7 ms·

WSL Manager

141 points by gballan 6mo ago

wongarsu 6mo ago
The ability to run docker containers as wsl instances looks nifty. A bit more overhead since they now run as a VM instead of a container, but you get the ability to start a shell with Windows terminal or access files with Explorer (and thus every program running in Windows)
- osigurdson 6mo ago
  Perhaps I misunderstand your comment but when you run docker / podman in Windows, you are using WSL / HyperV.
  - smallerize 6mo ago
    The linked project includes a very different way to launch docker containers.
  - wongarsu 6mo ago
    running docker on windows runs docker in wsl (which is a HyperV guest). The project offers running docker images as wsl instance (which is a HyperV guest), no docker involved
    - llm_nerd 6mo ago
      You said - "A bit more overhead since they now run as a VM instead of a container" To which osigurdson seemed to be noting that WSL2 itself is a VM (meaning if you launch 1 or 100 WSL2 instances, a single Linux VM will be spun up), and when you run docker, it runs using exactly that same VM (optionally, though it's the default now to just use WSL2's backend). Can you clarify what you meant by "A bit more overhead"? Running a container via docker or directly via WSL2 will use the same underlying VM, and there will only be that one VM regardless of the number of WSL2 or docker instances.
      - wongarsu 6mo ago
        For a single container the difference depends on your exact setup. I typically run docker in the same WSL instance as my other wsl stuff, so starting a single docker container adds 0 additional VMs, while starting the container as a wsl instance will add one VM. If you use the "docker for windows" package you may be adding a VM just for running docker, depending on your setup. Once you start the second container the difference becomes more obvious: running $N containers in docker uses one VM with one linux kernel, no matter how many containers you add. Running $N containers as separate WSL instances runs $N VMs and $N linux kernels. That's the "bit more overhead" I was referring to
        llm_nerd 6mo ago
        "Running $N containers as separate WSL instances runs $N VMs and $N linux kernels." But it doesn't, and this is what I'm disagreeing with. If you instantiate WSL2, it launches a Linux VM. A single Linux VM. If you then run Docker with WSL2 integration (the default and hugely recommended), it uses that Linux VM as its VM as well, so you're still at 1 VM. If you run 100 WSL2 instances, they will all use that single Linux VM, each doing namespacing for isolation with their own filesystems. If you run 100 Docker instances, they will all use that single Linux VM. If you run 100 WSL instances, and 100 Docker instances (assuming, again, WSL2 integration which is the default), they will all be using that single Linux VM.
        Jenk 6mo ago
        Every time you run `wsl --install <distro>` you are creating a new VM. Every time you run `wsl --unregister <instance id or name/>` your are removing a VM. It is these two operations at the heart of OP's app.
        llm_nerd 6mo ago
        Okay, are you guys using wrong terminology? Are you talking about a filesystem image as a "VM", because that would not be correct. A "Virtual HD" (VHD) is not a VM. Do you think a WSL2 distro instance is a "VM" because it's persistent? Did you know Docker containers can be persistent as well, people just choose as a best practice not to use it like that? Does that make them magical VMs? WSL2 has a single VM running as the process vmmem (or vmmemWSL in the newest versions). This is the single Linux kernel that will be shared by every WSL2 instance. It will also be the instance that hosts Docker containers as well. I mean, I'm just echoing myself and apologies for the repetition, but this is just easily confirmed, utter factual truth. A rootfs is not a VM. WSL2 and containers have different nuances about their filesystem and isolation (WSL2 instances is aware of other instances, for instance, as a design aspect, and WSL2 persists rootfs changes while docker as a best practices does not), but they're more alike than different. And they share little in common with something like VirtualBox or vmware, which actually isolate every such system as VMs. Again, sigh, if you install 10 WSL2 "distros", you will have 10 rootfs overlays on your drive, and 10 persistence VHD files. When you run these the VM they all run under in the shared vmmem instance, which is the single utility Linux VM.
  - ghosty141 6mo ago
    Just FYI you can also run a windows docker natively in windows without using WSL or any linux component. But that's more of a niche usecase.
    - andix 6mo ago
      I haven't heard anyone talk about Windows containers in years, and that was actually a good thing. Let's just pretend they never existed.
- Chris2048 6mo ago
  How does this compare to running the containers in one of the WSL VMs? Can't you do all the same things via the host VM?
lukax 6mo ago
Looks nice but still a bit sad that Flutter is used instead of something native given that they don't need the app to be cross-platform. Well, even Microsoft uses React Native for a lot of Windows-only apps.
- Defenestresque 6mo ago
