The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source

Denuvo counts each proton version as a unique activation, might help you avoid this issue going forward

Can you remember any particular problems in Overwatch? I've been down that road, so there's a chance I might have some info that you would find useful.

One problem that was unsolved last time I checked: Saving highlight videos. It used to work if you told Overwatch to use webm format instead of mp4, but Blizzard broke that somewhere along the line, possibly in the transition to Overwatch 2. (I worked around this with OBS Studio and its replay buffer feature.)

Really hope valve’s server side anti-cheat will be a success and more competitive games will move over to that.

There are even games like Infinity Nikki with anti-cheat that allows the Steam Deck but specifically detects and blocks desktop Linux. You have to wonder if that gets them any real security since the method they use to detect the Deck is probably spoofable.

Nowhere it says they don't want to.

There is more nuance to the anti-cheat systems supporting Linux argument than "it supports it but they won't use it". Turning on Linux support does weaken the security posture of the anti-cheat system, so it's not simply a decision of "it works with Linux, but they won't do it". It is moreso a question of whether the security posture changes for the game with this platform support enabled meet the business requirements. It's not a surprise that games with high MTX revenue do not turn this on, as I imagine this would be the biggest concern with this weaker security posture.

One of the boons of console hardware is also the strict execution environment that is presented on the system. While this of course doesn't prevent all cheating behavior in online games, a large selling point of it as a platform to publishers is not only the market segment available, but the security aspects of the runtime environment.

i play rdr1 via proton on opensuse + amd and i get better frames than windows

In general you want to avoid Nvidia if you want to play games on Linux, but maybe things will get better.

AoE2:DE has a gold rating, but multiplayer doesn't work at all, and it's not even due to anticheat.

Yeah, I really like my Mac, but third-party software isn't its strong suit. It's hilarious how often Apple will wholesale break like half the software in existence.

A fair comment, but the argument I'd make against that is a lot of those creative tools are moving to the web. I personally work for Figma, and have seen that first hand. UI/UX design was entirely OSX/Windows centric for the last 40 years, and now it's platform agnostic. Even video editors are just at the nacent stage of looking at the web as an editor surface.

Totally hear you though for things like CNC milling software that's meant to stay static for the lifetime of the mill - that's not going anywhere.

And this is why wine/proton are so good: they’re implementing the only defacto stable API that exists.

>And on top of that, Linux is completely unusable to Japanese/Chinese speakers due to how hard it is to input the moon runes

How do Deepin and such solve this?

Linux on HN is always an example of https://xkcd.com/2501/

How many months can you use a Linux desktop to do daily externally mandated processes and not drop down to a bash shell at some point?

Average consumers and users do not want to use the unix utilities that Linux people love so much. Hell, developers barely want to use classic unix utilities to solve problems.

Users do not know what a "mount point" is. Users do not want a case sensitive file system. Users do not want an OOM killer that solves a poor design choice by randomly culling important applications at high utilization.

Users do not care for something that was designed in the 60s before we understood things like interface design and refuses to update or improve due to some weird insistence on unix purity.

Users do not care about ABI stability. They care about using the apps they need to use. That means your platform has to be very easy to support, Linux is not at all easy to support, and at least part of that is a weird entitlement Linux users feel and demonstrate in your support queue.

Hilariously, users DO WANT a centralized app repository for most day to day apps! Linux had this forever, though it had mediocre ergonomics and it was way too easy for an average computer user to manage to nuke their system as Linus Sebastian found out in a very unfortunate timing situation. Linux never managed to turn this potential victory into anything meaningful, because you often had to drop into a bash shell to fix, undo, modify, or whatever an install!

> You can do very few productive things with Windows other than software development.

I guess you meant Linux here

It’s finally enough for me at least. I’m skipping windows 11 and going to Linux instead.

When we die off I guess lol.

I've been using windows since I was 6 or 7. I currently work in a Mac environment and hate it. I worked in a linux one for 5 years. Nothing feels like the first language you learned I guess?

My home computer is windows and it'll be that way until windows stops existing.

Edit: when I say we I mean the people still on windows.

Have they fixed the drivers on wayland yet?

I'd trade half my GPU performance for the NVIDIA drivers not freezing my system on wake-up. The new half-open ones arguably made it worse, it consistently freezes now.

WSL 2 runs a full Linux kernel under Hyper-V. There are some out-of-tree or staging drivers included in Microsoft's Linux kernel derivative and they publish their kernel sources at https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel.

Note that in recent versions of Windows, typically the bulk of Windows now runs under a hypervisor (i.e., "in a VM") as well: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/design/de...

That would not be unique, as is what BSD has done for Linux compatibility basically forever.

WSL 1 works fine. I much prefer it over 2 because I only run windows in a VM and nested virtualization support isn't all there.

Also feels a lot less intrusive for light terminal work.

I can tell that if POSIX subsystem in Windows NT was actually a good enough UNIX experience, I would never bothered with those Slackware 2.0 install disks.

And the subsystems concept was quite common in micro-computers and mainframes space, Microsoft did not come up with the idea for Windows.

Why not just use Linux then?

The whole point of Windows right now is having a kernel that a) does not shove GPL down the device manufacturer's throat and b) care about driver API stability so that drivers actually work without manufacturer or maintaner intervention every kernel upgrade.

I sometimes say, tongue in cheek slightly, that the best Linux desktop is Windows.

