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Anybody got any day-to-day practical stories of how this Linux layer generally is? I have the top tier Pixelbook bought on the promise of integrated Linux on se

Anybody got any day-to-day practical stories of how this Linux layer generally is? I have the top tier Pixelbook bought on the promise of integrated Linux on secure hardware. In reality it's crap, no FUSE, some GUI programs simply don't run, upgrades can trash your install, sporadic development attention from Google, and my 2015 MBP is an order of magnitude faster (wish I'd sprung for the 16Gb version though). The new MBP without a touchbar would be a great replacement but the Book 3 has caught my attention. Love to hear stories from Mac->Windows refugees.

fuzzy2 6y ago
Hm, depends on what you need. WSL1 translates syscalls to NT, it's not a real Linux kernel, so probably no FUSE. Performance is good in general, but it's still NTFS underneath. I use it for SSH and FileZilla, with Debian. No breakage so far, even going from Debian 9 to 10. WSL2 is basically a Linux VM on Hyper-V with some glue involved. It should be possible to make FUSE work there. I haven't really tried WSL2 yet. You'll have to bring your own X server. I use VcXsrv.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  So WSL1 was like a reverse Wine?
  - fuzzy2 6y ago
    Yes, I think that’s a valid way to put it. “is”, though. Because WSL2 is so different, WSL1 will stay, for the time being. You can use both side-by-side.
pedalpete 6y ago
I use it for all of my dev stuff, and I like it. I'm mostly a windows user, a few of our devs are heavy gamers, so they appreciate having a windows machine. With WSL, we run our servers in linux, and have browsers open in windows, and running VSCode in windows. The other benefit for us, is with the graphics work we do, and most of our users being on windows, in Chrome or Firefox, we're developing using the software our users are in, while developing in the same server environment our servers run on. It was fidgety to get set-up the first time, but now, that we've got that sorted, it's quite nice.

fuzzy2 6y ago

Hm, depends on what you need. WSL1 translates syscalls to NT, it's not a real Linux kernel, so probably no FUSE. Performance is good in general, but it's still NTFS underneath. I use it for SSH and FileZilla, with Debian. No breakage so far, even going from Debian 9 to 10. WSL2 is basically a Linux VM on Hyper-V with some glue involved. It should be possible to make FUSE work there. I haven't really tried WSL2 yet. You'll have to bring your own X server. I use VcXsrv.

colejohnson66 6y ago
So WSL1 was like a reverse Wine?
- fuzzy2 6y ago
  Yes, I think that’s a valid way to put it. “is”, though. Because WSL2 is so different, WSL1 will stay, for the time being. You can use both side-by-side.

pedalpete 6y ago

I use it for all of my dev stuff, and I like it. I'm mostly a windows user, a few of our devs are heavy gamers, so they appreciate having a windows machine. With WSL, we run our servers in linux, and have browsers open in windows, and running VSCode in windows. The other benefit for us, is with the graphics work we do, and most of our users being on windows, in Chrome or Firefox, we're developing using the software our users are in, while developing in the same server environment our servers run on. It was fidgety to get set-up the first time, but now, that we've got that sorted, it's quite nice.