Windows Subsystem for Linux is making inroads with developers

This isn't Lotus Notes.

The nice thing about FOSS is there's a property-based guarantee over software development progress. The moment WSL goes embrace-extend-extinguish (and that's far from guaranteed to happen, given Microsoft's benign nature of late), Linux will just continue to do its own thing. It won't just stop existing. The code isn't going anywhere, and you can always host your own mirrors.

And there's always BSD.

I think you're asking the right question. We're definitely seeing microsoft Embracing and Extending gnu/linux here.

> But I'm not sure what this will do to Open Source in the long run. I don't think WSL users will care a lot about the ideals of the Free Software people and I'm not sure whether the Free Software people will love to maintain code for people who don't give a fuck.

People who care about the ideals of the free software people have always been a genuine minority group. You might be using the terms interchangeably, but it's why the term "Open Source" exists.

With wsl Microsoft is trying to poach MacOS users. And Apple cares about open source about as much as Microsoft

>At least Canonical is getting paid.

WSL1 wasn't restricted to just Ubuntu. All the major distros were available. Canonical's cooperation is useful from a trademarks standpoint, but I don't see Canonical having any leverage in this arrangement.

"But I'm not sure what this will do to Open Source in the long run."

I don't know about Open Source as a concept/movement, however it will destroy Linux as we know it.

More and more developers are already flocking to it (and VSC) for writing Linux software. All it needs is a killer library (Windows GUI bindings?) and/or extensions that could push developers into writing software that expects to be run under WSL instead of the real thing. It may seem stretched, but WSL is to Linux what WINE is to Windows; so how many of us could run Windows software under WINE without any Windows installed? WINE didn't damage Windows because there are simply too many native Windows installs compared to Linux users with WINE, but what about the other way around? Linux wouldn't stand a chance. Microsoft is slowly gaining full control of Linux, one developer at a time, and nobody seems to care.

I can't say how it'll effect everybody else or what the overall effect will be but I do use WSL quite a bit. I don't use Linux as my main desktop but I have been using Linux since '98 in some dual boot but mostly headless installs. For me it makes life much easier.

All I want from Linux is the command line. Instead of having to fire up a VM or SSH into a remote box and transfer files I have access to them on my PC.

Based on my experience it makes Linux more accessible to me. It doesn't really change the way I use Linux other than to give me more options.

I can't imagine it being hurtful to Linux overall. Because of things like the Raspberry Pi and Android people are already in some ways getting familiar with Linux. Because of MacOS some people are getting familiar with Unix in general. If anything I think people will be like me in that WSL will simply make Linux more accessible.

I still prefer Cygwin. I can't make a WSL program that is also a win32 program and that has a native win32 GUI. With Cygwin, I can. If I want a sandboxed VM, I can get a sandboxed VM using a number of different technologies, of which WSL is merely one.

>I have every linux desktop app I want at my finger tips

Oh huh, are you running an X server for this? And if so, does GPU acceleration work for Linux apps?

Lack of virtualization and container support within the WSL was a major blocker for me, has this been resolved?

Link: https://x410.dev/

How does X410 compare to vcxsrv?

It's the Windows Subsystem for (running) Linux.

It's neither these days. It's a glorified VM.

It was an historical reason. WSL1 was named such because instead of using Linux kernel, Microsoft uses Windows NT subsystem to run Linux userland (hence Windows Subsystem for Linux). As WSL become a well known name, the next iteration (the one with the real Linux kernel) is simply named as WSL2.

It wholeheartedly agree with you, yet I suspect Microsoft would never name a product of theirs "Linux" first and "Windows" second.

On the other hand, they named their 32-bit Windows emulator "WOW64 (Windows-on-Windows 64-bit).

Subsystem here is a reference to a Windows subsystem. There are many subsystems within Windows that handle various OS functions. In this case, a subsystem was created to handle running Linux.

I'm waiting for the Datacenter Enterprise Pro Plus version.

It's phrased in a very confusing way, so it's a very poor choice of names, but I wouldn't go so far as saying incorrect.

