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Comment by osigurdson | Hacker News Reader

WSL is pretty great. I wish macOS had something like this.

WSL is a Linux subsystem because Windows doesn't have a built in Unix flavor. On the other hand, macOS is a true Unix™ and has all these things built in.

If you specifically want to run a Linux variant (now if you are a true Unix user, you will likely compile from source or use binaries built for Darwin/macOS), you will resort to a VM which is similar to WSL. There are many ways to do this, including just installing Docker which will bring up a Linux VM for you.

It doesn’t have cgroups. That is the problem. I think if they implemented that it would be the ideal developer platform.

Docker / Podman for Windows is much better than macOS equivalents currently.

Sorry, but that's hogwash. There's nothing holding you back as a developer due to not having cgroups. Develop on the machine you are using - alternatively (not ideal, but some people do it), develop against a Docker instance. I would not recommend the latter though.

I don’t like installing things on the local machine like that as it doesn’t have parity with production and harder to manage. Containerization solves real problems in my world.

I mostly don’t miss wsl on Mac because most software I use works well in both Linux and Mac, just not windows. When I want to test something on linux from my Mac, I use and recommend Canonical’s multipass.

macOS doesn’t have support for cgroups / containers however, so you are stuck running a vm to achieve this. wsl runs a vm as well but requires much less care and attention.

It is odd because it seems that macOS should be able to provide a better Linux development experience but right now, Microsoft seems to care about this immensely more than Apple.

Apple cares about macOS and iOS developers, whereas Microsoft's tech stack is aimed at Web Developers to try to make the development experience with Azure seamless. Apple couldn't care less if your Node backend runs well on their machines

You are absolutely right. Everything flows from the business model which is completely rational.

I'd rather just run a Linux vm inside MacOS if I felt a desperate need to do so in an already Unix OS.

The missing feature is cgroups. If they had that, it would be nirvana. Right now there is no nirvana but Windows has the edge (for me) because they’ve implemented a much smoother vm experience with wsl2.

Does POSIX compliance over two decade count? If so macOS definitely have something like this.

I mean… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem

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