Hacker News Reader

Comment by rpastuszak | Hacker News Reader

A genuine question from someone who hasn’t used windows for a long time: why do this and not just dual boot? What’s the main use case?

View on HN

Not why instead of dual boot but why wsl for me.

After more than an year trying to get my laptop (very high dpi) and my monitor (high dpi) to have decent fractional scaling on Linux so that I could use both screens while working comfortably. I decided to try wsl and it is pretty much as fast (with my computer/use case), OS just delivers the problem above, so I am sticking with it...

Main cons for me right now are:

* windows updates been too aggressively

* not able to easily create/edit hot keys

I really have to agree on the scaling issue. I spent an entire afternoon getting my two displays - one 4k, one 1080p - to scale at different values without having stupid issues, but I just couldn't get them to work. This is on X because I had issues getting Wayland to work (might have been my laptop nVidia 1060's fault, tbh). I can't wait for my issues with Wayland to get fixed, because I've heard the fractional scaling support is much, much better.

I've been debating Linux vs WSL2 recently and this is exactly the type of issue that has me pausing on embracing Linux Desktop.

I've paid thousands to the Mac ecosystem over the years purely to avoid these problems. I just want the OS to work, and i've literally never had that experience on Linux. I'm sure it's much much better these days than it was the last time i tried, but - everything i hear tells me they still exist to some degree.

4k and 1080p is my exact setup btw haha. I was debating installing PopOS this weekend.

If this is an issue, try using Wayland instead of X11. I run PopOS on a similar setup and it works flawlessly under Wayland. Give PopOS a try, you won't be disappointed!

Edit: there was no configuration needed. I selected Wayland from the menu and it just worked right out of the box. No bells and whistles, just a great desktop experience.

GGP here - I run Pop (20.04), too, but wayland doesn't work for me. As I've said earlier, it might be because of my laptop GPU.

it is, once I install nvidia drivers I get no wayland support

What's the material advantage of Wayland? I've done a tiny bit of research on what it is, but not how it materially provides a better UX to the end users. Thoughts?

I'll give it a look. Admittedly it doesn't sound attractive, because it sounds like the exact bells and whistles of configuration that i _don't_ want haha.

The longer i'm a software engineer the less energy i have for dealing with my OS, i guess.

I never tried Pop OS, I might look into it as well since it's based off Ubuntu LTS, which I quite like. I'm too old for the rolling releases that change constantly. I've been using Ubuntu and Redhat for a long time now.

It is much better. Run it in a VM for a while and get a feel for it. Pick one of the stable versions like Redhat (Centos) or Ubuntu LTS so that you don't have to worry about constant updates as you would in Manjaro/Arch. And buy linux compatible hardware or system if you plan on using it professionally. A preinstalled machine/laptop is great for that. Dell and Lenovo have several.

Any recommendation for linux compatible hardware? I'll be building a new machine next year and i'd like to make it work with Linux, so a buying list would be nice.

I know the CPU/Ram/GPU i want, but i imagine most of the trouble is motherboard, since so many features are there.

I'm also curious how my current hardware rates on compatibility.

I've been building my own systems for a while. As long as you don't get the absolute newest motherboards you'll probably be okay. I have never had an issue with Linux and the Asus/MSI boards I've bought. Also like someone else said go with an AMD GPU. On a self build you can always send parts back. But if you get a laptop and it doesn't work with Linux make sure they have a return policy :) . They're much more cantankerous in my experience. That said if you stick with a mainstream Linux like Ubuntu you'll probably be fine with nvidia. I just prefer AMD gpu policies because they open source the driver code. I think both have had issues with Linux in the past, so sometimes you have to try a couple of different versions of the drivers. I tend to be conservative and not always go with bleeding edge. However sometimes that's what works.

Go with AMD for graphics for sure! Support is so much better overall than nVidia.

Interesting, i've heard Nvidia is the way to go. Closed source, yes, but still great drivers. I saw some very concerning behavior from AMD GPUs, like not releasing decent drivers for ages after new cards were released, etc.

I also have an Nvidia right now, so.. hopefully it works great hah. Otherwise i'll be on Windows.

tl;dr: AMD - if a particular GPU is supported by your kernel and Mesa versions, it works flawlessly, NVIDIA - way more ifs and randomness.

AMD: check in which kernel version AMD added the support for your GPU, and which Mesa version has feature parity (most of the time it's already there because there weren't any big shifts since Vega, RDNA2 might be that one) and you're good to go on any distro.

NVIDIA: Wayland support isn't there for years and foreseeable future, random issues with driver updates. Supports only 3 distros (Red Hat family, SUSE and Ubuntu without derivatives, I even made a page for devs how to add Debian flavour of it on any deb distro since Mint users were constantly struggling), Debian makes it's own decoupling of blob which works flawlessly but new version might not be there for a month because maintainers aren't there. I still remember that full support for Pascal has landed 6 months after the release.