> I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine

It depends on what you're doing. PowerShell is incredible for Windows sysadmin, and the way it pipes objects between commands rather than text makes it really easy to compose pretty advanced operations.

However, if I'm doing text manipulation, wrangling logs, etc, then yes, absolutely I'm going to use a *nix scripting language.

>But WSL2 is freaking incredible

It's good. But if/when you start using it as your main work platform nagging issues start cropping up. The native linux filesystem inside it cannot actually reclaim space. This isn't very noticeable if you aren't doing intensive things in it, or if you are using it as a throwaway test bed. But if you are really using it, you have to do things like zero out a bunch of space on the WSL disk and then compact it from outside in the Windows OS. Using space from your NTFS partition / drive isn't very usable, the performance is horrible and you can't do things like put your docker graph root in there as it is incompatible. It also doesn't respect capitalization or permissions and I've had to troubleshoot very subtle bugs because of that. Another issue is raw network and device access, it basically isn't possible. Some of these things are likely beyond the intended use of WSL2, in its defense. Just be aware before you start heavily investing your workflow in it. For these use cases a traditional dual boot will work far better and save you much frustration.

Performance was one problem, but imho the biggest was that MMAP semantics were inherited from the NT side and made a lot of applications crash (mmap's created could only be as large as the file's current size as in Windows, while Linux/BSD semantics allows for a mmap larger than the file that's usable without constant remapping as the file grows).

They didn't prioritize it until fixing at a late stage, barely before WSL 2 came out. Sometimes i do wonder if they made a premature decision to move to WSL2 since there was quite a lot of basic applications/runtimes that were crashing due to this fix lacking (Naturally a lot of other new Linux API's like io_uring probably would have made it an api chasing treadmill that they just wanted to circumvent).

Hm. I used Git on WSL1 for many years, with medium sized repos hosted on a Windows drive, and it worked great. When I moved to WSL2 Git became a whole lot slower - it now takes about 5-8 secs to execute 'git status' where before it was instant.

Win32 APIs like CreateProcess suck because they have to spend so much time setting up the stuff that allows Win32's application model to mimic that of 16-bit Windows, which was coopreratively multitasked. The NT kernel is much faster at creating processes when it doesn't need to worry about that stuff.

As for NTFS: it's not NTFS specifically, it's the way the I/O system is designed in the NT kernel. Imagine any call from outside that layer transitioning through a stack of filter drivers before actually reaching the implementation. Very powerful stuff, but also very bad for performance.

Windows actually created a new process type for this: Pico processes[1]. This allows WSL1 to perform quite a bit better than Cygwin on something like Windows XP.

1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/wsl/pico-pro...

If you don't have an adaptive sync +variable refresh rate) monitor and everything set up to use it, and don't like screen tearing (you enable vsync wait), overrunning the frame budget (e.g 16ms for 60hz) can mean dropping down to half the frame rate.

But I'm hunting for reasons here. A gaming setup should be using adaptive sync so those concerns mostly go away. But there may be problems with Linux support.

Don't get me wrong, what I meant is that I only uses windows on games that runs poorly for me, I use Linux as my daily driver.

Regarding fps, it's around 15fps diff, and it's bad in my case because I had a potato machine.

I've been using Arch for 1-3 years now, as far as I can remember the only time that my system "break" was caused by pacman lock got stuck somehow. Aside of that it's pretty stable in general.

Yeah, I totally agree with what's being said here. It's a tough pill to swallow when you realize just how entrenched Microsoft is in the business world, and how difficult it would be to get everyone to make the switch to Linux.

I mean, think about it - most companies are still stuck on Windows 10 or 11, and they're using all those Microsoft services like Teams, Outlook, and Exchange. It's like they're trapped in this Microsoft ecosystem, and it's gonna take a lot more than just a few people saying "hey, let's switch to Linux" to get them out of it.

And don't even get me started on the IT departments in these places. A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing. They're using Windows 11 at home, but they have no idea how to deal with all the outdated Windows 7 machines that are still being used in manufacturing.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has been really smart about this. They've managed to get their products and services woven into the fabric of how we do business on a global scale. It's gonna take a lot more than just a few open-source projects to change that.

I would be very happy with Windows 7 on manufacturing side - lots of CNCs that are still in use and supported by manufacturers are still on Windows 98.

I left some room for myself with "a good reason" :)

When company is forcing you to use something out of inertia, then it's probably not for a good reason.

Actually regarding the "global scale" – I'm not really sure it's true, I think MS has influence mostly in US. Many EU and Asian companies I worked with were using OSX/Linux.

The higher up have such a hardon for Microsoft, I think it could actually be used as a bridge across the Atlantic ocean. We've already spent years migrating shit off of microsoft platforms onto the newest and latest microsoft platforms.

You're saying it like there is no alternative and you can't just open and edit same excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.

AAA and AAAA games became (expensive) gateways to microtransaction based money extraction application, in my opinion.

I enjoy older, smaller games nonproportionately more when compared to big titles which require much more resources and time. Yes they look nice, yes they use every documented and undocumented feature of my GPU, yes "it's so fluffy", but it is not enjoyable, esp. with shoved down microtransactions.

If we're talking FPS, give me any Half-Life (and Portal) title and I'm good. Gameplay first, unique art direction, good story, and a well built universe which is almost palpable with lore.

If we're talking RTS, C&C series, Dune Emperor, Supreme Commander and StarCraft is enough.

