26 ms·

WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history

614 points by delduca 6y ago

cmurf 6y ago
Problem found, added sync() before shutdown. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel/issues/168#issuecomment-754856054 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel/issues/168#is...
delduca 6y ago
More: - WSL2 sometime corrupt .zsh_history and git https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5026 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5026 - WSL2 corrupts ext4 filesystem https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5895 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5895
- tutfbhuf 6y ago
  But why? WSL1 was something like wine but reverse, but WSL2 is actually linux.
  - temac 6y ago
    Wild guesses: * the kernel is not properly shutdown (and sometimes some buffers are not flushed) * the virtual block device and/or its linux driver has bugs
  - cesarb 6y ago
    That's probably the cause. WSL2 being Linux means that, unlike WSL1 which directly uses the host NTFS filesystem, it's probably using an emulated block device to hold its filesystem. If that emulated block device doesn't correctly honor write barrier requests from the Linux kernel, it could explain the corruption.
  - tremon 6y ago
    The problem is likely not in the Ext4 code, but in the block I/O driver (which is Hyper-V specific, IIRC) or even in Hyper-V itself. Several reports mention Windows shutdowns, sleep or hibernation, so it may be a simple unclean shutdown of the VM. A bigger problem would be if Hyper-V is either ignoring memory barriers, or caching writes to the disk and losing them when the Hyper-V service is shutdown. But that would likely affect more than just WSL, so we'd have seen the problem sooner (or so I vehemently hope).
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      I recall ext4 had[1] some issues[2] with data loss due to unclean shutdowns. I assumed that had all been fixed by now, but yeah, these things can get tricky fast. [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/322823/ https://lwn.net/Articles/322823/ [2]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/comments/45 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/...
    - bmurphy1976 6y ago
      Huh, interesting. I run a variety of linux based services at home. For years I ran them on a Hyper-V VM (because my computer was technically my gaming machine). I only recently migrated everything to a cluster of Raspberry Pi devices. I used to have occasional problems with this setup, and it was always some kind of drive corruption or mounting issue. I wonder if this is related?
    - the8472 6y ago
      Virtualbox has (had?) similar issues in certain configurations where it maintains a small write cache and doesn't honor IO barriers which lead to journaled/cow filesystems reporting an inconsistent state that should have been prevented by journaling.
    - merb 6y ago
      > Hyper-V service is shutdown as far as I know when wsl2 is actiavted, hyper-v runs as type-1 and linux, windows are virtual after activating it. thus if it crashes, you get a bsod
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    FreeBSD has native support for Linux binaries by mapping system calls, and it's fairly reliable when it works. What's nice is that when it works, it works, adding support for system calls improves coverage, and since underlying things like the FS aren't virtualized, it tends to be pretty reliable.
    - loeg 6y ago
      Yeah; Windows had something like that, too. It was WSL1 (or just "WSL"). I also tend to think that was the better approach.
      - bonzini 6y ago
        It didn't extend to use cases like containers, that would have basically required MS to rewrite large parts of the Linux kernel's core code for namespaces, mount points etc.
        loeg 6y ago
        Sure. Running a Linux VM (WSL2) just to use containers seems to kind of defeat the point, though. You might as well just run your containers in VMs.
        bonzini 6y ago
        The use case is for developers to use their Linux tools with Windows integration. WSL1 only did the latter half well, "traditional" VMs only did the former. WSL2 does both, however that brings both advantages and disadvantages of VMs.
- kurare 6y ago
  I use arch linux.
- uncledave 6y ago
  This is probably HyperV. I’ve seen exactly this ext4 corruption in production on windows server 2012R2 with CentOS 7. Even to the point that the machine remounts root read only. Unfortunately our windows operations guys are severely lacking in diagnostic savvy and just reboot the machine over and over again or blast it and provision a new one and don’t analyse the problem. From what I’ve seen it’s a combination of the storage drivers and the storage virtualisation in HyperV rather than a specific issue. I imagine it’s something similar in WSL. I really don’t trust it as a platform at all. It’s barely better with windows guests.
  - ncphil 6y ago
    Had a serious talk a Unix manager over a decade ago who was convinced Windows ops didn't require as much expertise as Unix/Linux. It was a common misconception that MS seemed to encourage. As someone who came over from Windows, I knew better. That attitude continues to influence standard practices, hiring and, most importantly, training and education opportunities for Windows admins -- to the detriment of all. I've also had my collisions with Hyper V, and have come away with the same impressions as you have.
    - uncledave 6y ago
      Agreed. I've done both and if you ask me Windows ops is vastly more difficult because everything is brittle, inconsistent and unreliable and rarely repeatable almost all of the time. It requires great skill, determination and persistence to navigate issues like this. Unfortunately as you suggest, the outcome is hiring as cheap as possible and fixing all issues by not changing anything other than replacing everything every few years. There is rarely any day to day admin I see other than planning the next major rollout with some vain hope it'll have less problems than the last one.
      - oblio 6y ago
        I don't know if I'd call it brittle, I would call it super complex (when you get into wmic & friends) and harder to get info online, compared to Linux, because everyone has to tinker with Linux while only a minority of power sysadmins dig that deep into Windows.
- 29athrowaway 6y ago
  Execute order 66.
bserge 6y ago
I don't really understand the use case for WSL. What are the advantages? You could run a full Linux VM and do everything on it on any machine these days. Which is what I do, but I'm just an old school hack. Anyone who uses WSL care to enlighten me? Thanks!
- syshum 6y ago
  Lower overhead, and full integration with the host filesystem I believe are the 2 primary reasons many use it
- pjmlp 6y ago
  To sell Windows laptops to the same crowd that buys Apple laptops to develop GNU/Linux software, instead of supporting Linux OEMs, and are unhappy that Apple only cares about developers on Apple ecosystem. Microsoft understood that they only care about having some kind of POSIX support, and nowadays being Linux compatible is more relevant than straight POSIX, as the BSDs and IllumniOS also found out with their compatibility layers.
  - jevgeni 6y ago
    Or, alternatively, a crowd whose needs aren’t completely met by Linux.
    - pjmlp 6y ago
      Then why they develop GNU/Linux software to start with?
      - detaro 6y ago
        Because their needs aren't met by developing Windows or macOS software?
        pjmlp 6y ago
        Then again why they don't support GNU/Linux vendors?
sdoering 6y ago
I will need to monitor this more closely. I have switched to a WIN/WSL2 setup recently from Mac and have not had this problem happen to me. Nonetheless I hope this gets fixed before it hits me.
- uncledave 6y ago
  Keep the Mac handy. I just went the other way to you because of a thousand paper cuts.
  - kowsheek 6y ago
    Same here. I want to like Windows but MS just makes it impossible. The MBP M1 has blown me away, I don't think I'll try to go back any time soon.
