Yes, I used it every day at work for most of a year! Its showstopping bugs (a killer memory leak, freezes after suspend, data loss issues (!!), native systemd support making Emacs freeze somehow (???)) are a big part of why I finally took the leap to macOS at work.
How much do you use WSL? Because its bugs go well beyond rough edges and those reliably show up if you actually use it for most of your work every day.
> This is _not_ just a VM.
Sure it is! It's a VM with the following features/integrations that start working without any manual configuration:
- nice management interface that can download distros for people
- filesystem sharing via 9pfs, which is cool but unfortunately too slow for serious use
- a pair of command-line interfaces for invoking commands on each side from the other
- this doesn't involve the init system btw. it just uses good old binfmts on the Linux side with the Linux-side wsl command, just like some users do with wine for Windows binaries or qemu for RISCV Linux binaries
- automatically forwards network traffic between the Windows host and Linux guests so that users don't have to manually configure port forwarding
- a shared display server (Wayland implementation) on the host side and some plumbing to automatically forward its sockets to guest VMs
I'm not sure I'd wanna count this, but some third-party applications also do some socket forwarding tricks (and did so before Microsoft's Wayland implementation was a thing) so that guests can share one Docker implementation, like Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop, Podman Desktop, etc.
That's it. There's no other magic.
> It seamlessly extends Windows so that Windows can run Linux binaries.
I wouldn't characterize that feature as seamless— in fact it's so bad that you can't reliably pipe the output of WSL commands evoked from the Windows side into a Windows-side pager or clip.exe (sometimes wsl.exe would just hang or eat the output). And then there's the PATH translation issues, which often have to be handled quite manually with subshells calling cygpath or wslpath or whatever.
That particular feature is so bad that I hardly ever used it! I'm astonished to hear you call it 'seamless'. Have you ever tried to share a Yubikey for SSH auth and GPG encryption between the Windows host and Linux guests on WSL2? How 'seamless' was that for ya?
> I'm not saying it's perfect -- it is not -- but it's about 20 years ahead of simple VM solutions.
The things I compared it to (Lima, Orbstack) have the exact same features without ever having replaced systemd. Lima uses cloud-init as the interface for injecting its startup hooks. Idk what Orbstack does. Lima is definitely jankier than WSL2 (which is saying a lot, unfortunately), but Orbstack seems solid.
Anyway, both of them reproduce the port forwarding, filesystem sharing, and command forwarding that WSL2 has without replacing systemd, and Lima is older than the systemd integration for WSL2. Have you used either tool? There's no way WSL2 is even one decade ahead of either, though it might be a couple years ahead of Lima.
Me, no, I have only played around with it. From a technical level, I personally preferred WSL1, which I thought was more elegant. I am happy to concede your points as it certainly sounds like you have more experience with it than me.
WSL2 is just a VM, yes, I totally agree -- but a much better-integrated one than most non-techies could ever hope to achieve, and still better than most techies could achieve unless they really knew their stuff and they were competent in both of 2 different OSes.
From what I've seen over my working life, I'd say about 0.1% of Windows users would have the level of knowledge needed, and possibly more Linux ones -- but they mostly wouldn't want it or care.
My personal impression is that it's an attempt at the classic MICROS~1 "embrace and extend" manoeuvre on Linux.
No, I've never tried the Mac tools you mention, and I don't own a Yubikey or anything like it. I try new distros almost daily on my Mac but I have no need of any integration -- I am not a developer. I review distros sometimes, though, and occasionally things like hypervisors:
> From a technical level, I personally preferred WSL1
Same. WSL1 was ambitious, wild, and incredibly impressive despite the flaws that eventually convinced Microsoft to start over with WSL2.
> WSL2 is just a VM, yes, I totally agree -- but a much better-integrated one than most non-techies could ever hope to achieve, and still better than most techies could achieve unless they really knew their stuff and they were competent in both of 2 different OSes.
Agreed! WSL2 has a very impressive OOTB experience in terms of getting you from nothing to a VM that you can use. It would be a lot of work to set up comparable integrations yourself.
> My personal impression is that it's an attempt at the classic MICROS~1 "embrace and extend" manoeuvre on Linux.
Unfortunately I can't disagree. People seem to think that MICROS~1 is dead, but as far as I can tell they're in a very similar monopoly position with more or less the same interests now as they've ever had.
> No, I've never tried the Mac tools you mention, and I don't own a Yubikey or anything like it. I try new distros almost daily on my Mac but I have no need of any integration -- I am not a developer. I review distros sometimes, though, and occasionally things like hypervisors:
In that case, Orbstack and Lima might be tools worth your writing, the same way hypervisors and virtualization apps are! They're attempting to be WSL2-alikes but they don't use their own hypervisors (Lima supports qemu and Apple's virtualization framework, idk about Orbstack.)
Yes, I used it every day at work for most of a year! Its showstopping bugs (a killer memory leak, freezes after suspend, data loss issues (!!), native systemd support making Emacs freeze somehow (???)) are a big part of why I finally took the leap to macOS at work.
How much do you use WSL? Because its bugs go well beyond rough edges and those reliably show up if you actually use it for most of your work every day.
> This is _not_ just a VM.
Sure it is! It's a VM with the following features/integrations that start working without any manual configuration:
I'm not sure I'd wanna count this, but some third-party applications also do some socket forwarding tricks (and did so before Microsoft's Wayland implementation was a thing) so that guests can share one Docker implementation, like Docker Desktop, Rancher Desktop, Podman Desktop, etc.That's it. There's no other magic.
> It seamlessly extends Windows so that Windows can run Linux binaries.
I wouldn't characterize that feature as seamless— in fact it's so bad that you can't reliably pipe the output of WSL commands evoked from the Windows side into a Windows-side pager or clip.exe (sometimes wsl.exe would just hang or eat the output). And then there's the PATH translation issues, which often have to be handled quite manually with subshells calling cygpath or wslpath or whatever.
That particular feature is so bad that I hardly ever used it! I'm astonished to hear you call it 'seamless'. Have you ever tried to share a Yubikey for SSH auth and GPG encryption between the Windows host and Linux guests on WSL2? How 'seamless' was that for ya?
> I'm not saying it's perfect -- it is not -- but it's about 20 years ahead of simple VM solutions.
The things I compared it to (Lima, Orbstack) have the exact same features without ever having replaced systemd. Lima uses cloud-init as the interface for injecting its startup hooks. Idk what Orbstack does. Lima is definitely jankier than WSL2 (which is saying a lot, unfortunately), but Orbstack seems solid.
Anyway, both of them reproduce the port forwarding, filesystem sharing, and command forwarding that WSL2 has without replacing systemd, and Lima is older than the systemd integration for WSL2. Have you used either tool? There's no way WSL2 is even one decade ahead of either, though it might be a couple years ahead of Lima.