Yes but the point is to not do dev on windows, because window "terminal" sucks

Sadly I'm not one of those people because I have a desktop with an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D, which does not have an integrated graphics card.

However now that AMD is including integrated GPUs on every AM5 consumer CPU (if I'm not mistaken?), maybe VMs with passthrough will be more common, without requiring people to spend a lot of money buying a secondary GPU.

There are computers that size, but I guess you mean with a male PCIe plug on them?

If the card is running its own OS, what's the benefit of combining them that way? A high speed networking link will get you similar results and is flexible and cheap.

If the card isn't running its own OS, it's much easier to put all the CPU cores in the same socket. And the demand for both x86 and Arm cores at the same time is not very high.

You may be interested in SmartNICs/DPUs. They're essentially NICs with an on-board full computer. NVIDIA makes an ARM DPU line, and you can pick up the older gen BlueField 2's on eBay for about $400.

> full fledged computers in a GPU sized package

.. isn't this just a laptop or a NUC? Isn't there a massive disadvantage in having to share a case or god forbid a PCIe bus with another computer?

On linux it's quite trivial. KVM is part of the kernel. Installing libvirt and virt-manager makes it really easy to create vms.

I'd say even passing through a GPU is not that hard these days though maybe that depends on hardware configuration more.

What 3D modelling were you doing that couldn't be done on linux?

True, but I don't have the need to run applications that require GPU under WSL, while I do need to run applications that require the GPU under my current host OS. (and those applications do not run under Linux)

There is also native context for VirtIO, but for now Windows support is still not planned.

Also note some brave soul implemented 3D support on KVM for Windows. Still in the works and WinUI apps crash for some reason.

Last I looked, Thunderbird used Exchange Web Services to connect to Office365 which Microsoft is getting rid of: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/blog/exchange/retirement... (I point out Office365 since vast majority of "Exchange" users are on 365)

It also only support email and not calendaring/contacts.

That being said, Office365 Web Client is pretty good at this point and someone who doesn't live in Office all day can probably get along fine with it.

It's really nice if you have two seperate GPUs in your computer?

there is GUI program to automatic this progress[1]

I have been using WSL to develop Firmware in Zephyr, no problem so far.

[1]: https://blog.golioth.io/usb-support-in-wsl2-now-with-a-gui/

I don't do anything like USB pass through. I use it purely for the linux tooling to support software development. I find it a perfectly suitable system for that purpose and would recommend it.

As someone who occasionally does use WSL, I definitely think it's not better no. But I'm still biased, because I know a lot more about using linux than I do about using windows, and WSL is still windows.

for me,

> is it better to run Linux in Windows now? Genuinely asking.

definitely is. Servicing takes ~ 1 minute per month to click on "yeah, let's apply those updates and reboot". Peace of mind with no worrying on external hardware won't work or monitor will have issues or laptop won't sleep or during the call battery will discharge faster due to lack of hardware acceleration or noise cancellation not working or ...

I would rather use Linux, outside of VM.

*on bare metal

not on a shitty wrapper running on an ad-platform.

You're likely right, I haven't used it in ages. Though I recall that at one point you had to get distributions from the Store, but it may have been that long ago that it was still being called "Bash for Windows".

The files, including and especially the distro files, `wsl install` installs still originate from the Store's CDN, so the truly paranoid that distrust the Store (including some corporate environments) and just entirely block Store CDN access at the DNS and/or firewall level still break WSL installs.

You don't need the store.

Haha yes, I was being cheeky :)

I'm pretty sure that with the opensourcing, we'll see freebsd or more exotic systems popping up quite quickly. Heck, macOS would be fun!

It's a bit more than just some candy, there's substantial glue on both the Linux/Windows sides to get Plan9, WSLG, and the other components to work.

That said, the kernel they distribute is open source and you're not limited to just the distros they're working with directly. There are a number of third party (e.g. there's no Arch from Arch or Microsoft, but there's a completely compatible third party package that gives you Arch in WSL2)

I liked the networking in WSL1 more too

This. WSL was SO much more interesting in v1 times.

I'm guessing they use plan9 because distros already ship support for it, and it's super simple compared to NFS? It doesn't seem like CIFS/NFS would be any faster, and they introduce a lot more complexity.

>The problem is Windows IO filters

Not the biggest issue of them, 'find' and 'git status' on WSL2 in a big project is still >100 times slower on windows dev drive which avoids those filters than it is with WSL 1 on dev drive.

WSL 1 on regular ntfs with defender disabled is about 4x slower than WSL1 on dev drive, so that stuff does cause some of it, but WSL2 feels hopelessly slow. And wsl 2 can't share memory as well or take as much advantage of the filesystem cache (doubling it if you use the windows drive in both places I think, unless the network drive representation of it doesn't get cached on the WSL2 drive.

While I can see the subtle distinction you're trying to draw people's attention to (NTFS is not the problem, filesystem operations generally on Windows are the problem) I have to say it seems like a distinction without a difference in real terms. They made a range of changes that seem to produce more complicated code everywhere because the overhead of various filesystem tasks are substantially higher on this OS vs every other OS.

But in the end they had to get the OS vendor to bless their process name anyway, just so the OS would stop doing things that tank the performance for everybody else doing something similar but who haven't opened a direct line up with the OS vendor and got their process name on a list.

