6 ms·

Windows 11 WSL2 Performance Competitive Against Ubuntu 20.04 LTS / Ubuntu 21.10

37 points by marcodiego 5y ago

underscore_ku 5y ago
windows - close source spyware vs Ubuntu free and open-source software
- dandotway 5y ago
  Careful there - Microsoft and Canonical are increasingly cultivating a very close relationship that includes lucrative data sharing. There was a scary story on HN seven months ago, 'I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114194 Canonical knows everything an Ubuntu install at your IP address installs with "apt get" unless you change your repos to a mirror that you know for a fact doesn't share its logs with Canonical. And Canonical is pushing the Snap Store that it alone owns and controls, and which it can Big Brother monitor what every single IP addr installs. So Canonical doesn't need closed source spyware to make money spying on you. For the most part though, Canonical seems it will only use its spy data to market products developers are actually potentially interested in. If you download a bunch of container tools Canonical may wish to market to you that a certain service they make money from might work for your needs. And all things considered it actually might. I do use Ubuntu btw, mostly in WSL though. I will go back to native Ubuntu though once all the art and music tools I need run as well on native Ubuntu as they do on Windows, and once Ubuntu is as hassle free on laptops as Windows is. I recently bricked a native Ubuntu install because I forgot to turn off secure boot, which somehow broke the proprietary nVidia drivers I need. EDIT: Canonical seems to have closed down its Ubuntu One cloud storage product... I thought Canonical was still trying to offer an alternative to AWS/IBM/Google/Azure but it seems they are just focusing on their OS now. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
deleted 5y ago
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chris37879 5y ago
For our opensource friends stuck on MS for various reasons, this makes me happy, but requiring me to update to Windows 11 for fixes and features that were developed on Windows 10 was the last straw for me. I'm now on linux 100% as my daily driver with macos for my work machine. Video games be damned, the ones I care about right now work on Linux and going forward if it doesn't, it doesn't get my money.
- ajvs 5y ago
  With Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye having recently announced they're supporting Proton/Wine, there will be very few games that won't be able to be run on Linux in the near future.
- dandotway 5y ago
  > macos for my work machine When has Apple ever supported a computer for 10+ years like Windows routinely does? I have a 2012 iPad I can only use as a Kindle and PDF reader because the ancient Safari version on it doesn't support modern Javascript features like the "let" keyword that websites now use, and this is exactly what Apple wants: if I can't install Firefox on my iPad and if Apple won't update Safari, my only choice is to buy a new device. But I never again bought a new iPad, I learned my lesson. My old iPad can still run the original Flappy Bird. New $1000+ iPad Pros can't do this, because Apple deliberately breaks old apps on new devices, to encourage developers to charge customers for an updated app that continues to work on new devices, which Apple gets its mandatory 30% cut of. Apple also ties Xcode releases to the most recent macOS releases. Apple doesn't want you being able to run the newest Xcode on a 10 year old Mac so that you can keep your old iOS game you wrote in college still working, oh no, you have to buy a new Mac for that, and keep paying your $99/year membership dues. Microsoft lets you run Visual Studio on very old computers, unlike Apple with Xcode. High-profile ransomware attacks have made the news this year and so MS decided Win 11 should only be on computers that can secure the boot process so that ransomware can't encrypt your hard drive until you send bitcoins to Ukraine.
  - zigzag312 5y ago
    How does secure boot prevent ransomware from encrypting user's files? I'm genuinely interested in ransomware prevention.
jdlyga 5y ago
Definitely sucks to be stuck on Windows 10 and not having an upgrade path for a machine that's only a few years old. But always happy to have WSL2 available for Ubuntu.
huxflux 5y ago
"Out of 130 tests in total, Windows 11 WSL2 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS managed to run at 94% the speed of bare metal Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on the same system. Not bad at all especially in the CPU/system benchmarks where in many cases delivered comparable performance to Ubuntu Linux itself"
- dandotway 5y ago
  WSL2 is paradoxically the best and worst thing to happen to desktop Linux. It is the best thing because it makes Linux so easy to install and get started with on Windows PCs which dominate the market. It is the worst thing because desktop Linux users are no longer forced to dogfood and fix laptop hardware issues, and so these issues will continue to go unfixed, and native desktop Linux installs will thus continue to suffer. Case in point: I've used desktop Linux for more than 20 years and I recently moved to using WSL on Windows because I love having all my hardware devices like my photo printer "just work" on Windows and I love getting great laptop battery life. It looks like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon is the only killer laptop you can buy with Linux preinstalled that has a 4K UHD screen option, but Lenovo makes the buying experience extremely frustrating. Lenovo overprices Thinkpads most of the year and then occasionally does killer sales. And Lenovo has lately been suffering 4 month shipping delays on many Thinkpad configurations. I'm sick of wasting time waiting for the sales and then trying to buy before the reseller bots buy up the deals. So I bought a non-Thinkpad Win 10 laptop instead and I run WSL on it for my Linux needs.
  - fartcannon 5y ago
    Windows is just so much worse in every way, the idea that someone would prefer to use it over Linux as a desktop confounds me. Linux: fast, private, under your control, user empowering. Windows: slow, spyware, under microsofts control and works to wrench power from the user. Just blows my mind.
    - halo37253 5y ago
      Windows isn't really slow though... That being said I hate windows 11 and the choices made. While I love windows 10, as it mainly just works and was a big set up from 7. I use Linux nearly 90% of the time in server space. With Windows VM's mostly for the AD Domain Controller and Print Server, as Windows AD in a Azure AD Hybrid setup works great for user control. Integrates into my Linux server for a synced user control. The Linux alt is a janky option. Keeping user accounts locked down is pretty important for production systems. The Linux desktop scene however is a great deal better than it used to be. Back in the Day I used to rock opensuse on a IBM T61, everything worked out the box with that install. Something Ubuntu at the time did not do. But the lack of software was always an issue and wine was not what it is today. Office 2000 and other old windows apps ended up working fine.
exceptione 5y ago
Thanks, but I like my privacy. Nice that I get a 6% speed bonus in return for self-respecting my freedoms. Nonetheless, impressive. What I couldn't see quickly how storage I/O fared. I thought one of the big bottle necks was in that area for WSL2?
- ysleepy 5y ago
  The bottlenecks were in WSL1, 2 is "just" a linux VM with good guest additions.
- halo37253 5y ago
  Thing is WSL will only get better...
  - marcodiego 5y ago
    No, it is already fast enough. It is just a VM, it can't be much faster than it already is.
    - dandotway 5y ago
      For CPU and disk, sure, but GPU is the next frontier, and WSL on Win 11 allows the GPU to be used will full hardware accelerated OpenGL. Microsoft's own documentation even suggests installing Chrome for Linux inside WSL: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-apps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-a...
- karmakaze 5y ago
  For things that aren't very CPU-bound or highly cachable, e.g. the compilation tests are ~ 12-13% (vs Ubuntu 21.10 being more apples-to-apples)
IronWolve 5y ago
I'm still using win10/WSL1 with microsoft terminal, I've totally dumped cygwin now. youtube-dl, ssh tunnels, irc, ncdu, ffmpeg to recompress files. I still have virtualbox running a ton of OS's with the oracle virtualbox extension, that doesn't work with hyper-v, so no wsl2 for me. Maybe in the the future.
deleted 5y ago
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37 points by marcodiego 5y ago

