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Microsoft Rolling Out New Windows Subsystem for Linux "WSL" Features for 2024
- anamax 2y agoHas MS made it so WSL doesn't grab at least 256GB of ssd/disk space? I want to run WSL in 8-16GB. Argh - they've made it WORSE - 1TB seems to be the minimum now. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/disk-space https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/disk-space
- Rinzler89 2y agoThey should focus more on this kind of features, instead of paddling Copilot and AI every 5 minutes, or doing crazy stuff like removing the right Ctrl key to replace it with the new Copilot key. The only advantage of the latter is that is pushes more people to Linux faster. If they just focus instead on developers ("developers! developers! developers!") and gamers, instead of AI gimmicks, things would be more peachy for them instead of being the most hated big tech company.
- bongodongobob 2y agoWaaaaaay more people use Copilot than WSL. Like probably 100000x more. Most businesses run everything on Windows and Microsoft. That's their business. They don't give a shit about Windows Home edition or nerds crying and switching to Linux. You're not their market.
- mhh__ 2y agoUnfortunately there are lots of devs stuck on windows, wsl is very popular.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 2y agoStuck on corporate Windows, but WSL is verboten.
- illusive4080 2y agoLots of people prefer Windows + WSL over Mac. I can’t fathom why anyone would choose Windows over Mac or Linux.
- Dalewyn 2y agoFor what it's worth, I'm seeing more and more common people using Macs to run their business/office and daily life needs when last decade and prior they would have been using Windows.
- highwaylights 2y agoI’m mostly on Mac but I do prefer WSL to the Mac terminal experience. Most things end up happening in Docker regardless, but things are just smoother in WSL. Not to mention that Windows has proper Window management and multiple display support.
- illusive4080 2y agoI use Rectangle for window management and have 3 monitors. I’m really not sure what you mean by the multiple display support. The window management is easy to rectify with Rectangle or Spectacle.
- highwaylights 2y agoWindows (and to a lesser extent Gnome) have much better Window handling. Shortcut keys for tiling, snap to grid, snap to fill, window-walking (I don’t actually know what this feature is called but it’s when you cycle through window snaps and the window will “walk” across each position of each display in order). Meanwhile macOS has none of these things and struggles to remember my display arrangement between restarts. Sure I can download Rectangle/Spectacle/Amethyst and solve some of these problems (while giving screen observing permission to a third party) but it’s far from ideal and not at all what I used to have on Windows.
- drop_the_mike 2y agoNot OP but Mac doesn't support daisy chaining via display port alt mode over usb-c. It's a little ridiculous cause a hackintosh does so we know that they can support it. I assume they don't because it drives sales of their absurdly priced monitors.
- bongodongobob 2y agoRight, but there are a lot more non devs that use windows, probably 100000:1 ratio.
- wvenable 2y agoWeird comment to make on a thread about exactly this kind of feature. They're a big organization with many people working on many different things. Some will maybe great while others will potentially suck.
- RicoElectrico 2y agoOnly if there's no person at the helm with some sort of... um... vision, they call it?
- Rinzler89 2y agoIf only Satya Nadella would dogfood the OOTB experience of Windows 11 and not whatever his IT departments set up for him, he'd probably throw his laptop out the window and fire half the Windows managers.
- wrs 2y ago~20 years ago BillG would occasionally send an unhappy internal email to execs/architects with a list of annoying or nonsensical things he ran into using Windows, Office, or whatever. I can't say that it had much effect! Other than all installers being terrible, the only one I can sort of remember is a rant about "My Documents" and how the word "My" made no sense.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Dalewyn 2y ago>being the most hated big tech company. I thought that was either Google, Facebook, or Amazon depending on which way the winds are blowing on a given day.
- quickslowdown 2y agoI hate all of them equally, for what it's worth. Maybe Facebook a hair more, but it's too close to call.
- userbinator 2y agoIt's easy to avoid Facebook and Amazon. Microsoft and especially Google, not so much.
- happypumpkin 2y ago> especially Google Yup... Firefox, Kagi, & Protonmail get me away from the worst of it but YouTube doesn't really have a good competitor and other people using things like Google Forms (whatever the surveys are called) sometimes ends up forcing me to log into a Google account or have certain features locked out.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gonzo41 2y agoremoving right Ctrl key to replace it with the new Copilot key - What the hell are t hey thinking! OMG.
- cowmix 2y agoI was always under the impression that WSL was good on RAM - giving it back when not needed. There was never a way to tune RAM usage AFAIK.
- czl 2y ago> There was never a way to tune RAM usage AFAIK. Wsl2 has a config file setting for ram usage. WSL1 just shares the windows RAM.