  I'm glad I'm not alone in missing native apps. I get that it's easier to code a note-taking Electron app, but every time I look at a Linux terminal app written in JavaScript it makes me want to cry. I know I'm beating a dead HN horse here, but how the hell is it possible that megabytes of embedded JavaScript in websites, to the point that LinkedIn uses about half the RAM I had for my first computer loading 32 MB of JavaScript files. Jjira loads 50 (!) MB of javascript, enough to include the uncompressed version of War and Peace 16 times. That's the size of a full installation of the entire Windows 95 operating system. GitLab's static landing page is 13MB of JavaScript, larger than that of Twitter. What the hell are we doing here? Why can I spin up a 100 MHz, 8MB RAM VM with a hard drive size that's 1/16th of your entry level MacBook's RAM and have apps open immediately? I understand some backsliding as things get more high level, but a website loading 50 megabytes of JavaScript, to me, is like a bright neon sign that screams "something has gone wrong terribly here". Obviously programs, websites and operating systems have become incredibly more complex but your $200 A-series Samsung phone has about 8 cores at 2.2 GHz each. A $200 processor when Windows 95 was released had one core at 0.1GHz. making the processing power about 164x faster. Keep in mind this $200 includes a fully functioning computer in the palm of your hand. The actual CPU part for a midrange phone like the Samsung A15 5G is the Dimension 6100+, which costs all of $25 bucks. There must be some sort of balance between ease of prototyping, creating and deploying an application without bundling it with Electron or building websites that use tens of megabytes of a scripting language for seemingly nothing. Especially when we can see that a fast, usable website (see this very website or the blogs of many of the people who post here, compared to Reddit for your average medium or substack blog). How the hell do we fix this? The customers clearly don't want this bloat, companies clearly shouldn't want it either (see research that indicates users exposed to a 200 millisecond load delay on Google, performed 0.2-0.6% fewer searches, and effect that remained even when the artificial delay was removed. This was replicated by Microsoft, Amazon and others. It's frequently brought up that Amazon has said that every 100 milliseconds of page load time cost them 1% in sales, though it's hard to find definitive attribution to this), programmers should hopefully not want to create crappy websites just like mechanics should hopefully not want to install brake pads that squeal every time the user breaks. This got way longer than the two sentences I expected the post to be, so my apologies. [1] https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/ https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/ [2] Velocity and the Bottom Line, Shurman and Brutlag
behnamoh 6mo ago
I wish it was a TUI. Windows is a plague I try to stay away from as much as possible, and it already gives me headaches to setup WSL and manage them over ssh. Some things you just can't do w/o remote desktop... And sometimes WSL crashes and there's literally no way to recover except to restart the whole machine. The only reason I use Windows is because Nvidia drivers are easier to setup. But once I'm inside my Fedora WSL, that feels like home, not the Windows host.
- Juminuvi 6mo ago
  I think the UI is pretty slick but agree having a TUI option as well would be awesome. Everything in wsl management (import, export, register, compact, etc) can be done with shell commands I believe so a tiny performant TUI might be a straight forward thing for op to add in the future though.
- eddythompson80 6mo ago
  Are you sshing into the wsl instances or he windows host? Pretty much all my interactions with wsl is using the wsl cli. Other than the very initial step of enabling wsl, mostly because I never memorized the powershell enable command.
  - behnamoh 6mo ago
    I ssh directly into WSL but for setting it up (auto-start, recovery, etc.) I ssh into PowerShell (which I hate). A TUI would go a long way there because no one wants to learn PowerShell.
    - eddythompson80 6mo ago
      You can use wsl.exe from powershell to manage wsl.
      - mmastrac 6mo ago
        FWIW I started reverse engineering the WSL2 API -- it's not terribly complicated to do most tasks without the CLI (which is clunky IMO, as it had a number of times where it changed in backwards/forwards incompatible ways) https://crates.io/crates/wsl-api https://crates.io/crates/wsl-api
shmerl 6mo ago
Is there anything that can run a normal Linux VM guest with good quality graphics acceleration on Windows host (i.e. both full OpenGL and Vulkan support)? Not the gimped half VM over HiperV. VirtualBox has really broken graphics support, you can only run software rendering Linux DEs that way.
- eddythompson80 6mo ago
  You can pass a GPU to the vm if you have more than one. GPU vendors have been gating GPU virtualization for data centers only. Or you can run X on windows like wslg does it.
  - shmerl 6mo ago
    I need something similar to what qemu/kvm can do with virgl and venus, i.e. pass through graphics call to the same GPU that's used by the host, not pass whole GPU with SR-IOV or PCIe passthrough. So far I haven't found anything like that which actually works. I'm not using X, I need a normal KDE Wayland session.
- okanat 6mo ago
  WSL2 already allows you to use your own GPU driver as a paravirtualized GPU over open source Mesa d3d12 driver. You get quite good OpenGL performance with that. There are projects like this https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV that you can use to setup a Hyper-V machine to use the same paravirtualization.
  - deleted 6mo ago
    [deleted]
  - shmerl 6mo ago
