When WSL2 first came out, some losers on /g/ were cheering that it would "make Linux obsolete". Four years later, I think it's safe to say they were kinda missing the point.
[Miracle of the word wide web meme template]
"Thanks to the miracle of windows subsystem for linux..."
"...I can use the Linux terminal from the comfort of windows"
[Computer monitor showing windows update screen]
"Marvelous"
I don't understand the pointless hate over wsl. Sure, it doesn't replace Linux. It also doesn't have to... Just having access to basic nix functionality from a windows desktop is still a useful feature. It makes stuff like putty mostly obsolete. It let's windows users unpack tarballs without 7zip. It let's developers play video games while "compiling". It's just an all-around convenient tool to have.
Maybe Microsoft wanted it to replace the Linux desktop, but since when has anyone really cared about what Microsoft wanted :P
Yeah, I don't see what the big deal is. I won't be switching from Windows anytime soon, for various reasons, but I very much appreciate being able to have access to a local linux environment without having to dual boot.
Yeah, I can't emphasize enough how it can't replace Linux. And it doesn't even always work that well for stuff that you'd expect to be able to work there.
I use Windows for my mostly-for-gaming desktop and because I'm very lazy with dual booting, I usually just use WSL if I wanna do some small thing. Or even some not so small thing. I tried to get stable diffusion working using it. I strongly dislike using the windows command line (I do all my professional dev on Linux and it's what I'm most comfortable with), so I tried to use the Linux instructions with WSL. Did not go well. Wasted more time than I should have trying to make it work before I just gave up on that idea.
Not the first time I hit some weird WSL incompatibility either. I really should know better.
I spend like 80% of my work day in WSL. Using a Linux image that 100% matches the production environment, docker and k8s integration, and using VScode easily with WSL.
The big thing that makes is work is all I need is a command line.
Same, I have completely integrate WSL into my workflow. I use devcontainers with VScode and docker in WSL directly skipping docker in windows. It's great
Yes, with WSL2, it's implemented as a VM on hyper-v. But, that should be treated as an implementation detail, it's a very light VM, compared to your usual linux VM. And you get the tight integration with the windows side of the machine for free, without fuss.
It's very cool that you can have a workflow that starts in powershell, then executes commands in the bash shell, and the results stream right into powershell.
Yep. When I last had a windows machine at work I used WSL2 and for my workflow at least, it worked just like WSL1. I do know a few things changed between 1 and 2, but I never encountered them.
While technically different (VM vs compatibility layer), WSL and Wine fill the same role. I have yet to see lots of people bashing Wine for being incomplete and imperfect.
Weird how tribal people are. Let people enjoy things for God's sake. I use all combinations of macOS, Windows, Fedora, Ubuntu (server + on WSL), Pop_OS!, and what not. Different horses for different courses, and I like each one of these in their ways they excel at.
People who get out, see the world, meet people from other places tend to be far less tribal. Early career, I could have easily been a paid Microsoft Evangelist (is that still a real job title?). Eventually I was forced to begrudgingly learn a whole bunch of other things, then I became obsessed with OSS, shunning my former tribe every chance I got. At some point I just stopped caring about everything. Language, tabs vs spaces, design patterns, IDE, frameworks, I just don't care any more. I still have my go-tos if I'm starting fresh but, if the direction of the wind changes, it doesn't bother me a bit.
I shit on windows because I have had terrible experiences with windows. I dual boot a hackintosh with win10 and win10 is more unstable despite using it less. I use linux on my laptop and headless stuff and the only problems I have are ones that I create.
it's fun to fling shit at the other side on the internet, regardless of what you truly think. has been for 30 years. how is that difficult to understand?
I used WSL extensively at a couple of previous jobs. Sometimes IT only gives you the choice of Windows or Mac. I'm quite happy to have a Linux machine at my current job, but WSL has gotten the job done for me when I lacked that option.
My company mandates Windows laptops but I mostly work with Linux VMs hosted on our servers. WSL2 and Visual Studio Code (with Remote SSH and WSL2 plug-ins) are the best things that happened to Windows in years. Without these tools I would simply be unable to work.
I work at Oracle and leverage WSL for for some things. It works.. but I wish I could just use Linux. WSL is full of gotchas and weird bugs. Performance is not good either.
WSL2 is essentially a VM, and doesn't seem to have any weird bugs or gotcha's anymore (at least for command line programs). I don't use it for work, but playing around with it as a hobby, it seems fairly solid.
I use WSL2. It has bugs. DNS stops working when you connect to a VPN, which I have to do every day for all of my work. To fix that you can either modify the resolv conf (which gets wiped out on every startup) and then chattr it to prevent it from being deleted (this still didn't quite work for me). Or you can install wsl-vpnkit and pipe all of your network traffic through another container.
I have been working in docker and rancher desktop, both of which have integrations with WSL but with other caviats and bugs. I basically have a bunch of very highly specific steps written up for other employees for "how to get this working with WSL" because it is so buggy.
I feel so vinticated reading somebody else going through the DNS hell WSL2+VPN DNS issues. It is a nightmare in professional environments and for the life of me I cannot get my resolv to stop reverting after a while. Thanks for the tip on wsl-vpnkit, much harder to convince VM teams to spin you up a remote dev environment than to just use WSL sometimes.
Tinkering around to get things working is a part of the authentic Linux experience. Performance is 95% to Ubuntu 20.0.4 so not sure what you mean by that. resolv.conf won't get wiped out if you put
[networking]
generateResolvConf = false
in your /etc/wsl.conf file.
