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Comment by Tomte | Hacker News Reader

Is that WSL 2 with version number 1 or the "old" WSL?

This is WSL 2 1.0.0.

Microsoft is the worst company on the planet when it comes to version numbers. Don't even get me started about "Xbox One".

Seriously?

Will there also be WSL 1 2.0 then? But WSL 1 was never called 1, it was just WSL in contrast to WSL 2.

I think most people at this point call WSL1 "WSL1". That does seem to be the lasting "names" of these: WSL1 and WSL2. Arguably they aren't version numbers at all but naming in the way people name Word docs that start off as clones and slowly diverge. Perhaps someday we'll get WSL.Final and WSL.Final.Final to truly close the loop on the Word doc style naming scheme.

I think that honor goes to USB-IF.

USB 3.2 gen 2x2 would like a word. I had to Google it to make fun of it, and I’m still not sure if it’s “(gen 2) x2” or “gen (2x2)”.

USB has learned their lesson and finally have a sensible naming strategy going forward. When is Microsoft going to learn their lesson?

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/09/usb-if-says-goodbye-...

that didn't stop them from announcing new speeds (80 and 120Gbps) as USB4 2.0 though...

They have not. There are still optional components of USB4.

I’m not sure how or why this happens. USB, HDMI, BLE, all have optional components and it’s insanely frustrating. It’s got to be some new feature of designed-by-committee groups where it’s easy to get a feature only 1/2 the group wants.

Because, you see, if power transmission is optional, we can manufacture a cable without it for 37¢ instead of 39¢. Think of the savings!

... yes, I hate it too :(

By Grabthar's Hammer

For longer cables the cost is significant. USB-C can carry 5A, so you need 18 gauge wire for ~12 feet. Ideally you'd do the 8 power/ground pins at 18awg and the 16 data pins at 28awg. But that's a substantially more expensive cable than just 24 wires of 28awg.

And as a user it's annoying to have an excessively stiff cable, so it's suboptimal to have every cable support 240W charging, but for cost and convenience.

It's a mess. We all said we wanted one cable that does everything, and I still feel that way, but here I am buying different cables for laptop charging versus iPad charging because I want a light/thin cable for the iPad. Sigh.

Weren't all those names deprecated in favor of just calling it USB 10/20/40 Gbps in market facing use? I Think the whole "Gen X" makes sense for technical documentation, but it's clearly too specific for consumer communication.

You can still use WSL 1 with this version, so it's technically WSL 1&2 1.0.0, which feels more on par with the USB thing to me.

glares at video card numbering schemes

Didn't Apple call a specific non-first version of iPad just iPad? Like it was, iPad, iPad 2, iPad again. Or am I misremembering?

Anyway nobody is really worse than USB-IF who recently released USB4 2.0 specification.

yup, you remember it right. It looked like they wanted to have an iPhone-like numbering scheme with iPad 2 and then.. changed their minds I guess?

IIRC it was literally called “the new iPad” which is nonsensical a decade later.

When the iPad 3 released Apple called it "The new iPad" everywhere.

So you had:

- iPad ("iPad")

- iPad 2 ("iPad 2" or "iPad 2nd generation")

- iPad 3 ("The new iPad")

- iPad 4 ("iPad with Retina display")

So in late 2012 you had people shopping, and having to pick between "The New iPad" (last year's model), "iPad with Retina display" (this year's model), and the iPad Air.

Apple stopped after that, going with iPad [type] [number] naming.

I always try to just skip to the (year) identification scheme, which is potentially less confusing (unless I'm actually looking at my specific piece of hardware), unless they release multiple iterations each year, which it seems they've done a couple times.

Hmm I was confused about this as well. Thank you for the clarification here. Perhaps we could get a title update to something like "WSL 2 out of beta".

As an aside, I love WSL. Some of my favorite software out of Microsoft in years.

They're just trying to beat Sun.

> This is WSL 2 1.0.0.

> Microsoft is the worst company on the planet when it comes to version numbers.

I take some bleak comfort in the fact that this subsystem appears to be built on New Technology Subsystem Technology...

Department of Redundancy Department

What about "Xbox One Series" ?

What should the version have been?

It's not that unusual, especially in games. For instance,"The Witcher 2" version 3.3 [1], "Dota 2" version 7.32c [2], but also "Struts 2", version 6.0.3 [3]. Some others may be more considered a product name than a version number, e.g. "GNOME 2", "Winamp 5".

[1] https://en.cdprojektred.com/download/patch-3-3/ [2] https://www.dota2.com/patches/7.32c [3] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/WW/Version+Notes...

I'd agree, but they are calling it "WSL 1.0.0", which is reflected in the release name for example ("Microsoft.WSL_1.0.0.0_x64_ARM64.msixbundle"). Which is natural of course because they are already calling the WSL2 repo simply "WSL".