    > Tere are projects like this https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV that you can use to setup a Hyper-V machine to use the same paravirtualization. > Automatically Installs Windows to the VM This seems to be focused on Windows guests. I need this for Linux guests. May be when Hyper-V will make this usable out of the box for any guests, I'll take a look. And if it's something shareable, may be VirtualBox should pick that up.
skhameneh 6mo ago
This is great and all... Except I’ve long given up on WSL. I really tried to make WSL work for many things, only to find the entire experience (reliability, performance, and beyond) was simply better in every way without Windows. No matter what you do, there will always be some weird platform detection or line termination that pops up somewhere. And if it isn’t that, it’s degraded performance or kernel-level incompatibility.
- righthand 6mo ago
  100% agree. If anything WSL is a Linux onboarding experience at best.
- omnibrain 6mo ago
  Yes, I since embraced pwsh for terminal stuff on Windows. For everything else I switched back to proper VMs or remote hosts.
- TZubiri 6mo ago
  I've transitioned from linux back to windows for workstation usage, and it's one of the main features that allowed me to do so, I haven't had major problems, so I would be interested to know what issues you faced. Of course direct linux is better than WSL, but I found the product to be of very high quality and well integrated with windows.
  - nilkn 6mo ago
    Same here. The initial version of WSL back in the day could certainly be rough, but modern WSL2 seems totally fine to me. It is the key ingredient that allows me to have one workstation that can do "everything".
- Rapzid 6mo ago
  I guess your YMMV. I switched from developing in Linux VMs to WSL about 3 years ago and have used it daily for development. I don't do much OS level engineering these days though and would probably fire up some VMs for that.
- 6mo ago
llm_nerd 6mo ago
Neat project. Merging the layers of a docker image and setting that as a WSL filesystem is a nice convenience. I recently realized that 100% of what I use Windows for was as a WSL2 foundation: It had been reduced to being an extremely overbearing and heavyweight host machine for a Linux VM. Nothing in my life was Windows-only anymore, and it was basically just inertia that I even still had it installed. I'd been a "Windows guy" for decades, had decades of Windows software dev under my belt, even got my MCSE, MCDBA, along with other Microsoft certs, and even wrote for MSDN Magazine. No longer did it have any leverage on my profession at all, which was shocking to me. The next day I purged Windows from my two main working machines, so now I'm pure Linux and macOS. A few weeks later and I can say it has been a marvelous transition, and cuts out the no longer relevant middleman.
- binkHN 6mo ago
  Right there with you. When Microsoft started pushing Windows 11 over Windows 10, that's when I decided I had enough of my experience being dumbed down. I switched over to Linux, haven't looked back, and couldn't be happier. I still run a Windows virtual machine for those times that I need something native to that operating system, but I should have made the move years ago; Microsoft doesn't care about Windows anymore.
- martinald 6mo ago
  It's interesting because I'm the same in so much that I use windows basically as a WSL2 host and not much else. I use a MacOS a lot. _However_, still find the Linux desktops that I've tried are too buggy. While the hardware support is incredible (compared to Windows out of the box), I constantly hit bugs with fractional scaling on multiple monitors. I'm hopeful that Ubuntu 26.04 may finally iron out the last problems with this. The latest version of Fedora I installed did fix all this but I'm far too used to Debian based OSes.
tonymet 6mo ago
this is great and I have a feature request: A "refresh VM" feature that exports your home dir + packages into a new VM instance. I've tried Optimize-VHD but renewing the VM this way frees up disk and speeds up the VM as well. None of the WSL settings for sparse disk / disk shrinking seem to work well. Here's what I usually do $ tar -czf /mnt/c/Temp/home-backup.tgz $HOME $ apt list --installed > /mnt/c/Temp/packages.txt delete the VM, create a new one, reverse the process. $ tar -cxf /mnt/c/Temp/home-backup.tgz -C $HOME $ apt update $ cat /mnt/c/Temp/packages.txt | xargs apt install
- Quarrel 6mo ago
  You operate a little cleaner than I do- there are invariably things that end up in /usr/local/bin.. Still, thanks for the process you use. My wsl is pretty long lived now, through quite a few ubuntu upgrades and installations of stuff that I probably no longer need.
  - tonymet 6mo ago
    you can try doing fstrim + Optimize-VMD first . i've found it is good up to 20% savings. On my last run my 75 gb wsl disk saved about 15gb. But wiping and re-installing trimmed about 60 gb
- guenthert 6mo ago
  "delete the VM, create a new one, reverse the process. $ tar -cxf /mnt/c/Temp/home-backup.tgz -C $HOME" That's not going to bring much joy.
  - tonymet 6mo ago
    it's illustrative
herf 6mo ago
I wish there were more ways to specify whether the Windows filesystem /mnt/c should be mounted in a WSL2 instance - it is kind of generally on or off. In cases where I want WSL2 to function as a "container" isolated from my desktop, I use a different Windows user just in case.
admiralrohan 6mo ago
My WSL Ubuntu instance always gets disconnected after I come out of sleep or hibernation mode. Anyone else faced this issue and any solutions? I have tried everything found online.

