Hacker News Reader

Comment by manojlds | Hacker News Reader

Isn't it officially coming anyway from Microsoft - https://www.theverge.com/2020/5/19/21263377/microsoft-window...

The author of that article seems to be conflating GPU support somehow with GUI apps. GPU support is indeed coming to WSL2 and is available currently in Insider builds along with a special release of the Nvidia driver and some Linux support packages.

This, however has nothing to do with graphical applications or GPU acceleration of such. It’s entirely targeted to machine learning frameworks.

I do think Microsoft has said that GUI stuff is on the roadmap. I hope they can continue to force the hand of Nvidia on the ridiculous matter of not providing any kind of GPU virtualization on their consumer cards.

You should be able to run Linux GUI apps via WSL2 on a preview build soon.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-in-the-...

I love how WSL was put in the "command line" team and they are now doing graphics, GPU, and audio (plus probably Android again) :)

There was a story a few weeks back about Microsoft working on a new android subsystem. So truly coming full circle; android OS stability (via project treble), the vm approach instead of compatibility layer approach, and improvements to hardware sharing/passthrough to wsl 2 mean that they can finally realize what they tried to do with Projecy Astoria.

They'll need to manage their own app store as I can't imagine they'll have gapps//shims out of the box, but that works in their favor if they wanted to do another mobile play.

They'll need to manage their own app store as I can't imagine they'll have gapps//shims out of the box, but that works in their favor if they wanted to do another mobile play.

When the new EU fair market regulation is accepted, they will be able to compete with an app store op Android (or iOS):

allow the installation and effective use of third party software applications or software application stores using, or interoperating with, operating systems of that gatekeeper and allow these software applications or software application stores to be accessed by means other than the core platform services of that gatekeeper.

Since they already allow alternative app stores (e.g. Steam) on regular Windows, not much changes for them in this respect. But they will also be able to compete with the Play Store and iOS App Store with their own store.

Source: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CEL...

It's already possible to have other app stores than Play Store on Android, even simultanously. I think some features are reserved to Play Store in practice (to stores pre installed on the phone) so there could be some improvement on this point.

Google also currently prevents OEMs from installing competitors' stores by threatening to withhold access to Google's services. This is one of the points in Epic's lawsuit.

Um.... Samsung phones come with Samsung store...in usa..and have google services on them just fine...

There is also a web frontend for it: https://www.samsung.com/us/apps/galaxy-store/

>They'll need to manage their own app store as I can't imagine they'll have gapps//shims out of the box, but that works in their favor if they wanted to do another mobile play.

They own App Center so maybe its not that far away.

At this point I could see how some developers may prefer an MS store for ios and android devices over the native stores. Especially if they make deeper cuts on pricing (10% of sales instead of 30% and 3% of transactions instead of 30%).

I'm slightly leery about it all, but definitely warming up to MS this past decade. WSL2 and VS Code have made my life much easier to say the least. Of course this is the intended effect, I no longer have the urgency to get into a full Linux environment this way.

On-Topic: glad to see this GWSL thing, as I'd been thinking about doing similar... getting X and pulseaudio working in windows, and configured right in WSL environment is a pain to say the least. If this eases that pain even if only for local logins, I'm pretty happy with it. I spent a couple days trying to get it all working... I could launch Ubuntu's Firefox instance, but couldn't for the life of me get audio working right and just gave up after a couple days.

They are working on Wayland support: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Microsof...

Will they run into the same roadblocks that befell Wayland on Nvidia? I guess not, because they'll likely create their own compositor that bridges into dwm, so they can use EGLStreams but I sorta hope MS does pressure Nvidia into some kind of support.

Microsoft has shown it at X Developer Days 2020.

This will be a game changer if they flesh it out. Imagine Linux apps right alongside your windows apps with their own icons and everything.

Windows Terminal + Visual Studio Code + WSL2 is the bee's knees.

Until they allow USB passthrough (which is more or less blocked by the fact that Hyper-V itself doesn't seem to have the feature), a whole bunch of my use cases are basically barred from WSL2. Shame, cause otherwise I really, really enjoyed using it - coming from a guy who's been on Linux for 99% of his time for ~15 years at this point.

I really hope that happens at some point, since there's so much messing around just to get a yubikey working in WSL. I eventually gave up on that.

