layoffs round from last week, in a record earnings year, I wonder if this is a side effect of those layoffs.

90s_dev2• 1 year ago

Unless they're just flat out lying, no:

This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this

pjmlp12• 1 year 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.

jayd162• 1 year ago

Can't help but be pessimistic about this or any news coming out of Build, given the circumstances.

tgma19• 1 year 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.

jayd162• 1 year 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.

littlestymaar5• 1 year 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.

bitmasher9• 1 year ago

Didn’t Microsoft use to have annual 10% layoffs? Just culling the lowest performers every year.

tester7562• 1 year ago

Given the layoffs round from last week, in a record earnings year, I wonder if this is a side effect of those layoffs.

Decisions, preparations and execution to open source such projects in big corporations to not happen within a week, two or month.

dec0dedab0de• 1 year ago

you could probably say the same about layoffs

gjvc• 1 year ago

microsoft open sourcing a lot of things lately

behnamoh2• 1 year 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?

cokeandpepsi• 1 year ago

I mean yeah, the money and growth these days is pulling people into choose their cloud/services platforms

beanjuiceII• 1 year 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

ThrowawayR2• 1 year 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..."

DaSHacka2• 1 year 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.

SV_BubbleTime4• 1 year 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.

Grimeton• 1 year 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

hulitu3• 1 year ago

microsoft open sourcing a lot of things lately

Yeah, MS-DOS 3, Winfile and a castrated version of Powertoys. This all looks like extend and extinguish theater.

candiddevmike2• 1 year ago

Can I use a vanilla kernel with it yet?

risho2• 1 year ago

What does the native wsl kernel not offer that you need?

candiddevmike2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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."

jeroenhd2• 1 year 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.

rfoo3• 1 year 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.

elif2• 1 year ago

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?"

hobs• 1 year 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.

wkat42424• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

WorldMaker4• 1 year 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.)

trey-jones2• 1 year ago

Well, I'd still rather just use linux, but I take your meaning.

Theodores• 1 year 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.

TiredOfLife2• 1 year ago

wsl2 is linux

tuetuopay4• 1 year 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!

wkat42424• 1 year ago

Does it really need the store? I thought you could just go "wsl install" on the console.

wkat42424• 1 year 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.

wkat42424• 1 year 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

xPaw• 1 year ago

Slow IO is why I still use wsl1.

deetz• 1 year 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.

teruakohatu• 1 year 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.

JackSlateur• 1 year 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 ?)

arghwhat2• 1 year 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.

jmmv• 1 year ago

NTFS sucks

Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8 please.

ActorNightly9• 1 year ago

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.

phendrenad210• 1 year 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.

rs_rs_rs_rs_rs• 1 year 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?

jgd9dsv• 1 year ago

I love WSL, but you can do these things with Distrobox.

risho2• 1 year 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.

SV_BubbleTime4• 1 year 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.

frollogaston33• 1 year ago

Because it's easier to set up a local dev environment in WSL than in any of those.

dboreham• 1 year ago

with the virtual machine overhead.

signal11• 1 year 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”.

charcircuit2• 1 year 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.

righthand• 1 year 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.

dvtkrlbs3• 1 year 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.

ivanmontillam2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

I stopped using VMware Workstation when WSL2 broke it

Is it still broken?

MarkusWandel2• 1 year 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.

smw• 1 year ago

You get much nicer window decorations if you use the wayland support instead of X11.

MarkusWandel2• 1 year 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.

ec109685• 1 year ago

Step it up a notch and see if Netflix works w/ its DRM.

ezekg• 1 year 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.

bsnnkv3• 1 year ago

I will also die on this hill - NixOS on WSL + Windows + komorebi[1] for tiling window management is peak productivity for me.

[1] https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

randunel7• 1 year ago

Why not a Linux distro with i3wm, instead? What could possibly hold you back from upgrading?

Ericson2314• 1 year ago

I just run NixOS, but that feels like a respectable answer.

ndriscoll2• 1 year 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.

arcastroe2• 1 year 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.

phendrenad210• 1 year 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.

emmelaich3• 1 year ago

FWIW, you can run a VPN (e.g. tailscale) in WSL2. I have WSL2 start up on boot and I can remotely ssh to WSL2 without logging into Windows at all.

I also have tailscale running on Windows itself and they don't conflict.

jahy-notes• 1 year 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.

jchw13• 1 year 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...

sweeter• 1 year ago

And if they think that this version of Linux "isn't janky" but regular Linux is, than idk what to say.

adamc• 1 year 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.

0x4573• 1 year 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.

ThinkBeat2• 1 year 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.

fsloth• 1 year 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.

ActorNightly9• 1 year 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.

zymhan• 1 year 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.

high_na_euv2• 1 year ago

So, how you run Windows on Linux like WSL does?

ComplexSystems• 1 year ago

Is it a VM? It seems to be much faster than most VMs I've used.

pjmlp12• 1 year 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.

juancn• 1 year 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.

It's a quite interesting way to build an OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT

codr7• 1 year 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...

nottorp3• 1 year 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.

meta_ai_x• 1 year ago

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

ClumsyPilot• 1 year ago

You know what's even more convenient than a VM? Not needing a VM and still having the exact same functionality

I mean this is basically heresy now.

most code is virtualised, or sandboxed, or in a VM, or a docker container, or several of the above at the same time.

ok1234564• 1 year ago

My coworkers stubbornly try to use WSL instead of Linux directly. They constantly run into corner cases and waste time working around them compared to just using Linux. Some tooling detects that it is running on Windows, and some detects that it is running on Linux. In practice, it's the worst of both worlds.

RajT88• 1 year ago

I heard 2025 was the year of Linux on the desktop!

krferriter• 1 year ago

It's a VM plus some usability automation. Can't ignore the usability benefits.

vhguru• 1 year ago

If Windows provided easier access to hardware, especially USB, from WSL it would be nice. In fact, if WSL enumerated devices and dealt with them as native Linux does, even better.

xylophile• 1 year ago

Just FYI, you may also enjoy systemd-machine. It's essentially the same thing as toolbx but it handles the system bus much more sanely, and you can see everything running inside the guest from the host's systemctl.

shmerl3• 1 year ago

You know what's even more convenient than a VM? Not needing a VM and still having the exact same functionality.

Exactly.

rini173• 1 year ago

You don't stress about Windows updates? Hard to believe it.

chubot• 1 year 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)

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!

phendrenad210• 1 year ago

What do you mean by that?

Flamentono22• 1 year 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.

JonChesterfield• 1 year ago

putty is longer necessary? That would be a wild upgrade in usability for the work laptop, shall go try it

raggi• 1 year 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.

alex_smart17• 1 year ago

https://xkcd.com/963/

frollogaston33• 1 year 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.

brooke2k• 1 year 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

lpcvoid• 1 year ago

That may all very well be, but uuh, you're then forced to use Windows

gofreddygo• 1 year ago

I want to know what limitations and tradeoffs am I embracing when using WSL vs booting linux off a usb stick.

ksec• 1 year 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.

thewebguyd2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

Chris2048• 1 year ago

without all the crap

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..

baq5• 1 year 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.

jsmith99• 1 year 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.

alex_smart17• 1 year 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.

zczc• 1 year ago

a version of windows without all the crap

LTSC is a version like that

chrsw3• 1 year ago

This would be fantastic. But Microsoft doesn't have to do this. Their users are captives.

KingOfCoders3• 1 year 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.

CoolCold16• 1 year ago

nor the stop the world updates that take entirely too long

Interesting enough, that beyond release upgrades, happening may be once a year, all or may be 99% of updates took ~5 minutes of interruption of me, including needed reboot. I really wonder how others manage to have "entirely too long" updates.

dTal2• 1 year ago

To the tech savvy, there is essentially only one advantage to running Windows, and that is the ability to run Windows-only software. In all technical respects - control, performance, flexibility - it is inferior to the alternatives. Don't confuse vendor lockin with technology.

I find it dismaying that people on Hacker News willingly submit to incredibly user-hostile behavior from Microsoft and call it "the best of both worlds". Presumably a nontrivial proportion here are building the next generation of software products - and if we don't even respect ourselves, how likely is it that we will respect our users?

yellowapple3• 1 year ago

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

I've often said that if Microsoft had just iterated on Windows 2000 forever I'd probably still be a full-time Windows user. If Microsoft had maintained an LTSC-like Windows variant that was installable from the normal retail installation media and with a normal retail product key (at the very least Pro, but ideally Home), that also likely would have kept me on Windows full-time instead of switching to Linux as my daily driver.

pjmlp12• 1 year ago

Outside US and countries of similar income level, Windows is doing quite alright in mindshare, and will keep doing that unless Apples stops pretending being the computer version of audiophile.