Not sure if you've already seen this, but I highly recommend AutoHotkey [1] for setting up hotkeys and hotstrings in Windows. It's powerful and flexible, though the language can be a little odd at times. You can even script mouse movements, or create application-specific hotkeys.

[1] https://www.autohotkey.com/

I don't use WSL but I use a Linux VM that I just RDP into.

I run Windows on my personal computer, and just have a Debian VM I use for work.

When it's time to work, I just click an RDP shortcut and 3/5 monitors turn into work monitors. I still have easy access to my Windows stuff on the other two for the non-work related stuff I keep open all day (Spotify, Discord, etc).

When work is done, I just close the RDP session. All my work stuff stays open. I don't need to worry about saving any state, or restoring it the next day when I start work.

Also completely obviates any sort of driver or hardware issues. Stuff that's simple on Windows (e.g., using any of the multitude of USB/thunderbolt laptop docks) is just a friggin' nightmare on Linux.

The main use case for me, simplistically, is I still don't have an equivalent to Microsoft Word that I can run in Linux and that is still the standard for business / office applications. So I need a Windows desktop I can access ad hoc throughout the day interactively as I am doing things. Rebooting to do so would be prohibitively time consuming.

Of course, this is terrible, but it is what it is for now. The online office apps are slowly creeping towards viability but they are still a long way short. When (if) they get there I might be able to change this.

To use both systems simultaneously? Dual boot is either one or the other, and even then, adds considerable friction. Many Linux distributions don't support secure boot. Sometimes Windows updates overwrites the Linux bootloader.

There's ways to have the windows boot loader do it, but unless something's changed that really means the windows boot loader reboots the computer. EasyBCD[0] can do this, but only on an mbr partition with bios boot, not on gpt/UEFI boot. Loading the windows boot loader from grub works better.

0: http://neosmart.net/dl.php?id=1

I generally prefer linux, but need windows for work related stuff (excel and visual studio). I have a full version of linux installed for duel-boot purposes and I still use it a bit, but WSL is getting better and better to the point where it's hardly worth it to have two OS's installed. It takes up space; it means that I have two dev environments to keep in sync with each-other; and restarting my computer to get from one to the other is a hassle. On my next computer, I might not bother installing two OS's and just stick with windows/WSL.

Why dual boot when you can do your linux work and windows work on the same machine? Imagine you write a lot of python code that has to work on both linux and windows. You want to dual boot for that? Sure for the final set of tests you would run on pure Linux but for day to day development WSL is a fine substitute.

Until recently I was booting into Windows and then remote deskoping into Linux. But Wayland has broken that functionality so badly I have just given up on Linux. When WSL gets this update that will mean I can do development on Linux again for the cross-platform GUI I like tinkering on (LibreOffice).

Try out X410 from the Microsoft store! It shows for a really simple x server interface with WSL.

Because rebooting kills all your running applications.

Because then you'd have to set up dual boot.

If you're dual-booting, you can go one better and virtualize your Linux distro in the windows environment. It works fairly well, the only problem is making the disk available for both types of uses; virtualbox has the ability to use a disk partition, but for hyper-v or other, you may need to work around it by mounting a disk image. (Doing something like this is really only useful if you have to actually boot windows natively for gpu acceleration or other reasons)

It's handy for those of us that use Linux, but also need to use things like Adobe tools, Visio, a decent Outlook client, etc.

Dual boot takes way too much time. WSL2 literally fires up instantly and then you have an actual Linux VM running actual Ubuntu or whatever. Just no GUI. You can then use Visual Studio Code (the Windows app) to develop for Linux or Windows. If you do Linux GUI work it's obviously not ideal.

Main use case for WSL is to use Windows desktop and run Linux based development tools. Many tools are mostly developed/used on Linux and Windows support can be lacking.

This enables also using Linux based IDEs and other graphical tools (could be for example some command line tool popping up image viewer) or browser.

Develop in Visual Studio and debug your code (with the VS debugger attached) in a Linux environment.

For me, the draw is Linux without problems using my montiors, GPUs, Bluetooth, USB, etcetc.

Which is litaraly the same reason i use(d) Mac, but am now looking to move away from. Mac has too many problems, so i may as well move on.

You need to close all your programs and wait whenever you swap.

I use WSL over dual boot just because dual boot takes time, and it is more easier to share files between Windows and WSL.

Docker only runs on WSL

Docker is available for Windows and does not require WSL. Docker options include[0]:

> Linux containers in WSL 2 mode, Linux containers in Hyper-V mode, or Windows containers.

0: https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com