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3 months ago I trashed windows and hopped over to Ubuntu Budgie for my CAD and Dev workstation running 16GB RAM, after 18 months of somewhat hating life in Win1

3 months ago I trashed windows and hopped over to Ubuntu Budgie for my CAD and Dev workstation running 16GB RAM, after 18 months of somewhat hating life in Win11+WSL2. This dropped my full crashe requiring reboot - from 5/week to less than 1/week. I'm much happier for general browsing and dev - both have much fewer spontaneous crashes with reboot, and enjoy lower chance of OOM crisis thanks to the lighter OS and WM. My windows requirement, Rhino 3D 7, runs in a Win11 VM with 5GB RAM and 25 GB of storage. The VM can crash violently without taking down my host OS, so CAD BSODs impact me like a regular app crash. The VM RAM use is a bit higher than WSL, requiring me to close the browser when I do CAD to reduce the risk of OOM. But in windows I often had to close WSL2 and the browser, for the same reason. OOM will still lead to a gut wrenching lockup that require a reboot with 30% likelihood. That's probably because I don't run swap, out of a possibly unwarranted worry about NVME wear. To improve this, I'm looking at 3 solutions: 1) 4 GB of swap might give me a gradual OOM failure mode with plenty of time to kill apps as things slow down. It might even lower NVME wear by letting the OS swap static memory pages for pages of heavily used disk write cache. 2) CGroups can kill the Browser and VM if the system is near OOM. This is my favorite solution, since it would be nice to have this OOM behavior even if I adopt solutions 1 and 3. 3) A cheap upgrade to 32GB RAM would fix the problem, and also double my memory bandwidth. I can probably live without this, though. TLDR; Even with ample room for improvement, my best "Windows + WSL2" experience comes from Linux + a Windows VM! The most mysterious crashes are so rare it's a little freaky, and the remaining crashes have clear solutions. I am happy!

malfist 3y ago
Are you worried about swap in the guest os? You can configure the swapiness of the OS, if you set it to 10 or something it will only swap when you're out of memory or when an application explicit says it wants swap memory (pretty rare). That can preserve your SSD and prevent your hard crashes.
maxerickson 3y ago
If you are worried about the swap eating the drive, why not put it on a dedicated disk and just let it? If you are doing anything vaguely interesting, the time you are spending is costing a lot more than the drive would.
w0m 3y ago
> my best "Windows + WSL2" experience comes from Linux + a Windows VM tbf; your problem is you're running a buggy app that wants more hardware than you have and handles it poorly. I spend 90% of my day at a unix prompt; but you'd likely see similar HostOS stability irmprovement going Windows -> Windows VM` as you did `Linux -> Windows VM`. A few comments: 1) Ignore NVME wear; the drive controllers are smart enough nowadays to wear level; it will likely die sooner, but still outlive any machine you'll probably want to keep it in. 3) Buy the Ram. Whatever your motherboard fits, max it out. tldr; Your time is more valuable than dealing with pain to try and min/max your hardware life cycle (and honestly, your wallet). The time you lost switching Base OS is likely worth more than the cost of a ram upgrade; not counting that you're still dealing with (30%?%??!) crashes over it. Value yourself and your time.
throwaway0665 3y ago
It's unintuitive but you could consider using compressed ram (zram/zswap) for swap

malfist 3y ago

Are you worried about swap in the guest os? You can configure the swapiness of the OS, if you set it to 10 or something it will only swap when you're out of memory or when an application explicit says it wants swap memory (pretty rare). That can preserve your SSD and prevent your hard crashes.

maxerickson 3y ago

If you are worried about the swap eating the drive, why not put it on a dedicated disk and just let it? If you are doing anything vaguely interesting, the time you are spending is costing a lot more than the drive would.

w0m 3y ago

> my best "Windows + WSL2" experience comes from Linux + a Windows VM tbf; your problem is you're running a buggy app that wants more hardware than you have and handles it poorly. I spend 90% of my day at a unix prompt; but you'd likely see similar HostOS stability irmprovement going Windows -> Windows VM` as you did `Linux -> Windows VM`. A few comments: 1) Ignore NVME wear; the drive controllers are smart enough nowadays to wear level; it will likely die sooner, but still outlive any machine you'll probably want to keep it in. 3) Buy the Ram. Whatever your motherboard fits, max it out. tldr; Your time is more valuable than dealing with pain to try and min/max your hardware life cycle (and honestly, your wallet). The time you lost switching Base OS is likely worth more than the cost of a ram upgrade; not counting that you're still dealing with (30%?%??!) crashes over it. Value yourself and your time.

throwaway0665 3y ago

It's unintuitive but you could consider using compressed ram (zram/zswap) for swap