I on the other hand cannot get an affordable Mac that has the same GPU, disk space and memory size as my workstation class laptop.

pton_xd• 1 year 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.

PaulHoule3• 1 year ago

Maybe it is both-sidesism but the motd you get by default on Ubuntu these days is as bad as any OS. (“Ubuntu Advantage” sounds about as good as https://prospect.org/health/2024-01-12-great-medicare-advant...)

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.

alex_smart17• 1 year 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.

frollogaston33• 1 year 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.

CoolCold16• 1 year ago

Running a Linux VM on Windows is nicer than just booting into Linux

Indeed, it does. Having stable system and not dealing with Linux on Desktop, clear tradoffs (like "just add another 16gb RAM stick in laptop/desktop and you are golden") is great for peace of mind.

The average uptimes on my laptops (note for plural) is ~3 weeks, until next Windows Update to be applied. I don't have nostalgia on the days of using Linux on desktop (~2003 student times, ~2008 giving it one more try, ~2015 as required by dayjob)

Of course it adds up that I can tell people around me (who are not tech guys often, but smart enough to know basic concepts and be able to run bash scripts provided to them) - "yep, machine with 32GB+ of RAM will work fine, choose any you like" - and it works.

connicpu• 1 year 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.

tadfisher• 1 year 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.

[0] https://apps.gnome.org/Boxes/

phkahler• 1 year ago

Most people have little use for running multiple OSes, and that drops a lot when you just abandon Windows entirely.

asveikau• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

debootstrap absolutely works in Ubuntu

725686• 1 year 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.

TZubiri• 1 year ago

The power of linux with the professionalism of paid MSFT engineers

running101• 1 year 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.

2019842• 1 year 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.

ActorNightly9• 1 year ago

WSL2 can forward USB devices

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/connect-usb

I regularly run ADB through WSL2 using this.

cess11• 1 year 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?

NelsonMinar2• 1 year 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.

jollyllama• 1 year 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.

VikingCoder• 1 year 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.

jxjnskkzxxhx• 1 year ago

ELI5 does it allow me to run windows programs in Linux?

frollogaston33• 1 year ago

rao-v2• 1 year 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"?

nobody9999• 1 year ago

WSL1 (the original magic syscall translation vision).

Actually, the OG "magic syscall translation" is Cygwin[0], which dates back to 1995[1].

[0] https://cygwin.com

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin

Edit: Fixed prose.

emmelaich3• 1 year ago

Perhaps with the Mac Hypervisor someone is working on it.

But Qemu (via UTM) starts up pretty quickly for me. No slower than WSL2 under Windows. My only issue is that it seems to drain power even when idle.

emmelaich3• 1 year ago

Try https://tart.run/

Native performance Tart is using Apple’s native Virtualization.Framework that was developed along with architecting the first M1 chip. This seamless integration between hardware and software ensures smooth performance without any drawbacks.

arzig3• 1 year ago

Is this close enough? https://github.com/lima-vm/lima

RKFADU_UOFCCLEL2• 1 year 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.

Firehawke4• 1 year 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.

xboxnolifes• 1 year ago

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.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

Run a rootless X server (XWin, Xming) on Windows, network the two (SSH tunnel), you have GUI Linux apps on Windows.

okanat12• 1 year ago

You need to make sure that they use Wayland. Running X11 apps is significantly slower in wslg. Native Wayland apps run much faster.

sigwinch• 1 year ago

Lack of all packet types disqualified it for me. Is there any hope for nmap, etc?

KingOfCoders3• 1 year 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

https://www.amazingcto.com/upgrading-wsl-with-zsh-and-comman...

jasonthorsness• 1 year 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.

daveguy• 1 year 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.

t_mann• 1 year 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.

NikolaNovak• 1 year 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:)

stephenr5• 1 year 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.

adithyassekhar• 1 year ago

Windows by default runs on a hypervisor since some Windows 11 version.

p_ing9• 1 year 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"?

ryao5• 1 year 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.

dismalaf7• 1 year 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.

burnte3• 1 year ago

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.

sneak2• 1 year ago

It’s a delight to use if you don’t mind your computer conducting 24/7 surveillance on you for a multinational corporation.

jraph9• 1 year 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.

sebtron• 1 year 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.

nhumrich• 1 year ago

WSL is so incredible. But support for it from 3rd party dev tools is so terrible.

trollbridge• 1 year 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.

rich_sasha• 1 year 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.

1vuio0pswjnm7• 1 year 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.

nickjj3• 1 year 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.

Scarbutt• 1 year ago

That doesn't sound good. I was planning to set up a Windows/WSL2 box, but this gives me second thoughts. Where can I read more about this?

CoolCold16• 1 year ago

never had problems of systemd/2 minutes delays

not sure what would be the correct test here, but:

root@LP-T16:~# uname -rn

LP-T16 5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2

root@LP-T16:~# time systemctl restart ssh

real 0m0.039s

user 0m0.008s

sys 0m0.001s

runjake• 1 year 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.

have-a-break• 1 year ago

The development experience is relatively cumbersome compared to using a native Linux distribution and containerizing application dependencies where needed.

yoyohello13• 1 year 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.

phendrenad210• 1 year 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).

fluidcruft3• 1 year 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.

Gud• 1 year ago

Can do the same with FreeBSDs Linuxulator. I run Arch Linux on FreeBSD, emulated.

moshegramovsky• 1 year 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.

jm4• 1 year 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.

rlpb• 1 year 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.

0xbadcafebee2• 1 year ago

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.

theanonymousone• 1 year 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.

d--b• 1 year ago

Well I guess now you just need to add WSL support to wine.

GuB-42• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

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.

CoolCold16• 1 year ago

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.

Indeed, that's my case - using CLI mostly for ssh/curls/ansible/vim over ansible and Puppet, so on.

For GUI part, Windows is chosen and shines for me.

LeFantome4• 1 year ago

If you want to “run multiple versions of Linux at once” and don’t like plain Docker, maybe check-out Podman Desktop.

echelon• 1 year ago

Every time I praise WSL on hn I pay the karma tax

Hmm...

WSL is more powerful than Linux

Oh.

palata4• 1 year ago

WSL is more powerful than Linux ...

Are you a Windows user who is happy to have a good way to run Linux on Windows, or are you a Linux user trying to convince other Linux user that instead of using Linux, they should use Linux in a VM running on Windows?

I am a longtime Linux user, and I can't see a reason in the universe why I would want to access my Linux through a VM on Windows. That seems absolutely insane.

steeeeeve• 1 year ago

I won't downvote you, but I will die on the other hill - the one over there that has a guy sitting down with his arms folded sporting an angry face every time someone something positive about WSL. There's at least three of us on that hill. And we're not going anywhere.

dustedcodes• 1 year ago

I tried it and found it to be such an abomination. I can’t understand why any self respecting software developer would use Windows with a bastard linux like WSL instead of just using actual Linux. Feels like a massive skill issue.

shipmaker• 1 year ago

it's for when your corpo provides you with a windows laptop for development. hope that helps with your understanding

harha_• 1 year ago

You can run multiple linux distros on linux just fine via KVM/QEMU, there is nothing special WSL offers except that it is a must if you're doomed to use windows.

dark-star• 1 year ago

For WSL 1, I kinda agree. It was basically the Posix Subsystem re-implemented and improved. Technically amazing, and running parallel to Windows without virtualization. Too bad it had so many performance issues.

But WSL2 is just a VM, no more, no less. You can do the same with VMware Workstation or similar tools, where you even get a nice accelerated virtual GPU.

micromacrofoot• 1 year ago

This would be a great point if WSL didn't require running Windows

selfhoster2• 1 year ago

WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously.

I do that with KVM too, and each has their own kernel, not one shared kernel made and controlled by one vendor.

protocolture2• 1 year ago

I still have issues with the networking but I agree. Its a fantastic system and it shits me only that it could be a bit better.

spookie4• 1 year ago

You can do the same on Linux. Distrobox exists.

