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Comment by fodkodrasz | Hacker News Reader

So is this WSL 1.3.10 or WSL2 1.3.10? The Microsoft custom to confusingly name stuff goes on, in accordance the spirit of the Yoda-speak Windows subsystem for Linux...

ps.: the new features are nice, I like WSL2 and use it quite a bit sometimes.

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Memory reclaim sounds very much like something only relevant to a Hyper-V VM, therefore WSL2.

WSL1 just runs processes on the NT kernel directly. There's no need for memory reclaim just as there'd be no need while managing Win32 binaries.

It could be worse, it could be Java 2 Standard Edition 5.0 1.5.0 release 22!

I still don't understand Java versioning. Apparently the latest JRE is still 8u371? Is that Java 8? How does that relate to the SDK I use which is 17 or 20?

Bonus questions: why do I seemingly need to have both Java 8 and Java 11 installed on my work machine? But specifically some $RandomCompanyName Java, because Oracle Java and OpenJDK seem to be disallowed by corporate policies, and there are scanning tools running like hunter-killer drones, ready to snuff out any traces of openjdk and nuke it from orbit? And all I need it for is to run some PKI software that looks like it was written in the 90s?

I've lost track of what's going on with Java ecosystem, at least on the enterprise side.

Your corporate security crew are keenly aware that Oracle's licensing is just a wedge to help an army of lawyers invade your office. OpenJDK must be seen as guilty by association. There is no good reason to play around the legal nuclear pit that is maintained by Larry's minions.

As for jdk8 vs jdk11, backward compatibility was broken when J2EE javax.* classes were rightfully removed from the standard lib after Java 8. But Oracle (again) disallowed usage of the javax namespace in external libs and everybody now has to update to the poorly named jakarta replacement.

Thanks, this explanation actually makes perfect sense!

Oracle no longer releases JRE post Java 8. Users are not supposed to install it as Applets and WebStart are no longer supported. Post 8 only JDK is released which has bundled runtime environment.

I don't know if upstream ships it but I think JRE still exists as a build target. Debian stable at least has packages like openjdk-17-jre, and unstable has newer.

Oh my... Just checked my WSL2 version and it says WSL version: 1.2.5.0. Always thought it was version 2, but now I guess it's more about option 1 and 2...

WSL (option 1) is pretty dead I believe, so this should be WSL2 version 1.3.10...

I still run WSL1. Perf on WSL2 was still horrible if your files are under Windows last I checked.

but filesystem perf on WSL1 is horrible in general. Windows is much, much slower at touching a bunch of files than Linux, due to the filesystem filter driver architecture and NT's deep understanding of paths, the way NT does file locking, etc. it's night and day if you ever have to deal with something like a giant npm project or a huge git repo.

WSL2 is much faster on files that live inside it. I haven't found the 9P bridge to Windows to be too slow.

honestly, I don't know why they couldn't bypass the FS filter stack or something for WSL1.

(disclaimer: I work at MS, but not on WSL.)

They said Dev Drive supports bypassing most of the FS filter stack, and it somewhat makes sense that it is easier to bypass the stack at the drive level than the folder level (WSL1 was using folders deep in %LocalAppData%).

I'm very curious what WSL1 performance sitting on top of Dev Drive will be like. I have no idea yet if that's even an expected to be supported scenario. (In further curiosity with a few quick searches: no direct mention of it in the Dev Home repo, the only WSL-related issues they seem to be currently tracking are installing Repos to WSL paths from Dev Home. I don't see anything on automating installing WSL[1] distros to Dev Drive.)

I did try WSL2 on a new machine, and it does indeed seem pretty fast even on this dinky laptop, but then working on those files with JetBrains tools (PhpStorm) is a bit of an issue. It looks like they've added some support for it now, but I think it's running the IDE under Linux and then forwarding the GUI or I don't know what, but it adds a bit of latency on the IDE side instead. So I lose one way or the other.

On a fresh install I first setup WSL1, duplicated it and then converted the other one to WSL2. I don't really use the WSL1 one much, but it's nice whenever I need touch files "in Windows".

I used WSL2 for a long time and it was okay, but one day out of the blue CIFS (SMB) slowed to a crawl, like 10Mbps or something on a 1Gbps LAN connection. Downgraded to WSL1 and the problem went away, have been on 1 since. At least they made it easy to downgrade.

Microsoft's formal stance is still that WSL1 won't be deprecated. I use it every day!

Yes yes, just like ".NET Framework is a mature application platform" or any other vague terms they like to speak out just not to explicitly say "We will only do security fixes because we're obliged by the Windows Support cycle but really don't like to work on this anymore".

Good enough for me. It works well enough for editing Windows-side files which is all I need WSL1 for.

Was about to ask you how do you know the installed version, but wow, just updated WSL, and this new version also brought the support for the `--version` command line switch, so finally I can also check which version I have installed!

I'm still on 1, but admittedly this is the last time I ever set something up on WSL. VMs are still superior, at least for me.

WSL2 is basically the VM solution (the distro and unix files are installed into a VHD just like a VM; the "real" Linux kernel runs directly on top of Hyper-V, the Windows hypervisor, as opposed to WS1 having the NT Kernel acting like Linux), so it may be a "best of both worlds" for you if you were to try "upgrading" your WSL to it.

I tried, it didn't work. The upgrade hangs and then never completes. Known issue apparently. Plus git on WSL2 has had a lot of issues in the past to make me not want to upgrade. Also worth mentioning that using portable VM disks is easier with other softwares than it is with WSL.

They should call the next release ‘WSL one’, then follow up with ‘WSL series W’

Can't just skip the logical step to WSL360. That would be madness.

WSL 365... Linux apps in the cloud, accessible anywhere with Windows!

Which is obviously just rebranding of Azure Functions / Azure Automation.

WSL1 is not developed any further.

This is only WSL2 (I know, versioning could have been better)

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