The preposition "for" has a lot of different meanings, and the one they've used, though extremely unexpected here, is legal.

They mean it in the sense that it enables something, like in "tips for success" or "a budget for entertainment". This is a Windows subsystem, and what it's for is making Linux stuff available as a feature.

In the context of computers, "for" commonly means targeting toward or being compatible with something, like "apps for iPhone". Which is not how they mean it. And which is why they should have chosen something different.

Windows if full of weird names for it's subsystems if you look closely.

The old installer had "Windows Executive" and "Human Interface Parser" as installation items that always had my head scratching

Do you think there would have been as much value historically?

The main part of the appeal of WSL is that it lets me use the Linux dev ecosystem, which (for web work) is larger/nicer than the Windows ecosystem.

I think a lot of this comes from the revenue model - For example, nginx is free, where IIS cost money.

As the world of cloud computing took off, it was easier to have devs learn Linux than it would be to pay for licenses for each server.

Eventually this meant that more companies were expanding/developing Linux solutions, developers were more familiar with those tools, and you have a self-reinforcing circle.

Linux didn't win because of POSIX. Linux won despite POSIX. Linux won because it was free and fast.

For me, getting stuck with MPBs was mostly a function of wanting a higher quality Unix-like laptop. For a long time a vocal contingent of desktop Linux users wanted only ridiculously cheap hardware to run it on.

Thankfully that has started to change, and there are at least a few solid laptops available that ship with some flavor of Linux installed. I hope those options continue to make their way into the ranks of employer issued gear too.

Having WSL really has made me mostly stop dual-booting. While I have a Ubuntu installation for when I need a full blown Linux environment, I don't do that much development that requires a full blown Linux environment. When I'm working on hobby projects like small web apps, I have a hybrid setup using VSCode from Windows but using Bash via Ubuntu on WSL for the in-IDE terminal, which means the actual server is running from Node on Linux. For fairly vanilla web dev needs, it feels like the best of both worlds - I can even have Photoshop open on the same computer writing into the same drive.

My only gripe was how slow containers in WSL were on Windows, but with WSL2 that issue is going away.

Given how Microsoft and Apple have thrived to absurd heights these past twenty years, seems to me they made the right choice.

I am pretty sure that one of the common reasons that people flock from MacOS to Windows is because of the absurd price of their hardware, not necessarily their software.

Git Bash is nothing to do with WSL.

Reinstall Git properly. I use it every day on Windows with no issues.

> Setting up a new Manjaro workstation is far less annoying than setting up Windows 10

Pretty much true for any Linux distro. Also much easier to fix when something goes wrong (which is increasingly rare unless self-inflicted). And Gnome is an unbelievably polished environment (if not very customizable)

Hypothetical scenario - new Dell laptop refuses to connect to your home Wifi. Linux laptop does that flawlessly, same laptop connects when booted to a Linux live USB stick. Where do you look? Standard control panel? Driver-specific panel? Dell's panel? System logs?

Well, if you are resorting to VMWare/VirtualBox -- you might as well use WSL, since it's just a VM optimized for OS integration.

Wine, OTOH, is a runtime, not a VM... and I've personally never been able to get it to work (I'm sure this speaks to my lack of knowledge more than the merits of the project). I've had issues with WSL, but it's not really comparable.

I disagree. Both WSL and Wine are immensely useful to use some tools from the other world in your workflow without having to shuffle data between the two or adding overhead for simple tasks. I encounter tools that only exist for one (or are a real hassle to build for the other) often enough for this to be useful.

I wouldn't do development that's primarily for the other platform with them though.

No one uses Wine because they want to use Windows, they use it because they don't

> If you want to use Windows, use Windows.

Or get a Windows VM.

> If you want to use Linux, use Linux.

Then get a Linux VM.

Simple. Easily solved.

Re: files

I can open explorer.exe from inside wsl2 environment to copy files back and forth easily.

Linux doesn't require Windows to operate, but it might work better if it's packaged in Windows.