29athrowaway• 1 year ago

Windows treats you like a baby. You cannot learn the internals of it and it forces decisions on you. With Windows, the computer that you paid for is not yours.

arzig3• 1 year ago

You use distrobox (https://distrobox.it/) and move on with your life. At work I use multiple versions of Ubuntu seamlessly without messing with VMs on a host fedora box without issue. That includes building things like .deb packages.

screye• 1 year ago

I've lived in WSL for 3 years now, and have zero complaints. It has worked with no issues what so ever. In 2025, Windows is the best Linux UI.

nicoty• 1 year ago

Still somewhat janky. I use it on my work machine (since it at least seems a bit faster than using VirtualBox) and regularly run into issues where npm won't build my project due to the existence of symlinks [1,2]. wslg windows also don't yet have first-party support from the windowing system [3]. I also remember having trouble setting up self-signed certs and getting SSL working.

1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57580420/wsl-using-a-wsl... 2. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5118 3. https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/22

forinti• 1 year ago

I use Ubuntu 22 in a LXC container on Ubuntu 24 (because of Webex).

I also run other Linux instances with KVM.

I even run a Linux x86_64 executable on an ARM SBC using QEMU.

I just feel that Linux is so much more flexible than Windows.

dankwizard• 1 year ago

Real talk. And anybody who argues is taking a heavy dose of copium to justify their use of Linux and the ensuite of compatibility issues that entails. Let them have their sense of superiority :' )

smitty1e• 1 year ago

It's not literally true that "Weasels Ripped My Flesh"[1] but WSL2 did rip the python support in QGIS by polluting my PATH with space characters.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weasels_Ripped_My_Flesh

landl0rd• 1 year ago

I used to agree with this for WSL1. Syscall translation gave solid performance, decent FS integration, and interop within WSL with windows executables. I really liked it.

WSL2 has been such a pain. You're basically managing a VM with VMWare Tools somewhat more integrated. I gave up on WSL2 after a few months and went back to booting my arch installation most of the time. Now I'm on a mac for the first time in a long time because windows has gotten so bad.

This is doubly sad because the NT kernel is so well designed to host multiple OSes due to the OS/2 stuff decades ago. All wasted.

Thaxll• 1 year ago

WSL sucks and I much prefer having a true VM in Hyper-v. WSL is full of weird behaviour and gotchas. Docker?? no pid 1, weird kernel etc ...

perrygeo• 1 year ago

I like WSL for this single reason too - it gives me space to run isolated experiments without touching my primary OS. So if that's what windows users get out of it, cool.

You can do the same thing with many other technologies on most other operating systems. I've used, in chronological order: FreeBSD jails, VMs, Cloud-hosted VMs, Docker, K8s, and Nix flakes. WSL is probably somewhere in around K8s.

My point is, we've had the ability to run "subsystems" for decades, by different names, on every OS. WSL is cool but quite late to the game, far from being "more powerful than linux".

sellmesoap• 1 year ago

Jumping on the anti-wsl bandwagon; I just can't abide the loss on control on windows, will the next update ignore/reset/override my privacy settings? What Gordian knot must I slay to have a local only account (Thanks Rufus!) How do I turn off/uninstall a million things I don't want, Xbox game bar?!?

Linux or *BSD give so much more respect to the user, on windows you are the product! Stand up for yourself and your data!

TylerJaacks• 1 year ago

I agree with you. Maybe if it had AI shoehorned in, hn would be happy.

LeFantome4• 1 year ago

Have you used Distrobox?

bunnie• 1 year ago

I share your sentiments. Makes testing my builds against windows, Ubuntu 22, Ubuntu 24, etc a breeze. It pretty much 'just works' and I can take it to go on my laptop. Even though I do most my work in Linux, Windows is a convenient 'compatibility layer'. I was skeptical at first when my friend suggested I try this, but daily usage has won me over.

ankurdhama• 1 year ago

We already have Distrobox that does same thing.

xarope• 1 year ago

On linux, I've been using lxc (now incus) for years to get different distros.

sheepscreek• 1 year ago

Install Promox or TrueNAS on a bare metal desktop to experience the true power of multiple operating systems running simultaneously. On most days, I am running multiple VMs with these OSes in parallel: Windows Server 2025, Windows 11 Pro, and these flavours of Linux - TrueNAS/Debian, Ubuntu, Manjaro, Zorin OS. I also have a dozen or more lightweight containers running, some with LXC on the bare metal host and others with Docker inside the TrueNAS VM.

This setup automatically backs up my data and is resilient to disk failures. It’s the ultimate form of power and bliss.

shmerl3• 1 year ago

You can run multiple OSes simultaneously on Linux itself - Linux can run VMs just fine. I.e. Linux guests on Linux host and so on. Take a look for example at virt-manager (libvirt / qemu + kvm).

And WSL is a limited VM using HyperV anyway. If you want to run a VM, you can as a well run a proper one which isn't limited and runs a full blown distro with sane configuration.

So WSL is definitely not more powerful than normal Linux.

OhMeadhbh2• 1 year ago

I'm not the biggest fan of WSL2, but it's definitely good enough for people to like it. it's worked well enough for me in the past, but the last time I used it, there were problems with mDNS and BPF that it just made more sense for me to boot into leenucks.

But you're definitely not crazy for liking it. And people should chill out instead of downvoting for someone who just says what works for them.

I haven't tried Win11 and probably won't unless my employer forces me to. But if Win11+WSL2 works for you, more power to you.

osigurdson• 1 year ago

It is really good but honestly would prefer something a little more like:

- Linux that works great on a laptop / does the right thing when closing the lid - Linux that doesn't have worse battery life than Windows / macOS - Seamlessly runs Windows when you need to run something (e.g. click on Excel) - Isn't necessarily free (prefer quality over low price in this situation)

Windows of course has many of these traits and WSL is a pretty good compromise, but I would prefer to boot into Linux and use Windows only when necessary (since my need for it is less common).

charlieok• 1 year ago

I like that wsl is a thing when I'm on a windows machine, but it can also serve as a reminder of the often unnecessary frictions that exist between operating systems.

When the answer to a "how do I do X on windows" question begins with "start WSL", my primary reaction is frustration because they're basically saying "there's not a good way to do that on Windows, so fire up a Linux VM".

Just to pick my most recent example, from today. I wanted to verify the signatures on some downloaded rpm files, and the rpm tools work on linux. I know, rpm files are native to a family of linux distros, so it's not surprising that the tools for retrieving and verifying their signatures don't work on windows but... it also seems reasonable to want a world where those tools can install and run on windows, straight from a PowerShell session, with no VM.

Multiply that by all the little utilities that that can't be deployed across multiple operating sytems, and it just seems like some incompatibility headaches are never really going to go away.

fsflover5• 1 year ago

Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24.

Sounds like you could benefit from Qubes OS, which runs everything in VMs with a great UX. Including Windows.

behnamoh2• 1 year ago

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

tgma19• 1 year 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?

[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.

frollogaston33• 1 year ago

I don't know about any of that, just that as a user, I cannot run Linux on my Mac easily.

bigyabai2• 1 year 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.

mschuster91• 1 year ago

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.

[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/08/22/linux-for-apple-s...

ActorNightly9• 1 year ago

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.

jeroenhd2• 1 year 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.

einpoklum4• 1 year ago

Obligatory: "Challenge accepted!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iOi_iPNC50

lenerdenator3• 1 year 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.

frollogaston33• 1 year 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. It's not a drop-in for bash. Yeah you can change it back to bash, but then any Mac-specific help/docs assume zsh because defaults matter. Pretty fundamental thing to have issues with.

trollied• 1 year ago

What? Apple made changes to actually help them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29591578

bigyabai2• 1 year ago

Apple implementing iBoot is table stakes. They should have gone the extra mile actually, and implimented UEFI the same way Intel did; but that would have made it too easy to support Apple Silicon on Linux. Sticking to their proprietary bootloader forces reverse-engineers to painstakingly guess at DeviceTree drivers until a bare-minimum boot environment is possible.

If Apple hadn't opened iBoot in some way then I don't know how they would handle a secure reinstall process. If that's "to actually help them" then they very clearly didn't try too hard. Without driver code or UEFI support they're basically telling the community to pound sand, and modern Asahi efforts reflect that.

int_19h15• 1 year ago

On the macOS side, https://github.com/lima-vm/lima is the closest equivalent to WSL.

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.

rfoo3• 1 year 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.