141 points by gballan 6mo ago

The ability to run docker containers as wsl instances looks nifty. A bit more overhead since they now run as a VM instead of a container, but you get the ability to start a shell with Windows terminal or access files with Explorer (and thus every program running in Windows)

osigurdson 6mo ago
Perhaps I misunderstand your comment but when you run docker / podman in Windows, you are using WSL / HyperV.
- smallerize 6mo ago
  The linked project includes a very different way to launch docker containers.
- wongarsu 6mo ago
  running docker on windows runs docker in wsl (which is a HyperV guest). The project offers running docker images as wsl instance (which is a HyperV guest), no docker involved
  - llm_nerd 6mo ago
    You said - "A bit more overhead since they now run as a VM instead of a container" To which osigurdson seemed to be noting that WSL2 itself is a VM (meaning if you launch 1 or 100 WSL2 instances, a single Linux VM will be spun up), and when you run docker, it runs using exactly that same VM (optionally, though it's the default now to just use WSL2's backend). Can you clarify what you meant by "A bit more overhead"? Running a container via docker or directly via WSL2 will use the same underlying VM, and there will only be that one VM regardless of the number of WSL2 or docker instances.
    - wongarsu 6mo ago
      For a single container the difference depends on your exact setup. I typically run docker in the same WSL instance as my other wsl stuff, so starting a single docker container adds 0 additional VMs, while starting the container as a wsl instance will add one VM. If you use the "docker for windows" package you may be adding a VM just for running docker, depending on your setup. Once you start the second container the difference becomes more obvious: running $N containers in docker uses one VM with one linux kernel, no matter how many containers you add. Running $N containers as separate WSL instances runs $N VMs and $N linux kernels. That's the "bit more overhead" I was referring to
      - llm_nerd 6mo ago
        "Running $N containers as separate WSL instances runs $N VMs and $N linux kernels." But it doesn't, and this is what I'm disagreeing with. If you instantiate WSL2, it launches a Linux VM. A single Linux VM. If you then run Docker with WSL2 integration (the default and hugely recommended), it uses that Linux VM as its VM as well, so you're still at 1 VM. If you run 100 WSL2 instances, they will all use that single Linux VM, each doing namespacing for isolation with their own filesystems. If you run 100 Docker instances, they will all use that single Linux VM. If you run 100 WSL instances, and 100 Docker instances (assuming, again, WSL2 integration which is the default), they will all be using that single Linux VM.
        Jenk 6mo ago
        Every time you run `wsl --install <distro>` you are creating a new VM. Every time you run `wsl --unregister <instance id or name/>` your are removing a VM. It is these two operations at the heart of OP's app.
        llm_nerd 6mo ago
        Okay, are you guys using wrong terminology? Are you talking about a filesystem image as a "VM", because that would not be correct. A "Virtual HD" (VHD) is not a VM. Do you think a WSL2 distro instance is a "VM" because it's persistent? Did you know Docker containers can be persistent as well, people just choose as a best practice not to use it like that? Does that make them magical VMs? WSL2 has a single VM running as the process vmmem (or vmmemWSL in the newest versions). This is the single Linux kernel that will be shared by every WSL2 instance. It will also be the instance that hosts Docker containers as well. I mean, I'm just echoing myself and apologies for the repetition, but this is just easily confirmed, utter factual truth. A rootfs is not a VM. WSL2 and containers have different nuances about their filesystem and isolation (WSL2 instances is aware of other instances, for instance, as a design aspect, and WSL2 persists rootfs changes while docker as a best practices does not), but they're more alike than different. And they share little in common with something like VirtualBox or vmware, which actually isolate every such system as VMs. Again, sigh, if you install 10 WSL2 "distros", you will have 10 rootfs overlays on your drive, and 10 persistence VHD files. When you run these the VM they all run under in the shared vmmem instance, which is the single utility Linux VM.