underscore_ku 5y ago

windows - close source spyware vs Ubuntu free and open-source software

dandotway 5y ago
Careful there - Microsoft and Canonical are increasingly cultivating a very close relationship that includes lucrative data sharing. There was a scary story on HN seven months ago, 'I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure': https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114194 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26114194 Canonical knows everything an Ubuntu install at your IP address installs with "apt get" unless you change your repos to a mirror that you know for a fact doesn't share its logs with Canonical. And Canonical is pushing the Snap Store that it alone owns and controls, and which it can Big Brother monitor what every single IP addr installs. So Canonical doesn't need closed source spyware to make money spying on you. For the most part though, Canonical seems it will only use its spy data to market products developers are actually potentially interested in. If you download a bunch of container tools Canonical may wish to market to you that a certain service they make money from might work for your needs. And all things considered it actually might. I do use Ubuntu btw, mostly in WSL though. I will go back to native Ubuntu though once all the art and music tools I need run as well on native Ubuntu as they do on Windows, and once Ubuntu is as hassle free on laptops as Windows is. I recently bricked a native Ubuntu install because I forgot to turn off secure boot, which somehow broke the proprietary nVidia drivers I need. EDIT: Canonical seems to have closed down its Ubuntu One cloud storage product... I thought Canonical was still trying to offer an alternative to AWS/IBM/Google/Azure but it seems they are just focusing on their OS now. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

chris37879 5y ago

For our opensource friends stuck on MS for various reasons, this makes me happy, but requiring me to update to Windows 11 for fixes and features that were developed on Windows 10 was the last straw for me. I'm now on linux 100% as my daily driver with macos for my work machine. Video games be damned, the ones I care about right now work on Linux and going forward if it doesn't, it doesn't get my money.