OsrsNeedsf2P2• 1 year 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

flykespice• 1 year ago

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

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

singularity2001• 1 year ago

couldn't they have saved millions of dollars if they open sourced it earlier?

pasc1878• 1 year 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.

jleyank3• 1 year 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.

wging2• 1 year ago

MIT: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/blob/master/LICENSE

jleyank3• 1 year ago

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?

mrpippy• 1 year 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?)

charcircuit2• 1 year ago

No, both are still fully supported despite what the numbering may suggest.

boxfire• 1 year 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

senlala• 1 year ago

I'm very interested in knowing about your hacks! Would you mind sharing a bit more?

I'm also still using WSL1 and was hoping to be able to fix some of it's quirks :(

ryanhecht• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

OsrsNeedsf2P2• 1 year ago

Ok but MacOS is the worst of the 3 worlds. It can't run Linux or Windows apps

mikojan• 1 year ago

When you use WSL2, Windows itself is running virtualized on Hyper-V.

micw• 1 year ago

At least with VirtualBox and VMWare it is possible (not actually WSL but still).

Matl• 1 year 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.

rsynnott• 1 year ago

There's history here; there was an old thing called Windows Subsystem for Unix. Again, not what you'd expect from the name.

naikrovek7• 1 year ago

That was ”Windows Services for Unix”.

littlestymaar5• 1 year ago

It's a “Windows subsystem” for running Linux, but yeah the naming is pretty confusing.

avestura2• 1 year ago

Microsoft can't name a project leading with a trademark (Linux <something>), hence why it's called WSL.

Source: https://x.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610?s=19

philshem• 1 year ago

If you want to see the thread

https://xcancel.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610?s...

koakuma-chan• 1 year ago

GNU/Linux Subsystem for Windows

whoopdedo• 1 year 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.

ryao5• 1 year 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)”.

einpoklum4• 1 year ago

They should not presume to trademark something called a "Linux subsystem for Windows".

yoda222• 1 year ago

Subsystem Linux for Windows.

zamadatix5• 1 year ago

Windows' Subsystem for Linux :p.

naikrovek7• 1 year ago

The name is good if you understand what the subsystems are on Windows and how they work.

The NT kernel was always designed to host multiple subsystems. This Windows subsystem is for Linux. And that’s why it’s named like that.

nkydr0i0• 1 year ago

They tend to name things like that. For example in Azure you have "Azure Database for MySQL" and "Azure Cache for Redis"

apatheticonion2• 1 year ago

I agree that it's a dumb name but I actually think it's an apt description of what it is.

We run Linux on top of Windows. Windows is the subsystem for the Linux environment.

Still a dumb name.

abhisek• 1 year 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.

Night_Thastus• 1 year 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• 1 year 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.

burnte3• 1 year ago

The beta version actually updates more often than the release group. I use the beta so I get the updates sooner. It's been rock stable for me for YEARS.

CoolCold16• 1 year ago

I've tried WSLg for couple of times and all I run was something like xclock to ensure it works. I literally have 0 interest in running GUI Linux apps, so for me it all smooth sailing.

wvenable3• 1 year ago

I use it all the time but then I've never run a GUI application in it.

90s_dev2• 1 year ago

I'm still waiting for the day I need to install WSL, but so far git-bash is working just fine.

odie55332• 1 year ago

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

Brian_K_White2• 1 year ago

I still can't use usb-serial devices from within wsl2.

It was possible under wsl1, but wsl1 is an entirely different thing.

"never had any issues" is a meaningless statement. I "never had any issues" with infinite things I never tried to do in the first place.

Kuraj• 1 year ago

These days I don't even use a WSL distro directly, but I do use it as a backend for my Docker Desktop.

lenerdenator3• 1 year ago

Killer.

Now do NT.

p_ing9• 1 year ago

Too much 3rd party code in Windows to make that feasible.

lenerdenator3• 1 year ago

Buy them.

hugo1789• 1 year ago

Nice but where is the code? Is it just very, very incomplete or a joke?

muststopmyths2• 1 year ago

They do this sometimes during their Build conference. The code will probably show up after a keynote or session announcing it at the conference

muststopmyths2• 1 year ago

actually it's there. the link from the blog just points to a branch without the code

liendolucas• 1 year 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.

Animats2• 1 year ago

That's sort of what Wine does. That's how I run the occasional Windows program on Linux.

ActorNightly9• 1 year 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.

lostmsu• 1 year ago

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

NelsonMinar2• 1 year 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.

ghotli• 1 year 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

rounce4• 1 year ago

IMO this is the real blindspot: it's VR support, not Photoshop, or MS Office, or CAD tools (all of which I've got running fine via Wine). I'm guessing the intersection between VR users and Wine users must be really small and I suspect it's because of this that support is so lacking.

SunlitCat• 1 year ago

And even more worse with the Vive Pro 2 by HTC which needs a special Windows tool to use all it capabilities...

I would have switched over to Linux if it wouldn't be because of that one.

int_19h15• 1 year ago

If you're in a corporate environment, you often don't have a choice wrt Windows as your primary desktop OS.

kobalsky• 1 year 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.

arcastroe2• 1 year 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.

prettymuchnoone• 1 year ago

as for 1. if you ever have some free time on your hands, and want to take declarative configs to the next level, you can check out Impermanence for NixOS: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37218289

and 2...hm I know i've done Miracast before with GNOME Network Displays https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.NetworkDisplays

kasabali2• 1 year ago

(1) can be done with little to no configuration on default live images of like, every single distribution.

nxobject• 1 year ago

I always have Windows on Parallels on a Mac, too – unfortunately VirtualBox for arm64 Mac isn't quite there yet.

stephenr5• 1 year 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.

mdaniel2• 1 year ago

I think the biggest problem with VirtualBox on arm64 is that it is only for arm64 guests, unlike the qemu-system-x86_64 which colima et al use and allow booting up "normal" guest OSes

Also, VBoxManage was created by someone who firmly subscribes to the "git UX is awesome" school of thought :-(

RKFADU_UOFCCLEL2• 1 year 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).

password4321• 1 year ago

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.

MrPowerGamerBR3• 1 year 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".

teaearlgraycold• 1 year ago

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

hermitShell2• 1 year 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

frollogaston33• 1 year ago

People throw around the ideas of VMs or WINE like it's trivial. It's really not.

vvpan2• 1 year ago

Tried doing 3d modeling in a Windows VM - couldn't get acceleration to pass through.

zozbot234• 1 year ago

There is ongoing work on supporting paravirtualized GPUs with Windows drivers. This is not hardware-based GPU virtualization, and it supports Vulkan in the host and guest not just OpenGL; the host-based side is already supported within QEMU.

leni536• 1 year ago

Anything GPU related isn't great in WSL either.

robotnikman• 1 year ago

I'm hoping that IOMMU capability will be included in consumer graphics cards soon, which would help with this iirc there are rumors of upcoming Intel and AMD cards including it

ThatMedicIsASpy• 1 year ago

AMD has SRIOV on the roadmap for consumer gpus which hopefully makes things easier in the future for gpu accelerated VMs

https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GIM-Open-Source

Windows can run GPU accelerated Windows VMs with paravirtualization. But I have no use case for two Windows machines sharing a GPU.

Andrex• 1 year ago

I completely gave up on WINEing Adobe software but I didn't know about the second GPU thing, I thought it was totally impossible. Thank you!

I will do anything to avoid Windows but I miss Premiere.

Aurornis• 1 year 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.

zargon2• 1 year ago

I prefer to just have two (or three) GPUs than have Windows as the base OS.

luyu_wu• 1 year 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!

einpoklum4• 1 year ago

who need to use Windows for productivity apps and those who don’t.

LibreOffice has gotten quite good over the years, including decent(ish) MSO file format interoperability, and Thunderbird seems to support Exchange Server.

So, I suppose things like MS Project or MS Visio many not have decent counterparts (maybe, I don't really know), but otherwise, it seems like you don't need-need to use Windows for productivity apps.

sureglymop4• 1 year ago

Windows in a vm with a passed through GPU is really nice. Although still pretty niche these days it's easier than it used to be. It also works with a single GPU, e.g. on a laptop.

I personally have a desktop PC with an AMD GPU and then another Nvidia GPU that I pass through to windows hosts. I have a hook that changes the display output and switches the inputs using evdev.

rfoo3• 1 year 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.

KZerda• 1 year 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.

herbst4• 1 year ago

I love how subjective these things are.