Its actually WSL 360 Series X 365

... for Workgroups

Service Pack 3.1a

Ultimate Edition

365

Professional

The old "Microsoft Designs iPod Packaging" https://youtu.be/EUXnJraKM3k

Exactly my question. How confusing.

Especially since there is some feature discrepancy between WSL1 and WSL2, sometimes there is a need to use the former.

Yep, WSL1 is good and sometimes very fast, it’s just not as compatible to linux as WSL 2.

It's more compatible if you want to access a usb or serial port.

WSL2 is like a car that's great in most ways but for some reason just cannot make right turns from one-way streets. You might not encounter that particular situation very often but your car still needs to be able to do it or else it's just an annoying 3/4-baked thing that is better just skipped until it's actually fully functional.

> It's more compatible if you want to access a usb or serial port.

Yep, that's the case I had in mind.

I quite prefer the original, albeit little more than a container.

Mostly because the newer version forces you into Hyper-V, and I'd rather not be committed to that hypervisor

If I'm on Windows I'm much more likely to want good old VMWare Workstation. Enabling WSL2/Hyper-V precludes this

I haven't had nearly as good of an interactive (UI capable) guest experience with anything else (beyond KVM with QXL/Spice)

Edit: At risk of arguing their merits, video game anti-cheat clients will often categorically refuse to run if Hyper-V is enabled, too.

You can run VMWare Workstation with Hyper-V enabled now: https://blogs.vmware.com/workstation/2020/05/vmware-workstat...

Ah, awesome! That's a good step, I'll give it a try the next time I find myself on Windows.

I'm curious if the seemingly choppy display stuff continues, it has been quite a while.

As much as it pains me, I have to avoid Hyper-V generally for anti-cheat client compatibility

> As much as it pains me, I have to avoid Hyper-V generally for anti-cheat client compatibility

Which anti cheat clients still have trouble with Hyper-V?

ESEA is the one on my mind - service I participate w/ for CS:GO.

Partner of ESL, leagues/practice on servers better than first party (128 tick vs 66)

ref: https://support.esea.net/hc/en-us/articles/360008741974-Erro...

There are others, I think Valorant complained... but I gave up when I couldn't mask it

To expand (I can't edit now)... ESEA anti-cheat is posited as Hyper-V specific, but it's actually against being virtualized in general.

I was able to work around this with KVM on Linux with a GPU passed to a Windows VM.

I tweaked the libvirt XMLs (VM definitions) a few key ways and was able to convince ESEA it's bare metal, but not Valorant. I never got to play it, but it's fine by me :)

This combination works well enough, I only boot up Windows when I need a couple anti-cheats I've managed to trick (that also can't work in Proton)

I know WSL2 only requires a part of Hyper-V to run ("Virtual Machine Platform"). This also allows it to work on Windows Home. I wonder if anti-cheat systems will be able to do there jobs while still allowing WSL2 to be used. I don't know enough about how Hyper-V is used to circumvent anti-cheating.

It's worth noting that there have been reports of performance degradation running VMWare alongside Hyper-V[0]. Don't get me wrong, I love what Microsoft is doing with Windows Hypervisor Platform (WHP/WHPX). There's even experimental support for running accelerated QEMU VMs on Windows Hosts[1]. Hopefully these performance issues improve over time.

[0]: https://communities.vmware.com/t5/VMware-Workstation-Player/...

[1]: https://qemu.weilnetz.de/

I believe WSL 1 is abandonware so WSL 2 is just WSL so to answer your question, it's WSL 2 1.0.0 lol

It's sad since WSL 1 really is more interesting than WSL 2. Also better suited for my use cases, since it's on the same network interface.

Yeah, I thought wsl 1 was very cool.

microcontroller & fpga programming, all kinds of usb and serial port stuff, all unusable on wsl2, works on wsl1, hell even cygwin. wsl2 is half-baked crap.

I think the problem is that the market is much more interested in things like container development, which doesn't generally need hardware access beyond CPU, RAM, network, maybe storage, and maybe GPU.

WSL2 is much better than WSL1 at solving my problems. But that sucks it has become worse for you :/

I another comment I likened it to an amazing car that just can't turn left off of one-way streets. You can do a lot and never notice, but I just happen to live on a one-way street.

Maybe they just shouldn't be calling it a linux system or an os but just an application server. Do that and the missing finctionality suddenly isn't a problem because it's not implied in the first place. I never would have made this complaint about tomcat or whatever.

The blogs claim WSL1 is still being maintained and there are scenarios where WSL1 still makes sense. (WSL1 has better hardware compatibility because it is not VM emulated hardware but direct access via the NT Kernel, as an example mentioned in other comment threads here.)

This seems like a case where they should have picked a different naming scheme rather than numbers like WSL-A and WSL-B or something.

The blogs also claim that their strategy for addressing the use cases where WSL1 is still needed is to try to improve WSL2 in those areas, i.e., to pave the way to fully abandoning WSL1.

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