Microsoft Rolling Out New Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" Features for 2024 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Rolling Out New Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" Features for 2024

phoronix.com

58 pointsmikece73 comments

They should focus more on this kind of features, instead of paddling Copilot and AI every 5 minutes, or doing crazy stuff like removing the right Ctrl key to replace it with the new Copilot key. The only advantage of the latter is that is pushes more people to Linux faster.

If they just focus instead on developers ("developers! developers! developers!") and gamers, instead of AI gimmicks, things would be more peachy for them instead of being the most hated big tech company.

Weird comment to make on a thread about exactly this kind of feature. They're a big organization with many people working on many different things. Some will maybe great while others will potentially suck.

Only if there's no person at the helm with some sort of... um... vision, they call it?

If only Satya Nadella would dogfood the OOTB experience of Windows 11 and not whatever his IT departments set up for him, he'd probably throw his laptop out the window and fire half the Windows managers.

~20 years ago BillG would occasionally send an unhappy internal email to execs/architects with a list of annoying or nonsensical things he ran into using Windows, Office, or whatever. I can't say that it had much effect!

Other than all installers being terrible, the only one I can sort of remember is a rant about "My Documents" and how the word "My" made no sense.

It had plenty of effect! WinXP/2k were the most logically organized Windows OS. It went rapidly downhill once Bill Gates left Microsoft.

So Bill Gates was the good guy?

Don't confuse competence and ethics.

I guess the purpose of "My Documents" and "Program Files" was to break compatibility with some old DOS programs. Because using space in filenames was not a very wise idea from Microsoft. (it broke even some Microsoft programs)

The “interesting” parsing behavior of CMD.EXE made the spaces extra fun.

Not to mention it was under “Documents and Settings” and it was pretty easy to hit the 255 character path limit with all that as a prefix.

> a rant about "My Documents" and how the word "My" made no sense

Where's the lie? They aren't the computer's document — they're mine! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wX1x7pfH8fw

Exactly, so why is the computer referring to them as “My Documents”? Shouldn’t it be “Your Documents”? But I think his preference was just “Documents” so nobody would need to even consider this!

> a rant about "My Documents" and how the word "My" made no sense.

Well, we're not in a communist country for them to be "Our Documents", so of course it will be "My Documents". USA! USA! USA!

I'd take OOTB windows than anything the IT departments set me up any day. If you ever worked at a big corp using Windows you know what I mean.

you cant download viruses or exfiltrate data if security tooling uses 100% of your CPU taps head

Who do you think is responsible for where Windows is going?

What's wrong with the OOTB experience? It's a million times better than it was back when I lived in the Windows OOTB experience. It seems much better than the OOTB of Ubuntu, although probably less good than MacOS.

Without even getting into Recall, every time I install Windows 11 (not even a consumer edition) it takes a solid 10 minutes of clicking multiple times on hard to find options to disable the pre-AI spyware that merely monitored what you did for advertising purposes. And I know exactly where to click because I have to do it a lot.

I run a lab with public computers for students to use in their projects. It is unhelpful to train a public computer with student data, even if it were ethical (it is not). Again, not going to get into the issues with Recall on public PCs... but you can use your imagination when students check their email on a public Windows computer.

I set up dozens of computers in this lab each year from scratch, it actually hurts my mouse hand to have to click so many times in order to keep students' information private. Windows 11 has ~10x as many individual dialogs I have to click on than even Windows 10, and now I have to figure out how to disable even more unsafe stuff, or guess when they will silently re-enable something I previously disabled. The number of times OneDrive has reinstalled itself after a Windows Update is nauseating.

And that's a fancy Enterprise edition for a university that had the leverage to get the worst stuff removed, I am sure I was able to add/remove programs to remove a lot of things that are just impossible to disable on a normal install.

> I set up dozens of computers in this lab each year from scratch ...

Have you looked at automated solutions for that?

If it's a cost issue, then I think even Clonezilla will let you take an image of a "golden master" (aka pc set up how you want) then deploy it over the network to image a bunch of computers at the same time.

