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Genuine question: Why not just virtualbox/vmware it up with an ISO ? That's how I've been doing for years and it works just fine.
by fb03 9y ago
Genuine question: Why not just virtualbox/vmware it up with an ISO ? That's how I've been doing for years and it works just fine.
- NikolaeVarius 9y agoVirtualbox reserves system resources for itself. This runs fully alongside the Host OS, from what I can see.
- ygra 9y agoIt's a different approach. WSL is more like CoLinux back in the day, in that Windows and Linux kernels run alongside each other. Even a bit better integrated because processes across both worlds can run each other, and see and talk to each other. No one is taking away your VM, don't worry.
- fb03 9y agoAh, nice, thanks for the explanation! I do remember CoLinux. This should provide way better latency than my VM tho, right?
- pmilot 9y agoTheoretically, yes, but WSL is still beta and performance (especially filesystem I/O) is mediocre at best. They'll get there eventually!
- fb03 9y agoNice, because right now altough I use a linux VM for dev work, I am still bummed by the latency and stuff. For tty based work it is there but any X.org workload is still laggy as fuck, which kinda bothers me a little while coding (I'm using Xubuntu with all the VirtualBox additions on).
- detaro 9y agoWSL doesn't run a Linux kernel – a Windows Subsystem just provides a different API to the underlying Windows kernel, in this case the API Linux applications expect. So arguably, it's even further from a VM than CoLinux.
- fb03 9y agoDo you know if they already have proper X support? Or is it just a matter of compiling X.org and running it yourself?
- detaro 9y agoI haven't followed this, but last I've seen a while ago was that you could run an X-server for Windows and then have Linux applications talk to that (and the normal environment didn't have dbus and things like that)
- Piskvorrr 9y agoIndeed. For years now, I've been running MobaXTerm - which is a toolset, including a proprietary X server for Windows. Quite convenient. (Full disclosure: no relation to product, user only)
- ygra 9y agoWell, CoLinux ran Linux as a kernel-mode driver under Windows. WSL is a Windows kernel subsystem providing the Linux kernel API. That's why I made that comparison. I do know that they're very different things technically.
- krylon 9y ago> CoLinux Oh, that brings up some fond memories. During my training, I would use CoLinux to run Debian on my Windows XP desktop. Good times... ;-)
- rubber_duck 9y agoThis is one (windows) kernel instance running apps built for linux. VMWare just starts a new OS instance on the same PC - but it has a separate memory/FS/scheduler/drivers/etc. a lot of overhead, duplication and sync work. Say there's a tool that doesn't have a Windows version, like Facebook Flow didn't have - you can just install the necessary packages and run the linux app on your project folder - plenty of dev tools are built on top of *nix and Windows is a second class citizen in OSS - this solves that problem nicely. Or you can use linux GCC/clang to build the linux binaries on Windows and not muck around with cross compiling.