Wsl 2 is really cool, right up until you want/need to do anything with the underlying hardware. No usb passthrough, no hardware acceleration, gpu passthrough is there but it's still early stages as performance is about half of native and vendor tooling is absent, etc

It's getting better all the time though - they tease usb passthrough might be doable as it's already supported with remote desktop

Yeah it's actually pretty damn good. Performance was better than it was with WSL1 for me, at least (especially IO). IIRC they are exploring USB passthrough using Hyper-V sockets, but it's still very early to actually talk about having that included[1]

Once they figure that out I might just as well be able to switch over and stop dual booting. I hate dual booting more than I hate Windows, so it would be an improvement.

[1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2195#issuecomment-74...

> Performance was better than it was with WSL1 for me, at least (especially IO).

WSL1 performance is better for CPU-bound problems

WSL2 only shines due to the VHDX approach. If WSL1 could use a VHDX or (gasp!) a native partition in a native linux format, it would smoke WSL2.

WSL1 was more or less the reverse-equivalent of WINE as I understood it, more or less a translation layer for a subset of syscalls, the approach is awfully limited from the get go. Not sure how using a VHDX or partition would solve that. We'd be back to square one, with things like containers being unusable again.

> Not sure how using a VHDX or partition would solve that

The problem with WSL1 is limited to disk IO performance, because the compatibility layer that's easy to do with system calls isn't so easy to do with the filesystem.

> We'd be back to square one, with things like containers being unusable again.

It's complementary. WSL2 when you play with containers, WSL1 when you don't.

Personally, I don't bother with containers for about 90% of the development cycle - and it's just for testing before being deployed to a genuine linux, not some VM.

Also, if you want to run servers with WSL (say, postgres), having containers is the last of your problems.

Ah, different usecases then. I pretty much tend to go containers from A-Z for anything non-trivial, thus WSL1 was more or less useless for me. IO is also a big problem, just running a simple git status on a bigger project is a PITA.

It's not all that limited.

VHDX/partition would help significantly by not being NTFS and/or enabling a linux-style dentry cache.

I wouldn't call having only a subset of system calls, no containerization, no background services, no proper init system, no kernel modules, "not all that limited". But maybe that's just my use case.

I've never hit a system call I wanted but wasn't available on WSL. In fact the couple times I've been disappointed at the lack of a system call it was when I was booting linux.

No containerization: Agreed, this is a significant limit.

Background services work just fine, I don't know what you're getting at. I have cron and stuff going.

What's improper about the init system? I start services, I stop services, it seems fine.

No kernel modules: I feel like this is pretty niche.

Probably, but it also introduced a lot of edge cases for compatibility issues. I thought it was a reasonable approach, though likely took more devs than just supporting the more tightly integrated VM environments.

I will say that Docker Desktop works MUCH more smoothly with WSL2 than the prior approach.

About the only issue I see now is about once a month I have to reboot because the magic localhost port mapping between docker, wsl-ubuntu and native host goes wonky. It's not so bad as long as I realize before diving into a rabbit hole to figure out why I can't connect to something.

uh oh. I intend to use only external HDs on my new box (the SSD HD is small) and if I can't mount a USB it ain't gonna work.

I can do it fine in WSL1.

You can mount partitions/drives but something like a yubikey, mic, etc you can't right now

Ah, ok. I was trying to follow a support thread and it wasn't clear about that. It made it sound like WSL2 didn't support USB at all.

WSL2 is backed by an actual virtual machine, so it comes with the limitations of its hypervisor (Hyper-V). Hyper-V doesn't support full USB passthrough. AFAIK it does support passing down USB volumes though.

It seems many people find USB/IP works as a replacement for real USB passthrough http://usbip.sourceforge.net/

Found this guide a couple of days ago[1]. Looks awfully convoluted and impractical. Good if it works, but I personally draw my line of acceptable minimum functionality somewhere between "working" and "practical". This is a bit much, and has a couple of pretty bad gotchas, unfortunately.

[1] https://github.com/rpasek/usbip-wsl2-instructions

I managed to get usb pass through working the other day for the serial monitor on a development board, they may have updated since last you tried.

You can already do some of this with wslu (out of the box on the ubuntu image). You can create desktop shortcuts to linux apps (and I think provide an icon, otherwise it'll try to guess), wslview proxies to your default browser on the Windows side, and I think there are a couple of other things.

All that goodness limited by networking troubles of WSL2 while on a VPN.

Wonder why it is never seen by WSL devs! Most of those trying to use WSL are running Windows, in a corp network, where a VPN is there by default.

I'm glad we're using dedicated vpn boxes... kind of annoying that I can't use a wifi directly, but usually at my home desk and tethered in anyway. Didn't know about the VPN issues in practice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com