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Comment by k__ | Hacker News Reader

How does it compare to real Linux distributions? Does it have a package manager? Is it like Debian? What are the limitations?

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It sounds fancy but it's just a VM with a bit more polished Windows integration.

Hm, okay. That doesn't sound impressive anymore.

No, but the good news is you can literally run Arch, Debian and Fedora on the same machine with shared files.

You could already do that with WSL1.

Source: I have Arch and Ubuntu on WSL1.

Those didn't change. Other things did.

WSL1 managed to corrupt SQLite dbs. Which is really annoying, and does not happen with WSL2.

My (casual, not work) use relies heavily on Nix, which is built around a centralized SQLite file. I did not enjoy that experience.

Thanks for that, I have hit this bug once with WSL1 in the past and didn't think much of it at the time. Good to know what caused the issue.

Wow, that's amazing/terrible. Would you have a link to a repro?

I think this is the relevant bug: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/2395

WSL2 has been great so far (I’ve been using it for a few months now with no serious issues).

Thanks!

Thanks, this perfectly explains a weird error I have been seeing!

They didn't say that something changed.

But I'm intrigued, what did change?

WSL2 uses a VM while WSL1 uses a Linux like interface over a system-call DLL.

WSL2 sounds like a step back.

Their other choice was to make Windows file IO actually fast.

That just wasn't going to happen.

I/O performance characteristics changed, your ability to share the same filesystem for both OSes changed, etc.

That sounds good.

How does it handle case-sensitivity?

WSL gives you a full Linux distro. You can use Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, from the top of my head. These are default options. There are others available. Additionally, you can bootstrap to other distros. I know Arch was an early target.

WSL1 replaced the init process. For Ubuntu, at least, snaps were not enabled, at least out of the box. There were occasional issues early on where the syscall translation was not perfect. For me, at least, these were all ironed out after a few revisions. Unsure if there were still edges I didn't hit.

WSL2 takes advantage of virtualization technology, so should be an even better Linux experience.

There were 4 "standard" distros in the Microsoft store IIRC

Just double checked in a Windows VM. These are available when searching WSL in the Microsoft Store. Some of these are for a fee. There are also a few results for terminal emulators and an X server.

- Ubuntu (18.04 and 20.04)

- Kali

- Debian

- Fedora (remix for WSL)

- openSUSE-Leap-15

- SUSE Linux Enterprise

- Alpine

- Pengwin (Debian-based and apparently optimized for WSL, and an enterprise version)

- Centos (7 and 8.1)

It is a real Debian (or, by default, Ubuntu). Original packages from Debian's servers are used. You're using apt, as usual.

You can run various Debian distros. It works like it should. You can run an x server and get a GUI as well.

It is an actual linux distribution. The default is Ubuntu but there are others (Suse, Alpine...)

WSL2 is a full blown emulator / virtualization solution, so it runs a real linux kernel / distribution. The largest downside to me is no gpu passthrough from the host.

They say GPU passthrough is on the backlog in their post build FAQ. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/wsl-2-post-build-...

I've been tracking that. Almost certainly AMD exclusive since, AFAIK, NVIDIA prohibits GPU passthrough on their consumer cards so VPNs are forced into purchasing 'professional' grade GPUs.

You can even compile your own custom kernel for it. I've had to do so in order to run some modules that the WSL 2 kernel currently doesn't have.

I'm using full ubuntu in it. The only real pain is anything that relies on systemd (which comes up unsurprisingly often).

Systemd is not working.

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