I hate the half assed commercialised approached for software on both Mac and Windows where you download 50mb+ of electron bullshit for a bash 2 liner with default tools on Linux.

Mostly for windows but when I installed 5+ tools from untrustworthy websites (which they all look like if you aren't used to that) it feels like my computer is likely forever busted with some scamware. But there is no dd, no proper editor, no removing adware and "news" without these tools.

On windows if you want to configure something it's like going into a computer museum where you start in the metro area and end up in UIs straight out of win 95. That's better on Mac, but the UI is depressing (in my opinion) and I always had the feeling my Mac wouldn't need to run that hot if it wouldn't draw shadows, mirroring and weird effects I haven't asked for.

That said. Linux is not a panacea

montymintypie• 1 year ago

It's funny, more than any productivity app (though I do have a few of those), the Directory Opus [1] Explorer replacement is one of the things that I've yet to find a viable replacement for on both Linux and macOS. Unparalleled customisability, scriptable actions, outstanding performance (thumbnailing 10,000 images in a folder never causes slowdown), incredible search and "huh, why doesn't anyone else do this" features everywhere. I use my file explorer a lot so the friction is felt daily.

I'm using Forklift [2] on my mac at work, but it's a pale imitation of what a file explorer can truly be. I did some searching for Linux but it's all pretty pedestrian.

[1] https://www.gpsoft.com.au/ [2]: https://binarynights.com/

nlawalker• 1 year ago

I feel like every conversation about this is the bell curve/midwit meme[1], with the middle being the argument over “Windows VM on Linux” and “Linux VM on windows”, and the edges being “own multiple computers”.

[1] https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/iq-bell-curve-midwit

ho_schi• 1 year ago

Right! Use Linux, because it is your preference [1]. It doesn't cause harm (side-effects: incompatibility and vendor lock-in, due to mass-effect) to others.

We need to remember why Microsoft uses WSL. Microsoft wants to prevent users (i.e. developers) to migrate on Linux. It is the old approach Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish [2].

Monopolies are made by users and politics, because we don't consider vendor lock-in and mass-effect. I wish strong regulation for all information-technology. We saw the wonderful effects of regulation with AT&T {UNIX, C, Open-Source, Open-Documentation} and then a mistake was done. The company was split up, looking back a complete failure.

    [1] Means: It is a better operating-system and adapt to users needs. Either novice user or programmer.
    [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish

icemelt84• 1 year ago

You haven't used Photoshop for 15 years?

mosfets• 1 year ago

WSL is the main reason I switched from Mac/Linux to Windows two years ago. Excited to see this move!

misano• 1 year ago

so they gotch you

blindstitch• 1 year ago

I would love if the bug(s) with working on the windows filesystem from within wsl could now be fixed. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/discussions/9412#discussion...

1oooqooq3• 1 year ago

Microsoft too.

Animats2• 1 year ago

Does this mean Microsoft is abandoning it as end of life? It's hard to tell intent here.

gocsjess3• 1 year ago

Probably related to AI, given how closely integrated both WSL and AI is

footlose_3815• 1 year 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.

jjcm4• 1 year 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• 1 year ago

Just curious, which games gave you problems?

jjcm4• 1 year 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.

zamadatix5• 1 year 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

delduca2• 1 year ago

For me, Red Dead Redemption 1 via Proton does not work on Pop_OS + NVIDIA.

npteljes2• 1 year ago

For the curious, the protondb front page gives a pretty good overview of the state of Linux gaming:

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).

2OEH8eoCRo0• 1 year ago

Escape from Tarkov and GTA V (online).

falcojr• 1 year ago

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Anything "denied" won't work ever unless they change their minds. Anything "broken" is...well...broken.

neogodless2• 1 year ago

When I ran a two month experiment, Hogwart's Legacy and Anno 1800.

The former ran slowly at low settings, with the occasional complete single digit slowdown. On the same laptop in Windows 10, it ran medium settings and easily twice the frame rate, no issues.

The latter wouldn't connect to multiplayer, and would occasionally just crash out.

(Comment written from memory, but I enshrined my experiment here: https://retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm )

1oooqooq3• 1 year 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.

kmacdough• 1 year ago

For consumers. A load of professional software still exists only for Windows, particularly as you do more niche.

7bit• 1 year ago

For me it's Adobe Phuckushop. But yeah, always that one thing holding one back from swapping

mulmen• 1 year 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.

sertraline• 1 year 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.

seventhtiger2• 1 year 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.

ozgrakkurt4• 1 year ago

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

jasonm23• 1 year ago

Honestly accurate for a dev work machine.

For a gamer... still not quite, but very close.

For the corps ... it's a legacy issue, but that may slip away as a side effect of Trump destroying global soft power and making it a hard sell to remain on a US led platform, purely op sec concerns, the spyware issue will add more weight to that.

herbst4• 1 year ago

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

dabockster7• 1 year ago

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

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

throwaway148773• 1 year ago

Except if you're on Nvidia...

jjcm4• 1 year ago

Am currently on nvidia and have no issues with their proprietary drivers. While they aren't following the linux ethos, the software runs just fine.

spartanatreyu• 1 year ago

No.

Their GTX series cards all used proprietary blobs that required unmanageable device specific interfaces.

Starting from the RTX series cards, they still have proprietary blobs but instead of having device specific interfaces, they all use a shared public interface which makes compatibility and performance much better.

It's not across the board, but there are instances of gaming benchmarks showing more performance under linux than windows.

hypercube33• 1 year ago

WSL 1 was supposed to be like "Windows on NT" where it emulated the Linux kernal to the NT one. they skipped a ton of features then dumped the whole thing for a containerized virtual machine thing for version 2. Wish the NT one worked out but I get it being complicated.

snailscale• 1 year ago

For anyone curious (as I was) the basic difference is that WSL1 implemented the Linux syscall table directly whereas WSL2 actually runs Linux on top of some virtual drivers (hypervisor).

dbdoskey• 1 year ago

If the WSL 1 ended up working, it would have been one of the best historical coincidences in MS's history. A long forgotten feature in the NT kernel, unique to pretty much any other OS out there, used to push it's dominance in the 90's, is revived almost 30 years later, to fight for relevance with Unix based OS, once again. To quote Gorge Lucas, It's like poetry, it rhymes.

rcleveng3• 1 year ago

I know -- I was super excited to see WSL1 and wished it worked. NT when started was the OS/2 personality and back at that time was excited to see NT as the OS to end all OSes (by running them all as a personality).

But WSL2 is freaking incredible, I'm super excited to see this and just wish the rest of windows would move to a Linux kernel and support bash natively everywhere. I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine

pjc503• 1 year ago

The essential problem was that critical Windows APIs like CreateProcess and the NTFS file system were far too slow to be used in UNIX-like ways. If you tried to run git or build things in WSL1 - a key use case - it was way slower than doing so on native or VM Linux.

garylkz3• 1 year ago

Curious, if you don't mind answering, do you mainly uses Ubuntu or Nixos, and which one do you liked more ATM?

Regarding Steam, do you install it with distro provided or through Flatpak?

What is the spec of your machine that you do Linux gaming on? I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.

RussianCow• 1 year ago

I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.

I don't mean to dismiss your comment at all, but I'm surprised that such a low overhead would be the primary reason holding you back from switching. The difference between, say, 100 FPS and 91 FPS seems so negligible in my mind that it would be pretty near the bottom on the list of reasons not to switch to Linux.

rcleveng3• 1 year ago

I try to use debian, since it's a bit older (read: stable) than ubunutu and I've found that if something compiles and runs on debian it'll run on ubunutu and others but the inverse is not true.

cirelli94• 1 year ago

It looks like nvidia suffer more of the difference between windows/proton, while AMD difference it's towards zero.

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LI-1Zdk-Ys

graynk5• 1 year ago

I quite like CachyOS currently. I see no performance penalty (but I also have only a 75 Hz monitor and I haven't tested VR games all that much yet). Currently I'm playing through Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 on ultra with no issues.

CachyOS provides packages for Steam, handles nvidia drivers for you and they even provide their own builds of proton and wine, allegedly compiled with flags for modern hardware + some patches (not sure how much they help though - before Cachy I used Pop OS and also had no problems with performance).

Cachy is based on Arch though, so unless you're ready for your system to potentially break with an update - maybe used something more stable (again - I quite liked Pop OS, it was extremely stable for me)

gloosx9• 1 year ago

I truly believe if AAA titles would not release for windows exclusively no-one would have a good reason to use windows really besides inertia.

