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Comment by 1718627440 | Hacker News Reader

WSL2 is a different product from WSL1, not a different version. Is WSL3 now a different version of WSL2 or another separate product?

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It's the same thing. Seems like the major version bump is to advertise WSLc, which is like Apple containers - an SDK for launching Linux containers as part of a Windows app.

I guess windows containers where dead on arrival?

Not dead on arrival, just extremely expensive on arrival for commercial/production use-cases, unless you're using Windows Containers on Azure.

They're missing things like winget as well, but that's mostly an inconvenience rather than a blocker.

Not dead, but they are ridiculously buggy. Much like WSL.

Windows Containers, owing to how NT itself is put together, are incredibly awkward to use. Container images have to go all the way down to smss.exe (the NT equivalent to init), which ties you to a particular kernel patch level.

Upgrade the container host? Re-bake your container images. It's a massive pain in the ass.

Yeah, I wasn't familiar with that (being all day working with Linux containers), and past week I found you cannot build images nor run Windows containers unless the host and the image match on the major Windows release. No backwards compatibility either.

So, for example, you cannot run a Windows 2019 container in a Windows 2025 host (nor the other way around). So, upgrading a base image means upgrading all the containers running in that host, and also the host itself.

Exactly, and there isn't really any backwards compatibility possible. Below csrss.exe on the stack, you really are wedded to a particular kernel patch level.

Linus found religion in a stable system call interface somewhere in the 2.4 series, and it's made the Linux container experience rather nice. Windows moves that particular kind of interface stability much, much further into userspace, and it makes the Windows Containers situation untenable.

Looks like a different version of WSL2 with a newer kernel and newer VM host software

An evolution, better said.

Now there is virtio support, finally no need to depend on external CLI tools for what should have been in the box on day on.

Until now, even for Windows containers, we needed some Docker compatible CLI tool.

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