    - uncledave 6y ago
      Yeah M1 Mini here. Total game changer.
      - temporaryacc62 6y ago
        Sorry if this doesn't apply to you but how do you deal with Docker development? I've heard some horror stories regarding Docker for mac and I don't think I'll be able to live without my Docker containers.
        uncledave 6y ago
        I do that on an AWS instance. I have learned over the years to keep my desktop and my tools well apart as there have been some fatalities which have knocked me out for a day at a time before. I mostly write Go though which is fine on M1 macs.
        whatever1 6y ago
        If you are doing remote work why does the client matter? You can use an iPhone terminal app and achieve the same functionality. BTW the new windows terminal app is ages better compared to anything I had seen in the windows world.
jaltekruse 6y ago
MS is ridiculous, corrupting the filesystem is an OS mistake of the first order. Any systems developer should view corruption of a persistent storage system of any kind as totally unacceptable. And in this case the whole filesystem is open source! Meanwhile the open source people built a decent NTFS driver for linux years ago, I haven't seen what specs are released but I assume they needed to fill a few doc gaps to make it happen. Also other nice people did bundle up ext3 and ext4 into an app you could run on windows to browse and copy stuff from your linux partition years ago. Now MS finally caves and accepts the defeat of linux being a better experience for devs, so they now 'support' it and can't check that saving files always works?!? There is no way this only happens for bash history and git repos, some people have files they don't instantly throw on the cloud, or consider half-ephemeral like bash history, in this case you wouldn't be able to just re-clone as a workaround, I'll keep running my desktop linux on my dev machine (although it's not all rosey over there either, I trust it to save my files).
- jaltekruse 6y ago
  This was reported back in August and unless the people commenting yesterday just haven't updated Windows in a while it still isn't fixed.
- efdee 6y ago
  Yes, let's pretend that the 4.19 EXT4 corruption issue in 2018 never happened.
  - kasabali 6y ago
    No need to pretend, because it never happened: > Initially, the problem was thought to be in the ext4 filesystem, since that is what the affected users were using...It took until December 4 for Lukáš Krejčí to correctly bisect the problem down to a block-layer change. https://lwn.net/Articles/774440/ https://lwn.net/Articles/774440/
    - efdee 6y ago
      I never said the problem was in the EXT4 filesystem. The problem resulted in EXT4 corruption. Quite sure the Git corruption issue WSL2 has isn't in Git either.
crispyambulance 6y ago
I think calling it WSL2 was a mistake. The predecessor, WSL, "just worked" and it was more a less a linux experience for most practical purposes-- and certainly better than hoary old cygwin. This caused a lot of people to believe they could just transition to WSL2, lead on by the promise of an even more performant linux experience. The documentation didn't say anything about complications from attempting this, so a lot of people just tried it as soon as they could, thinking it would go as smoothly as when they tried WSL. But nope... it many cases, it doesn't just work out of the box. There's network configuration and gateway issues, snags with vpn, and now this git repo corruption. When you look on git issues, it's just people randomly shot-gunning suggestions, some of which work, some of which don't. I think WSL2 was rushed out too early, or at least it's lacking a comprehensive troubleshooting guide to get it up and running.
- pletnes 6y ago
  Same difference in my experience - WSL1 git screwed up git repos for me, broke git lfs, +++. I guess it’s more of the same-ish on WSL2, just different edge cases due to different edges.
- shaklee3 6y ago
  I agree. I tried wsl2, and while it's nice, it has issues wsl1 didn't have. For instance, networking almost never worked until I applied a common workaround of resetting the ip stack. Wsl1 always worked fine for that. It's just not ready for primetime yet.
- harikb 6y ago
  File system corruption is unforgivable mistake, but FS work is really hard to get right. Even stuff like VMware corrupts shared folders ... wherever they try to bypass a driver translation layer. Just Google for “vmware shared folder corruption”
  - rleigh 6y ago
    Is this the reason why they have deprecated shared folders in Workstation 16?
jarym 6y ago
poor quality joke alert Maybe Microsoft still believe Linux and the GPL are a 'cancer' and WSL2 is there to attack it?
nijave 6y ago
Reading through the issues it seems like the problem is occuring when opening the same files from directly inside the WSL2 container and also through the network device that exposes them to Windows at the same time. I'm not very familiar with how WSL2 exposes files but that seems to be the problem
ncphil 6y ago
A while back spent about 2 mos mastering WSL2 and came to the conclusion that the default of automatically opening up in the Windows fs share was... unwise. Besides fs permissions being a complete mess, the unstable behavior described here liked to show up at the most inopportune moments. Wound up confining my work to the virtual Linux fs, but that kind of defeated the whole purpose of WSL for me. I'm also back to using a VMware machine on my company owned laptop, but my personal systems are still Linux on bare metal. As an aside, I struggled with Hyper V to replace VMware, but it makes the system unstable on the particular Win 10 builds my company provides employees. I'd gone at least 8 years not seeing a blue screen before that.
- sieabahlpark 6y ago
  I find wsl2 with docker to be a decent use case. You get a reliable terminal that doesn't just background processes you ctrl-c to. The IO is slow but overall manageable. File permissions are a joke but they're being ported into a container. I don't see WSL as an environment as much as it's just a more reliable terminal with a shotty emulated filesystem.
johnchristopher 6y ago
> Feel like booting Linux on a separate disk because of these issues. It always seemed strange to me that people would rather use WSL than the real thing when Windows doesn't bring much advantage. What am I missing ?
- javajosh 6y ago
  You are missing Office, Outlook, Visual Studio, and any enterprise nonsense IT requires on company computers. All of that requires Windows.
  - larrik 6y ago
    The web version of Outlook has come a long way, and in my opinion has become the superior product (for my use cases, at least).
    - thethimble 6y ago
      You’re also missing Adobe products as well as most games. Using Linux without a reboot is an incredible convenience. Glossing over the value of proprietary software that only runs on Windows is narrow minded.
      - Zardoz84 6y ago
        few games, not most games.
      - larrik 6y ago
        My comment was really only about Outlook itself (using the web vs the desktop version, I prefer the web version). that said, I hate Adobe products with a passion. When I build identical computers for my wife and I, the moment I install the Abode shit on hers, it becomes noticeably slower at everything. I don't truly understand it.
    - chrisandchris 6y ago
      The web version does work until you need to sign into more than 2 accounts per day (1 in regular, 1 in private). If you need more than 2 accounts, it does not work anymore. Edit: it does work, but it will sign you out from all M365 services which requires a lot of logins for nothing.
Tempest1981 6y ago
Reminded me of a different issue: If you have 2 different git clients (different git versions) accessing the same shared .git directory, bad things can happen -- incorrect file status, iirc.
nedsma 6y ago