0xEF• 1 year ago

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

It gets worse. When we go to the manufacturing side of the building, there's a high chance they're still using Windows 7. Yeah, still! And IT or Controls has no idea what to do with it since, well, it's still working. Is it secure? They don't know because the team is comprised of kids who memorized the CompTIA exams and use Windows 11 at home.

Trying to get the business world to switch to Linux with all that in mind is an impossible task. It's the same as asking an American city to rip out all its old infrastructure at once and replace it with new instead of patching the old. The cost and knowledge required for such a task is unthinkable, to them. Believe me, I've tried.

Microsoft was quite brilliant in the way that they shoehorned their way into the fabric of the way we do business, not just in the US, but on a global scale.

Peanuts99• 1 year ago

I think you're underestimating how many businesses rely on Excel alone.

b3lvedere2• 1 year ago

The market is getting more diverse (mobile, steam deck alikes, laptops, consoles, etc), but i guess if you want to quickly earn the most money on your (huge) development investment, you better try and take the biggest piece of the pie first.

Personally i don't really believe in AAA (or UbiSoft's AAAA) titles that much anymore. Strange exclusivity for some console or device may bring some money early on, but i have plenty games in my Steam libary that could run perfectly under many platforms. And most AAA games heavily drop in price after a few months, Nintendo being the sole exception.

icemelt84• 1 year ago

Adobe Photoshop? Microsoft Excel?

ErrorNoBrain• 1 year ago

You underestimate how many companies use microsoft business central for various things...

But i also believe there's a lot of special software for laboratories etc, that run on windows only

UltraSane• 1 year ago

So many companies use windows server because they don't have anyone who knows Linux.

icemelt84• 1 year ago

I'll take Linux seriously when I can play Starcraft 2 and Fortnite on it

neogodless2• 1 year ago

StarCraft 2 definitely works on Linux, with a relatively simple act of adding it to Steam as a non-Steam title, and then letting the Proton layer do its thing.

And this is coming from a very Linux-hesitant newbie who mostly uses Windows.

I have not tried Fortnite.

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcr...

graynk5• 1 year ago

Starcraft 2 worked well for years.

Fortnite doesn't work because Sim Tweeney doesn't want it work: both BattleEye and EAC can work on Linux, Epic just chooses not to enable that functionality.

steve-chavez• 1 year ago

I played starcraft2 13 years ago on Linux, the wizard installer worked just fine.

meandmycode• 1 year ago

I think actually Linux has come a long way and recently I actually dual booted fedora with windows and fedora was easily my main choice unless gaming.. unfortunately when updating from 41 to 42 there was clearly an issue with the GPU not having drivers for acceleration or cuda, updating the drivers bricked the OS immediately and while I could recover, I spent hours and hours on this and could never get the GPU drivers installed again without bricking it.. ultimately I realised how at mercy of drivers Linux is. I hope though that in the next few years things improve as windows is dismal to work on these days

godzillabrennus• 1 year ago

I just had a problem with Windows and Nvidia drivers/CUDA not working properly on a two year old Windows 11 install. I had to reinstall the operating system after days of troubleshooting and attempting different things to get it operational again. It can happen on there as well.

gosub100• 1 year ago

I was excited about it too, even just having a tmux and using it for grepping and file copying. Then after a year or two on windows, my computer started slowing down. Tale as old as time. I'm not surprised, and some of the issues aren't ms' fault, but nevertheless I see CPU spikes to 100 with several browser tabs open, or the drawing tablet driver goes to 100% cpu usage even though I never even use it. The UX shouldn't degrade like a mechanical system.

prmoustache• 1 year ago

Why would anyone run malwares on purpose on the same machine they use to do development/work?

open-paren• 1 year ago

What distros are y'all using on WSL?

gocsjess3• 1 year ago

debian bookworm; just to get my work, and hobbies done

srfn• 1 year ago

NixOS! [1] You can keep the entrie system config in a single git repo. For me, it's far easier to work with, than, let's say, Ubuntu. But beware, it has steep learning curve.

[1] https://github.com/nix-community/NixOS-WSL

xyst• 1 year ago

Internal WSL maintainers must have been hit particularly hard by the quarterly layoffs.

sneak2• 1 year 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.

Vaslo2• 1 year ago

If you can do it better and use a very permissive open license, no one is stopping you.

shutterstock• 1 year ago

WSL caused me to just install Ubuntu right over my Windows installation. That is how useful it was for me.

abshkbh• 1 year ago

Amazing, I briefly worked on WSL v1 in 2015! 10 years and going

nsxwolf• 1 year 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?

dbacar2• 1 year 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.

bni• 1 year ago

Every time I read this product name I think that the words come in the wrong order.

Zambyte• 1 year ago

(Windows subsystem) for (Linux)

jay_kyburz• 1 year ago

A Windows Subsystem for running Linux

coldblues• 1 year 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.

jwnin2• 1 year ago

See if the trick in this article helps out: https://pomeroy.me/2023/12/how-i-fixed-wsl-2-filesystem-perf...

attah_• 1 year ago

Still named backwards.

stopthe2• 1 year 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.

rizalp5• 1 year ago

For me, I just accepts the quirks and move on with other things in life.

wvenable3• 1 year ago

The worlds don't really cross. If I'm using WSL to develop software using a Linux toolchain I'm not using any other Windows tools, other than VS Code, in that environment. I could but I just don't find the need. I could literally be remoted into an actual physical Linux box and the experience would be nearly identical.

Occasionally I'll use File Explorer to manage my Linux file system or Linux tools on the Windows file system but really not the degree in which any quirks would be an issue.

CoolCold16• 1 year ago

may be you missed the point - in WSL, you are with Linux/unix based env. So your Vim or other editors and tools just work like in regular Linux, Windows part until needed can be invisible and uninvolved.

Other tools like VSCode IDE, has special handling (extension) to work _inside_ WSL and only keep GUI frontend on the Windows side (very close to how it works over SSH).

On the other hand, I quite often use "explorer.exe ." inside WSL to open File Explorer and jiggle around with files downloaded/created/modified (say with sed) in WSL and it works fine too.

Or use MarkText markdown editor on folder inside WSL being some git repo and I'm adding docs/instructions there.

stopthe2• 1 year ago

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

gocsjess3• 1 year ago

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.

exactly why I use WSL, lf-only line endings, UTF-8, everything a basic debian bookworm iso can provide, plus docker with GPU Access

fortran77• 1 year ago

How do you deal with the mac 0x0A line endings?

dataflow4• 1 year 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?

rizalp5• 1 year ago

It's because WSL2 is using HyperV behind the scenes, and HyperV is a Type 1 (Native Hypervisor), running directly on top of hardware.

When you activate it, it also makes you host windows OS virtualized as well, albeit with native access for some components like GPU etc.

That's why all other Windows Hypervisor (Virtualbox, VMWare Workstation) will experience one issue or another when WSL2 is activated, because more abstraction is happening and more things could go wrong.

dataflow4• 1 year ago

That makes no sense. Are you actually familiar with the technical issues or are you hand-waving? WSL2 itself is a Linux VM running in top of Hyper-V. Heck, as far as I know other Hyper-V VMs run fine alongside WSL2 too. Why can't a VirtualBox Linux VM do the same?

badmonster• 1 year ago

big news

throwaway48476• 1 year ago

The title is misleading and ambiguous as to whether this applies to WSL1 or WSL2.

est• 1 year ago

still yet to find out.

nottorp3• 1 year ago

That page has no mention of the actual license though.

Totoradio• 1 year ago

MIT License: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/blob/master/LICENSE

nottorp3• 1 year ago

Are they ashamed, if they didn't mention it in the announcement?

asim• 1 year 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.

loloquwowndueo3• 1 year 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.

frollogaston33• 1 year 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.

formerly_proven2• 1 year ago

Yep, see VS Code etc.

This whole thread is basically frogs praising the cozy warming water in the pot.

Boogie_Man• 1 year ago

Why isn't it "Linux Subsystem for Windows" as it is a Linux subsystem running on a Windows os?

CivBase• 1 year ago

It's hard to argue it's even a subsystem anymore. More like "Integrated Linux VM for Windows".

aaronbaugher2• 1 year 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• 1 year 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• 1 year 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".

