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Comment by shmerl | Hacker News Reader

Why not run Linux natively? If you need Windows, you can run it in VM.

I don't know any legitimate mainstream reason why you would run Linux when WSL2 exists. It runs everything Linux does perfectly, but also with an operating system that isn't built around an 11-year old somehow still "experimental" display server that leaves fundamental use-cases like screen sharing to "an exercise for the reader"

WSL 2 has issues: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues

For most of the users doing a lightweight work, it might not be a problem but my repository is extremely huge and building on WSL 2 takes at least 5X more than natives Widnows or MacOS.

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197

edit: My use-case for WSL 2 is that I have codebase that only runs on windows / Linux. Switching between the two is cumbersome and VM takes a hit on performance. If I didn't need Windows then definitley no need to use WSL 2 and just go for Linux/MacOS

If Wayland doesn't work for you, you can still use Xorg, that has worked fine for millions of people in the last few decades. I like Wayland, but I won't switch until it gets to the same level of features and stability of Xorg.

Also if we must be fair, Windows still has no way to reliably install Windows updates through SSH, because you apparently cannot elevate yourself, without even if you are logged in as administrator. I still need to RDP into my Windows instances while every other OS can conveniently be updated using just a few shell commands.

Windows updates can be installed remotely/using only command line tools with Powershell, though I forget if it requires admin.

I tried almost everything and I can't for pete's sake find a way to get them to install when connected through SSH. Chocolatey works fine, though

Also, have you ever tried to do any serious in C++ development work under Windows? Downloading 10 gigabytes of SDK just to run the compiler is not fun.

Also, most if not all compilers (GCC is a number 1 offender here) are much slower than Linux or macOS under Windows. It all depends on what you do, what kind of user you are and what kind of job you are trying to do. No one uses something worse on purpose, so there sure must be reasons why people still say installing Linux is worth it. WSL is good for those who would have run Linux in a VM anyway, but if you need Linux or if you're just used to it, it's still not enough.

I haven't noticed GCC being slower, though I admittedly haven't measured. Which build of GCC do you use? MinGW64? or MSYS or something else? If you use the versions that are Cygwin derivatives, they will probably be slower, but that's not really due to GCC.

No, it's a native mingw-based GCC toolchain(cross compiler for an embedded platform), and everything is noticeably slower than on Linux or even macOS. I think it's because GCC is designed as relying on a multitude of separate binaries instead of being a single process. For each file it compiles it spawns a truckload of separate processes (collect2, cc1plus, as, ld...) and if there's something that's slow as heck on Windows, is spawning processes.

You're right about the slowness! I just noticed it now. I'm confused why though -- I don't actually see it spawning a lot of processes, and the slowness is far beyond what could be explained by that. Even a single process call appears to run much more slowly. I haven't dug into it but maybe the I/O pattern is funny?

Downloading 10 gigabytes of SDK just to run the compiler is not fun.

This is not very accurate. Just the compiler/linker (which doesn't need the SDK to build and run programs, i.e. equivalent of getting just gcc) is about 300mb to download. Then, assuming you're talking about the Windows SDK, which as far as I'm aware you only need when targetting OS-specifics is abut 700mb.

Why do you need WSL2? I don't want to touch Windows, unless there is no choice. WSL2 is just a bait MS are using to ensure Windows usage won't decline among developers. I'm not buying it.

If you are forced to use Windows (often corp IT are not competent enough or are simply not willing to spend extra resources on Linux support and are forcing Windows on users), then WLS2 is an option for running Linux. But I'd never pick it as a first choice.

Maybe I need systemd to manage services. Is it still broken under WSL2?

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