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A couple Saturdays ago, I spent thirty minutes setting up WSL2 on a Windows 10 machine. Immediately afterward, I called Apple and spent a thousand dollars on an

A couple Saturdays ago, I spent thirty minutes setting up WSL2 on a Windows 10 machine. Immediately afterward, I called Apple and spent a thousand dollars on an M1 Mac mini for same-day pickup. I've been running Linux devenvs on Windows, in Virtualbox, for something well over a decade now. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the vaunted WSL2 is literally just that, plus preinstalled OS images that save maybe a half hour's work, plus also it actually breaks virtualization so you can only use WSL2 and no other VMs. And ~ is still just a shared folder, so chown and symlinks don't work. I'd tolerate it if I had no better option, just like I have all those other times. But even then, just running Virtualbox proper is no worse in any way, and better in some. I really don't understand what the hell all the hype is about - maybe for folks who've only ever used Windows and never had a chance to really try Linux at all, I can see it, but people who have no reason not to know better also seem often to be over the moon about it and I can't for the life of me figure out why. Granted, that Lenovo had been pissing me off well before I tried turning it into a dev machine - Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect, WSL2 or no. But it was WSL2 turning out to be literally just broken Virtualbox that really sent me over the top. And I have to thank Microsoft for that! Even with the occasional slight flakiness of any new architecture, the M1 mini is an excellent dev machine, blazing fast and unbelievably power-efficient - the same deskside UPS that promised 50 minutes runtime for the Windows box claims almost 300 for the mini, and that's with something like a 10x perf boost. If WSL2 hadn't been so lousy, I might have taken another year to make the jump.