This seems like a pain point for the vendor to fix, rather than everybody shipping software to their OS

It's hard to pick the Windows feature I hate the most, but floating around at the top is Defender. It can't be disabled, at least not easily, and it demolishes IO performance. And Windows update takes the computer hostage, and takes ages to do anything giving no feedback in the process, meanwhile APT can update to a new major version in like 5-10 minutes.

Yes, you get Windows telemetry which enabled fixing bugs without a bug report, you get minimal ads in the start menu (if you're playing "spot the new advertising opportunity" I found it. It's in the start menu. You can stop playing now), AI "copilot" which isn't spyware just because you think it is, updates that ASK you nicely multiple times to update (I don't want to be ableist, if you suffer from a Christopher Nolan Memento-like disability where you don't remember the warnings, you might think it's "resetting at will", but I assure you, it isn't), a great UAC model that's a lot better than "just type your root password into this terminal already, and just hope the binary wasn't hijacked in some way to keylog you, because unlike UAC, there is no visual evidence that you're not getting hacked", and dependence on a company that SV_BubbleTime thinks "has gone out of their way to prove how much of an unstoppable behemoth they are" with no evidence or clarity so they must just be making FUD, and best of all the OS costs so little you can pay it in 8 hours of working as a software developer.

You can setup local and limited user accounts under Windows. Many applications including every development tool out there doesn't need any admin permissions.

Spyware and adware is a government policy / regulation problem. Thanks to GDPR and DMA, using Windows in EU is significantly better experience (try setting a Windows desktop with an EU image). You can remove almost all of the apps including Edge and Copilot. There are no ads in the UI. Neither in Explorer nor in Start menu.

How is it easier to setup a linux dev environment in WSL than in https://containertoolbx.org/ or https://distrobox.it/ or just in Linux directly?

There are virtual machines for Linux with seamless window integration, so upgrading to Linux is still recommended imo.

OP's statement remains incorrect, because their assumption is that the WSL experience can't be reproduced in Linux.

I've never seen a good UWP app. My biggest issue with Wine is that it can't run anything that needs a driver. That means any hardware with garbage Windows-only control software (hello Roboteq) needs a proper VM.

Is anything using UWP? It's a complete dead end.

It's really a skill issue on my part.

LAMP stack worked for me perfectly on Linux out of the box, whether Ubuntu Server or any RHEL-based distro (even with SELinux enabled!).

I spent some solid 8+ hours on that, saw it uneconomical and went the VM way.

Nope, VMWare added the capability to work as a sort of nested hypervisor atop Hyper-V (which WSL2 and newer Windows security features depend on).

That being said, there is a performance impact.

> You get much nicer window decorations if you use the wayland support instead of X11.

Wayland supports window managers ?

But not having to dual boot and just get both worlds at the same time definitely beats having to dual boot.

I don't think people are using WSL to avoid problems with dual booting. Dual-booting has become about as simple as it can be, thanks to UEFI, but it's still not exactly fun to have to close all of your open apps to switch to another OS to run just one app.

I've yet to find anything comparable feature-wise on Linux - and they all come with the huge downside of having to roll your own cohesive settings widget ecosystem for basic everyday things like WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. I run Cosmic Epoch on my old Macbook which is better, but again, feature-wise, it's just not comparable for serious work.

I don't know how it's set up. That's kind of my point though. I have to now be an expert in Linux and Windows to debug this stuff, which is a waste of my time as someone who's job it is to develop (server, i.e. Linux) software. I had exactly zero issues when I was using Fedora. At one point my company made all of the Linux users move off (we do now have an IT-supported Linux image, but I haven't found the time to re-set up my laptop and don't fully trust that it will work without a bunch of trouble/IT back-and-forth because they also made Windows users start using passkeys), and since then I've seen way more issues with Windows than Linux (e.g. one day my start menu just stopped reacting to me clicking on programs), in addition to things like ads in the lock screen and popups for some XBox pass thing that I had to turn off, which is just insane in a "professional" OS. A lot of days I end up having to hold down the power button to reboot because it just locks up entirely.

OSX was a bit janky with docker filesystem slowness, homebrew being the generally recommended package manager despite being awful (why do I sometimes tap a cask and sometimes pour a bottle? Don't tell me; I don't care. Just make it be "install". Also, don't take "install" as a cue to go update all of my other programs with incompatible versions without asking), annoying 1+ second animations that you can't turn off that make it so the only reasonable way to use your computer is to never maximize a window (with no tiling support of course), and completely broken external monitor support (text is completely illegible IIRC), but Windows takes jank to another level.

By contrast, I never encounter the issues people complain about on Linux. Bluetooth works fine. Wifi works fine. nVidia GPUs and games work fine. Containers are easy to use because they're natively part of the OS. I prefer Linux exactly because I stopped enjoying "tinkering" with my computer like 10 years ago, and I want it to just quietly work without drawing attention to itself (and because Windows 8 and the flat themes that followed were hideous and I was never going to downgrade to that from Windows 7).

With WSL you can use “Linux the good parts” (command line tools, efficient-enough paradigms for fork() servers) and completely avoid X Windows, the Wayland death spiral, 100 revisions of Gnome and KDE that not so much reinvent the wheel but instead show us why the wheel is not square or triangular…

But you still get the worst of the Windows world, which is more than many are willing to deal with. I was using windows for years as my main gaming OS, but after they announced W11 being the only way forward. Switching to Linux on the desktop was like a breath of fresh air. I'll leave it at that.

