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Comment by dbacar | Hacker News Reader

With all respect, why would anyone bother to use these tools when you have a full-blown linux distro at your command with WSL/2?

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Yes, set up a VM and then add 3 levels of nested containers inside the VM just to be sure.

Incidentally next week I have to debug one of our tester's laptop - he installed vmware which stopped WSL from running somehow and now neither option works.

You hit an important point here. Teaching IT to 16 jear old children is very much like being an admin for a large corporation. Most of them have installed VMWare, VirtualBox, Hyper-V and pfSense, depending on the preference of the other teachers. Most first-graders don't know anything about networking, so I didn't want to add WSL to that. I used Cygwin. Worked perfectly until I started to teach Sendmail. Sendmail runs in unprivileged mode. This means that it starts as root, but then switches to a user with very few rights. Cygwin couldn't handle that at first, but I got it working. But then students couldn't uninstall Cygwin anymore because of changed file ownership in Windows. I had to install a second Cygwin to uninstall the first. With MinC I took extreme care to get all the different models of Access Control Lists that are used in Windows right.

wait, first graders?!?

He said 16 year old. I was installing Slackware from floppies at 16 so why wouldn't modern kids play with VMs?

This is pretty common. They turned off hyper-v.

Thanks, I'll check that when the easter some-people-took-more-time-off period is over.

yes but you get what you pay for, a real linux environment that you can install any tool. Vmware is kinda problematic as I observe on my windows 11. And I had problems with hyperv . Even for wsl2 i had to do reinstalls till I get it working but now it is pretty cool. It takes around 5-6 seconds for initial vm startup. If you close the terminal the vm shuts down in a couple of minutes. But if you want it always up, I use the tmux trick to make it always stay up.

WSL/2 has a lot of overhead and it NOT Windows native. I used it all the time, but I also use Windows Git Bash -- which is also like this project.

I used Git Bash also but it is kinda slowish, does not act like a true terminal always but it is OK. WSL2 is much better in my opinion, and fast.

Because I want more tight coupling with Win32 OS. Im old Cygwin user here. Actually, I cant work on Windows without Cygwin. Its very first thing installed on fresh system so I can bring all my tools with it :)

I have free access to entire FS, I can run Win32 console tools as well inside bash. If I want true Linux environment, I can always spawn VM and use Xserver on Win32 to work on it (Xming).

You can have access to the entire fs (/mnt/c) and run exe files with WSL too

Probably WSL1.. Yeah.. But why should I bother with it if Cygwin does the work just fine? :)

Works in WSL2 - thanks to Plan 9’s 9P protocol

Many orgs’ security policies don’t permit WSL/2.

wow, TIL. Can't believe I've done nearly 40 circles around our sun and never knew about WSL/2.

To be fair, WSL/2 didn't exist for most of those circles.

One reason would be if anyone does not want to, or is not able to, enable virtualization (WSL requires this).

Doesn't WSL 2 essentially run Linux in a VM? It's fine when things are in one OS or the other, but gets weird when it crosses over.

Yes it is in a VM but beautifully handled.Your C drive is mounted and slower than a real linux because it is NTFS but works much better than those cygwin, or git bash tools.

Better manual pages?

Because WSL is just a VM, Cygwin is native.

In my observation, cygwin is so slow to be usable.

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