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Comment by 2OEH8eoCRo0 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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