8 ms·

WSL was very cool from a pure tech standpoint, but I've never been clear what the actual use case for it was. WSL2 seems to be more along the lines of coLinux,

• waheoo 7y ago
  The usecase was Apple has Terminal.app, Windows has MS-DOS. Tell me which you would rather use for node and or docker development.
  • dboreham 7y ago
    Windows with git and its bash installed works surprisingly well for node development. Docker doesn't work on either MacOS nor Windows, right?
    • abhishekjha 7y ago
      I have used docker on MacOS. I don’t know about windows but it ran fine on my mac. Is there something particular that didn’t work for you?
      • geerlingguy 7y ago
        There are a number of use cases where Docker for Mac and Windows are painful compared to Linux, and to overcome those problems (like fs performance on shared volumes) people spend a lot of time building hacky solutions.
      • jacobr1 7y ago
        docker for osx uses a linux VM behind the scenes (transparently)
      • zxexz 7y ago
        I use Docker on macOS daily for work. I love it, and am grateful for it, but the experience is NOTHING like using Docker on Linux. Docker for macOS runs in a virtual machine, and requires dedicating RAM to the daemon. You aren’t directly using the host OS’ kernel either, which can lead to wonky behavior, especially in regards to networking (IME).
        • RMPR 7y ago
          Have you tried podman (https://podman.io/whatis.html https://podman.io/whatis.html)?
          • FireBeyond 7y ago
            How would podman help here? It doesn't run on macOS at all.
      • deergomoo 7y ago
        - Bind mount performance is appalling, even with the delegated/cached modes. I understand the reasons for this, but it's still a major issue for some workloads. To use PHP development as an example, where a popular framework boot-up can read hundreds of files per request (as well as writing out to caches), it's not uncommon to see 5 second response times for a page that displays "hello world" and nothing else. Thankfully there are tools like docker-sync and Mutagen which, while it's one extra thing to set up, get you back to nearly native performance. - com.docker.hyperkit is nuts. I can have a single container idling in the background doing nothing, hear my laptop fans spin up, and know without checking that com.docker.hyperkit is using 200% CPU for no discernible reason. Restarting the daemon brings things back down...for a while. At the office we use Linux, but since I've been working from home on my Mac I've gone back to Vagrant for as many projects as I can. Heavier and far less easy to orchestrate yes, but I've found I actually end up with better and more predictable performance (and far less time with my laptop doing double duty as a space heater).
    • Semaphor 7y ago
      Windows has direct docker support and has had it for a while. Not sure how great, not into containers myself ;)
      • inyorgroove 7y ago
        Just like on Mac OS it runs in a VM.
        • judge2020 7y ago
          soon it won't (at least, not on its own- in the wsl2 VM) https://www.docker.com/blog/new-docker-desktop-wsl2-backend/ https://www.docker.com/blog/new-docker-desktop-wsl2-backend/
        • pjmlp 7y ago
          It can make use of Hyper-V and Windows Containers.
      • nickjj 7y ago
        Docker Desktop 2.1.x with WSL1 works amazingly well. I've been running this set up for over a year and the volume performance is superb. Flask, Phoenix, Rails and Webpack driven apps are all a fantastic experience. For example Webpack takes 150ms to compile SCSS / ES6 JS diffs for large real world projects. Web server reloads on code change are effectively instant and I get microsecond response times in some Phoenix apps in development. This is on 6 year old hardware too and the source code isn't even sitting on an SSD (but Docker Desktop is installed on an SSD). In all cases, everything is running in Docker through Docker Deskop and I use the Docker CLI / Docker Compose in WSL as a client to connect to Docker Desktop. It's all documented at https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/setting-up-docker-for-windows-and-wsl-to-work-flawlessly https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/setting-up-docker-for-windows....
    • __d 7y ago
      Docker runs just fine on macOS. eg. https://download.docker.com/mac/stable/Docker.dmg https://download.docker.com/mac/stable/Docker.dmg
      • jamesgeck0 7y ago
        Docker runs in a VM on macOS, with significant penalties to filesystem speed. I haven't used it for a few years, but booting the large Rails app I work on was several times slower under Docker.
    • GordonS 7y ago
      Git for Windows with all the Unix tools it installs works great for me. It's nice for working with Docker, writing and running bash scripts etc. I have WSL1 installed, but very seldom feel the need to actually use it.
