What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite

Re:What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite by munchbunny on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @10:59AM (#23311982)

are processes in WSL2 manageable by Task Manager and Windows Defender as in WSL1?

I haven't tried (just installed Windows 10 v1909 last night) but I don't think so, given that WSL2 sits in a VM, which WSL1 didn't.

I liked WSL1, but it had a lot of the same drawbacks that Cygwin had, which was that Windows and Linux are different enough under the hood that you start running into issues with file system performance and containers, and WSL2 fixes that at the cost of being clumsier with file management.

The solution I recall for WSL2 is to put the shared files inside the Linux instance instead of putting it in NTFS.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite by dleslie on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @12:07PM (#23312902)

Putting the shared files inside the Linux instance is a non-starter for me.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite by munchbunny on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @12:43PM (#23313328)

Putting the shared files inside the Linux instance is a non-starter for me.

What requirement do you have that has to be managed without going over to the Linux side of the system?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite by dleslie on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @01:04PM (#23313600)

Unity and its suite of tools. Anything that slows access to disk IO can add significant time to my large-project build turnaround.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite by munchbunny on Tuesday May 26, 2020 @07:09PM (#23317512)

In the case of Unity, why do you need Linux crossover? I can see also having a Unity development setup in bare-metal Linux if you plan to target Linux gaming, but WSL currently doesn't give you graphics.

The game development scenario feels to me like a case where a Windows based toolchain is going to be more coherent. I might be missing something though.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite by dleslie on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @01:31AM (#23319653)

No, I don't _really_ need Linux crossover. I greatly prefer a Linux CLI environment as that's been how I've been comfortable as a developer for nigh-on three decades now.

No, we don't/won't support a Linux port of our product at this time, and as a primary developer it's not worth my time to be hassled by it.

But WSL1 is _so nice_. I've fought with MSYS, MSYS2, Cygwin, various other bash environments and such, and I find none are quite as good as WSL1+X410.

And, let's be honest, if WSL2 is just another VM then it's a worse product than the other VMs that are available and far more mature. Hell, Canonical's Multipass is as good or better.

I really don't get why they went the VM route with WSL2. It seems to totally wipe out any advantage that WSL had over the other VM products.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite by munchbunny on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @09:34AM (#23322916)

Where has Cygwin or Git Bash been falling short? As far as I can tell, these days it's not particularly hard to assemble most of the Linux CLI environment in a Linux-like UX on Windows. And these days with process based isolation support on Windows you can even package the dev setup in a Docker container for easier setup.

I really don't get why they went the VM route with WSL2. It seems to totally wipe out any advantage that WSL had over the other VM products.

They're not deprecating WSL1 yet. You can still use it. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-faq#what-w...

But if you're looking for reasons, here are some officially stated ones. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/wsl2-about

I/O performance and support for using Docker inside WSL seem like big ticket items. I'd agree with them that the trade-off of convenience sharing files between the two OSes for better support running Linux things in WSL is worth it.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What Microsoft got right about power users, but not quite by dleslie on Wednesday May 27, 2020 @02:35PM (#23327768)

They're brittle as hell when installing additional packages. WSL1 is still brittle at the edges, particularly when attempting to use it instead of a VM to run services, but all of the compilation woes because Cygwin/MSYS/Mingw are special build targets _simply disappear_.

I got tired of having to find patches/hacks/bespoke branches of tools I find interesting just to have them work in half-baked POSIX environments.

If they think Docker is more important than seamless desktop integration then obviously developers like myself are not as important to them as sysadmins who want to run docker services, I suppose.

I really, really want a proper and seamlessly integrated Linux environment on my Windows machine.

[ Parent | on HN ]