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Comment by linuxlizard | Hacker News Reader

I'm quite impressed at how nice WSL is. It's very snappy, great internetworking with the host Windows, and is kept up-to-date. The only thing it's missing, for me, is nl80211 support (I do wifi) and usb-serial. I do a lot of console app dev in WSL regardless.

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I think it's quite crap actually.

If you don't have IPv6 on your network it just makes an address up and then tries to route everything through it because IPv6 has precedence.

And of course the sysctl to disable IPv6 doesn't work under WSL. It took me 30 mins just to fix that and that was straight out of the box.

I don't know why I'd want all the windows baggage on my Linux laptop.

WSL1 was so much better. WSL2 appears to simply be an effort for Microsoft to showcase Hyper-V and it has all the issues associated with virtualization - despite Microsoft's best attempts at blending the two environments.

WSL1 was almost useless on anything that did a lot of file I/O (so, installing or updating packages for a development environment took ages). This was not fixable given how Windows handles the file system and as I understand it this was the main drive to move to WSL2

I think it was only if you were interacting with the Windows host FS, operations within the Linux fs were fine with performance. I would be surprised if there wasn't a solution to that they could have worked towards.

Anyway, doesn't WSL2 mount Windows volumes over Samba?

WSL actually mounts over 9P from Plan 9 fame. fwiw I remember WSL1 being dog slow on file IO perf.

WSL might be integrated nicely, but then you still have to deal with Windows. No thanks.

A few years ago I got a new laptop, and booted windows so I could download a Debian installer. The first-time Windows setup was full of telemetry and other crap that would have needed to be turned off, and then I immediately started seeing ads for Edge and other crap showing up. It was disgusting.

The WSL instance is a special kind of VM, in a virtual network that gets masqueraded onto whatever network the host is on, yet nowhere in Windows can you manage this, for example to set the subnet the WSL runs in. Sometimes you have to reboot to get DNS going again. I'd call that not great.

you can normally just disable/reenable the virtual network switch to fix that. Not elegant but does the job:

> netsh interface set interface "vEthernet (WSL)" disable

then run again with enable.

You'll be even more impressed when you see Windows running on Linux on KVM with hardware passthrough, because that's what WSL is, a glorified VM with hardware-passthrough.

Honestly PCI pass through would probably make it perfect for me. Pass through a usb controller or whatever other weird device you need

Well USB in general is missing, and the workarounds don't always work (or in my case just plain don't work)

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