If I were to run an OS on a VM it's gonna be windows, not Linux

For me, the best part of running Linux as the base OS is not having to deal with Windows.

No ridiculous start menu spam; a sane, non-bloated operating system (imagine being able to update user space libraries without a reboot, due to being able to delete files that other processes still have opened!); being able to back up my data at the file level without relying on weird block-level imaging shenanigans and so much more.

How is inverting the host/guest relationship an improvement on that?

Similarly powerful would be totally fine. More powerful really is silly. Personally I couldn't make a lot of my workflows work very well with WSL2. Some of the stuff I run is very memory intensive and the behavior is pretty bad for this in WSL2. Their Wayland compositor is also pretty buggy and unpolished last I used it, and I was never able to get hardware acceleration working right even with the special drivers installed, but hopefully they've made some progress on that front.

Having Windows and Linux in the same desktop the way that WSL2 does obviously means that it does add a lot of value, but what you get in the box isn't exactly the same as the thing running natively. Rather than a strict superset or strict subset, it's a bit more like a Venn diagram of strengths.

> You get the best of both worlds with WSL.

You obviously don't. Maybe WSL is the best compromise for people who need both Windows and Linux.

But it's ridiculous to think that WSL is better than just Linux for people who don't need Windows at all. And that's kind of what the author of this thread seems to imply.

Windows supports Linux because the latter is open source, it's a lot easier than the reverse.

Linux, on the other hand, barely supports Windows because the latter is closed, and not just closed, windows issues component updates which specifically check if they run in wine and stop running, being actively hostile to a potential Linux host.

The two are not equivalent, nobody in the Linux kernel team is actively sabotaging WSL, whereas Microsoft is actively sabotaging wine.

> Where is the reverse WSL on Linux, where Windows is deeply embedded and you have all the Windows features in your hands?

https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps

Enjoy.

I preferred WSL to running linux directly even though I had no need for any windows only software. Not having to spend time configuring my computer to make basic things work like suspend/wake on lid down/up, battery life, hardware acceleration for video playback on the browser, display scaling on external monitor and so on was reason enough.

> You can use Wine/Crosseover, which is cool, but even now the number of software products it supports is tiny. Steam has a lot of games.

This isn't really the case, and hasn't been for some years now, especially since Valve started investing heavily in Wine. The quality of Wine these days is absolutely stunning, to the point that some software runs better under Wine than it does on Win11. Then there's the breadth of support which has has moved the experience from there being a slight chance of something running on Wine, to now it being surprising when something doesn't.

I fully agree with you - "YMMV" is the one true take. Visual Studio has never been particularly attractive to me, my whole workflow is filled with POSIX tools, and my code mostly runs on Docker and Linux servers. Windows is just another thing to worry about for me, be it having to deal with the subtle quirks of WSL not running on raw metal or having to deal with running UNIX-first tooling (or finding alternatives) on Windows. If it wasn't for our work provided machines being Windows by default, and at home, being into VR gaming and audio production (mostly commercial plugins), I'd completely ditch Windows in a heartbeat.

> Forscan for Ford vehicles also has to run under Windows.

I've successfully run it with WINE. Thought, my Forscan executable was 3 years old or so and that may have changed, but I doubt it.

Did you know that Forscan works flawlessly under Wine if you're not using Bluetooth?

In the same spirit if "it depends", there are other options that may work for people with different Linux/Windows balance points:

* Wine is surprisingly good these days for a lot of software. If you only have an app or two that need Windows it is probably worth trying Wine to see if it meets your needs.

* Similarly, if gaming is your thing Valve has made enormous strides in getting the majority of games to work flawlessly on Linux.

* If neither of the above are good enough, dual booting is nearly painless these days, with easy setup and fast boot times across both OSes. I have grub set to boot Linux by default but give me a few seconds to pick Windows instead if I need to do one of the few things that I actually use Windows for.

Which you go for really depends on your ratio of Linux to Windows usage and whether you regularly need to mix the two.

My development is mainly Windows and I prefer Linux host with Windows VM guests. The experience is more stable and I can revert to a snapshot when Windows or Microsoft product update brakes something or new test configuration does. It also allows to backup and retain multiple QA environments that are rarely used, like a client's Oracle DB. It is nice being able to save the VM state at the end of the week and shut it all down so you can start the next right where you left off. Cannot do that when your development environment is the bare metal OS. Windows has known issues of waking a sleeping laptop.

I really want to like Windows 11, and I enjoy using WSL, but Microsoft treats me too much like an adversary for me to tolerate it as a daily driver. Only a complete scumbag of a product manager would think pushing Candy Crush ads is a good idea.

I’ve got an airgapped Toughbook that I use for the few Windows apps I really need to talk to strange hardware.

> For example, I use Solidworks, so I need to run windows.

Right. One of the things a lot of people don't get is the extent to which multidisciplinary workflows require Windows. This is particularly true of web-centric software engineers who simply do not have any exposure to the rest of the engineering universe.

Years ago this was the reason we had to drop using Raspberry Pi's little embedded microcontroller. The company is Linux-centric to such an extent that they simply could not comprehend how telling someone "Just switch to Linux" is in a range between impossible and nonsensical. They were, effectively, asking people to upend their PLM process just for the sake of using a little $0.50 part. You would have to do things like store entire OS images and configurations just to be able to reconstruct and maintain a design iteration from a few years ago.