A more modern solution is outlined here which you will want to adjust if you're using something other than Cisco.
I've been using Linux for 15 years. Tinkering with WSL is not as fruitful as tinkering with Linux.
The link you provided for DNS is exactly the solution I was describing in my original post. It never worked for me, though. We have a custom DNS setup in-house and simply setting the nameserver doesn't work. It is far too much of a hassle, so we just spin up wsl-vpnkit when we need network access.
Mac users and Linux native users don't have these issues and everything works out of the box.
The performance I get when compiling and running integration tests through Rancher desktop integration on WSL is abysmal. Taking 30+ minutes to complete whereas for other employees on Macs see things done in under 5 minutes. Not sure if there is a WSL specific firewall / networking issue or what. If you look up "WSL2 poor network performacne" you'll see dozens of open GitHub issues. It is very non-deterministic. Some days it runs great, other days it is terrible.
I assume I'll have a million of other replies coming along that link me to random benchmarks and articles about how great WSL2 is, but I'm telling you, I use it every single day at my job as a software engineer. It has problems. I'm grateful it exists and that I can hack it just enough to work (sometimes), but it is nothing like using Linux natively.
To be clear I wasn't trying to say WSL replaces Linux. Just trying to help with your issues. I use WSL on Windows but I still also use native Arch (btw).
My personal computer is Windows mainly because of gaming and game dev, but WSL means I don't have to dual boot to tinker on a web project or something. In a way, it killed the Linux desktop for me, but I still use Linux as much as ever. With Docker as well.
I feel WSL just gives enterprises an excuse not to let developers have pure Linux machines. After putting up with horrible and buggy WSL for years, managed to have my organisation bless running proper Linux on our machines. Bye Windows, hardly ever knew you.
90% of ICT techs would have to be fired if corporate switched to Linux. Any ops tech that knows Linux is in the bunkers babying the data center's servers, not caring for old laptops and abused browser machines.
I'm not saying Linux is superior to Windows, that would be a opinion. But for anyone outside of gamers (Steam Deck...) or business folks, it IS the better option. The issue is Dell isn't going to ship Ubuntu by default, for example.
It's all subsidiaries, all the way down. FOSS just cannot throw their weight around like M$.
From what I can tell these days Microsoft only wants to compete with services not so much software these days. The operating system to them is just a tool to sell ads and to get you places. They haven't cared about power users for the last 8 years.
They were really trying to pander to developers back then... What shows it best is their ad for windows terminal that I swear has more production value than most of Nike's advertisements. You know you're desperate when you go this hard on advertising a bloody terminal
Being very familiar with bash/zsh etc, and somewhat forced to use Windows, I've tried to learn use PowerShell. My impression is basically, what? Why would I do this? The design is intriguing but the verbosity is awful.
But that ad is ridiculous, because it shows absolutely nothing of value.
I think I disagree with you here. The ad shows:
Ligature support
Themeing
Integration with WSL
that Windows Terminal is open source ("Check out our github!" at 0:21)
Hyperlink support
Unicode support (implied by the emoji)
Some sort of package manager specifically for Windows Terminal extensions? (0:20)
Which are all features that could conceivably be valued by developers. At the very least it gets across the point that "Yeah, CMD is shit, but fear not! Now there's a first-party terminal that doesn't suck!". There's no denying that all of this is presented in an "emotion-based" format as you put it, but I would argue that it's a good balance between informative and entertaining. Heck, I much prefer it to the ads you get nowadays on youtube where you can't even tell what they hell they're trying to sell to you.
the worst thing about windows is that you can't natively change the window manager or desktop environment. that is so backwards. they even removed the ability to move the taskbar wherever you want. this is so weird.
They also removed the ability to disable window stacking in the enterprise version. When I got Win 11 for my home pc I use it just to force myself to get it instinctively.
I think most actual Linux users saw this as expanded access to the Linux environment, and easier ways for Windows users to dip their toes in. That was the feel i got from the general community at the time.
Combines the power of a really half-arsed Linux distro with the pure speed of the Windows file system.
I mean, it's slightly better than nothing, but installing a real Linux distro on Windows through eg. VirtualBox absolutely fucks it into the bin. I don't see who WSL is for. People in really locked-down corporate environments?
I use it a lot - I use my main rig for gaming and general stuff, but also need to be able to program things; rather than dealing with dual booting and the headaches it brings (including limited hardware support), I use docker with WSL2.
I am able to launch VS Code or PhpStorm on my local, have it remote into WSL and run things how they’re meant to be ran on a Linux box, without dealing with installing windows specific variants.
This makes working with things like Laravel/Composer a lot easier and with everything built on docker, deploying to prod is as simple as a docker image push to my registry of choice.
I also enjoy the benefits of not having a bunch of dependencies sitting around - drop the container and you’re system is as clean as it was before
I understand that this doesn't work for everyone but I'm kinda the reverse. My entire workflow relies on Linux, but I occasionally play video games. I'd say any game without aggressive anti cheat works fine on Linux nowadays.
The one good thing that came about for me from Reddit was realizing I’m not the target gamer demographic anymore. It really opened up my mind to realize if I’m not enjoying or playing online multiplayer anyways what do I have to lose?
I was so afraid of potentially missing out on the one or two games I’d actually be interested in playing that I stayed on windows even when it only gave me a pain in the ass every other quarter. Nowadays If the game doesn’t work on Linux it doesn’t deserve my money, and that isn’t as big a compromise as I thought.
