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Comment by nopenopenopeno | Hacker News Reader

WSL is so much extra work to maintain. I absolutely love running Ubuntu LTS as my daily OS. I use Wine to run Photoshop CC 2018 and Illustrator CC 2019, Nvidia drivers work excellently on Linux these days, and all my development tools just work. I dread the day I have to depend on anything else.

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So much extra work as compared with what? In my experience WSL is a godsend for those who have to work on windows and like to integrate Linux tools in daily work. Before there were things like cygwin, some ported tools, or Linux in vm. All limited and/or major pain to work with.

No systemd/cron/…, one extra OS to patch/upgrade, slooow perf on NTFS, can’t ssh into it (trivially), the list goes on. It has its uses but linux has many other uses that it doesn’t reliably cover.

Why would you want to SSH into WSL? Sounds to me you are not using WSL for what it is meant to be used.

Probably the same reason you’d want to SSH into any machine? You want to access a CLI, remotely, from another machine.

That is not what WSL is about though. In that case you would probably want a proper VM or use the Windows OpenSSH Server and get into the WSL CLI that way.

You’re right. I want Linux, full stop.

Why is it not what WSL is about, in particular? It works fine for me, am I doing things wrong? I don't want a "proper VM", I want something that has access to my windows filesystem, that I can SSH to. I also want to be able to run linux software from said CLI.

service sshd start

WSL(2) has no bridge networking, so you need to do port forwarding in windows (and enable the port through windows firewall) to make this work. It’s not super hard, but not as trivial as it could be if there were tighter integration.

I just followed Scott’s guide and there are easy scripts on github.

I mean sure, so did I. I'm just saying it's not as trivial as it could be. The script triggers a UAC prompt which means you can't just have it run automatically when the computer boots, it needs human intervention (if you have a better way, I'd love to hear it.)

Won't simply doing

ssh win-PC wsl

give you the same result as SSHing directly into WSL distro?

SSH'ing into the windows machine itself is a pretty useless feature for me. Windows' shell (cmd.exe) is awful, and as good as PowerShell may be, I never really learned it. I want a real unix/linux style environment.

So, having an SSH server in Windows, that only exists so I can run the `wsl` command, doesn't seem very useful. I'd rather the SSH server be hosted directly in the WSL VM itself and skip the intermediary step.

Yeah, I have to agree. Really the only thing keeping me on Windows was the state of Nvidia drivers on Linux, but a few years ago they became pretty usable on Xorg so I made the switch and haven't looked back. I did very much like WSL in my time using it, and it's integration with VS Code was sublime, but pulling the maintenance line for two systems drove me pretty crazy, pretty quickly.

Glad to hear that, the last time I tried running my GTX 1070 on Ubuntu the drivers weren't so great.

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