WSL2 is pretty good. We still haven't fully integrated this into PLM workflows though. That said, what we've done on our machines was to install a separate SSD for WSL2. With that in place, backing-up and maintaining Linux distributions or distributions created in support of a project is much, much easier. This, effectively, in some ways, isolates WSL2 distributions from Windows. I can clone that drive and move it from a Windows 10 machine to a Windows 11 machine and life is good.

For AI workflows with NVIDIA GPU's WSL2 is less than ideal. I don't know if things have changed in this domain since I last looked. Our conclusion from a while back was that, if you have to do AI with the usual toolchains, you need to be on a machine running Linux natively rather than a VM running under Windows. It would be fantastic if this changed and one could run AI workflows on WSL2 without CUDA and other issues. Like I said, I have not checked in probably a year, maybe things are better now?

EDIT: The other reality is that one can have a nice powerful Linux machine next to the Windows box and simply SSH into it to work. Most good IDE's these days support remote development as well. If you are doing something serious, this is probably the best setup. This is what we do.

I run Windows in a VM where I need windows. It’s so much easier to fix a broken Linux installation than a broken Windows installation.

It's deeper but let's not overblow it.

I think the two fairly deep integrations are window's ability to navigate WSL's filesystem and wslg's fairly good ability to serve up guis.

The filesystem navigation is something that AFAIK can't easily be replicated. wslg, however, is something that other VMs have and can do. It's a bit of a pain, but doable.

What makes WSL nice is the fact that it feels pretty close to being a native terminal that can launch native application.

I do wish that WSL1 was taken further. My biggest grip with WSL is the fact that it is a VM and thus takes a large memory footprint. It'd be nice if the WSL1 approach panned out and we instead had a nice clean compatibility wrapper over winapi for linux applications.

Yes, yes I can. Also does most of everything. WSL has severe issues with hardware translation.

> The integration between Windows and the WSL VM is far deeper than a typical VM hypervisor.

Sure, but I never claimed otherwise.

> You cannot claim with a straight face that Virtualbox is easier to use.

I also didn't claim that. I wasn't comparing WSL to other virtualization solutions.

WSL2 is cool. Linux doesn't have a tool like WSL2 that manages Linux virtual machines.

The catch 22 is that it doesn't need one. If you want to drop a shell in a virtual environment Linux can do that six ways through Sunday with no hardware VM in sight using the myriad of namespacing technologies available.

So while you don't have WSL2 on Linux, you don't need it. If you just want a ubuntu2204 shell or something, and you want it to magically work, you don't need a huge thing with tons of integration like WSL2. A standalone program can provide all of the functionality.

I have a feeling people might actually be legitimately skeptical. Let me prove this out. I am on NixOS, on a machine that does not have distrobox. It's not even installed, and I don't really have to install it since it's just a simple standalone program. I will do:

    $ nix run nixpkgs#distrobox enter

Here's what happened:

    $ nix run nixpkgs#distrobox enter
    Error: no such container my-distrobox
    Create it now, out of image registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:latest? [Y/n]: Y
    Creating the container my-distrobox
    Trying to pull registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:latest...
    ...
    0f3de909e96d48bd294d138b1a525a6a22621f38cb775a991974313eda1a4119
    Creating 'my-distrobox' using image registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:latest [ OK ]
    Distrobox 'my-distrobox' successfully created.
    To enter, run:

    distrobox enter my-distrobox

    Starting container...                    [ OK ]
    Installing basic packages...             [ OK ]
    Setting up devpts mounts...              [ OK ]
    Setting up read-only mounts...           [ OK ]
    Setting up read-write mounts...          [ OK ]
    Setting up host's sockets integration... [ OK ]
    Integrating host's themes, icons, fonts... [ OK ]
    Setting up distrobox profile...          [ OK ]
    Setting up sudo...                       [ OK ]
    Setting up user groups...                [ OK ]
    Setting up user's group list...          [ OK ]
    Setting up existing user...              [ OK ]
    Ensuring user's access...                [ OK ]

    Container Setup Complete!
    [john@my-distrobox]~% sudo yum install glxgears
    ...
    Complete!
    [john@my-distrobox]~% glxgears
    Running synchronized to the vertical refresh.  The framerate should be
    approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
    302 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.261 FPS
    ^C

No steps omitted. I can install software, including desktop software, including things that need hardware acceleration (yep, even on NixOS where everything is weird) and just run them. There's nothing to configure at all.

That's just Fedora. WSL can run a lot of distros, including Ubuntu. Of course, you can do the same thing with Distrobox. Is it hard? Let's find out by using Ubuntu 22.04 instead, with console output omitted:

   $ distrobox create --image ubuntu:22.04
   ...
   $ distrobox enter ubuntu-22-04
   ...
   $ sudo apt install openarena
   ...
   $ /usr/games/openarena

To be completely, 100% fair: running an old version of Ubuntu like this does actually have one downside: it triggers OpenGL software rendering for me, because the OpenGL drivers in Ubuntu 22.04 are too old to support my relatively new RX 9070 XT. You'd need to install or copy in newer drivers to make it work. There are in fact ways to do that (Ubuntu has no shortage of repos just for getting more up-to-date drivers and they work inside Distrobox pretty much the same way they work in real hardware.) Amusingly, this problem doesn't impact NVIDIA since you can just tell distrobox to copy in the NVIDIA driver verbatim with the --nvidia flag. (One of the few major points in favor of proprietary drivers, I suppose.)