I’ve not been able to get full performance of games on Linux; then you add on lack of support for mouse/keyboard/headsets and it just becomes easier to have a windows setup to play games
My guess is that this time they really wanted to pull the developer demographic over into the M$ sphere of influence. MSYS, MingW, and Git Shell already fill the same niche as WSL, so it wasn't destined to succeed. Thing is, they probably didn't expect it to succeed either. Microsoft's strategy has always been to throw a hundred dicks at the wall and hope that one of them sticks (think Zune, Windows Phone, etc). This time, Azure kind of stuck. WSL didn't. When you're as big as Microsoft, the occasional win more than covers the cost of a hundred fails.
I don't see who WSL is for. People in really locked-down corporate environments?
That's me pretty much. Locked down low spec Windows 10 laptop that would probably suffocate under the weight of a full VM anyway, so I'm happy to have access to a proper Linux shell with a nice-ish terminal that's a lot less clunky than "git bash", MingW etc.
I use it for ad hoc scripting and things like interacting with webservices (curl), massaging text files with tools like jq, sed, awk and to use Azure and AWS cli tools to interact with cloud infrastructure.
I stopped using virtualbox after I discovered my compiles were way faster in WSL2. It was pretty close to native Linux speed, not that I had a great way to compare it.
Personally, I think WSL is a great start point to introduce users in Windows to take the first step to Linux. Me myself and several people from what I know starts from WSL and end up using Linux full-time
fair, but i could not figure out wsl and found it really annoying, but found true linux a lot easier off the back when i installed it. maybe thats weird tho
So true :'-)
I used WSL on my company computer. Somehow I managed to snake through corporate restrictions on administration settings and WSL had practicaly full access to system. I even managed to make xserver and GUI apps working :-)
I use WSL2 for my work and sometimes I feel like it's magic.
I'm using ksniff against a docker container running on a supervised kubernetes node subsystem of a virtual server running inside a huge server which is clustering to a kubernetes cluster with other vms on other huge servers, which sniffes the traffic through my Linux WSL and this then forwards the traffic to a Wireshark instance running on the windows host without any problems.
It was the only way Microsoft could envision serious cloud devs taking windows seriously at all- not that it worked, but going to AWS re:invent and seeing 7000 MacBooks for every 1 rando win/pc must have been writing on the wall. I’m a Mac user, but everything I build in the cloud is Linux- for me, osx is close enough with gnu tools to be a good compromise between a userland I like and compatibility I need. Trying to use a windows box to do anything without WSL is like pulling god damned teeth.
That's funny, I did the opposite - I got used to developing on osx, then Linux, but that was always on my work computer - my desktop has always been Windows (I'm still using the same license and chassis from the computer I bought in high school a decade and a half ago).
Then I burnt out hard, and started picking up contracts here and there, but didn't have the money to pick up a second computer powerful enough for gaming or work. So I ran virtualbox and avoided cmd like the plague for a while... It was driving me nuts, so I made plans to run Linux with Windows in a hypervisor - I was looking at pci passthrough so I could give it direct access to the graphics card.
But then wsl came out and it just didn't seem as important. Even as Linux gaming has grown, I just haven't felt the need to switch... It's sometimes finicky and setting everything up on a new computer is a pain, but the only time I considered switching one of my machines over is setting up LLMs - that was a real pain to coax into working, and it'd run better on Linux
But it is Ubuntu, it essentially negates any benefit from being Linux.
But seriously, you still have to sift through all the worst of Windows to make it to Linux. When you could be, you know, just using Linux and avoid the dead weight.
Meanwhile, the huge improvements that Proton has gone through since 2018 have made Windows damn near obsolete for myself and many other Linux users. I really only keep it around on my gaming machine for VR titles and if I want to use Discord screen sharing (since they still haven't fixed the lack of audio on Linux) at this point, and my main laptop has been Windows-free for years now.
since they still haven’t fixed the lack of audio on Linux
Huh, never heard of this. Do you mean that it's impossible to stream desktop audio through discord? As a workaround, you can try switching to Pipewire and patching your audio output's monitor into Discord through helvum. Or write a script that does that automatically.
Yeah, when you stream your desktop from Linux over Discord, your desktop's audio doesn't come through. It's been a known issue for years but it's a very low priority fix for Discord's developers.
Does the method you're describing play well with speaking at the same time, or do you have to decide whether you want speech or audio?
Does the method you’re describing play well with speaking at the same time
Yes.
With pipewire, it is possible to patch two sources (i.e. your microphone and an application's audio) into a single input, and it will mix them together into one stream. I just tested this with Audacity (didn't feel like booting up Discord, but it should work the same). I could hear my voice and the application's audio at the same time. This is what it looked like for me in Helvum:
The gray PortAudio block is Audacity (would be Discord in your case). "ALC3232 Analog" is my microphone (on the left) and my headphones (on the right). Music Player Daemon is the application whose audio I wanted to stream. The connection between the microphone and Audacity was made automatically as soon as I started the recording. I had to manually make the connections from Music Player Daemon to Audacity for both left and right channels. After that I could see both the mic sound and the music player daemon sound in the recording, mixed into one stream. It should work the same way with Discord. If you wanted to, for example, make your voice louder or quiter compared to the application audio, you could just adjust your mic's gain (or the application's volume) with Pavucontrol (it's an app made for Pulseaudio, but it works flawlessly under pipewire as well).