> Have you looked at automated solutions for that?

Sure, I look forward to IS&T releasing one but it's more likely to happen if I have one to suggest they review for security.

> If it's a cost issue, then I think even Clonezilla will let you take an image of a "golden master" (aka pc set up how you want) then deploy it over the network to image a bunch of computers at the same time.

We used to do it that way with Acronis disk cloning. It is better to do PXE boot installs to avoid weird config problems according to IS&T, I didn't second-guess them on that. I don't hate the idea, just was told to avoid it.

Ahhh yeah. I'd forgotten about PXE, it's been years since I did anything serious with that.

That can work well if the network card(s) in the computers all support PXE booting.

From memory: Ads. Weather and stock market info. Removal of options and features from windows 10 (why can't I have the taskbar vertically on the side of my wide monitor?). Flaky, slow and inconsistent bluetooth and sound controls. More and more things moving from control panel to settings where they are being dumbed down, leading to a lot more googling to figure out how to change things. Windows desperately trying to save things in onedrive rather than on the local disk. Really really trying to open everything in edge instead of the default browser.

When did you last try Ubuntu? It's actually gotten very good, to the point where I had an easier time setting up an external Blu-ray player on Linux than on Windows this past month.

My recent experience with a lenovo legion laptop was bad. Ubuntu boots then GPU driver crashes as soon you open a browser window. The end.

> Some will maybe great

like the Microsoft vacuum cleaner

> while others will potentially suck.

everything they actually do: Windows, Office, Teams

removing right Ctrl key to replace it with the new Copilot key - What the hell are t hey thinking! OMG.

>being the most hated big tech company.

I thought that was either Google, Facebook, or Amazon depending on which way the winds are blowing on a given day.

It's easy to avoid Facebook and Amazon. Microsoft and especially Google, not so much.

> especially Google

Yup... Firefox, Kagi, & Protonmail get me away from the worst of it but YouTube doesn't really have a good competitor and other people using things like Google Forms (whatever the surveys are called) sometimes ends up forcing me to log into a Google account or have certain features locked out.

I hate all of them equally, for what it's worth. Maybe Facebook a hair more, but it's too close to call.

Waaaaaay more people use Copilot than WSL. Like probably 100000x more.

Most businesses run everything on Windows and Microsoft. That's their business. They don't give a shit about Windows Home edition or nerds crying and switching to Linux. You're not their market.

Unfortunately there are lots of devs stuck on windows, wsl is very popular.

Lots of people prefer Windows + WSL over Mac. I can’t fathom why anyone would choose Windows over Mac or Linux.

At work I spent 13 years on the Mac. Then 5 solid years on nothing but Linux. And the last two years on WSL+Windows. My home system is an M1 Macbook Air. I'm an SRE so I mostly write lots of code and bash scripts and run 50+ tmux panes/day in parallel. I run 3 monitors - 35", Laptop, 27" to my left. All three monitors are in constant use.

All three have something to offer - the "Why" of Windows+WSL.

- WSL offers a pretty pure modern Linux experience - which takes an awful lot of brew effort to replicate on a Mac.

- The windows GUI is far superior to anything Linux has to offer - PowerToys/Fancy Zones offers snapping and window control I could never replicate on Linux - despite multiple years of trying to.

- I spend 80% of my time in tmux/terminal.

- Bare Bones Windows Terminal is absolutely rock solid and high performance.

- Linux native is more stable than Windows+WSL - I would go months without rebooting my Linux system. My windows system rarely makes it more than a couple weeks.

- I use my laptop as a workstation (Precision 5560 - it only get ~80 minutes battery, even with all the discrete NVIDIA stuff turned off) - so the (significant) superiority of Mac Laptop Portability doesn't do anything for me.

If Microsoft can dial in the stability of WSL -speaking as one who has spent at least 1/2 decade on all three platforms at work - My preference for work is Windows + WSL for GUI + Linux experience reasons. If I didn't think Microsoft was going to fix WSL, I'd probably switch to Arch.