WSL2 works until you need it really, and then it starts giving you problems. The networking problems are the worst. Installed a Linux VM under VMWare and called it a day.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  Yah, or use Linux.
  - nedsma 6y ago
    I do prefer Linux to pretty much any other OS.
  - jijji 6y ago
    its like running linux through a vm but with a lot more random bugs
dpmdpm 6y ago
Huh. I've used WSL2 and got extensively and never had any problems.
- mmcnl 6y ago
  Me too. I abuse it often as well (hard shutdowns with wsl --shutdown, interacting with files from both Linux and Windows side, etc.). The only issue I have is that because of the virtualization approach it uses more RAM as there is no unified RAM pool for both Windows and WSL (as was the case with WSL1). But that's perhaps expected behavior.
  - WhoIsSuraj 6y ago
    You can still limit the amount of ram used by wsl 2 by setting it in the wslconfig. I like to limit the amount of cores it has access to as well as i tend to find that these two things are generally prone to spiking.
- yokoprime 6y ago
  same. no issues
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
dboreham 6y ago
Important I think to point out that these are (numerous) user reports of files "corrupted". There isn't afaics any confirmation yet as to exactly what's happening nor the underlying cause.
- smarx007 6y ago
  Acked by the MSFT folk: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5026#event-4160127480 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5026#event-416012748...
  - sedatk 6y ago
    Are you sure this person is MSFT? There is zero information about them on GitHub.
    - smarx007 6y ago
      Did MSFT start giving commit/moderation rights to outsiders on their repos? I assumed only MSFT org members can add tags to issues etc.
      - sedatk 6y ago
        Apparently. The comment box is enabled for me for example.
        smarx007 6y ago
        I think filing issues and PRs and commenting on them is open to anyone. Assigning issues, labelling them etc. is a member privilege.
DavyJone 6y ago
I only see 1 user confirming it and he had a special or odd disk setup (merged disks which also do not show as merged, might be the source of the problem). Is this confirmed by anyone else?
- lights0123 6y ago
  Huh? skhaz, 2n3906, PulsarFox, Annih, Champkinz, sidharthramesh, mbrumlow, luigimannoni, and jmfury all confirm the problem in the linked GitHub issue.
- gokhan 6y ago
  My zsh history on wsl2 got corrupted last week. A friend shared a script to fix it, mentioning the same happened him in the past. Git is ok though.
f12345g 6y ago
While using Visual Studio (not code) with git in wsl2 with Ubuntu 20.04, I saved three open files with changes, committed shutdown the laptop. On next start files showed as empty 0 bytes in Visual Studio and thought as far as I recall were non-zero size in wls2. No way to recover them from git. I stopped using git repos in wls2 for now.
kohlerm 6y ago
I haven't had a problem so far, but I do use only Linux binaries (including VS code)
facorreia 6y ago
The fact that this can even happen is enough for me to never touch this for doing work. I stopped developing on Windows after the Windows 8 fiasco and I don't see myself ever coming back. Both Mac and Linux are faster, more convenient, and more solid in my experience. I considered advising my son to buy a Surface for his school work and developing on WSL2, but I'm glad the M1 Mac came out with a much better cost/performance, so he got one. At least his git repos won't get corrupted.
- smarx007 6y ago
  I am a macOS user myself (daily driver since circa 2016, Arch/Ubuntu 2013-2016 and Win 7 before that) and I can tell you that the honeymoon is surely over. On top of that, I have my 2 old laptops running as Win10 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS home servers and I can say they have not given me any grief. I feel that Windows and Ubuntu LTS are getting more and more stable while macOS is going towards "move fast and break things" with every release (both still require some group policy fu and command line fu respectively but that's not a big deal). Back in the days, you'd snapshot your Windows XP with Acronis or something similar every time you'd install something major and these days I am contemplating downgrading to Mojave from Catalina. Big Sur is out of the question with things like firewall bypass and many others. P.S. You simply cannot make this stuff up: as I was typing this comment in Safari, my input field text became blurred just like that in an instant https://imgur.com/a/2Ae0QpZ https://imgur.com/a/2Ae0QpZ
3gg 6y ago
> Mind that I come from a Ubuntu distro, Windows is the most energy efficient solution at the moment and allows me to run my Dev tools and work on battery for 4 hours straight. Ubuntu (or any Debian-based distro) destroy my battery in 40 minutes and there's no solution or optimization for that. I know this is not a solution, but the Librem laptops from Purism hold up for hours straight. I also used to run Windows on laptops for the same reason, but the obvious solution to this is to buy a laptop built with Linux in mind from the ground up, and now we have options available.
- indymike 6y ago
  I quadrupled battery life when I switched form Windows to Ubuntu. No idea why. I'm using a Dell XPS 15 which has factory support for Linux. I didn't do a lot of digging into why... was just happy to be able to go 4 hours instead of one.
  - 3gg 6y ago
    As far as I can tell, and I am not an expert, it has always boiled down to hardware/driver parity. Laptops ship with proprietary hardware and drivers that Windows can tap into to optimize battery life, things like turning off hard drives and stuff, but that a Linux doesn't have access to. Provided hardware/driver parity, a Linux environment should generally be more lightweight and last longer. Maybe that was your experience with the XPS; those guys also ship with Linux out of the box like you said, so the hardware should lend itself just as well to Linux distributions.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    If you were only getting a single hour on a laptop, I’m almost certain your battery management settings weren’t configured correctly (brightness on max, etc)
trinovantes 6y ago
Another funny interaction I found with WSL2 and Windows is file case sensitivity leading to all sorts of weird error messages I wish I can use a real Linux installation but their display drivers don't work well with my multiple displays with different resolutions
- shrimp_emoji 6y ago
  >their display drivers don't work well with my multiple displays with different resolutions Unless you're writing through a time warp from 2004, this is not true at all, IME. But the statement is vague. "Work well" can mean some esoteric DPI scaling stuff that I think is only noticeable with 4K combinations. What distribution? What's "their display driver"? Nouveau, the open-source Nvidia one, is pretty bad, and everyone uses the proprietary Nvidia driver (this may be hard to come by on some distros, like Debian, but don't use those; use Ubuntu or Manjaro). The AMD open-source one is great and everyone on AMD GPUs uses that. I've been running triple monitor, diagonally-aligned 1080p/1440p configurations for years on several distros and DEs with both Nvidia and AMD drivers.
  - trinovantes 6y ago
    I have a drawing tablet with a display in 1080p while the rest of my monitors are 1440p. For whatever reason, my mouse cursor thinks it's on a 1080p display inside my 1440p monitors resulting in a humongous cursor. (nvidia's proprietary drivers if it matters) I doubt this will ever be fixed since it's an obscure hardware that's rarely used by other Linux users
  - month13 6y ago
    I use a 1080p and a 4k display, it's pretty tricky getting consistent scaling per display.
- sedatk 6y ago
  What kind of problem do you have with case sensitivity?
  - 6y ago
bg117 6y ago
Having trouble with WSL2 networking. Suddenly stopped working. Looking into Ubuntu Multipass.
tgbugs 6y ago