- ghosty141 6mo ago
  Just FYI you can also run a windows docker natively in windows without using WSL or any linux component. But that's more of a niche usecase.
  - andix 6mo ago
    I haven't heard anyone talk about Windows containers in years, and that was actually a good thing. Let's just pretend they never existed.
Chris2048 6mo ago
How does this compare to running the containers in one of the WSL VMs? Can't you do all the same things via the host VM?

lukax 6mo ago

Looks nice but still a bit sad that Flutter is used instead of something native given that they don't need the app to be cross-platform. Well, even Microsoft uses React Native for a lot of Windows-only apps.

Defenestresque 6mo ago
I'm glad I'm not alone in missing native apps. I get that it's easier to code a note-taking Electron app, but every time I look at a Linux terminal app written in JavaScript it makes me want to cry. I know I'm beating a dead HN horse here, but how the hell is it possible that megabytes of embedded JavaScript in websites, to the point that LinkedIn uses about half the RAM I had for my first computer loading 32 MB of JavaScript files. Jjira loads 50 (!) MB of javascript, enough to include the uncompressed version of War and Peace 16 times. That's the size of a full installation of the entire Windows 95 operating system. GitLab's static landing page is 13MB of JavaScript, larger than that of Twitter. What the hell are we doing here? Why can I spin up a 100 MHz, 8MB RAM VM with a hard drive size that's 1/16th of your entry level MacBook's RAM and have apps open immediately? I understand some backsliding as things get more high level, but a website loading 50 megabytes of JavaScript, to me, is like a bright neon sign that screams "something has gone wrong terribly here". Obviously programs, websites and operating systems have become incredibly more complex but your $200 A-series Samsung phone has about 8 cores at 2.2 GHz each. A $200 processor when Windows 95 was released had one core at 0.1GHz. making the processing power about 164x faster. Keep in mind this $200 includes a fully functioning computer in the palm of your hand. The actual CPU part for a midrange phone like the Samsung A15 5G is the Dimension 6100+, which costs all of $25 bucks. There must be some sort of balance between ease of prototyping, creating and deploying an application without bundling it with Electron or building websites that use tens of megabytes of a scripting language for seemingly nothing. Especially when we can see that a fast, usable website (see this very website or the blogs of many of the people who post here, compared to Reddit for your average medium or substack blog). How the hell do we fix this? The customers clearly don't want this bloat, companies clearly shouldn't want it either (see research that indicates users exposed to a 200 millisecond load delay on Google, performed 0.2-0.6% fewer searches, and effect that remained even when the artificial delay was removed. This was replicated by Microsoft, Amazon and others. It's frequently brought up that Amazon has said that every 100 milliseconds of page load time cost them 1% in sales, though it's hard to find definitive attribution to this), programmers should hopefully not want to create crappy websites just like mechanics should hopefully not want to install brake pads that squeal every time the user breaks. This got way longer than the two sentences I expected the post to be, so my apologies. [1] https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/ https://tonsky.me/blog/js-bloat/ [2] Velocity and the Bottom Line, Shurman and Brutlag

