Comment by th0ma5 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by th0ma5 | Hacker News Reader

Just mentioning this for posterity. Some solutions I've had are:

1. Using Cygwin, Cygwin's X12 server and ssh X forwarding to run Linux apps on Windows that were actually running in VirtualBox.

2. Same thing with Cygwin X server but running everything in WSL1.

3. Trying to natively compile things for Cygwin.

4. Using Docker for Windows to run specific apps, although this is fairly similar to #1.

5. Straight Hyper V Debian... Networking was such a pain I went back to VirtualBox.

I haven't messed with WSL2 yet but I imagine it'll be some cross of #1 and #2.

Compiling stuff in Cygwin was a pain somewhat, still took hours to compile seemingly every dependency if the thing you wanted wasn't in the Cygwin package managers. The X server is rock solid though.

The WSL1 sure is a neat idea but I can understand that being a dead end street so they hopped to virtualization.

Another commenter mentioned ChromeOS and I really dig how they made that work. Even better than OSX. Recently I got a Pinebook Pro and running arch it seems I have to run a Debian container and forward X for so much stuff I'm thinking about just going to Debian straight away, but I may lose some support for some things I'm not sure.

Edit: I forgot there is I think a closed source X server for Windows that is still free that supports some of OpenGL. I managed to get Kitty (terminal) running on that.

WSL2 is basically the same as WSL1 for the comparison you're making, though the upcoming GUI stuff will mean that you don't have to fiddle with the X server, it'll "just work".

The main difference I encounter between WSL1 and WSL2 is that accessing files across the OS divide happens through a networked filesystem instead of a natively shared filesystem, so it's not as seamless/performant, but the upside is much better filesystem performance when it's Linux doing Linux things. Which I'm happy about when it comes to containers. (I run both WSL1 and WSL2 on different computers.)

Docker for Windows also now has WSL integration so that you can launch Linux containers directly into WSL. I don't think it's configured by default just because you have to choose to install WSL, but once you've flipped the requisite switches it's seamless.

> The main difference I encounter between WSL1 and WSL2 is that accessing files across the OS divide happens through a networked filesystem instead of a natively shared filesystem

This has been my biggest gripe with WSL and linux virtualization on windows. WSL1 wouldn't work with some weirdly mapped network drives we had and with WSL2 (and linux in general) I don't find the drivers (or samba or some other component) stable enough when you're doing large writes to NTFS drives, I've had the same issues with vmware too.

This is one of the big reasons I'm still on cygwin, it's worked for years (maybe decades), it interoperates with windows better and all the little bugs have been worked out. Ultimately it's then GNU tools I'm after, the kernel isn't particularly interesting for my use cases.

> Ultimately it's then GNU tools I'm after, the kernel isn't particularly interesting for my use cases.

That’s an interesting take, and it makes sense that some people need properly hybrid setups. I personally used Cygwin mostly to have access to a Linux dev environment inside Windows, not so much to apply GNU tools to Windows development. As a result I’m pretty happy with WSL just for the sake of having a Linux dev environment within easy reach, and I typically don’t feel a need to do much with the shared file system.

My latest solution is to just install git sdk for Windows. It comes with pacman and mays, almost perfect for my research work.

It is my favorite too! I can quickly work in Bash/Zsh without starting any WSL sessions.

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