While we're on the topic of WSL2 causing issues, I will add one that I noted to the pile. If you have WSL2 installed then the first bash on PATH is the WSL2 version of bash. For whatever reason, this version of bash has a major impedance mismatch with Emacs and org-mode. From windows native Emacs (not an Emacs installed in WSL2) if you try to run an org babel block that contains bash code, whole commands will simply be ignored. The end result is that if you blindly execute bash blocks in Emacs on windows without checking which bash is being used there can be disastrous results because a seemingly safe script like `pushd some-folder; rm -r ; popd` suddenly becomes `rm -r ` without warning. I'm guessing that it has to do with mismatched line endings since mingw bash (aka git bash) doesn't have these issues. Also, you can't rely on the ordering of your PATH environment variable to protect you because updates can change it. tl;dr WSL2 bash is not bash but it pretends to be and there are terrifying changes to the semantics of bash scripts as a result.
- oahuja 6y ago
  I have experienced this exact issue as well.
llacb47 6y ago
I recently upgraded to WSL2. Let's hope this doesn't happen to me
mrharshley 6y ago
WSL2 was promised as a good working extension for a Linux dev environment on windows by my peers. Sadly, a whole host of issues specific to my dev environment meant that it was useless as I’d spend more time fixing it than getting any valuable use out of it. More importantly, this became the very reason I switched to arch full time, and haven’t looked back since. I still hope that it becomes what it was promised to be, although I don’t see myself going back to windows any time soon.
- madeofpalk 6y ago
  Opposite anecdata - I got a gaming PC and i migrated all my development to it and WSL(2) has been a godsend. VS Code has a "WSL Remote" mode that works really well (where a vscode server runs in Linux and the windows GUI access it "remotely"). I even use the Windows Github app for the occasional GUI-assisted commit, and apart from being slow its fine. I've had only two problems with this set up: - Occasionally VS Code Typescript features slow down, but it fixes itself a few days later (maybe after a restart). I presume this is due to the WSL Remote, but not certain. - The occasional line endings snafu, but this is more of a tooling issue.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - gavinray 6y ago
    Also opposite anecdote, I switched from Pop!_OS to Windows after getting into music production recently as a hobby (MIDI controller driver software doesn't always play well, even with WINE-devel) after over a decade on Linux. I expected to hate it, but I'm asking myself why I didn't do this sooner. It's the same sort of scenario as before -- I have Windows running the games I occasionally play, and music stuff, and I do all of my code stuff in WSL2/Ubuntu. But this way, I never have to fiddle with weird WINE patches or googling bugs, everything "just works". Asking myself why I didn't do this sooner to be honest. I had one big complaint which is that copying files from Windows to WSL2 would create ".ZoneInfo" file copies of every file, that was downloaded from the web, but they patched this recently too. With the support for Linux GUI apps that launched with Windows Insider Preview recently, I have a hard time making arguments against it now. The taste of crow is a little bitter, eh. Linux + WINE/Proton basically felt like shittier, more bug-ridden Windows + WSL2. With the one notable exception that as an OS/host, Windows 10 "feels" a bit slower in general.
29athrowaway 6y ago
Reminds me of this e-mail chain at Microsoft, on September 27, 1991: Brad Silverberg: "drdos has problems running windows today, and I assume will have more problems in the future." Jim Allchin: "You should make sure it has problems in the future. :-)"
intricatedetail 6y ago
I only use Windows because of a couple of tools there is no equivalent version for Linux. Unfortunately companies think there would be not enough customers to warrant development for that OS so I am kind of stuck with maintaining dedicated Windows PC. I have mixed feelings about Microsoft appropriation of Linux. Whatever they touch turns to excrement with a few exceptions.
cracksmoka420 6y ago
I'm so glad that I don't use Windows LOL
utxaa 6y ago
the scary part is that git reports an error and that's why people are noticing. what else is going on with files that are not source controlled?
zaptheimpaler 6y ago
After constantly getting caught in bugs between WSL and Docker, i'm now running Ubuntu Server headless with a Windows VM (with GPU passthrough) on top. The biggest issue across all these things is filesystems. There is simply no good way to share a filesystem between Windows and Linux that is both 1. fast 2. fully correct - i.e doesn't break some code. SMB/NFS just never work super well because they are slow, or programs think they are local filesystems so things break (e.g VScode won't detect new files created on the linux side of a SMB mount without a manual refresh). Plenty of details on getting permissions right too. Not to mention extended attributes which differ slightly and break stuff. Network file systems in general are just too different to local FS's for programs to work seamlessly. The 2 non-ideal solutions I've found are 1. keep all files in linux + edit over network using VSCode Remote or IntelliJ Remote support or 2. keep a copy of the dev workspace in windows, and use something like unison (or manual git) to sync.
gabrielblack 6y ago
I experienced this problem and a ext4 corruption, too. Because my company force me to use Windows for internal policy, my previous solution was a VMware VM , accessed "remotely" by my IDE. Then I wanted try the new sauce. My colleagues working to legacy code on SVN also experienced problems (anyone else ?). So I switched back to VMWare VM. The other considerations were that a VM can be easily backupped copying a directory and, if I need to change computer or an additional environment, the migration of the whole environment is extremely easy. Moreover i use snapshots, so if something goes wrong at OS level I can go back with a click.
systemvoltage 6y ago
Microsoft should come out with a new Linux distro. That would have been easier than developing WSL.
vmception 6y ago
> I recently switched my development enviroment from macOS to Windows M I S T A K E
fmakunbound 6y ago
Jfc that’s some janky shit many of you seem to be into. I don’t quite get why some developers seem hell bent on those kinds of hybrid development environments. Why not straight up Linux or macOS where he user-space is consistent at least?
zelly 6y ago
it's a GPL violation as far as i'm concerned, so anyone who uses it deserves what they get
- ahupp 6y ago
  Not sure what you mean, the source is right here: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel
johnghanks 6y ago
So many of y'all have bespoke setups and then bitch about WSL2 not working for you.
jijji 6y ago
sounds like torturing yourself or masochism
apatheticonion 6y ago
I won't leave WSL1 for my bash on Windows needs. For native linux, I have my choice of distro installed on my choice of hypervisor (Debian, VMWare). I use VSCode and the Remote SSH extension (functions identically to WSL2). The difference is I know exactly what is going on. I know when and why certain network conditions exist (port forwarding, etc).
metreo 6y ago
I used WSL2 with Debian and found it slow, aside from that Windows required what seems like an excessive amount of system resources to even get to WSL2.
Razengan 6y ago
Since there’s almost always comments from people saying how they’re happy on Windows whenever there’s news about some fuckup on macOS, I’d like to balance it by saying that shit like this is why I’m never going back to Windows.
blacklight 6y ago
I was afraid that WSL2 was old Microsoft's EEE again. Thanks for keeping it so bad that you can't even push to a repo without corrupting the filesystem or the repo itself. It might have supposed to be EEE, but it turned out to be the last push many people needed to switch to a full Linux OS.

