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Comment by wenc | Hacker News Reader

For folks who have used this and WSL, how does this compare to WSL? (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

Has anyone tried to run production(ish) workloads on WSL? Multipass?

Currently, you can only use WSL1 in Windows. WSL1 is emulation and has way too few features compared to a proper virtual machine. WSL2 currently is available only through the Windows Insider Program, which is something that you will NOT setup on a work machine.

WSL2 is still work in progress. Currently it misses many features and the provided Linux kernel does not include many kernel modules (several for networking are missing). For example, WSL2 currently does not support bridge networking.

In my experience, WSL1 is also very, very slow and cannot run all programs. A while ago, no haskell programs would run, for instance. Not sure about the current status though.

Another limitation in WSL1 is that it cannot run docker. And so on.

It still might be an OK way to obtain *nix based software, and can «see» your windows directory tree without any mounting/configuration. And no VM is needed.

> In my experience, WSL1 is also very, very slow

I've commented this in the past, but WSL1 is much faster than WSL2 when interoping with the Windows file system[0]

[0]https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197

I'm running Multipass alongside WSL2 with no ill effects (other than my not being able to ping/SSH directly to Multipass instances from inside WSL2, which is probably due to their being on a separate HyperV "switch"), and I spotted three things right off the bat:

* WSL2 sees all my CPU cores (Multipass might be able to do that, but I haven't figured out how to yet)

* Home directory integration seems to be there, but require a manual mount (might be just me, I am running this on an Insiders build)

* I was able to run multipass.exe from inside WSL2 and get a shell to its instances without even thinking twice about it :)

I do use WSL1 on my main machine (and have done so for a long while without any significant issues), and might set up Multipass on it and my Macs to work with Docker containers without the slow, pokey Docker Desktop UI (all I really need is a quick way to get a VM running on any of the native hypervisors, and I'm good).

Interestingly enough, I am able to ssh to the multipass VM from within WSL2.

I need to have another go at it, then. Didn’t work for either the primary it sets up or another I set up alongside it.

Oh, and cloud-init support is just dandy :)

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