  • tasogare 7y ago
    There is so much confusion and technical inaccuracies in this little post it’s hard to know where to start...
  • Hello71 7y ago
    well, I definitely wouldn't use MS-DOS, because it doesn't support node or docker, but also because it's been obsolete since before Terminal.app existed.
  • 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
    Windows has Windows Terminal and PowerShell, too. Apple and Linux also have PowerShell.
    • saagarjha 7y ago
      Presumably the draw is UNIX, not the Terminal app itself.
      • ElCapitanMarkla 7y ago
        One of my main pain points in Windows is that the terminal app options are so crap compared to iterm2 or even the plain terminal app. The app itself is definitely a draw too
        • garethrowlands 7y ago
          Were you thinking of the Console Window? If so, that's not a terminal in the UNIX sense. These days, there's the Windows Terminal, which is fine, surely, https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-terminal-preview/9n0dx20hk701 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/p/windows-terminal-preview/9...
      • hunter2_ 7y ago
        POSIX is probably the best way to put it. This would cover Unix, Gnu/Linux, Darwin, BSD... the whole family tree.
  • pjmlp 7y ago
    None, as I stay away from them as far I can avoid them, Java and .NET are perfectly fine and IDEs have docker support in case I really need to deal with it.
    • pault 7y ago
      Oh cool, we can just abandon all other languages and toolchains so we can switch to windows native. Why didn't I think of that?
      • pjmlp 7y ago
        Nah, you just target Windows with toolchains that support Windows natively, like I am expected to target UNIX with toolchains that support UNIX natively. Your statement goes into both directions. Guess why "Year of Linux Desktop" has failed to happen, and no, ChromeOS and Android aren't really GNU/Linux, the kernel is irrelevant to userspace languages and public APIs.
  • nailer 7y ago
    Personally, as a node developer (and occasional contributor), Windows Terminal and pwsh. Not sure why you'd use or mention 'MS-DOS' since that stopped being a thing about 20 years ago, a decade before node existed.
• chx 7y ago
  Well, if you want to use multimedia and do web development on the same machine, what are you going to do? Linux support is somewhere between nonexistent and utterly broken for the first one and the same can be said for the second on Windows. So your choices are, 1. run Linux primary, put Windows in a VM 2. run Windows primary and put Linux in a VM 3. Give up and just run a separate Linux server.
  • geerlingguy 7y ago
    Or use macOS ;)
    • new_time 7y ago
      The devil on the shoulder has appeared
      • 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y ago
        He said macOS not FreeBSD ;)
    • chx 7y ago
      I will the moment you give me a mac with a seven row keyboard and a trackpoint.
      • LeoPanthera 7y ago
        Since you did not specify a laptop, you can plug in any arbitrary USB HID to desktop Mac. (MacBooks too - though I'm sure this isn't what you meant.) Most people choose their laptops based on the OS, not on the pointing device.
        • chx 7y ago
          There are about 5000 of us who did choose a laptop for its keyboard and pointer: it's the ThinkPad 25 Anniversary Edition. I have an SK-8855 already and also ordered the new TEX Shinobi so my unwavering stance on my laptop needing a proper keyboard+pointer might change but for now my choice of weapon is the TP25.
• wutwutwutwut 7y ago
  I use it all the time. I develop software for Windows but being able to use various Linux utilities and software is super convinient. Many of them have ports to Windows but it's just easier when it's all already available. Some days ago I needed to run some penetration test software and while supposedly I should be able to download the code myself and build in Windows, just installing using apt is a lot easier.
• jpalomaki 7y ago
  Main use case for WSL was to provide better user experience for developers working on Windows. Many modern tools are more geared towards Linux/MacOS. Maybe there was also some long term goals, like making Windows better platform for Linux software in general (server use).
• int_19h 7y ago
  Same use case as Wine does on Linux. It doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.
• sabas_ge 7y ago
  I use it as Terminal on files stored in windows under /mnt/c (php dev environment in xampp), plus ssh and python for notebooks running in vscode
• erklik 7y ago
  I basically do all of my js web development on WSL now.
• zaarn 7y ago
  Development. At work we rely heavily on it to get work done because having an almost-linux-like environment is much better than having to run a WAMP stack or similar silly stuff. It's made mine and my coworkers lives so much easier compared to before, so I'm certain use cases exist. Since WSL2 runs on HyperV, for some of my coworkers it's not an option, since they rely on VMware and similar for other essential work.