614 points by delduca 6y ago

Problem found, added sync() before shutdown. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel/issues/168#issuecomment-754856054 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel/issues/168#is...

delduca 6y ago

More: - WSL2 sometime corrupt .zsh_history and git https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5026 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5026 - WSL2 corrupts ext4 filesystem https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5895 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5895

tutfbhuf 6y ago
But why? WSL1 was something like wine but reverse, but WSL2 is actually linux.
- temac 6y ago
  Wild guesses: * the kernel is not properly shutdown (and sometimes some buffers are not flushed) * the virtual block device and/or its linux driver has bugs
- cesarb 6y ago
  That's probably the cause. WSL2 being Linux means that, unlike WSL1 which directly uses the host NTFS filesystem, it's probably using an emulated block device to hold its filesystem. If that emulated block device doesn't correctly honor write barrier requests from the Linux kernel, it could explain the corruption.
- tremon 6y ago
  The problem is likely not in the Ext4 code, but in the block I/O driver (which is Hyper-V specific, IIRC) or even in Hyper-V itself. Several reports mention Windows shutdowns, sleep or hibernation, so it may be a simple unclean shutdown of the VM. A bigger problem would be if Hyper-V is either ignoring memory barriers, or caching writes to the disk and losing them when the Hyper-V service is shutdown. But that would likely affect more than just WSL, so we'd have seen the problem sooner (or so I vehemently hope).
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    I recall ext4 had[1] some issues[2] with data loss due to unclean shutdowns. I assumed that had all been fixed by now, but yeah, these things can get tricky fast. [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/322823/ https://lwn.net/Articles/322823/ [2]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/comments/45 https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/317781/...
  - bmurphy1976 6y ago
    Huh, interesting. I run a variety of linux based services at home. For years I ran them on a Hyper-V VM (because my computer was technically my gaming machine). I only recently migrated everything to a cluster of Raspberry Pi devices. I used to have occasional problems with this setup, and it was always some kind of drive corruption or mounting issue. I wonder if this is related?
  - the8472 6y ago
    Virtualbox has (had?) similar issues in certain configurations where it maintains a small write cache and doesn't honor IO barriers which lead to journaled/cow filesystems reporting an inconsistent state that should have been prevented by journaling.
  - merb 6y ago
    > Hyper-V service is shutdown as far as I know when wsl2 is actiavted, hyper-v runs as type-1 and linux, windows are virtual after activating it. thus if it crashes, you get a bsod
- dehrmann 6y ago
  FreeBSD has native support for Linux binaries by mapping system calls, and it's fairly reliable when it works. What's nice is that when it works, it works, adding support for system calls improves coverage, and since underlying things like the FS aren't virtualized, it tends to be pretty reliable.
  - loeg 6y ago
    Yeah; Windows had something like that, too. It was WSL1 (or just "WSL"). I also tend to think that was the better approach.
    - bonzini 6y ago
      It didn't extend to use cases like containers, that would have basically required MS to rewrite large parts of the Linux kernel's core code for namespaces, mount points etc.
      - loeg 6y ago
        Sure. Running a Linux VM (WSL2) just to use containers seems to kind of defeat the point, though. You might as well just run your containers in VMs.
        bonzini 6y ago
        The use case is for developers to use their Linux tools with Windows integration. WSL1 only did the latter half well, "traditional" VMs only did the former. WSL2 does both, however that brings both advantages and disadvantages of VMs.
kurare 6y ago
I use arch linux.
uncledave 6y ago
This is probably HyperV. I’ve seen exactly this ext4 corruption in production on windows server 2012R2 with CentOS 7. Even to the point that the machine remounts root read only. Unfortunately our windows operations guys are severely lacking in diagnostic savvy and just reboot the machine over and over again or blast it and provision a new one and don’t analyse the problem. From what I’ve seen it’s a combination of the storage drivers and the storage virtualisation in HyperV rather than a specific issue. I imagine it’s something similar in WSL. I really don’t trust it as a platform at all. It’s barely better with windows guests.
- ncphil 6y ago
  Had a serious talk a Unix manager over a decade ago who was convinced Windows ops didn't require as much expertise as Unix/Linux. It was a common misconception that MS seemed to encourage. As someone who came over from Windows, I knew better. That attitude continues to influence standard practices, hiring and, most importantly, training and education opportunities for Windows admins -- to the detriment of all. I've also had my collisions with Hyper V, and have come away with the same impressions as you have.
  - uncledave 6y ago
    Agreed. I've done both and if you ask me Windows ops is vastly more difficult because everything is brittle, inconsistent and unreliable and rarely repeatable almost all of the time. It requires great skill, determination and persistence to navigate issues like this. Unfortunately as you suggest, the outcome is hiring as cheap as possible and fixing all issues by not changing anything other than replacing everything every few years. There is rarely any day to day admin I see other than planning the next major rollout with some vain hope it'll have less problems than the last one.
    - oblio 6y ago
      I don't know if I'd call it brittle, I would call it super complex (when you get into wmic & friends) and harder to get info online, compared to Linux, because everyone has to tinker with Linux while only a minority of power sysadmins dig that deep into Windows.
29athrowaway 6y ago
Execute order 66.

bserge 6y ago

I don't really understand the use case for WSL. What are the advantages? You could run a full Linux VM and do everything on it on any machine these days. Which is what I do, but I'm just an old school hack. Anyone who uses WSL care to enlighten me? Thanks!

syshum 6y ago
Lower overhead, and full integration with the host filesystem I believe are the 2 primary reasons many use it
pjmlp 6y ago
To sell Windows laptops to the same crowd that buys Apple laptops to develop GNU/Linux software, instead of supporting Linux OEMs, and are unhappy that Apple only cares about developers on Apple ecosystem. Microsoft understood that they only care about having some kind of POSIX support, and nowadays being Linux compatible is more relevant than straight POSIX, as the BSDs and IllumniOS also found out with their compatibility layers.
- jevgeni 6y ago
  Or, alternatively, a crowd whose needs aren’t completely met by Linux.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    Then why they develop GNU/Linux software to start with?
    - detaro 6y ago
      Because their needs aren't met by developing Windows or macOS software?
      - pjmlp 6y ago
        Then again why they don't support GNU/Linux vendors?

sdoering 6y ago

I will need to monitor this more closely. I have switched to a WIN/WSL2 setup recently from Mac and have not had this problem happen to me. Nonetheless I hope this gets fixed before it hits me.