phendrenad2 6y ago
> Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect Well it works great for me. What issues are you experiencing?
- input_sh 6y ago
  No way I can list them all, but here's my top five: 1. Start menu is awfully designed, really slow, and doesn't even return exact matches sometimes. Seriously, it shouldn't take that long to launch something. 2. Lack of tabs in file explorer forces me to have like three-to-five windows open, making alt+tab navigation annoying. 3. It's like each app does its own thing with notifications. It does have a decent notification system, it just happens that nobody really uses it. 4. Lack of proper package management makes every app run their own update checker in the background. I easily have 10-15 items in my tray, and have to chase down something essential like Bluetooth across them. And half the time at least one of them doesn't have an icon! 5. Updates. Booted into Windows after about a month, it restarted twice + gave me multiple notifications that it's gonna restart again outside active hours. I only need to use it for like an hour or so.
Zardoz84 6y ago
> I'd tolerate it if I had no better option. Did you try to install a native Linux distribution. The experience is always better that running on a VM.
- throwanem 6y ago
  The machine also has to run Lightroom.
  - papaf 6y ago
    You are probably better off with the Mac, but I can recommend one option that many people ignore but that works for well me. Modern Linux virtualization (KVM/Qemu) is powerful and is getting easier to setup with programs such as Virtual Machine Manager and Boxes. I run several Windows VMs without problems and they have usable performance. I have used Windows VMs for Word and Skype for Business using KVM.
    - throwanem 6y ago
      I'm certainly better off with the Mac. Lightroom is an utter resource hog and practically unusable without GPU acceleration - reasonable given the 45-megabyte raws I develop in it, but still a constraint. Too, I use a physical edit controller that needs a driver of its own, and setting up USB passthrough is probably a hassle. Judging by the docs I've read, setting up GPU passthrough certainly is. Meanwhile, the Mac driver for that edit controller, compiled to x86_64 and not yet updated for arm64, works flawlessly and with no extra effort under Rosetta 2. (And Darktable isn't really an option - impressive as anything given the constraints the devs have to work under, but one of those constraints is relatively poor support for undocumented raw formats including those my cameras produce, so I can't get the same quality of results out of it that Lightroom gives me.) In general, I avoid sysadmin work wherever possible these days, as for example when I migrated to Fastmail in January after 17 years of self-hosting. Back when I set that up, I had more time than money, and an interest in learning how to do it, besides. These days I have more money than time, and already know very well how. So at this point it's just a question of the most efficient use of resources, and - in part because of that drive to learn new things, which I now apply to other technologies - obtaining more money has become fairly straightforward, while obtaining more time is of course impossible, human life lasting only as long as it does. Sure, by dint of enough effort, I could have got WSL2 working acceptably, or get Lightroom running OK under virtualization, or whatever. But at this stage in my life, I can afford to spend money to not have to deal with those problems, so that was what I happily did.
dsego 6y ago
Apparently WSL 1 is different, it's a layer between linux apps and the windows kernel. WSL 2 is not great, esp. file operations, that's why VSCode has a wsl plugin.
- throwanem 6y ago
  Yeah, I know, but I also hear WSL1 is super slow especially for Node, which is a big part of what my mentees want to learn - the major point of setting up that devenv at all was so I could use it for mentoring, and quite aside from my own impatience with flaky tech, I also don't want to waste a mentee's valuable time with nonsense on the part of the machine we're using as a teaching and learning tool. We all have busy lives. When there's only an hour a week or an hour every other week to spare for doing this, it's on me to make sure they get the most out of that time. So, from that perspective too, it was more worth spending the money on a known good platform than spending any more time dinking with one that had already shown itself at best only questionably equal to the task.
zmmmmm 6y ago
Without invalidating the rest of your comment, 30 mins is way shorter than I consider a valid attempt at this. I'm happy to invest even months in achieving an optimal setup, as long as it gets there. Most of what I am interested in is a streamlined docker setup and WSL2 provides an amazing experience for that, with a single docker / container experience spanning both the Windows host and the linux VM. While there are still some issues with it I have reasonable confidence MS will sort out the sharing of memory and CPUs so that resources can be shared better b/w Win10 and Docker/Linux than you would ever get without a lot of work through VirtualBox. On the Windows side all I really need is a proper, native office experience. Working in a regulated industry there isn't really any room for less than 100% fidelity in handling official documents and forms. But I will never need to touch powershell or anything else from the native Win10 experience.
- throwanem 6y ago
  No setup involving "oh, it's literally just worse Virtualbox" was ever going to be optimal for me, not when I could just use a Mac and do everything I care to do on that machine without putting up with a lot of nonsense to marshal between two very different and not all that compatible operating systems and filesystems. As I said in the comment to which you replied, I've done lots of that with Linux in Virtualbox on Windows. I know how to do it just fine. It was wanting to do it that I lacked. And, happily, I didn't have to! I could do something else instead. So something else is what I did. I'm glad you have something that works for you! I'm glad I have something that works for me, too.
  - zmmmmm 6y ago
    I'm just not sure I agree that "literally worse than Virutalbox" is a fair assessment. For example, I don't think VirtualBox can do dynamic memory sharing no? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/memory-reclaim-in-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-2/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/memory-reclaim-in...
    - throwanem 6y ago
      Happily, it is nowhere required that we agree!

phendrenad2 6y ago

> Windows 10 is just a dumpster fire in every respect Well it works great for me. What issues are you experiencing?

input_sh 6y ago
No way I can list them all, but here's my top five: 1. Start menu is awfully designed, really slow, and doesn't even return exact matches sometimes. Seriously, it shouldn't take that long to launch something. 2. Lack of tabs in file explorer forces me to have like three-to-five windows open, making alt+tab navigation annoying. 3. It's like each app does its own thing with notifications. It does have a decent notification system, it just happens that nobody really uses it. 4. Lack of proper package management makes every app run their own update checker in the background. I easily have 10-15 items in my tray, and have to chase down something essential like Bluetooth across them. And half the time at least one of them doesn't have an icon! 5. Updates. Booted into Windows after about a month, it restarted twice + gave me multiple notifications that it's gonna restart again outside active hours. I only need to use it for like an hour or so.