In my original comment, I said that you could patch your output's monitor back into Discord. This is a bad idea, since if anyone speaks to you in the call, that audio will also be echoed back to them. So it's better to connect the individual applications' audio into Discord as opposed to the output monitor.
Now, this could get a little tedious, making those connections by hand every time you want to screen share. So you could try to make a script that does something like that automatically. Pipewire also has the concept of a "session manager", which is basically a daemon that decides which connections are made by default, when new sources or sinks register with Pipewire. For example, wireplumber, the default session manager, was responsible for connection audacity to my microphone automatically. Maybe you could try to configure your session manager to also automatically make connection between Discord and any app that outputs audio (idk tho, never done it before).
Oh, that's good to know. I just hope it isn't a ban risk. Well, worst case scenario, I can use my alternate account for video streaming, since i have one for using unofficial clients.
It's certainly progressed massively but I have to admit I still use Windows primarily for gaming. It's still a little faffy for my likes. I'm more excited by Vulkan - I think that and proton together is what will make Windows a choice rather than a necessity for gaming.
It can be a bit temperamental, I will admit. Mostly with newer games that have anti-cheat, and with VRchat where you have to use ProtonGE to get in-game video players to work. But gaming on Linux has truly advanced by staggering leaps and bounds since Proton began life. Those were dark days.
its pretty clear they are going to push the desktop os off the boat for something linux based. might take years. the OS is already no longer "in charge" everything is hypervisor run now.
its possible very few would even notice a swap out once they reach a certain level of capability. I am sensing a willingness to pull what apple has done many times and just cut legacy support off at the knees.
Work pc is windows 11, secured with pluton. WSL is a good replacement for cygwin in my use case. I get access to my favorite tools, and it feels more like Linux.
Honestly, I'm happy to see Microsoft embracing Linux & Android.
It gives me the chance to realistically insist that my fellow developers work under linux, so they stop randomly changing the case of filenames in the repo. And work in the same environment we're deploying in.
Yeah this always baffled me; I love Linux and use it as a core for all my projects (containerized and VM), but disabling updates on windows takes about two minutes to open run > gpedit.msc > set auto updates to false
Are people really able to configure full Linux boxes to their liking but struggle to tick one box?
I mean, it's never an issue for a power user, which arguably most Linux advocates are. But the disable option available for the average user is known to be overridden by MS. And the way that is not susceptible to MS remote meddling requires a Pro license, technical knowledge, installation of advanced system administration tools. All things that most people either don't have, or are not allowed (restricted permissions in corporate equipment, etc.), or rightfully don't care to invest time into doing. So this is still a common occurrence.
"Dumb users have their system updated to protect them from themselves" is what I'm getting out of your comment, and frankly I think that's a good thing.
I have never touched this setting and never had unexpected updates occur. This 'Windows force update hur-dur' circlejerk is baffling and tiring.
AFAIK Windows will only "force" the update when you keep skipping them for long periods of time + I'm pretty sure Linux tards keep their OS updated, not sure why they can't do the same with Windows.
Transcript:
[Miracle of the word wide web meme template]
"Thanks to the miracle of windows subsystem for linux..."
"...I can use the Linux terminal from the comfort of windows"
[Computer monitor showing windows update screen]
"Marvelous"
How can downvotes be negative?
Simples, its so positive that the negative becomes positive.
no no you have a point
Someone should open an issue on Github, I don't see any ones except one that's 4 years old and solved
Your guess is as good as mine haha
Someone found a way to do the mythical double upvote! Neo has risen again, very exciting time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXkABEg-miQ
I don't understand the pointless hate over wsl. Sure, it doesn't replace Linux. It also doesn't have to... Just having access to basic nix functionality from a windows desktop is still a useful feature. It makes stuff like putty mostly obsolete. It let's windows users unpack tarballs without 7zip. It let's developers play video games while "compiling". It's just an all-around convenient tool to have.
Maybe Microsoft wanted it to replace the Linux desktop, but since when has anyone really cared about what Microsoft wanted :P
Yeah, I don't see what the big deal is. I won't be switching from Windows anytime soon, for various reasons, but I very much appreciate being able to have access to a local linux environment without having to dual boot.
WSL + Docker is all I need :-)
Seriously, with the VSCode integration to control everything from your IDE.
Yeah, I can't emphasize enough how it can't replace Linux. And it doesn't even always work that well for stuff that you'd expect to be able to work there.
I use Windows for my mostly-for-gaming desktop and because I'm very lazy with dual booting, I usually just use WSL if I wanna do some small thing. Or even some not so small thing. I tried to get stable diffusion working using it. I strongly dislike using the windows command line (I do all my professional dev on Linux and it's what I'm most comfortable with), so I tried to use the Linux instructions with WSL. Did not go well. Wasted more time than I should have trying to make it work before I just gave up on that idea.
Not the first time I hit some weird WSL incompatibility either. I really should know better.
I spend like 80% of my work day in WSL. Using a Linux image that 100% matches the production environment, docker and k8s integration, and using VScode easily with WSL.
The big thing that makes is work is all I need is a command line.
Same, I have completely integrate WSL into my workflow. I use devcontainers with VScode and docker in WSL directly skipping docker in windows. It's great
You're right. It's a great tool to have, and a much more efficient way to do lots of things than running a linux VM.
It is a Linux VM though. At least that's what I've heard.