behnamoh 6mo ago

I wish it was a TUI. Windows is a plague I try to stay away from as much as possible, and it already gives me headaches to setup WSL and manage them over ssh. Some things you just can't do w/o remote desktop... And sometimes WSL crashes and there's literally no way to recover except to restart the whole machine. The only reason I use Windows is because Nvidia drivers are easier to setup. But once I'm inside my Fedora WSL, that feels like home, not the Windows host.

Juminuvi 6mo ago
I think the UI is pretty slick but agree having a TUI option as well would be awesome. Everything in wsl management (import, export, register, compact, etc) can be done with shell commands I believe so a tiny performant TUI might be a straight forward thing for op to add in the future though.
eddythompson80 6mo ago
Are you sshing into the wsl instances or he windows host? Pretty much all my interactions with wsl is using the wsl cli. Other than the very initial step of enabling wsl, mostly because I never memorized the powershell enable command.
- behnamoh 6mo ago
  I ssh directly into WSL but for setting it up (auto-start, recovery, etc.) I ssh into PowerShell (which I hate). A TUI would go a long way there because no one wants to learn PowerShell.
  - eddythompson80 6mo ago
    You can use wsl.exe from powershell to manage wsl.
    - mmastrac 6mo ago
      FWIW I started reverse engineering the WSL2 API -- it's not terribly complicated to do most tasks without the CLI (which is clunky IMO, as it had a number of times where it changed in backwards/forwards incompatible ways) https://crates.io/crates/wsl-api https://crates.io/crates/wsl-api

shmerl 6mo ago

Is there anything that can run a normal Linux VM guest with good quality graphics acceleration on Windows host (i.e. both full OpenGL and Vulkan support)? Not the gimped half VM over HiperV. VirtualBox has really broken graphics support, you can only run software rendering Linux DEs that way.

eddythompson80 6mo ago
You can pass a GPU to the vm if you have more than one. GPU vendors have been gating GPU virtualization for data centers only. Or you can run X on windows like wslg does it.
- shmerl 6mo ago
  I need something similar to what qemu/kvm can do with virgl and venus, i.e. pass through graphics call to the same GPU that's used by the host, not pass whole GPU with SR-IOV or PCIe passthrough. So far I haven't found anything like that which actually works. I'm not using X, I need a normal KDE Wayland session.
okanat 6mo ago
WSL2 already allows you to use your own GPU driver as a paravirtualized GPU over open source Mesa d3d12 driver. You get quite good OpenGL performance with that. There are projects like this https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV that you can use to setup a Hyper-V machine to use the same paravirtualization.
- deleted 6mo ago
  [deleted]
- shmerl 6mo ago
  > Tere are projects like this https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV https://github.com/jamesstringer90/Easy-GPU-PV that you can use to setup a Hyper-V machine to use the same paravirtualization. > Automatically Installs Windows to the VM This seems to be focused on Windows guests. I need this for Linux guests. May be when Hyper-V will make this usable out of the box for any guests, I'll take a look. And if it's something shareable, may be VirtualBox should pick that up.

skhameneh 6mo ago

This is great and all... Except I’ve long given up on WSL. I really tried to make WSL work for many things, only to find the entire experience (reliability, performance, and beyond) was simply better in every way without Windows. No matter what you do, there will always be some weird platform detection or line termination that pops up somewhere. And if it isn’t that, it’s degraded performance or kernel-level incompatibility.