FateOfNations• 1 year ago

A "Windows Subsystem" is a concept that dates back to the original Windows NT line of operating systems. Historically, there've been a number of supported "Windows Subsystems", essentially APIs for the kernel. In Windows NT 3.1, there were multiple subsystems: Win32, POSIX, and OS/2, plus a separate one specifically for security.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

While WSL2 isn't implemented as an architectural sub-system (it uses a VM instead), WSL1 was far closer to the original architecture, providing a Linux compatible API for the Windows kernel.

jve• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

WSL is an easy compliance trick when you want to run your own Postfix/Dovecot installation.

jwnin2• 1 year ago

Depends. How do you feel about an OS running on your network that's not subject to your standard OS hardening, mandatory agent stack?

Joel_Mckay2• 1 year ago

QEMU has win64 builds, and the guest OS can access SAMBA/NFS/SSHFS host shares. Getting guest OS hypervisor to work is soft locked on Home licensed windows, so options are often limited to Win guests on linux hosts.

In general, the utilities on posix systems heavily rely on a standardized permission and path structure fundamentally different than windows registry paradigms.

Even something as simple as curl... while incredibly useful on windows, also opens a scripting ecosystem that side-channels Microsoft signing protections etc.

Linux VM disk image files can be very small (some are just a few MB), simply copied to a physical drive/host later given there is no DRM/Key locks, and avoids mixing utf8 with windows codepage.

Mixing ecosystems creates a Polyglot, and that is going to have problems for sure... given neither ecosystems wants the cost of supporting the other.

Best method, use cross platform application ports supported on every platform. In my opinion, Windows should only be used for games and industry specific commercial software support. For robust system privacy there are better options now, that aren't booby-trapped for new users. =3

pxc5• 1 year ago

It's not about bugs, it's that users can do basically whatever they want in their WSL2 guest VMs and most endpoint security software has little control over it or visibility into it. It's a natural little pocket of freedom for users, which is great but undermines efforts to lock those systems down (for good or ill).

wiseowise• 1 year ago

And written in C#!

Right?

Right?…

qwertox3• 1 year 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.

applied_heat• 1 year ago

What hypervisor are you using for the windows vms?

qwertox3• 1 year ago

QEMU/KVM.

anticensor• 1 year ago

WSL1 is the good one, WSL2 just runs Linux simultaneously alongside Windows.

mdtrooper• 1 year ago

Is it a good news for Wine or ReactOS (Can they learn something to improve their projects)?

einpoklum4• 1 year ago

Probably not. WSL2 is a kind of a VM, so it should be bypassing the Windows API.

okanat12• 1 year ago

No. WSL2 is a Linux VM. It doesn't expose Windows API internals or implementation details. It uses normal, already well-documented public ones. Wine and ReactOS can already use the publicly available documentation and they are still behind on many such APIs' implementation. Windows is a big OS. It takes serious man power to implement many things.

mlhpdx• 1 year ago

Not only open source, but extremely well documented.

sigmonsays• 1 year ago

what if this really is a long haul embrace, extend, extinguish. Guess time will tell

Dwedit2• 1 year 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.

varbhat• 1 year ago

Cool! Now make Microsoft Office Open Source! I understand you won't,so atleast release the Linux versions of them!

aaronbaugher2• 1 year ago

I remember way, way back when Internet Explorer first came out, there was talk of a Unix/Linux version coming soon.

wvenable3• 1 year ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

1997 to 2001 (IE 4 to IE 5 SP1)

rizalp5• 1 year ago

That would not be a sound strategy. Microsoft choose to make a OS a commodity, but not services and platforms, as part of the strategy to commoditize the complements like developer tooling

Commoditize your complements: https://gwern.net/complement

everdrive• 1 year ago

I'm not be sarcastic or funny when I ask this. Why isn't this called the Linux subsystem for Windows? It seems like a Linux subsystem running on Windows. If it were the other way around, (ie, a Windows Subsystem for Linux) I'd think that Linux would be the primary OS, and something like WINE would the subsystem.

dazhbog• 1 year ago

Management or marketing needs "Windows" to be the first word when people write articles about it..

burnte3• 1 year ago

Trademark law. They'd have to license the TM to have a product name that leads with another entity's trademark.

alisonatwork2• 1 year ago

I think it's supposed to be read as "the Windows subsystem for [running] Linux [applications]". Back in the old days there used be a thing called Services For UNIX (SFU), which was a bunch of Windows tools and services that provided UNIX-like behavior. Then came Subsystem for UNIX Applications (SUA). And now it's WSL.

palata4• 1 year ago

Not a Windows user, but I think WSL is great. I see a lot of Windows user criticising Linux for... essentially not looking like Windows. "Linux Desktop will never reach mass adoption unless it [something that boils down to 'looks more like Windows']".

The thing is: I consider myself a real Linux user, and I don't want it to look like Windows. And I hate it when Windows people try to push Linux there, just because they want a free-with-no-ads version of Windows.

In that sense, if WSL can keep Windows users on Windows such that they don't come and bother me on Linux, I'm happy :-).

tryauuum• 1 year ago

Not a Windows user, but I hate WSL. Looks like microsoft realizing they will lose a generation of developers to linux so they implemented linux inside their OS. Now people won't see the joys of recompiling kernel :)

CoolCold16• 1 year ago

I've stopped seeing joys of recompiling kernel [and consequence reboots of servers which easily could take 10 minutes and that's without IPMI /KVM] since 2009-2010

naikrovek7• 1 year ago

WSL isn’t Linux implemented in Windows. WSL 1 was, but it is not the good version of WSL that most use.

WSL 2 is a special purpose VM which has ties into Windows in a few key ways to make interoperability easier. You can run a program on Windows and pipe its output to a Linux program for example. Windows and WSL can trade system RAM back and forth as needed. Networking between the two is very smooth.

You can recompile the kernel for WSL all you want, and many do. Microsoft make their changes public as required by the GPL. You can use your own kernel without anything from Microsoft. You can easily create your own WSL distributions, customized to your hearts content.

It’s more than the sum of its parts, really. Feels that way to me, anyway.

froh• 1 year ago

great news :-)

now how about mainlining the kernel patches?

so we get a chance of a more current and Linux distro provided wsl kernel :-)? https://github.com/issues/created?issue=microsoft%7CWSL%7C11...

OhMeadhbh2• 1 year ago

Cool! This means I can fix mDNS now!

labadal• 1 year ago

I never even realized that it was tivo-ized. Probably because I haven't been on windows since before WSL became a thing.

ewy1• 1 year ago

While I had to, I enjoyed using WSL1 on Windows. It was disappointing to find WSL2 has no user upside; it just discards the benefits of WSL1 in favor of the simpler implementation.

Shame for all of the people who worked hard on WSL1 only to be virtualized into nonexistence.

broknbottle• 1 year ago

Podman offers the same experience natively but also supports VMs via podman machine.

Vaslo2• 1 year ago

WSL is amazing if you work for a non tech company that is a windows house but want to do development in Linux. It’s seamless (at least to my middle ability) for VS Code.

rnd0• 1 year ago

Lxcore.sys, the kernel side driver that powers WSL 1

This isn't open source, and considering that this is probably what ties into/sets up WSL as a windows subsystem that's a bit of a bummer.

The rest is just a Virtual Machine for the most part, isn't it?

your_challenger2• 1 year ago

WSL is a landmine of bad design. I lost all my data once, and that incident made me switch to a Mac.

Here's how you can lose all your data - and Microsoft engineers won’t care: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8992 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9830 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9049#issuecomment-26...

dbacar2• 1 year ago

Mac IS the Sotate of the Art at the developer experience. The only annoyance was the virtualisation on Arm but having UTM/Multipass/Virttualbox now, it is the best. If you are up to too many containers, a linux box would be more preferable.

pxc5• 1 year ago

I've hit real data loss bugs in WSL, as well— files disappearing, sometimes even rendering the WSL guest unbootable.

wbkang• 1 year ago

I read your issue, and it's not so different from `sudo rm -rf /` as opposed to an actual design flaw.

your_challenger2• 1 year ago

`sudo rm -rf /` requires you to be a superuser or provide a password, whereas running `wsl --unregister` does not require elevated privileges.

tonyhart72• 1 year ago

why is not called Linux subsystem for windows??? or its just programmer bad naming things

not_a_bot_4sho• 1 year ago

It's one of those things that make sense if you understand the details.