On the other hand, even trying pretty hard (and using special drivers) I could never get hardware acceleration for OpenGL working inside of WSL2, so it could be worse.

That aside, everything works. More complex applications (e.g. file browsers, Krita, Blender) work just fine and you get your normal home folder mapped in just like you'd expect.

Methods I know are using qemu/Wine/proxmox/VirtualBox.

Literally built on top of MS's Hyper-V.

IDK how many VMs you've used, but there has been a lot of work specifically with x86 to make VMs nearly as fast as native. If you interact with cloud services everything you do is likely on a VM.

WSL 2 is actually virtualized despite the name

WSL1 was a subsystem. WSL2 is mostly a VM.

They had to give that up because it was too slow, I think for IO. Unfortunate.

It used to be. They moved to a VM.

Turns out that it's easier to emulate a CPU than syscalls. The CPU churns a lot less, too, which means that once things start working things tend to keep working.

As everyone said, WSL2 is actually virtual machines and it is what most people are actually using now. That said, I feel the need to chime in and say I actually love WSL1 and I love Windows NT the kernel. It bums me out all the time that we probably won't get major portions of the NT kernel, even an out-of-date version, in some open source form.

I like Linux, and I use Linux as my daily desktop, but it's not because I think Linux or even UNIX is really that elegant. If I had to pick a favorite design it would be Windows NT for sure, even with all its warts. That said, the company behind Windows NT really likes to pile a lot of shit I hate on top of that pretty neat OS design, and now it's full of dubious practices. Automatic "malware submission" on by default, sending apps you download and compile yourself to Microsoft and even executing them in a VM. Forced updates with versions that expire. Unbelievable volumes of network traffic, exfiltrating untold amounts of data from your local machine to Microsoft. Ads and unwanted news all over the UI. Increasing insistence in using a Microsoft account. I could go on and on.

From a technical standpoint I do not think the Linux OS design is superior. I think Linux has some amazing tools and APIs. dmabufs are sweet. Namespaces and cgroups are cool. BPF and it's various integrations are borderline insane. But at its core, ... It's kinda ugly. These things don't all compose nicely and the kernel is an enormous hard-to-tame beast. Windows NT has its design warts too, all over, like the amount of involvement the kernel has in the GUI for historical reasons, and the enormous syscall surface area, and untold amounts of legacy cruft. But all in all, I think the core of what they made is really cool, the subsystems concept is super cool, and it is an OS design that has stood up well to time. I also think the PE format is better than ELF and that it is literally better for the capabilities it doesn't have w.r.t. symbols. Sure it's ugly, in part due to the COFF lineage, but it's functionally very well done IMO.

I feel the need to say this because I think I probably came off as a hater, and tbh I'm not even a hater of WSL2. It's not as cool as WSL1 and subsystems and pico processes, but it's very practical and the 9p bridge works way better than it has any right to.

Thanks for pointing this out.

You're thinking of the POSIX personality of Windows NT of old. This was based on Interix and has been deprecated about two decades ago and is now buried so deep that it couldn't be revived.

The new WSL1 uses kernel call translation, like Wine in reverse and WSL2 runs a full blown Linux kernel in a Hyper-V VM. To my knowledge neither of these share anything with the aforementioned POSIX subsystem.

I mean... WINE does the same on windows, but microsoft refuses to release their API docs for all internal APIs. They release WSL by relying on Linux's open-ness, while refusing the same for themselves.

File Explorer is better on Windows? How? I tried Windows 11 for the first time a month ago and it takes several seconds for file explorer to open, it's asynchronously loading like 3 different UI frameworks as random elements pop in with no consistency, there's two different rightclick menus because they couldn't figure out how to make the new one have all the functionality of the old one so they decided to just keep the old one behind "Show More Options", and it's constantly pushing OneDrive in your face. I'm offended that this is what they thought is good enough to ship to a billion users.

> No Remoting Software beats RDP. When I remote to a Windows workstation through RDP, I can't tell the difference. VNC is always janky

Any recent distro running Gnome or KDE has built-in support for connecting and hosting an RDP session. This used to be a pain point, you don't need to use VNC anymore.

It's actually worse on windows since you need to pony up for a pro license to get RDP hosting support...

> The UI is still better on Windows(basic utilities like File Explorer and Config Management is better on Windows).

5 years ago, we would be comparing old GNOME 3 or KDE Plasma 5 on X11 and Windows 10. I would be forced to agree. The Windows UI was better in many ways at that point.

Today we have KDE Plasma 6.3 on Wayland and Windows 11. This is an entirely different ball game. It's hard to explain. Wayland feels like it has taken an eternity to lift off, like well over a decade, but now things change dramatically on the scale of months. A few months ago HDR basically didn't work anywhere. Right now it's right in front of me and it works great. You can configure color profiles, SDR applications don't break ever, and you even get emulated brightness. Display scaling? Multiple monitors with different scale factors? What about one monitor at 150% and another at 175% scale factor? What about seamlessly dragging windows between displays with different scale factors? Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes. No `xrandr` commands. You configure it in the GUI. I am dead serious.