For personal use - I have a NUC11 with a Decent RTX2060 video card for Steam Gaming, and would never consider anything for a personal laptop than a macbook in one form or another.

> - The windows GUI is far superior to anything Linux has to offer - PowerToys/Fancy Zones offers snapping and window control I could never replicate on Linux - despite multiple years of trying to.

Fvwm ? I won't comment about Windows.

For Windows: Visual Studio, familiarity

Against macOS: Not wanting to fight the OS when I want to do something like attach a debugger to a program I didn't build

Against Linux: Having an NVIDIA card in my desktop

I’m mostly on Mac but I do prefer WSL to the Mac terminal experience.

Most things end up happening in Docker regardless, but things are just smoother in WSL. Not to mention that Windows has proper Window management and multiple display support.

I’m with the other poster, I don’t understand what you mean by multiple display support. I use my Mac Studio with a two monitor setup and it works beautifully. Even better, when I set my MacBook next to it, some kind of Apple magic happens in the background and I can move my mouse over to it like it’s a third display, letting me drag files between the two machines, control windows, use my keyboard, copy/paste, etc.

I use Rectangle for window management and have 3 monitors. I’m really not sure what you mean by the multiple display support. The window management is easy to rectify with Rectangle or Spectacle.

Windows (and to a lesser extent Gnome) have much better Window handling. Shortcut keys for tiling, snap to grid, snap to fill, window-walking (I don’t actually know what this feature is called but it’s when you cycle through window snaps and the window will “walk” across each position of each display in order).

Meanwhile macOS has none of these things and struggles to remember my display arrangement between restarts.

Sure I can download Rectangle/Spectacle/Amethyst and solve some of these problems (while giving screen observing permission to a third party) but it’s far from ideal and not at all what I used to have on Windows.

Not OP but Mac doesn't support daisy chaining via display port alt mode over usb-c. It's a little ridiculous cause a hackintosh does so we know that they can support it. I assume they don't because it drives sales of their absurdly priced monitors.

Honestly macos is in my opinion, a worse system in every regard, the only good thing is apple doesn't annoy you with ads, but if you can ignore that or just work around it somehow, I think windows is a better, more flexible OS.

The only advantage macos has for me is the battery life, and that's gone when the X elite drops, hopefully with great Linux support too (though I'm worried about X86-64 emulation on Linux)

That's all without mentioning the absurd pricing of Mac devices (in usable configurations, no, 8gb isn't enough).

Plenty of us also know UNIX, and rather not use it more than what is needed to the extent of job requirements.

We rather enjoy our IDEs and graphical workflows as much as possible.

At this stage it's because office on Mac sucks.

With the push to the new fisher price version of unified office that benefit will go away.

Microsoft products, while better than they were 10 years ago, are still terrible on Mac. Completely agree with you.

I want to use my own hardware - Hackintosh requires too much effort to boot, let alone work reliably.

For what it's worth, I'm seeing more and more common people using Macs to run their business/office and daily life needs when last decade and prior they would have been using Windows.

Stuck on corporate Windows, but WSL is verboten.

Right, but there are a lot more non devs that use windows, probably 100000:1 ratio.

Original link here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-in-the-...

Very excited about these new changes and improvements, particularly the RAM releasing and automatic storage reclamation.

WSL2 replaced my Macbook many years ago, and these days I couldn't be happier using Windows + komorebi as a DE over NixOS running on WSL2.

Finally decided that there are too many papercuts with WSL2. As new features and enhancements are introduced, new bugs appear at a similar rate.

This is not just me, but colleagues in the team using a mixture of personal and corporate devices encounter a similar stream of bugs. just enough to frustrate as we use WSL2 for our own work and support users.

I've yet to decide if to use VBox or go back to a Linux desktop (100% of my non admin work is Linux based, 100% of my admin work can be done through the browser).