Yes, with WSL2, it's implemented as a VM on hyper-v. But, that should be treated as an implementation detail, it's a very light VM, compared to your usual linux VM. And you get the tight integration with the windows side of the machine for free, without fuss.
It's very cool that you can have a workflow that starts in powershell, then executes commands in the bash shell, and the results stream right into powershell.
Is that still true with WSL2? It absolutely was with 1, but when 2 came out everyone said: Forget that we ever had WSL1.
Yep. When I last had a windows machine at work I used WSL2 and for my workflow at least, it worked just like WSL1. I do know a few things changed between 1 and 2, but I never encountered them.
Yeah, I don't get it either.
While technically different (VM vs compatibility layer), WSL and Wine fill the same role. I have yet to see lots of people bashing Wine for being incomplete and imperfect.
Weird how tribal people are. Let people enjoy things for God's sake. I use all combinations of macOS, Windows, Fedora, Ubuntu (server + on WSL), Pop_OS!, and what not. Different horses for different courses, and I like each one of these in their ways they excel at.
People who get out, see the world, meet people from other places tend to be far less tribal. Early career, I could have easily been a paid Microsoft Evangelist (is that still a real job title?). Eventually I was forced to begrudgingly learn a whole bunch of other things, then I became obsessed with OSS, shunning my former tribe every chance I got. At some point I just stopped caring about everything. Language, tabs vs spaces, design patterns, IDE, frameworks, I just don't care any more. I still have my go-tos if I'm starting fresh but, if the direction of the wind changes, it doesn't bother me a bit.
I shit on windows because I have had terrible experiences with windows. I dual boot a hackintosh with win10 and win10 is more unstable despite using it less. I use linux on my laptop and headless stuff and the only problems I have are ones that I create.
Enjoying Windows is like thanking your home invader.
it's fun to fling shit at the other side on the internet, regardless of what you truly think. has been for 30 years. how is that difficult to understand?
Be the change you want to see. Stop the division!
I used WSL extensively at a couple of previous jobs. Sometimes IT only gives you the choice of Windows or Mac. I'm quite happy to have a Linux machine at my current job, but WSL has gotten the job done for me when I lacked that option.
My company mandates Windows laptops but I mostly work with Linux VMs hosted on our servers. WSL2 and Visual Studio Code (with Remote SSH and WSL2 plug-ins) are the best things that happened to Windows in years. Without these tools I would simply be unable to work.
I work at Oracle and leverage WSL for for some things. It works.. but I wish I could just use Linux. WSL is full of gotchas and weird bugs. Performance is not good either.
WSL2 is essentially a VM, and doesn't seem to have any weird bugs or gotcha's anymore (at least for command line programs). I don't use it for work, but playing around with it as a hobby, it seems fairly solid.
I use WSL2. It has bugs. DNS stops working when you connect to a VPN, which I have to do every day for all of my work. To fix that you can either modify the resolv conf (which gets wiped out on every startup) and then chattr it to prevent it from being deleted (this still didn't quite work for me). Or you can install wsl-vpnkit and pipe all of your network traffic through another container.
I have been working in docker and rancher desktop, both of which have integrations with WSL but with other caviats and bugs. I basically have a bunch of very highly specific steps written up for other employees for "how to get this working with WSL" because it is so buggy.
I feel so vinticated reading somebody else going through the DNS hell WSL2+VPN DNS issues. It is a nightmare in professional environments and for the life of me I cannot get my resolv to stop reverting after a while. Thanks for the tip on wsl-vpnkit, much harder to convince VM teams to spin you up a remote dev environment than to just use WSL sometimes.
Tinkering around to get things working is a part of the authentic Linux experience. Performance is 95% to Ubuntu 20.0.4 so not sure what you mean by that. resolv.conf won't get wiped out if you put
in your /etc/wsl.conf file.
A more modern solution is outlined here which you will want to adjust if you're using something other than Cisco.
I've been using Linux for 15 years. Tinkering with WSL is not as fruitful as tinkering with Linux.
The link you provided for DNS is exactly the solution I was describing in my original post. It never worked for me, though. We have a custom DNS setup in-house and simply setting the nameserver doesn't work. It is far too much of a hassle, so we just spin up wsl-vpnkit when we need network access.
Mac users and Linux native users don't have these issues and everything works out of the box.
The performance I get when compiling and running integration tests through Rancher desktop integration on WSL is abysmal. Taking 30+ minutes to complete whereas for other employees on Macs see things done in under 5 minutes. Not sure if there is a WSL specific firewall / networking issue or what. If you look up "WSL2 poor network performacne" you'll see dozens of open GitHub issues. It is very non-deterministic. Some days it runs great, other days it is terrible.
I assume I'll have a million of other replies coming along that link me to random benchmarks and articles about how great WSL2 is, but I'm telling you, I use it every single day at my job as a software engineer. It has problems. I'm grateful it exists and that I can hack it just enough to work (sometimes), but it is nothing like using Linux natively.
To be clear I wasn't trying to say WSL replaces Linux. Just trying to help with your issues. I use WSL on Windows but I still also use native Arch (btw).
I use WSL2 a lot and it does have weird "uniquenesses".
My personal computer is Windows mainly because of gaming and game dev, but WSL means I don't have to dual boot to tinker on a web project or something. In a way, it killed the Linux desktop for me, but I still use Linux as much as ever. With Docker as well.
Those who wants to run Linux desktop (and can afford it) will run it. Those who cannot would get the first taste of Linux. I'd say it's a win.