File Explorer? That's the application that has two context menus, right? I think at this point Windows users might actually be better off installing KDE's Dolphin file manager in Windows for the sake of their own productivity. If I had the option to use Windows File Explorer on KDE I would impolitely decline. I have not encountered any advertising built into my file explorer. I do not have an annoying OneDrive item in the menu on the left. I have a file tree, a list of Places, and some remote file shares. When I right click it does not freeze, instead it tends to show the context menu right away. And no, I'm not impressed by Tabs and Dark Mode, because we've had that on Linux file managers for so long that some people reading this were probably born after it was already supported.

Windows still has the edge in some areas, but it just isn't what it used to be. The Linux UI is no longer a toy.

> When I remote to a Windows workstation through RDP, I can't tell the difference. VNC is always janky.

I don't really blame you if you don't believe me, but I, just now, went into System Settings, went to the Remote Desktop setting, and clicked a toggle box, at which point an RDP server spawned. Yes, RDP, not VNC, not something else. I just logged into it using Reminna.

Not everything on Linux is seamless and simple like this, but in this case it really is. I'm not omitting a bunch of confusing troubleshooting steps here, you really can do this on a modern Linux setup, with your mouse cursor. Only one hand required.

> Of course there is Word/Excel/Illustrator which is simply not available on Linux

True, but if you want to use Linux and you're held back by needing some specific software, maybe it's not the end of the world. You have many options today. You can install VirtualBox and run your spreadsheets in there. You can use Office 365 in a browser. You can run Crossover[1] and emulate it. You can use an office alternative, like possibly WPS Office. You can dual boot. You can go the crazy route and set up a KVM GPU passthrough virtual machine, for actually native performance without needing to reboot.

The point I'm making here is not "Look, Linux is better now! Everyone go use it and get disappointed ASAP!" If you are happy with Windows, there's literally no point in going and setting yourself up for disappointment. Most people who use Linux do so because they are very much not happy with Windows. I'm sure you can tell that I am not. However, in trying to temper the unending optimism of Linux nerds, sometimes people go too far the other way and represent Linux as being in far worse of a state than it actually is. It really isn't that bad.

The worst thing about modern Linux is, IMO, getting it to work well on your hardware. Once you have that part figured out, I think modern Linux is a pretty good experience, and I highly recommend people give it a shot if they're curious. I think Bazzite is a really nice distro to throw on a random spare computer just to see what modern Linux is actually capable of. It's not the absolute most cutting edge, but it gives you a nice blend of fairly up-to-date software and a fairly modern RPM ostree base system for better stability and robustness, and it's pretty user-friendly. And if you don't like it, you can easily get a full refund!

[1]: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsof...

The important bit though is that Docker containers are not VMs or sandboxes, they're "just" a combination of technologies that give you an isolated userland using mostly Linux namespaces. If you're running a Linux host you already have namespaces, so you can just use them directly. Distrobox gives you basically the same sort of experience as WSL2 except it doesn't have any of the weird parts of running a VM because it's not VMs.

Saying running full Linux avoids wasting time on fiddly workarounds kinda blows my mind.

Full hardware support is still not a given, and Windows emulation is still need for so many cases (e.g. games, specialized software etc).

Until I can choose any machine based on form factor and specs alone and just run Linux on it, WSL will the best version of Linux it can run.

What detects it is running on windows out of interest?

I use WSL extensively, with lots of languages, and I’ve never had anything do that.

It’s running in a VM, so that would be some kind of weird VM escape?

If on WSL2, they need

[interop]

appendWindowsPath=false

section in /etc/wsl.conf.

Then everything will go flawlessly.

I would love to hear about these edge cases and which tooling fails to detect they they were launched form linux.

Sounds a lot like a picnic problem but you didn’t give nearly enough details.

As a reply to: You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"

openssh has been an optional windows component for... almost a decade now? including the server, so you can ssh into powershell as easily as into any unix-like. (last time I set it up there was some fiddling with file permissions required for key auth to work, but it does work.)

I dislike using putty, I use the ssh client from WSL. Just feels .. better. And bash/fish history helps.

On the other hand sometimes the GUI on WSL decides to break and you have to restart the whole thing.

Aged like fine milk

There is no flavor of Windows 11 that is acceptable. Even the UI itself is a disaster. A cornucopia of libraries and paradigms from React Native to legacy APIs as if an interdimensional wave function of bad ideas had collapsed into an OS, but with ads.

You can make your own clean version, legally, with this file. https://schneegans.de/windows/unattend-generator.

I get customers and most people don't know about it but it's kind of ridiculous that techy people in a tech forum don't know how to do it.

I replaced my m1 with a snapdragon laptop running Win11 and upgraded that to pro. For what I do with it, it runs great with very long battery times, for less than Apple quoted to repair the m1. I don't use the copilot features and haven't seen any ads so far, except maybe for office during setup.

Superior hardware with terrible software. Also they straight up artificially limit their hardware so they don't cannibalize their sales, which is slightly understandable, but they do it in the dumbest ways. My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor, even though it has the same specs as her work Pro. Oh and good luck actually getting that external display to work, I swear only like 50% of USB-C docks work on the platform.

>Macbooks are winning the laptop war because of superior hardware.

No. This is just you repeating marketing.

No Nvidia chip = B tier at best.

I have a $700 Asus with a 3060 that is better. Go ahead and scale up to a $2000 computer with an Nvidia chip and its so obviously better, there is nothing to debate.

No one cares about performance per watt, its like someone ran a 5k race, came in 3rd and said "Well at least I burned fewer calories than the winner!"

Only on countries where people earn salaries big enough to pay for the Apple hardware tax.