Recently encountered issues in our team:

  - New experimental disk space reclaim feature caused WSL2 machine AND NTFS corruption. I've provided logs and others have confirmed.
  - 2 weeks ago installed docker desktop to help support a user. WSL2 will no longer (usually between 1 and 2GB) release memory or allow WSL2 to shutdown after shutdown of Docker Desktop.    
  - We still get various networking glitches with the new and old networking modes, routing and DNS issues when connected/disconnecting from VPN, IPV6, docker network access, accessing localhost web servers
  - A WSUS update deployed in April breaking WSL2 until WSL2 manually shutdown and  updated.   
  - A WSUS update requiring a restart breaking WSL2 until machine restarted.

Note everyone in the team encounters a different subset of the issues.

The decision to hide the virtual ethernet bridge on Windows 11 is a major WTF moment.

I burned a few hours trying to figure that one out, I need to disable/enable it each time I connect or disconnect to VPN.

Why Microsoft decided to hide that from the technical userbase of WSL2 I don't understand.

Microsoft Windows must be one of the world's biggest Linux distributions.

Anyone remember a zinger from Linus Torvalds a couple of decades ago: "Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." (https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/magazine/the-way-we-live-...)? Horribly ironic that the Year of Linux On the Desktop™ turns out to have been ushered in by Microsoft as a subsystem firmly under Windows' thumb. How the old /. crowd would have wailed and gnashed their teeth to find out what the future turned out to be.

WSL provides the means to run a distribution, it doesn’t provide its own. Ubuntu is the default, but others are officially supported.

The joke is that Windows provides a refined frontend to the otherwise fervid chaos that is Linux, and thus makes Windows de facto the largest (and best?) Linux distro.

> best

Lmao

The Closed Linux.

Isn't it just a linux VM with some nice guest intergrations?

Very Very happy to see this. My 64 GB 8 Core (Dell Precision 5560) Laptop get hits with the VMMEM CPU thrash/crash issue fairly frequently, (every week or two) even with the well known workaround:

  [wsl2]
  memory=8GB

I love wsl/tmux on Windows. I don't like how unreliable it is if you use it 12+ hours/day with memory stress.

I was always under the impression that WSL was good on RAM - giving it back when not needed. There was never a way to tune RAM usage AFAIK.

It's only good on RAM at first. I've got to reboot my machine somewhat regularly or it gets out of control, and that's on a machine with 32GB.

Same on a machine with 64 GB and memory limited to WSL with:

  [wsl2]
  memory=8GB

In my .wslconfig. Vmmem thrashes and kills the system every couple weeks, even when I'm not running Docker (which kills it even faster)

> There was never a way to tune RAM usage AFAIK.

Wsl2 has a config file setting for ram usage. WSL1 just shares the windows RAM.

Has MS made it so WSL doesn't grab at least 256GB of ssd/disk space?

I want to run WSL in 8-16GB.

Argh - they've made it WORSE - 1TB seems to be the minimum now.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/disk-space

sigh there is not enough enterprise improvements around management and security.

I'm probably a month or two away from having to disable this across the org, I dont want to but i cant disagree with the cyber sec team in the fact that its a dangerous security hole in our org.

Releasing RAM is a much-awaited improvement and should make things smoother.

“ Experimental features include: – wsl --manage <distro> --set-sparse <true/false> to enable automatic disk space reclaim”

Finally. No more messing with potentially dangerous tools.

What is the easiest option for running Linux commands on windows? Is WSL overkill for that?

I really hate the power shells CLI. The commands are so long and unintuitive.

Nowadays, installing WSL is really painless procedure [1]

Also make sure to install the Windows Terminal [2] to take full advantage of wsl2.

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install

[2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/install

Git Bash provides bash alongside a minimal set of coreutils. But of course, if you want more to the full suite of coreutils you need Cygwin or a WSL system.

I know this doesnt answer your question, but just install wsl. It is incredibly easy and works with zero setup.

Windows is truly the most stable Linux distro.

Cygwin

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