As it was designed to do
I feel WSL just gives enterprises an excuse not to let developers have pure Linux machines. After putting up with horrible and buggy WSL for years, managed to have my organisation bless running proper Linux on our machines. Bye Windows, hardly ever knew you.
90% of ICT techs would have to be fired if corporate switched to Linux. Any ops tech that knows Linux is in the bunkers babying the data center's servers, not caring for old laptops and abused browser machines.
I'm not saying Linux is superior to Windows, that would be a opinion. But for anyone outside of gamers (Steam Deck...) or business folks, it IS the better option. The issue is Dell isn't going to ship Ubuntu by default, for example. It's all subsidiaries, all the way down. FOSS just cannot throw their weight around like M$.
Yet MS has thrown money for decades at dethroning Linux in the server space and gotten nowhere.
From what I can tell these days Microsoft only wants to compete with services not so much software these days. The operating system to them is just a tool to sell ads and to get you places. They haven't cared about power users for the last 8 years.
love combining linux with the worst parts of windows
They were really trying to pander to developers back then... What shows it best is their ad for windows terminal that I swear has more production value than most of Nike's advertisements. You know you're desperate when you go this hard on advertising a bloody terminal
Hey now, as someone who works in a 100% Microsoft shop, WSL2 and the Windows Terminal are the only things keeping me sane. Please MS, keep pandering.
Absolutely love the new Terminal app - anyone having to work on windows machines knows much value it finally adds over the ancient cmd/pwshell.
This is one of the core apps I install on any windows rig now
Being very familiar with bash/zsh etc, and somewhat forced to use Windows, I've tried to learn use PowerShell. My impression is basically, what? Why would I do this? The design is intriguing but the verbosity is awful.
It is not meant just for powershell; it combines all the shells on windows plus support of fit, bash/zsh in WSL.
I use Linux daily for development and a MacBook for a laptop; having to go from extensive terminals back to shitty blue windows was painful.
The new Terminal has been the best addition MS has added to windows in a long while.
Sure, I gather that the topic is something other than regular PowerShell. This is actually the first I've heard of it. I'll check it out, thanks!
I hate the Windows environment so much. I was given the green light to switch to Linux although I have to do it myself.
I second this. WSL and windows terminal are both part of my daily toolbox and I love them both dearly.
Well, if something in Windows did need an ad for developers, it's the terminal. Advertising it here was the correct choice.
But that ad is ridiculous, because it shows absolutely nothing of value. It's all emotion-based "look how nice it looks" stuff.
I think I disagree with you here. The ad shows:
Which are all features that could conceivably be valued by developers. At the very least it gets across the point that "Yeah, CMD is shit, but fear not! Now there's a first-party terminal that doesn't suck!". There's no denying that all of this is presented in an "emotion-based" format as you put it, but I would argue that it's a good balance between informative and entertaining. Heck, I much prefer it to the ads you get nowadays on youtube where you can't even tell what they hell they're trying to sell to you.
Holy shit that commerical is ridiculous lol it's like a new iphone commercial
This is incredible. How much money did they spend on a terminal ad?
the worst thing about windows is that you can't natively change the window manager or desktop environment. that is so backwards. they even removed the ability to move the taskbar wherever you want. this is so weird.
Cant move the taskbar? Do you mean in windows 11, cos its possible in windows 10. If so i have just another reason to be glad i didnt make the move
Yeah, Windows 11 removed the ability to move your taskbar around, can only be at the bottom of the screen now.
There's a popular patcher application for this problem called ExplorerPatcher
We should not have to fight back the OS of our computers.
Indeed, but "your" computer is merely loaned from mr. Nadella
The computer is yours. The OS is not.
They also removed the ability to disable window stacking in the enterprise version. When I got Win 11 for my home pc I use it just to force myself to get it instinctively.
Wait, window stacking as in, one symbol on the taskbar for multiple opened windows of a browser for example?
Yeah. In Win 10 it can be disabled. In Win 11 Home there is a script that can be added. Not so for Ent though.
They removed the classic theme and I'm still pissed because you can't quite get it back.
I think most actual Linux users saw this as expanded access to the Linux environment, and easier ways for Windows users to dip their toes in. That was the feel i got from the general community at the time.
My favorite windows feature. Being broken.
WSL is nice if you want to build things/run software for Linux, otherwise.. just use Linux. Also it's a nice way to run Docker without paying for it.
I don't understand how Linux could make Linux obsolete
Or were they talking about the original WSL, where it was an implementation instead of a specialized VM
Combines the power of a really half-arsed Linux distro with the pure speed of the Windows file system.
I mean, it's slightly better than nothing, but installing a real Linux distro on Windows through eg. VirtualBox absolutely fucks it into the bin. I don't see who WSL is for. People in really locked-down corporate environments?
I use it a lot - I use my main rig for gaming and general stuff, but also need to be able to program things; rather than dealing with dual booting and the headaches it brings (including limited hardware support), I use docker with WSL2.
I am able to launch VS Code or PhpStorm on my local, have it remote into WSL and run things how they’re meant to be ran on a Linux box, without dealing with installing windows specific variants.
This makes working with things like Laravel/Composer a lot easier and with everything built on docker, deploying to prod is as simple as a docker image push to my registry of choice.