uncledave 6y ago
Keep the Mac handy. I just went the other way to you because of a thousand paper cuts.
- kowsheek 6y ago
  Same here. I want to like Windows but MS just makes it impossible. The MBP M1 has blown me away, I don't think I'll try to go back any time soon.
  - uncledave 6y ago
    Yeah M1 Mini here. Total game changer.
    - temporaryacc62 6y ago
      Sorry if this doesn't apply to you but how do you deal with Docker development? I've heard some horror stories regarding Docker for mac and I don't think I'll be able to live without my Docker containers.
      - uncledave 6y ago
        I do that on an AWS instance. I have learned over the years to keep my desktop and my tools well apart as there have been some fatalities which have knocked me out for a day at a time before. I mostly write Go though which is fine on M1 macs.
        whatever1 6y ago
        If you are doing remote work why does the client matter? You can use an iPhone terminal app and achieve the same functionality. BTW the new windows terminal app is ages better compared to anything I had seen in the windows world.

jaltekruse 6y ago

MS is ridiculous, corrupting the filesystem is an OS mistake of the first order. Any systems developer should view corruption of a persistent storage system of any kind as totally unacceptable. And in this case the whole filesystem is open source! Meanwhile the open source people built a decent NTFS driver for linux years ago, I haven't seen what specs are released but I assume they needed to fill a few doc gaps to make it happen. Also other nice people did bundle up ext3 and ext4 into an app you could run on windows to browse and copy stuff from your linux partition years ago. Now MS finally caves and accepts the defeat of linux being a better experience for devs, so they now 'support' it and can't check that saving files always works?!? There is no way this only happens for bash history and git repos, some people have files they don't instantly throw on the cloud, or consider half-ephemeral like bash history, in this case you wouldn't be able to just re-clone as a workaround, I'll keep running my desktop linux on my dev machine (although it's not all rosey over there either, I trust it to save my files).

jaltekruse 6y ago
This was reported back in August and unless the people commenting yesterday just haven't updated Windows in a while it still isn't fixed.
efdee 6y ago
Yes, let's pretend that the 4.19 EXT4 corruption issue in 2018 never happened.
- kasabali 6y ago
  No need to pretend, because it never happened: > Initially, the problem was thought to be in the ext4 filesystem, since that is what the affected users were using...It took until December 4 for Lukáš Krejčí to correctly bisect the problem down to a block-layer change. https://lwn.net/Articles/774440/ https://lwn.net/Articles/774440/
  - efdee 6y ago
    I never said the problem was in the EXT4 filesystem. The problem resulted in EXT4 corruption. Quite sure the Git corruption issue WSL2 has isn't in Git either.

crispyambulance 6y ago

I think calling it WSL2 was a mistake. The predecessor, WSL, "just worked" and it was more a less a linux experience for most practical purposes-- and certainly better than hoary old cygwin. This caused a lot of people to believe they could just transition to WSL2, lead on by the promise of an even more performant linux experience. The documentation didn't say anything about complications from attempting this, so a lot of people just tried it as soon as they could, thinking it would go as smoothly as when they tried WSL. But nope... it many cases, it doesn't just work out of the box. There's network configuration and gateway issues, snags with vpn, and now this git repo corruption. When you look on git issues, it's just people randomly shot-gunning suggestions, some of which work, some of which don't. I think WSL2 was rushed out too early, or at least it's lacking a comprehensive troubleshooting guide to get it up and running.

pletnes 6y ago
Same difference in my experience - WSL1 git screwed up git repos for me, broke git lfs, +++. I guess it’s more of the same-ish on WSL2, just different edge cases due to different edges.
shaklee3 6y ago
I agree. I tried wsl2, and while it's nice, it has issues wsl1 didn't have. For instance, networking almost never worked until I applied a common workaround of resetting the ip stack. Wsl1 always worked fine for that. It's just not ready for primetime yet.
harikb 6y ago
File system corruption is unforgivable mistake, but FS work is really hard to get right. Even stuff like VMware corrupts shared folders ... wherever they try to bypass a driver translation layer. Just Google for “vmware shared folder corruption”
- rleigh 6y ago
  Is this the reason why they have deprecated shared folders in Workstation 16?

jarym 6y ago

poor quality joke alert Maybe Microsoft still believe Linux and the GPL are a 'cancer' and WSL2 is there to attack it?

nijave 6y ago

Reading through the issues it seems like the problem is occuring when opening the same files from directly inside the WSL2 container and also through the network device that exposes them to Windows at the same time. I'm not very familiar with how WSL2 exposes files but that seems to be the problem

ncphil 6y ago

A while back spent about 2 mos mastering WSL2 and came to the conclusion that the default of automatically opening up in the Windows fs share was... unwise. Besides fs permissions being a complete mess, the unstable behavior described here liked to show up at the most inopportune moments. Wound up confining my work to the virtual Linux fs, but that kind of defeated the whole purpose of WSL for me. I'm also back to using a VMware machine on my company owned laptop, but my personal systems are still Linux on bare metal. As an aside, I struggled with Hyper V to replace VMware, but it makes the system unstable on the particular Win 10 builds my company provides employees. I'd gone at least 8 years not seeing a blue screen before that.

sieabahlpark 6y ago
I find wsl2 with docker to be a decent use case. You get a reliable terminal that doesn't just background processes you ctrl-c to. The IO is slow but overall manageable. File permissions are a joke but they're being ported into a container. I don't see WSL as an environment as much as it's just a more reliable terminal with a shotty emulated filesystem.

johnchristopher 6y ago

> Feel like booting Linux on a separate disk because of these issues. It always seemed strange to me that people would rather use WSL than the real thing when Windows doesn't bring much advantage. What am I missing ?

javajosh 6y ago
You are missing Office, Outlook, Visual Studio, and any enterprise nonsense IT requires on company computers. All of that requires Windows.
- larrik 6y ago
  The web version of Outlook has come a long way, and in my opinion has become the superior product (for my use cases, at least).
  - thethimble 6y ago
    You’re also missing Adobe products as well as most games. Using Linux without a reboot is an incredible convenience. Glossing over the value of proprietary software that only runs on Windows is narrow minded.
    - Zardoz84 6y ago
      few games, not most games.
    - larrik 6y ago
      My comment was really only about Outlook itself (using the web vs the desktop version, I prefer the web version). that said, I hate Adobe products with a passion. When I build identical computers for my wife and I, the moment I install the Abode shit on hers, it becomes noticeably slower at everything. I don't truly understand it.
  - chrisandchris 6y ago
    The web version does work until you need to sign into more than 2 accounts per day (1 in regular, 1 in private). If you need more than 2 accounts, it does not work anymore. Edit: it does work, but it will sign you out from all M365 services which requires a lot of logins for nothing.