- delecti 2y agoIt's only good on RAM at first. I've got to reboot my machine somewhat regularly or it gets out of control, and that's on a machine with 32GB.
- ghshephard 2y agoSame on a machine with 64 GB and memory limited to WSL with: [wsl2] memory=8GB In my .wslconfig. Vmmem thrashes and kills the system every couple weeks, even when I'm not running Docker (which kills it even faster)
- hakanderyal 2y agoReleasing RAM is a much-awaited improvement and should make things smoother.
- bsnnkv 2y agoOriginal link here: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-in-the-windows-subsystem-for-linux-in-may-2024/ https://devblogs.microsoft.com/commandline/whats-new-in-the-... Very excited about these new changes and improvements, particularly the RAM releasing and automatic storage reclamation. WSL2 replaced my Macbook many years ago, and these days I couldn't be happier using Windows + komorebi as a DE over NixOS running on WSL2.
- sys_64738 2y agoMicrosoft Windows must be one of the world's biggest Linux distributions.
- ffhhj 2y agoThe Closed Linux.
- DaiPlusPlus 2y agoWSL provides the means to run a distribution, it doesn’t provide its own. Ubuntu is the default, but others are officially supported.
- autoexecbat 2y agoIsn't it just a linux VM with some nice guest intergrations?
- ThrowawayR2 2y agoAnyone remember a zinger from Linus Torvalds a couple of decades ago: "Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect." (https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/magazine/the-way-we-live-now-9-28-03-questions-for-linus-torvalds-the-sharer.html https://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/magazine/the-way-we-live-...)? Horribly ironic that the Year of Linux On the Desktop™ turns out to have been ushered in by Microsoft as a subsystem firmly under Windows' thumb. How the old /. crowd would have wailed and gnashed their teeth to find out what the future turned out to be.
- nailer 2y ago“ Experimental features include: – wsl --manage <distro> --set-sparse <true/false> to enable automatic disk space reclaim” Finally. No more messing with potentially dangerous tools.
- OnionBlender 2y agoWhat is the easiest option for running Linux commands on windows? Is WSL overkill for that? I really hate the power shells CLI. The commands are so long and unintuitive.
- genter 2y agoCygwin
- jhanschoo 2y agoGit Bash provides bash alongside a minimal set of coreutils. But of course, if you want more to the full suite of coreutils you need Cygwin or a WSL system.
- XzAeRosho 2y agoNowadays, installing WSL is really painless procedure [1] Also make sure to install the Windows Terminal [2] to take full advantage of wsl2. [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install [2]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/install https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/terminal/install
- screye 2y agoI know this doesnt answer your question, but just install wsl. It is incredibly easy and works with zero setup. Windows is truly the most stable Linux distro.
- ghshephard 2y agoVery Very happy to see this. My 64 GB 8 Core (Dell Precision 5560) Laptop get hits with the VMMEM CPU thrash/crash issue fairly frequently, (every week or two) even with the well known workaround: [wsl2] memory=8GB I love wsl/tmux on Windows. I don't like how unreliable it is if you use it 12+ hours/day with memory stress.
- senectus1 2y agosigh there is not enough enterprise improvements around management and security. I'm probably a month or two away from having to disable this across the org, I dont want to but i cant disagree with the cyber sec team in the fact that its a dangerous security hole in our org.
- NGRhodes 2y agoFinally decided that there are too many papercuts with WSL2. As new features and enhancements are introduced, new bugs appear at a similar rate. This is not just me, but colleagues in the team using a mixture of personal and corporate devices encounter a similar stream of bugs. just enough to frustrate as we use WSL2 for our own work and support users. I've yet to decide if to use VBox or go back to a Linux desktop (100% of my non admin work is Linux based, 100% of my admin work can be done through the browser). Recently encountered issues in our team: - New experimental disk space reclaim feature caused WSL2 machine AND NTFS corruption. I've provided logs and others have confirmed. - 2 weeks ago installed docker desktop to help support a user. WSL2 will no longer (usually between 1 and 2GB) release memory or allow WSL2 to shutdown after shutdown of Docker Desktop. - We still get various networking glitches with the new and old networking modes, routing and DNS issues when connected/disconnecting from VPN, IPV6, docker network access, accessing localhost web servers - A WSUS update deployed in April breaking WSL2 until WSL2 manually shutdown and updated. - A WSUS update requiring a restart breaking WSL2 until machine restarted. Note everyone in the team encounters a different subset of the issues.
- nikau 2y agoThe decision to hide the virtual ethernet bridge on Windows 11 is a major WTF moment. I burned a few hours trying to figure that one out, I need to disable/enable it each time I connect or disconnect to VPN. Why Microsoft decided to hide that from the technical userbase of WSL2 I don't understand.