I also enjoy the benefits of not having a bunch of dependencies sitting around - drop the container and you’re system is as clean as it was before
I understand that this doesn't work for everyone but I'm kinda the reverse. My entire workflow relies on Linux, but I occasionally play video games. I'd say any game without aggressive anti cheat works fine on Linux nowadays.
The one good thing that came about for me from Reddit was realizing I’m not the target gamer demographic anymore. It really opened up my mind to realize if I’m not enjoying or playing online multiplayer anyways what do I have to lose?
I was so afraid of potentially missing out on the one or two games I’d actually be interested in playing that I stayed on windows even when it only gave me a pain in the ass every other quarter. Nowadays If the game doesn’t work on Linux it doesn’t deserve my money, and that isn’t as big a compromise as I thought.
I’ve not been able to get full performance of games on Linux; then you add on lack of support for mouse/keyboard/headsets and it just becomes easier to have a windows setup to play games
My guess is that this time they really wanted to pull the developer demographic over into the M$ sphere of influence. MSYS, MingW, and Git Shell already fill the same niche as WSL, so it wasn't destined to succeed. Thing is, they probably didn't expect it to succeed either. Microsoft's strategy has always been to throw a hundred dicks at the wall and hope that one of them sticks (think Zune, Windows Phone, etc). This time, Azure kind of stuck. WSL didn't. When you're as big as Microsoft, the occasional win more than covers the cost of a hundred fails.
Given that Docker/Podman heavily rely on WSL to work on windows, I would argue that it definitely has succeeded
The Google graveyard is a monument of this practice.
That's me pretty much. Locked down low spec Windows 10 laptop that would probably suffocate under the weight of a full VM anyway, so I'm happy to have access to a proper Linux shell with a nice-ish terminal that's a lot less clunky than "git bash", MingW etc.
I use it for ad hoc scripting and things like interacting with webservices (curl), massaging text files with tools like jq, sed, awk and to use Azure and AWS cli tools to interact with cloud infrastructure.
I stopped using virtualbox after I discovered my compiles were way faster in WSL2. It was pretty close to native Linux speed, not that I had a great way to compare it.
Personally, I think WSL is a great start point to introduce users in Windows to take the first step to Linux. Me myself and several people from what I know starts from WSL and end up using Linux full-time
fair, but i could not figure out wsl and found it really annoying, but found true linux a lot easier off the back when i installed it. maybe thats weird tho
It's a VM. With this tech, Linux will only be more powerful
To put it like /g/, WSL is redpilling the normies on free software.
So true :'-) I used WSL on my company computer. Somehow I managed to snake through corporate restrictions on administration settings and WSL had practicaly full access to system. I even managed to make xserver and GUI apps working :-)
These days you don't even need to do that, thanks to the wslg project microshaft has developed it has Wayland and pulseaudio inbuilt.
Wait is it pulse directly or is it using pipewire with pulse for compatibility?
Crashing in whole new ways
If anything, WSL2 made me realize that I didn't need Windows. now, I'm a Linux user for almost 2 years.
I use WSL2 for my work and sometimes I feel like it's magic.
I'm using ksniff against a docker container running on a supervised kubernetes node subsystem of a virtual server running inside a huge server which is clustering to a kubernetes cluster with other vms on other huge servers, which sniffes the traffic through my Linux WSL and this then forwards the traffic to a Wireshark instance running on the windows host without any problems.
Recently having a conversation with a man who thinks that Windows is superior because of WSL, Linux "is just an executable in Windows".
Of course, he's trolling, yet this is a high level of trolling. Because after that his windows installation went into reboot due to updates 🤣 .
It was the only way Microsoft could envision serious cloud devs taking windows seriously at all- not that it worked, but going to AWS re:invent and seeing 7000 MacBooks for every 1 rando win/pc must have been writing on the wall. I’m a Mac user, but everything I build in the cloud is Linux- for me, osx is close enough with gnu tools to be a good compromise between a userland I like and compatibility I need. Trying to use a windows box to do anything without WSL is like pulling god damned teeth.
That's funny, I did the opposite - I got used to developing on osx, then Linux, but that was always on my work computer - my desktop has always been Windows (I'm still using the same license and chassis from the computer I bought in high school a decade and a half ago).
Then I burnt out hard, and started picking up contracts here and there, but didn't have the money to pick up a second computer powerful enough for gaming or work. So I ran virtualbox and avoided cmd like the plague for a while... It was driving me nuts, so I made plans to run Linux with Windows in a hypervisor - I was looking at pci passthrough so I could give it direct access to the graphics card.
But then wsl came out and it just didn't seem as important. Even as Linux gaming has grown, I just haven't felt the need to switch... It's sometimes finicky and setting everything up on a new computer is a pain, but the only time I considered switching one of my machines over is setting up LLMs - that was a real pain to coax into working, and it'd run better on Linux
Linux is Linux.
WSL is Bill Gates' wet fart of an OS running Linux.
Definitely not the same thing.
Is it not? It's basically a Linux container running on Windows, isn't it?
But it is Ubuntu, it essentially negates any benefit from being Linux.
But seriously, you still have to sift through all the worst of Windows to make it to Linux. When you could be, you know, just using Linux and avoid the dead weight.
You can install distros other than Ubuntu though. But what's wrong with Ubuntu anyway?
I'm using it on a daily basis, and I haven't really encountered any real issues, so for me it's fine.
For most people nothing. But at a technical and ethical level, for those who care about that sort of stuff, they've been appalling for a while.
Doesn’t need to be Ubuntu, even though it is the default.