righthand 6mo ago
100% agree. If anything WSL is a Linux onboarding experience at best.
omnibrain 6mo ago
Yes, I since embraced pwsh for terminal stuff on Windows. For everything else I switched back to proper VMs or remote hosts.
TZubiri 6mo ago
I've transitioned from linux back to windows for workstation usage, and it's one of the main features that allowed me to do so, I haven't had major problems, so I would be interested to know what issues you faced. Of course direct linux is better than WSL, but I found the product to be of very high quality and well integrated with windows.
- nilkn 6mo ago
  Same here. The initial version of WSL back in the day could certainly be rough, but modern WSL2 seems totally fine to me. It is the key ingredient that allows me to have one workstation that can do "everything".
Rapzid 6mo ago
I guess your YMMV. I switched from developing in Linux VMs to WSL about 3 years ago and have used it daily for development. I don't do much OS level engineering these days though and would probably fire up some VMs for that.
6mo ago

llm_nerd 6mo ago

Neat project. Merging the layers of a docker image and setting that as a WSL filesystem is a nice convenience. I recently realized that 100% of what I use Windows for was as a WSL2 foundation: It had been reduced to being an extremely overbearing and heavyweight host machine for a Linux VM. Nothing in my life was Windows-only anymore, and it was basically just inertia that I even still had it installed. I'd been a "Windows guy" for decades, had decades of Windows software dev under my belt, even got my MCSE, MCDBA, along with other Microsoft certs, and even wrote for MSDN Magazine. No longer did it have any leverage on my profession at all, which was shocking to me. The next day I purged Windows from my two main working machines, so now I'm pure Linux and macOS. A few weeks later and I can say it has been a marvelous transition, and cuts out the no longer relevant middleman.

binkHN 6mo ago
Right there with you. When Microsoft started pushing Windows 11 over Windows 10, that's when I decided I had enough of my experience being dumbed down. I switched over to Linux, haven't looked back, and couldn't be happier. I still run a Windows virtual machine for those times that I need something native to that operating system, but I should have made the move years ago; Microsoft doesn't care about Windows anymore.
martinald 6mo ago
It's interesting because I'm the same in so much that I use windows basically as a WSL2 host and not much else. I use a MacOS a lot. _However_, still find the Linux desktops that I've tried are too buggy. While the hardware support is incredible (compared to Windows out of the box), I constantly hit bugs with fractional scaling on multiple monitors. I'm hopeful that Ubuntu 26.04 may finally iron out the last problems with this. The latest version of Fedora I installed did fix all this but I'm far too used to Debian based OSes.

tonymet 6mo ago

this is great and I have a feature request: A "refresh VM" feature that exports your home dir + packages into a new VM instance. I've tried Optimize-VHD but renewing the VM this way frees up disk and speeds up the VM as well. None of the WSL settings for sparse disk / disk shrinking seem to work well. Here's what I usually do $ tar -czf /mnt/c/Temp/home-backup.tgz $HOME $ apt list --installed > /mnt/c/Temp/packages.txt delete the VM, create a new one, reverse the process. $ tar -cxf /mnt/c/Temp/home-backup.tgz -C $HOME $ apt update $ cat /mnt/c/Temp/packages.txt | xargs apt install

Quarrel 6mo ago
You operate a little cleaner than I do- there are invariably things that end up in /usr/local/bin.. Still, thanks for the process you use. My wsl is pretty long lived now, through quite a few ubuntu upgrades and installations of stuff that I probably no longer need.
- tonymet 6mo ago
  you can try doing fstrim + Optimize-VMD first . i've found it is good up to 20% savings. On my last run my 75 gb wsl disk saved about 15gb. But wiping and re-installing trimmed about 60 gb
guenthert 6mo ago
"delete the VM, create a new one, reverse the process. $ tar -cxf /mnt/c/Temp/home-backup.tgz -C $HOME" That's not going to bring much joy.
- tonymet 6mo ago
  it's illustrative

herf 6mo ago

I wish there were more ways to specify whether the Windows filesystem /mnt/c should be mounted in a WSL2 instance - it is kind of generally on or off. In cases where I want WSL2 to function as a "container" isolated from my desktop, I use a different Windows user just in case.

admiralrohan 6mo ago

My WSL Ubuntu instance always gets disconnected after I come out of sleep or hibernation mode. Anyone else faced this issue and any solutions? I have tried everything found online.