Tempest1981 6y ago

Reminded me of a different issue: If you have 2 different git clients (different git versions) accessing the same shared .git directory, bad things can happen -- incorrect file status, iirc.

nedsma 6y ago

WSL2 works until you need it really, and then it starts giving you problems. The networking problems are the worst. Installed a Linux VM under VMWare and called it a day.

fartcannon 6y ago
Yah, or use Linux.
- nedsma 6y ago
  I do prefer Linux to pretty much any other OS.
- jijji 6y ago
  its like running linux through a vm but with a lot more random bugs

dpmdpm 6y ago

Huh. I've used WSL2 and got extensively and never had any problems.

mmcnl 6y ago
Me too. I abuse it often as well (hard shutdowns with wsl --shutdown, interacting with files from both Linux and Windows side, etc.). The only issue I have is that because of the virtualization approach it uses more RAM as there is no unified RAM pool for both Windows and WSL (as was the case with WSL1). But that's perhaps expected behavior.
- WhoIsSuraj 6y ago
  You can still limit the amount of ram used by wsl 2 by setting it in the wslconfig. I like to limit the amount of cores it has access to as well as i tend to find that these two things are generally prone to spiking.
yokoprime 6y ago
same. no issues
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

dboreham 6y ago

Important I think to point out that these are (numerous) user reports of files "corrupted". There isn't afaics any confirmation yet as to exactly what's happening nor the underlying cause.

smarx007 6y ago
Acked by the MSFT folk: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5026#event-4160127480 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5026#event-416012748...
- sedatk 6y ago
  Are you sure this person is MSFT? There is zero information about them on GitHub.
  - smarx007 6y ago
    Did MSFT start giving commit/moderation rights to outsiders on their repos? I assumed only MSFT org members can add tags to issues etc.
    - sedatk 6y ago
      Apparently. The comment box is enabled for me for example.
      - smarx007 6y ago
        I think filing issues and PRs and commenting on them is open to anyone. Assigning issues, labelling them etc. is a member privilege.

DavyJone 6y ago

I only see 1 user confirming it and he had a special or odd disk setup (merged disks which also do not show as merged, might be the source of the problem). Is this confirmed by anyone else?

lights0123 6y ago
Huh? skhaz, 2n3906, PulsarFox, Annih, Champkinz, sidharthramesh, mbrumlow, luigimannoni, and jmfury all confirm the problem in the linked GitHub issue.
gokhan 6y ago
My zsh history on wsl2 got corrupted last week. A friend shared a script to fix it, mentioning the same happened him in the past. Git is ok though.

f12345g 6y ago

While using Visual Studio (not code) with git in wsl2 with Ubuntu 20.04, I saved three open files with changes, committed shutdown the laptop. On next start files showed as empty 0 bytes in Visual Studio and thought as far as I recall were non-zero size in wls2. No way to recover them from git. I stopped using git repos in wls2 for now.

kohlerm 6y ago

I haven't had a problem so far, but I do use only Linux binaries (including VS code)

facorreia 6y ago

The fact that this can even happen is enough for me to never touch this for doing work. I stopped developing on Windows after the Windows 8 fiasco and I don't see myself ever coming back. Both Mac and Linux are faster, more convenient, and more solid in my experience. I considered advising my son to buy a Surface for his school work and developing on WSL2, but I'm glad the M1 Mac came out with a much better cost/performance, so he got one. At least his git repos won't get corrupted.

smarx007 6y ago
I am a macOS user myself (daily driver since circa 2016, Arch/Ubuntu 2013-2016 and Win 7 before that) and I can tell you that the honeymoon is surely over. On top of that, I have my 2 old laptops running as Win10 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS home servers and I can say they have not given me any grief. I feel that Windows and Ubuntu LTS are getting more and more stable while macOS is going towards "move fast and break things" with every release (both still require some group policy fu and command line fu respectively but that's not a big deal). Back in the days, you'd snapshot your Windows XP with Acronis or something similar every time you'd install something major and these days I am contemplating downgrading to Mojave from Catalina. Big Sur is out of the question with things like firewall bypass and many others. P.S. You simply cannot make this stuff up: as I was typing this comment in Safari, my input field text became blurred just like that in an instant https://imgur.com/a/2Ae0QpZ https://imgur.com/a/2Ae0QpZ

3gg 6y ago

> Mind that I come from a Ubuntu distro, Windows is the most energy efficient solution at the moment and allows me to run my Dev tools and work on battery for 4 hours straight. Ubuntu (or any Debian-based distro) destroy my battery in 40 minutes and there's no solution or optimization for that. I know this is not a solution, but the Librem laptops from Purism hold up for hours straight. I also used to run Windows on laptops for the same reason, but the obvious solution to this is to buy a laptop built with Linux in mind from the ground up, and now we have options available.

indymike 6y ago
I quadrupled battery life when I switched form Windows to Ubuntu. No idea why. I'm using a Dell XPS 15 which has factory support for Linux. I didn't do a lot of digging into why... was just happy to be able to go 4 hours instead of one.
- 3gg 6y ago
  As far as I can tell, and I am not an expert, it has always boiled down to hardware/driver parity. Laptops ship with proprietary hardware and drivers that Windows can tap into to optimize battery life, things like turning off hard drives and stuff, but that a Linux doesn't have access to. Provided hardware/driver parity, a Linux environment should generally be more lightweight and last longer. Maybe that was your experience with the XPS; those guys also ship with Linux out of the box like you said, so the hardware should lend itself just as well to Linux distributions.
- colejohnson66 6y ago
  If you were only getting a single hour on a laptop, I’m almost certain your battery management settings weren’t configured correctly (brightness on max, etc)

trinovantes 6y ago

Another funny interaction I found with WSL2 and Windows is file case sensitivity leading to all sorts of weird error messages I wish I can use a real Linux installation but their display drivers don't work well with my multiple displays with different resolutions

shrimp_emoji 6y ago
>their display drivers don't work well with my multiple displays with different resolutions Unless you're writing through a time warp from 2004, this is not true at all, IME. But the statement is vague. "Work well" can mean some esoteric DPI scaling stuff that I think is only noticeable with 4K combinations. What distribution? What's "their display driver"? Nouveau, the open-source Nvidia one, is pretty bad, and everyone uses the proprietary Nvidia driver (this may be hard to come by on some distros, like Debian, but don't use those; use Ubuntu or Manjaro). The AMD open-source one is great and everyone on AMD GPUs uses that. I've been running triple monitor, diagonally-aligned 1080p/1440p configurations for years on several distros and DEs with both Nvidia and AMD drivers.
- trinovantes 6y ago
  I have a drawing tablet with a display in 1080p while the rest of my monitors are 1440p. For whatever reason, my mouse cursor thinks it's on a 1080p display inside my 1440p monitors resulting in a humongous cursor. (nvidia's proprietary drivers if it matters) I doubt this will ever be fixed since it's an obscure hardware that's rarely used by other Linux users
- month13 6y ago
  I use a 1080p and a 4k display, it's pretty tricky getting consistent scaling per display.
sedatk 6y ago
What kind of problem do you have with case sensitivity?
- 6y ago

bg117 6y ago

Having trouble with WSL2 networking. Suddenly stopped working. Looking into Ubuntu Multipass.