ajvs 5y ago
With Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye having recently announced they're supporting Proton/Wine, there will be very few games that won't be able to be run on Linux in the near future.
dandotway 5y ago
> macos for my work machine When has Apple ever supported a computer for 10+ years like Windows routinely does? I have a 2012 iPad I can only use as a Kindle and PDF reader because the ancient Safari version on it doesn't support modern Javascript features like the "let" keyword that websites now use, and this is exactly what Apple wants: if I can't install Firefox on my iPad and if Apple won't update Safari, my only choice is to buy a new device. But I never again bought a new iPad, I learned my lesson. My old iPad can still run the original Flappy Bird. New $1000+ iPad Pros can't do this, because Apple deliberately breaks old apps on new devices, to encourage developers to charge customers for an updated app that continues to work on new devices, which Apple gets its mandatory 30% cut of. Apple also ties Xcode releases to the most recent macOS releases. Apple doesn't want you being able to run the newest Xcode on a 10 year old Mac so that you can keep your old iOS game you wrote in college still working, oh no, you have to buy a new Mac for that, and keep paying your $99/year membership dues. Microsoft lets you run Visual Studio on very old computers, unlike Apple with Xcode. High-profile ransomware attacks have made the news this year and so MS decided Win 11 should only be on computers that can secure the boot process so that ransomware can't encrypt your hard drive until you send bitcoins to Ukraine.
- zigzag312 5y ago
  How does secure boot prevent ransomware from encrypting user's files? I'm genuinely interested in ransomware prevention.

jdlyga 5y ago

Definitely sucks to be stuck on Windows 10 and not having an upgrade path for a machine that's only a few years old. But always happy to have WSL2 available for Ubuntu.

huxflux 5y ago

"Out of 130 tests in total, Windows 11 WSL2 Ubuntu 20.04 LTS managed to run at 94% the speed of bare metal Ubuntu 20.04 LTS on the same system. Not bad at all especially in the CPU/system benchmarks where in many cases delivered comparable performance to Ubuntu Linux itself"

dandotway 5y ago
WSL2 is paradoxically the best and worst thing to happen to desktop Linux. It is the best thing because it makes Linux so easy to install and get started with on Windows PCs which dominate the market. It is the worst thing because desktop Linux users are no longer forced to dogfood and fix laptop hardware issues, and so these issues will continue to go unfixed, and native desktop Linux installs will thus continue to suffer. Case in point: I've used desktop Linux for more than 20 years and I recently moved to using WSL on Windows because I love having all my hardware devices like my photo printer "just work" on Windows and I love getting great laptop battery life. It looks like the Thinkpad X1 Carbon is the only killer laptop you can buy with Linux preinstalled that has a 4K UHD screen option, but Lenovo makes the buying experience extremely frustrating. Lenovo overprices Thinkpads most of the year and then occasionally does killer sales. And Lenovo has lately been suffering 4 month shipping delays on many Thinkpad configurations. I'm sick of wasting time waiting for the sales and then trying to buy before the reseller bots buy up the deals. So I bought a non-Thinkpad Win 10 laptop instead and I run WSL on it for my Linux needs.
- fartcannon 5y ago
  Windows is just so much worse in every way, the idea that someone would prefer to use it over Linux as a desktop confounds me. Linux: fast, private, under your control, user empowering. Windows: slow, spyware, under microsofts control and works to wrench power from the user. Just blows my mind.
  - halo37253 5y ago
    Windows isn't really slow though... That being said I hate windows 11 and the choices made. While I love windows 10, as it mainly just works and was a big set up from 7. I use Linux nearly 90% of the time in server space. With Windows VM's mostly for the AD Domain Controller and Print Server, as Windows AD in a Azure AD Hybrid setup works great for user control. Integrates into my Linux server for a synced user control. The Linux alt is a janky option. Keeping user accounts locked down is pretty important for production systems. The Linux desktop scene however is a great deal better than it used to be. Back in the Day I used to rock opensuse on a IBM T61, everything worked out the box with that install. Something Ubuntu at the time did not do. But the lack of software was always an issue and wine was not what it is today. Office 2000 and other old windows apps ended up working fine.

exceptione 5y ago

Thanks, but I like my privacy. Nice that I get a 6% speed bonus in return for self-respecting my freedoms. Nonetheless, impressive. What I couldn't see quickly how storage I/O fared. I thought one of the big bottle necks was in that area for WSL2?

ysleepy 5y ago
The bottlenecks were in WSL1, 2 is "just" a linux VM with good guest additions.
halo37253 5y ago
Thing is WSL will only get better...
- marcodiego 5y ago
  No, it is already fast enough. It is just a VM, it can't be much faster than it already is.
  - dandotway 5y ago
    For CPU and disk, sure, but GPU is the next frontier, and WSL on Win 11 allows the GPU to be used will full hardware accelerated OpenGL. Microsoft's own documentation even suggests installing Chrome for Linux inside WSL: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-apps https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/tutorials/gui-a...
karmakaze 5y ago
For things that aren't very CPU-bound or highly cachable, e.g. the compilation tests are ~ 12-13% (vs Ubuntu 21.10 being more apples-to-apples)

IronWolve 5y ago

I'm still using win10/WSL1 with microsoft terminal, I've totally dumped cygwin now. youtube-dl, ssh tunnels, irc, ncdu, ffmpeg to recompress files. I still have virtualbox running a ton of OS's with the oracle virtualbox extension, that doesn't work with hyper-v, so no wsl2 for me. Maybe in the the future.

deleted 5y ago

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deleted 5y ago

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