The big question mark for me is drivers. Having great drivers to take advantage of hardware across a multitude of different platforms is an issue of market share and market demand. I have an NVMe drive, 16GB of the fastest RAM, workstation-grade networking, and Dolby speakers on my laptop. I can't take advantage of it, because I accidentally erased Windows 10 Professional for Workstations when dual booting Ubuntu, that had all the specialized drivers. I'm fine with Ubuntu, but I kind of wish I had Windows + WSL instead.

Many developers are using Windows or macOS and roll out to Linux servers. HN news has a relatively large number of people that use Linux on the desktop. But if you go to big traditional IT companies, it's mostly Windows and some Mac on the desktop. For people who prefer Linux or deploy to Linux in such environments, WSL and WSL2 are a great improvement over juggling (non-WSL2) VMs.

Google was there first with ChromeOS and Android, apparently many like their Linux "improvements".

Also Solaris, SmartOS, IBM and Unisys mainframes also run Linux on their hypervisor based environments and not much are complaining about them.

I’ve used windows my entire life/career. I recently moved jobs to an all Mac startup and I can’t believe how much better Bluetooth and VPN is. I keep messing up keyboard shortcuts and I don’t quite understand how “windows” work on a Mac. But the Bluetooth situation alone (I could never get my QC35s to work as a headset when needed and just headphones as needed) means I won’t use windows for a productive work environment for awhile. (Still have a gaming desktop that will always run windows for fun and VMs for dev)

Can you share how you configured your bluetooth headset? I have a pair of sony's noise cancelling ones, but I could never get the mic to work on linux. Thanks in advance!

This is about the only gripe I've had with linux desktop in recent years. For everything else, its been at par or better than windows/osx for me. I do mostly programming, music synthesis/recording and photogrammetry/image processing on a Dell XPS-15, and its been great.

> Where are the WSL files and the docker volumes inside it ?

In WSL1 files are stored in a protected folder of %LocalAppData%. It's protected because using Windows and regular NTFS-expecting tools has a bad tendency to mess up Linux ACL metadatda. More recent versions of WSL1 added a Plan9-based file server that shows up as a pseudo-device in Windows under a UNC path \\wsl$

In WSL2 the files are stored in a VHD-like file (VM hard drive) and the Plan9-based file server is always available in every version of WSL2 (under \\wsl$ still) and additionally used in both directions (/mnt/c/ is no longer a direct NTFS mount on the Linux side, but now uses the file server, because WSL2 is more VM-like in every facet).

Just an FYI, if somebody wants a legitimate license of windows 10 pro (well, pretty legitimate) eBay vendors sell “OEM” keys which have been pulled from scrapped hardware for a for dollars.

If you’re getting audited by Microsoft this is probably not OK, but I have never had any problems with it for personal use.

There are also numerous ways to get upgrades from 7 to 10, your employer might offer etc. etc. Microsoft is being pretty liberal with windows 10 licenses these days, even pro.

No hypervisor support for Windows Home is pretty insane. Ran into this problem with a friend's laptop during a hackathon a year or two ago. Wonder if ripping that out makes QA faster.

Docker for WSL2 will be supported with windows home edition. There was an announcement recently : https://www.docker.com/blog/docker-desktop-for-windows-home-...

The trick to cron is to have WSL always "running".

In my case, I use X410+WSL and have a xfce panel always active on my desktop, and that is sufficient to keep WSL alive and so have a working cron.

WSL2 should be OK, as long as you're on the WSL managed filesystem image. On NTFS you will still have issues.

I remember when I bought my XPS13 a year ago, to work while I traveled, I found that even with WSL, it was painful to get my toolchain working on windows (mostly unix based tools) I ended up putting ubuntu (and currently popOS) and never looking back.

Have you had bad experiences with Windows subsystem for Linux? In my experience it's useful, effective, and works out of the box with no configuration.

Well sometimes you can't choose (Work PC), in that case using WSL on windows is a much better experience than DIY on Windows.

Also chocolatey -> brew etc

The filesystem performance on a Windows FS mount is absolutely unusable in WSL2. They are aware of it, but it does not seem to be a priority right now. Looks like I'm going to be stuck on WSL1 for quite some time unfortunately.