tgbugs 6y ago

While we're on the topic of WSL2 causing issues, I will add one that I noted to the pile. If you have WSL2 installed then the first bash on PATH is the WSL2 version of bash. For whatever reason, this version of bash has a major impedance mismatch with Emacs and org-mode. From windows native Emacs (not an Emacs installed in WSL2) if you try to run an org babel block that contains bash code, whole commands will simply be ignored. The end result is that if you blindly execute bash blocks in Emacs on windows without checking which bash is being used there can be disastrous results because a seemingly safe script like `pushd some-folder; rm -r ; popd` suddenly becomes `rm -r ` without warning. I'm guessing that it has to do with mismatched line endings since mingw bash (aka git bash) doesn't have these issues. Also, you can't rely on the ordering of your PATH environment variable to protect you because updates can change it. tl;dr WSL2 bash is not bash but it pretends to be and there are terrifying changes to the semantics of bash scripts as a result.

oahuja 6y ago
I have experienced this exact issue as well.

llacb47 6y ago

I recently upgraded to WSL2. Let's hope this doesn't happen to me

mrharshley 6y ago

WSL2 was promised as a good working extension for a Linux dev environment on windows by my peers. Sadly, a whole host of issues specific to my dev environment meant that it was useless as I’d spend more time fixing it than getting any valuable use out of it. More importantly, this became the very reason I switched to arch full time, and haven’t looked back since. I still hope that it becomes what it was promised to be, although I don’t see myself going back to windows any time soon.

madeofpalk 6y ago
Opposite anecdata - I got a gaming PC and i migrated all my development to it and WSL(2) has been a godsend. VS Code has a "WSL Remote" mode that works really well (where a vscode server runs in Linux and the windows GUI access it "remotely"). I even use the Windows Github app for the occasional GUI-assisted commit, and apart from being slow its fine. I've had only two problems with this set up: - Occasionally VS Code Typescript features slow down, but it fixes itself a few days later (maybe after a restart). I presume this is due to the WSL Remote, but not certain. - The occasional line endings snafu, but this is more of a tooling issue.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- gavinray 6y ago
  Also opposite anecdote, I switched from Pop!_OS to Windows after getting into music production recently as a hobby (MIDI controller driver software doesn't always play well, even with WINE-devel) after over a decade on Linux. I expected to hate it, but I'm asking myself why I didn't do this sooner. It's the same sort of scenario as before -- I have Windows running the games I occasionally play, and music stuff, and I do all of my code stuff in WSL2/Ubuntu. But this way, I never have to fiddle with weird WINE patches or googling bugs, everything "just works". Asking myself why I didn't do this sooner to be honest. I had one big complaint which is that copying files from Windows to WSL2 would create ".ZoneInfo" file copies of every file, that was downloaded from the web, but they patched this recently too. With the support for Linux GUI apps that launched with Windows Insider Preview recently, I have a hard time making arguments against it now. The taste of crow is a little bitter, eh. Linux + WINE/Proton basically felt like shittier, more bug-ridden Windows + WSL2. With the one notable exception that as an OS/host, Windows 10 "feels" a bit slower in general.

29athrowaway 6y ago

Reminds me of this e-mail chain at Microsoft, on September 27, 1991: Brad Silverberg: "drdos has problems running windows today, and I assume will have more problems in the future." Jim Allchin: "You should make sure it has problems in the future. :-)"

intricatedetail 6y ago

I only use Windows because of a couple of tools there is no equivalent version for Linux. Unfortunately companies think there would be not enough customers to warrant development for that OS so I am kind of stuck with maintaining dedicated Windows PC. I have mixed feelings about Microsoft appropriation of Linux. Whatever they touch turns to excrement with a few exceptions.

cracksmoka420 6y ago

I'm so glad that I don't use Windows LOL

utxaa 6y ago

the scary part is that git reports an error and that's why people are noticing. what else is going on with files that are not source controlled?

zaptheimpaler 6y ago

After constantly getting caught in bugs between WSL and Docker, i'm now running Ubuntu Server headless with a Windows VM (with GPU passthrough) on top. The biggest issue across all these things is filesystems. There is simply no good way to share a filesystem between Windows and Linux that is both 1. fast 2. fully correct - i.e doesn't break some code. SMB/NFS just never work super well because they are slow, or programs think they are local filesystems so things break (e.g VScode won't detect new files created on the linux side of a SMB mount without a manual refresh). Plenty of details on getting permissions right too. Not to mention extended attributes which differ slightly and break stuff. Network file systems in general are just too different to local FS's for programs to work seamlessly. The 2 non-ideal solutions I've found are 1. keep all files in linux + edit over network using VSCode Remote or IntelliJ Remote support or 2. keep a copy of the dev workspace in windows, and use something like unison (or manual git) to sync.

gabrielblack 6y ago

I experienced this problem and a ext4 corruption, too. Because my company force me to use Windows for internal policy, my previous solution was a VMware VM , accessed "remotely" by my IDE. Then I wanted try the new sauce. My colleagues working to legacy code on SVN also experienced problems (anyone else ?). So I switched back to VMWare VM. The other considerations were that a VM can be easily backupped copying a directory and, if I need to change computer or an additional environment, the migration of the whole environment is extremely easy. Moreover i use snapshots, so if something goes wrong at OS level I can go back with a click.

systemvoltage 6y ago

Microsoft should come out with a new Linux distro. That would have been easier than developing WSL.

vmception 6y ago

> I recently switched my development enviroment from macOS to Windows M I S T A K E

fmakunbound 6y ago

Jfc that’s some janky shit many of you seem to be into. I don’t quite get why some developers seem hell bent on those kinds of hybrid development environments. Why not straight up Linux or macOS where he user-space is consistent at least?

zelly 6y ago

it's a GPL violation as far as i'm concerned, so anyone who uses it deserves what they get

ahupp 6y ago
Not sure what you mean, the source is right here: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel https://github.com/microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel

johnghanks 6y ago

So many of y'all have bespoke setups and then bitch about WSL2 not working for you.

jijji 6y ago

sounds like torturing yourself or masochism

apatheticonion 6y ago

I won't leave WSL1 for my bash on Windows needs. For native linux, I have my choice of distro installed on my choice of hypervisor (Debian, VMWare). I use VSCode and the Remote SSH extension (functions identically to WSL2). The difference is I know exactly what is going on. I know when and why certain network conditions exist (port forwarding, etc).

metreo 6y ago

I used WSL2 with Debian and found it slow, aside from that Windows required what seems like an excessive amount of system resources to even get to WSL2.

Razengan 6y ago

Since there’s almost always comments from people saying how they’re happy on Windows whenever there’s news about some fuckup on macOS, I’d like to balance it by saying that shit like this is why I’m never going back to Windows.

blacklight 6y ago

I was afraid that WSL2 was old Microsoft's EEE again. Thanks for keeping it so bad that you can't even push to a repo without corrupting the filesystem or the repo itself. It might have supposed to be EEE, but it turned out to be the last push many people needed to switch to a full Linux OS.