Zardoz84 6y ago

> I'd tolerate it if I had no better option. Did you try to install a native Linux distribution. The experience is always better that running on a VM.

throwanem 6y ago
The machine also has to run Lightroom.
- papaf 6y ago
  You are probably better off with the Mac, but I can recommend one option that many people ignore but that works for well me. Modern Linux virtualization (KVM/Qemu) is powerful and is getting easier to setup with programs such as Virtual Machine Manager and Boxes. I run several Windows VMs without problems and they have usable performance. I have used Windows VMs for Word and Skype for Business using KVM.
  - throwanem 6y ago
    I'm certainly better off with the Mac. Lightroom is an utter resource hog and practically unusable without GPU acceleration - reasonable given the 45-megabyte raws I develop in it, but still a constraint. Too, I use a physical edit controller that needs a driver of its own, and setting up USB passthrough is probably a hassle. Judging by the docs I've read, setting up GPU passthrough certainly is. Meanwhile, the Mac driver for that edit controller, compiled to x86_64 and not yet updated for arm64, works flawlessly and with no extra effort under Rosetta 2. (And Darktable isn't really an option - impressive as anything given the constraints the devs have to work under, but one of those constraints is relatively poor support for undocumented raw formats including those my cameras produce, so I can't get the same quality of results out of it that Lightroom gives me.) In general, I avoid sysadmin work wherever possible these days, as for example when I migrated to Fastmail in January after 17 years of self-hosting. Back when I set that up, I had more time than money, and an interest in learning how to do it, besides. These days I have more money than time, and already know very well how. So at this point it's just a question of the most efficient use of resources, and - in part because of that drive to learn new things, which I now apply to other technologies - obtaining more money has become fairly straightforward, while obtaining more time is of course impossible, human life lasting only as long as it does. Sure, by dint of enough effort, I could have got WSL2 working acceptably, or get Lightroom running OK under virtualization, or whatever. But at this stage in my life, I can afford to spend money to not have to deal with those problems, so that was what I happily did.

dsego 6y ago

Apparently WSL 1 is different, it's a layer between linux apps and the windows kernel. WSL 2 is not great, esp. file operations, that's why VSCode has a wsl plugin.

throwanem 6y ago
Yeah, I know, but I also hear WSL1 is super slow especially for Node, which is a big part of what my mentees want to learn - the major point of setting up that devenv at all was so I could use it for mentoring, and quite aside from my own impatience with flaky tech, I also don't want to waste a mentee's valuable time with nonsense on the part of the machine we're using as a teaching and learning tool. We all have busy lives. When there's only an hour a week or an hour every other week to spare for doing this, it's on me to make sure they get the most out of that time. So, from that perspective too, it was more worth spending the money on a known good platform than spending any more time dinking with one that had already shown itself at best only questionably equal to the task.

zmmmmm 6y ago

Without invalidating the rest of your comment, 30 mins is way shorter than I consider a valid attempt at this. I'm happy to invest even months in achieving an optimal setup, as long as it gets there. Most of what I am interested in is a streamlined docker setup and WSL2 provides an amazing experience for that, with a single docker / container experience spanning both the Windows host and the linux VM. While there are still some issues with it I have reasonable confidence MS will sort out the sharing of memory and CPUs so that resources can be shared better b/w Win10 and Docker/Linux than you would ever get without a lot of work through VirtualBox. On the Windows side all I really need is a proper, native office experience. Working in a regulated industry there isn't really any room for less than 100% fidelity in handling official documents and forms. But I will never need to touch powershell or anything else from the native Win10 experience.

throwanem 6y ago
No setup involving "oh, it's literally just worse Virtualbox" was ever going to be optimal for me, not when I could just use a Mac and do everything I care to do on that machine without putting up with a lot of nonsense to marshal between two very different and not all that compatible operating systems and filesystems. As I said in the comment to which you replied, I've done lots of that with Linux in Virtualbox on Windows. I know how to do it just fine. It was wanting to do it that I lacked. And, happily, I didn't have to! I could do something else instead. So something else is what I did. I'm glad you have something that works for you! I'm glad I have something that works for me, too.
- zmmmmm 6y ago
  I'm just not sure I agree that "literally worse than Virutalbox" is a fair assessment. For example, I don't think VirtualBox can do dynamic memory sharing no? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/memory-reclaim-in-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-2/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/memory-reclaim-in...
  - throwanem 6y ago
    Happily, it is nowhere required that we agree!