Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nickjj | Hacker News Reader

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> It's an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop or laptop, with no configuration required.

I have been using it since the beginning of WSL 1 with a very terminal heavy set up but it has some issues.

For example WSLg's clipboard sharing is buggy compared to VcXsrv. It doesn't handle pasting into Linux apps without introducing Windows CRs. I opened an issue for this https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1326 but it hasn't gotten a reply.

Also, systemd is still pretty sketchy. It takes over 2 minutes for systemd services to start and if you close a WSL 2 terminal for just a few minutes systemd will delay a new terminal from opening for quite some time. This basically means disabling systemd to use WSL 2 in your day to day.

Then there's this 6 year old issue with 1,000+ upvotes https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699 around WSL not reclaiming disk space. It means you need to routinely shut everything down and compress your VM's disk or you'll run out of space.

Beyond that is does work well so I'm happy it exists.

Also, systemd is still pretty sketchy. It takes over 2 minutes for systemd services to start and if you close a WSL 2 terminal for just a few minutes systemd will delay a new terminal from opening for quite some time. This basically means disabling systemd to use WSL 2 in your day to day.

That doesn't sound good. I was planning to set up a Windows/WSL2 box, but this gives me second thoughts. Where can I read more about this?

It's still ok even without systemd. Technically systemd is disabled by default, you have to turn it on with systemd=true in /etc/wsl.conf.

I can't find a definitive source with an open ticket but if you Google around for "WSL 2 systemd delay startup" you'll find assorted folks talking it about with a number of different reasons.

I just went by my end results of there is a delay with systemd enabled and no delay with it disabled.

never had problems of systemd/2 minutes delays

not sure what would be the correct test here, but:

root@LP-T16:~# uname -rn

LP-T16 5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2

root@LP-T16:~# time systemctl restart ssh

real 0m0.039s

user 0m0.008s

sys 0m0.001s

The delay is related to starting WSL 2, not starting a systemd service btw.

Maybe it's specific to Windows 10 Pro, who knows. I'm using the latest WSL 2 from the MS app store.

I just know when I installed Docker directly into WSL 2, when I launched a terminal I could not run `docker info` and connect to the Docker daemon for 2 minutes. The culprit was the Docker service was not available. I was able to reproduce this on Arch and Ubuntu distros.

Separate to that systemd also delayed a terminal from opening for ~15 seconds (unrelated to Docker).

After ~10 minutes of the terminal being closed, both issues happened. They went away as soon as I disabled systemd.

First opening of my main wsl2 Ubuntu 22.04 instance takes roughly 20 seconds, the next new terminals opens in ~1s. As it happens once a 3 weeks or so when Windows rebooted for updates, I don't care much.

It takes me more time to fill passwords for ssh keys to agent anyways.

Granted, I'm not using native docker inside.

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