Windows NT itself has had an architecture supporting environment subsystems for things like Win32, POSIX, OS/2 for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT for more details. Later, it made it relatively easy to host Linux and Android too.

You can imagine they commonly called these things "subsystem for XYZ". So "Windows subsystem for Linux" made sense for those in the know.

Does sound weird outside of the world of NT though

TiredOfLife2• 1 year ago

It's just HN commenters not knowing how to read

tonyhart72• 1 year ago

https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcREVRSJ...

karunamurti2• 1 year ago

WSL is ok, I can run drop down terminal quickly to run any command and VS Code is well integrated with it. Too bad it's very slow.

roundup• 1 year ago

Is there fuzzing documentation?

udev40963• 1 year ago

I still can't believe how people use windows as their main system with all the extremely invasive telemetry and bogus "AI" features that hogs a LOT of resources at idle

grishka• 1 year ago

Some people don't know that computers can be fast. Others modify their system to remove/neutralize all this crap. There are even tools to automate that.

ruszki• 1 year ago

It’s not even that difficult to manually remove these from Windows. It’s like a handful of configs. It’s way easier to do that than make (probably) any Linux distro to work with my current and previous setups. Which btw I could never achieve even with considerable amount of tinkering.

udev40963• 1 year ago

"Some people are just stupid"

guardian5x• 1 year ago

And yet games run pretty fast on Windows.

Mashimo4• 1 year ago

What AI features hogs a lot of resources on windows?

gowthamgts12• 1 year ago

i use it only for gaming. no developer i know personally uses windows. either they are on mac or linux.

misja111• 1 year ago

I am forced to use Windows at work. Surprisingly many large enterprises use Windows, mostly because of their dependency on Microsoft Office and Exchange. I'm really happy that WSL exists so I have to deal as little with Windows as possible.

At home I still need to have a native Windows laptop because of one application that I use a lot (a backgammon analyser) that runs natively on Windows and is heavily cpu driven. I could run it in a VM but the performance penalty is just too heavy.

TrackerFF• 1 year ago

I mainly use a computer for:

- Work (heavy usage of Microsoft office apps)

- Audio / recording studio

- Some gaming

- Software development

Unfortunately for me, that's three uses where Windows excels, versus one for Linux.

k8sToGo• 1 year ago

Three out of four would also work on a Mac though

designerarvid• 1 year ago

Few people know what Linux is. Most only know that there are "macs" and "pc" and haven't used a personal computer privately at all since they got their first ipad in 2016.

LikelyLiar• 1 year ago

I play video games that require an anti-cheat, so there's that. But honestly, it's fairly easy to deal with that. You can use the Windows IoT LTSC version and use one of those trusted debloaters. I haven't seen any AI features or bloat in a very long time.

I am not that proficient, I tried it three times, first hurdle is trying to find a distro, making all that research about which ones have more pre-configuration and which ones would be less buggy for your hardware can be a pain.

The thing that attracted me to Linux is the file system and customization. I just wanted to daily drive it, not really for any work. But bugs are just a reality using most DEs available.

In my case once, it even was related to performance, I had to stay the whole day trying to find out why Kubuntu was slower than Windows on my laptop, ended up just being one line in some config file that forced battery-saving performance, I failed to find the post online after encountering the same issue months later after reinstalling the system.

Believe it or not, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, I just realized I use Windows more and more in my dual boot system, so I gave up on using Linux after that.

spixy• 1 year ago

Because 90% of software run only on Windows.

As a software dev I understand that having telemetry is a good thing. I dont believe it is "extremely invasive".

And I have no idea what AI features you mean (at least on Win10).

udev40963• 1 year ago

It is definitely in win11. Might be less on win10. Maybe try using something like simplewall [0], which shows prompts for every network request that phones home

[0] https://github.com/henrypp/simplewall

tuukkao• 1 year ago

WSL 2 is one of the biggest reasons I'm able to be productive as a blind software developer. With it I'm able to enjoy the best desktop screen reader accessibility (Windows and NVDA) as well as the best developer tools (Linux). I hate Microsoft's AI and ads force-feeding as much as anyone else but trust me, you'd do the same if you were in my shoes. Screen reader accessibility on Mac Os is stagnating even faster than the os itself and even though Linux / Gnome accessibility is being worked on, it's still ready only for enthusiasts who don't mind their systems being in a constant state of somewhat broken, as illustrated by this series of blog posts from just a few weeks ago: https://fireborn.mataroa.blog/blog/i-want-to-love-linux-it-d...

craigaloewen• 1 year ago

This is so awesome to hear!!

hodgesrm• 1 year ago

Thanks for pointing this out. I'm not visually impaired but even so the graphics and presentation features on Windows seem noticeably better than the competition.

protocolture2• 1 year ago

Screen reader accessibility on Mac Os is stagnating

Apocryphally, a lot of this was apparently developed at the direct insistence of Steve Jobs who had some run ins with very angry visually impaired people who struggled to use the early iphone/ipad.

That said, my source for this is one of the men who claims to have spoken to Mr Jobs personally, a visually impaired man who had lied to me on several fronts, and was extremely abusive. However I couldn't find anyone inside apple management or legal who would deny his claim. And he seemed to have been set the expectation that he could call the apple CEO at any time.

pawanjswal• 1 year ago

WSL going open source is a huge win for devs. Can’t wait to see what the community builds with it!

nar001• 1 year ago

I hope they'll do WSA next!

atoav2• 1 year ago

WSL in combination with the enshittification of Windows was the thing that finally convinced me to switch from Windows as a main driver to Kubuntu/Linux.

KDE Plasma is IMO the best grapical desktop environment at the moment, including MacOS.

cranium• 1 year ago

And now for the reverse (Windows on Linux): https://github.com/winapps-org/winapps

dd_xplore2• 1 year ago

People just want to bash Windows left n right. But no other OS in history has been this mature with handling GUI snd and providing the flexibility, customisations etc.

Before I say anything, Windows 11 is bad.

I remember playing with Win98, XP , I would modify many many registry settings, mod binary files to do something with games, you could access all sorts of weird hardware which only had drivers for windows!

Windows 98-7 were best for learning stuff about computers (inner workings etc).

I remember, to remove viruses (XP)I was trying to hard delete system 32 folder, it deleted lots of files and it continued to run!

thrownaway561• 1 year ago

WSL along with VSCODE has been a godsend for Rails development.

hk1337• 1 year ago

I wonder if this is in any way connected to devcontainer becoming more prominent in Github and VSCode?

olav• 1 year ago

I'd rather stay in Linux and use Windows if I really must. Can we have an LSW, then?

jerryhomelab• 1 year ago

Like Wine?

stephenr5• 1 year ago

Virtual Machines exist.

rstuart4133• 1 year ago

    qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -smp cores=4 -drive file=windows.qcow2,index=0,format=qcow2,if=virtio -display gtk -usb -device qemu-xhci,id=xhci -device usb-tablet -m 8G -vga std Win10_1803_EnglishInternational_x64.iso -netdev user,id=net0,restrict=off,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:22 -device virtio-net,netdev=net0

tw1984• 1 year ago

WSL is a stupid idea. Microsoft should just stop developing and maintaining its windows kernel and built a windows compatibility layer on top of Linux.

calvinmorrison• 1 year ago

WSL is amazing. Nothing short of it. My laptop SSD controller died on a conference. I bought a 200 dollar netbook running windows, installed WSL, downloaded the MDADM packages, was about to mount the encrypted drive with cryptsetup, mount the ext4 partition, then chroot into it, then my home drive was like working on my old laptop.

I did this in about 20 minutes, with the help of chatgpt.

In the end I was able to keep working through the trip and provide some demos to clients which landed us some big deals.

Go WSL!

husamia• 1 year ago

Microsoft is always too little too late just in time to save the day!

apatheticonion2• 1 year ago

WSL1 got my hopes up that we were on the path to Windows supporting the Linux user space API but then it was cancelled and replaced with a virtual machine based solution that I didn't need WSL2 to implement myself (with more flexability and capabilities).

I'd much prefer a proper compatibility layer that converts Linux system calls to their equivilent Windows calls and those calls be exposed from the Windows kernel itself.

That way I could just run Linux applications, bash, zsh and development tools directly on top of Windows without needing any "remote development tools" in my IDE or whatever.

Something closer to MSYS2/git bash/busybox for win - but where tools can ignore their Windows specific stuff like the filepath seperator.

It's fine I guess

The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

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