The irony is I mostly use wsl to pop open a terminal and apt-get update/upgrade.
Meanwhile, the huge improvements that Proton has gone through since 2018 have made Windows damn near obsolete for myself and many other Linux users. I really only keep it around on my gaming machine for VR titles and if I want to use Discord screen sharing (since they still haven't fixed the lack of audio on Linux) at this point, and my main laptop has been Windows-free for years now.
Huh, never heard of this. Do you mean that it's impossible to stream desktop audio through discord? As a workaround, you can try switching to Pipewire and patching your audio output's monitor into Discord through
helvum. Or write a script that does that automatically.Yeah, when you stream your desktop from Linux over Discord, your desktop's audio doesn't come through. It's been a known issue for years but it's a very low priority fix for Discord's developers.
Does the method you're describing play well with speaking at the same time, or do you have to decide whether you want speech or audio?
Yes.
With pipewire, it is possible to patch two sources (i.e. your microphone and an application's audio) into a single input, and it will mix them together into one stream. I just tested this with Audacity (didn't feel like booting up Discord, but it should work the same). I could hear my voice and the application's audio at the same time. This is what it looked like for me in Helvum:
The gray PortAudio block is Audacity (would be Discord in your case). "ALC3232 Analog" is my microphone (on the left) and my headphones (on the right). Music Player Daemon is the application whose audio I wanted to stream. The connection between the microphone and Audacity was made automatically as soon as I started the recording. I had to manually make the connections from Music Player Daemon to Audacity for both left and right channels. After that I could see both the mic sound and the music player daemon sound in the recording, mixed into one stream. It should work the same way with Discord. If you wanted to, for example, make your voice louder or quiter compared to the application audio, you could just adjust your mic's gain (or the application's volume) with Pavucontrol (it's an app made for Pulseaudio, but it works flawlessly under pipewire as well).
In my original comment, I said that you could patch your output's monitor back into Discord. This is a bad idea, since if anyone speaks to you in the call, that audio will also be echoed back to them. So it's better to connect the individual applications' audio into Discord as opposed to the output monitor.
Now, this could get a little tedious, making those connections by hand every time you want to screen share. So you could try to make a script that does something like that automatically. Pipewire also has the concept of a "session manager", which is basically a daemon that decides which connections are made by default, when new sources or sinks register with Pipewire. For example, wireplumber, the default session manager, was responsible for connection audacity to my microphone automatically. Maybe you could try to configure your session manager to also automatically make connection between Discord and any app that outputs audio (idk tho, never done it before).
Huh, this is all very informative. Thanks for the breakdown. I'll have to see if I can get Pipewire going on my gaming setup.
There's also discord-screenaudio on Flathub if you don't feel like doing the work yourself. It works out of the box for me.
Oh, that's good to know. I just hope it isn't a ban risk. Well, worst case scenario, I can use my alternate account for video streaming, since i have one for using unofficial clients.
No problem! I'm just happy to spread the good word of Pipewire! Good luck with the setup!
It's certainly progressed massively but I have to admit I still use Windows primarily for gaming. It's still a little faffy for my likes. I'm more excited by Vulkan - I think that and proton together is what will make Windows a choice rather than a necessity for gaming.
It can be a bit temperamental, I will admit. Mostly with newer games that have anti-cheat, and with VRchat where you have to use ProtonGE to get in-game video players to work. But gaming on Linux has truly advanced by staggering leaps and bounds since Proton began life. Those were dark days.
its pretty clear they are going to push the desktop os off the boat for something linux based. might take years. the OS is already no longer "in charge" everything is hypervisor run now.
its possible very few would even notice a swap out once they reach a certain level of capability. I am sensing a willingness to pull what apple has done many times and just cut legacy support off at the knees.
it may be time.
imagine thinking whatever happens in /g/ is relative/serious/non-ill-intended in any way
Work pc is windows 11, secured with pluton. WSL is a good replacement for cygwin in my use case. I get access to my favorite tools, and it feels more like Linux.
Honestly, I'm happy to see Microsoft embracing Linux & Android.
It gives me the chance to realistically insist that my fellow developers work under linux, so they stop randomly changing the case of filenames in the repo. And work in the same environment we're deploying in.
Ah, yes, the feature to update the operating system that is by default enabled but is able to be disabled completely.
If a *nix user can't figure out how to disable automatic updates, it's on them.
Yeah this always baffled me; I love Linux and use it as a core for all my projects (containerized and VM), but disabling updates on windows takes about two minutes to open run > gpedit.msc > set auto updates to false
Are people really able to configure full Linux boxes to their liking but struggle to tick one box?
I mean, it's never an issue for a power user, which arguably most Linux advocates are. But the disable option available for the average user is known to be overridden by MS. And the way that is not susceptible to MS remote meddling requires a Pro license, technical knowledge, installation of advanced system administration tools. All things that most people either don't have, or are not allowed (restricted permissions in corporate equipment, etc.), or rightfully don't care to invest time into doing. So this is still a common occurrence.
"Dumb users have their system updated to protect them from themselves" is what I'm getting out of your comment, and frankly I think that's a good thing.
That's Microsoft's opinion of their users, yes.
I have never touched this setting and never had unexpected updates occur. This 'Windows force update hur-dur' circlejerk is baffling and tiring.
AFAIK Windows will only "force" the update when you keep skipping them for long periods of time + I'm pretty sure Linux tards keep their OS updated, not sure why they can't do the same with Windows.