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Comment by thingfish | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Teaching anything to children is to start simple. So I start with bare-bone UNIX. In their second year we move to Linux (all flavours). For their final exam in the third year, they must be able to use Suze Linux.

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What is Suze Linux? Did you mean Suse Linux? I would suggest dropping Linux from the description since this has nothing to do with the Linux kernel. Perhaps you could write POSIX instead.

Wouldn't it be easier to use WSL? Microsoft has done al the hard work in getting native Linux code to run on Windows. I don't know how bare-bones you want it to be, but if you install Debian in WSL without extra packages, that seems pretty bare-bone to me. And it seems to me you avoid unnecessary friction from switching from OpenBSD to Linux later on.

WSL requires Windows 10 or 11 though.

Installing WSL was much harder than 'download and double click EXE' when I last did it. The 'app' shop installed something botched I now can't easily get rid of and then I had to do a few Powershell incantations to actually get an install that boots a Linux-like terminal. If I had to use Linux under Windows more than a few hours per year I'd Hyper-V it instead.

I'd also guess 'telemetry' pumps out all one does in WSL, while this might leak less of what the kids are doing.

I doubt that, since telemetry slows things down and it has been found that software runs faster under WSL than native Windows. A quick search found this, which shows a substantial performance difference for the same thing between native Windows and WSL:

https://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/vtc0fy/wsl2_faster_th...

There have been others who observed the same in the past (and with WSL1), although I do not have a list. I recall reading libc telemetry hooks on Windows that are absent as being claimed to be the cause, but I cannot find the page where I read that. The Reddit post has the alternative suggestion that process creation speed is the cause.

Suggesting that the entirety of the performance difference between Windows and WSL is due to telemetry is by far the weirdest MICROS~1 apologia I've come across.

Performance on my bare metal Linux machines is even better. Do you consider this to be sufficient proof that WSL has telemetry hooked into it?

No, since Windows is less efficient in general.

OK, so you agree that your argument was flawed.

Installing WSL2 as of the latest versions of Windows is as simple as "wsl --install" to get a basic Ubuntu install set up. It'll do all the steps, including turning on all necessary Windows features, in a single command.

And you’re still locked in the Microsoft ecosystem.

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