I think it's a fair exchange too, even as an individual I pay for plenty of smaller open-source SaaS services—even if they're more expensive than proprietary competitors—for the very reason that I could always selfhost it without interruption if SHTF and the provider goes under.
Microsoft is not much better now.
I've seen a number of theories online that boil down to young tech enthusiasts in the 2000's/early-2010's getting hands-on experience with open source projects and ecosystems since they're more accessible than enterprise tech that's typically gated behind paywalls, then translating into what they use when they enter the working world (where some naturally end up at M$).
This somewhat seems to track, as longtime M$ employees from the Ballmer-era still often hold stigmas against open source projects (Dave's garage, and similar), but it seems the current iteration of employees hold much more favorable views.
But who knows, perhaps it's all one long-winded goal from M$ of embracing, extending, and ultimately extinguishing.
My guess…
The same reason Rome didn’t fall. It simply turned into the Church.
MS isn’t battling software mfgs because they have the lock on hardware direction and operating systems so strongly that they can direct without having to hold the territory themselves.
- three years later it's left in the hands of the powerful community that was built around it with MS help
- MS doesn't have to provide support and it's not their problem anymore
Yeah, MS-DOS 3, Winfile and a castrated version of Powertoys. This all looks like extend and extinguish theater.
strace shows that the sleep program uses clock_nanosleep, which is theoretically "passive." However, if the host suspends and then wakes up after the sleep period should have ended, it continues as if it were "active."
Of course, if you want the native integration WSL offers, you'll need to upgrade the Linux driver/daemon side to support whatever kernel you prefer to run if it's not supported already. Microsoft only supports a few specific kernels, but the code is out there for the Linux side so you can port the code to any OS, really.
With some work, this could even open up possibilities like running *BSD as a WSL backend.
Of course, there might be some regressions. They are usually only fixed (upstream) after WSL kernel gets upgraded and it starts to repro in WSL.
Edit: for clarity, by "multiple OS" I mean multiple Linux versions. Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24. You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"
So I left - I am willing to do more work to be spied on less, to be used as a product less, and to fight with my computer about who owns it less.
This feature thing is really one of their strategies. At work they send us "adoption managers" that run reports to check whether people use feature xyz enough and set up stupid comms campaigns to push them to do so.
I really hate that. I decide how I use my computer. Not a vendor.
This is a great way of saying it and expresses the uneasy feeling windows has given me recently. I use Linux machines but I have 1 windows machine in my home as a media PC; and for the last several years windows has made me feel like I don’t own that computer but I’m just lucky to be along for the ride. Ramming ads on the task bar and start menu, forcing updates on me, forcing me to make a Microsoft account before I can login (or just having a dark UI pattern so I can’t figure out how to avoid it, for the pedantic).
With Linux I feel like the machine is a turing complete wonderbox of assistance and possibility, with windows it feels like Microsoft have forced their way into my home and are obnoxiously telling me they know best, while condescendingly telling me I’m lucky to be here at all. It’s a very different feeling.
However, for those of us that went Linux many years ago, and like our free open source, in 2025, is it better to go back to the dark side, to run Windows and have things like a LAMP stack and terminals run with WSL?
I don't play games or run Adobe products, I use Google Docs and I don't need lots of different Linux kernels. Hence, is it better to run Linux in Windows now? Genuinely asking.
> is it better to run Linux in Windows now? Genuinely asking.
definitely is. Servicing takes ~ 1 minute per month to click on "yeah, let's apply those updates and reboot". Peace of mind with no worrying on external hardware won't work or monitor will have issues or laptop won't sleep or during the call battery will discharge faster due to lack of hardware acceleration or noise cancellation not working or ...
This is not a Linux issue, it's a "I bought a Windows computer, slapped Linux on it, and expected that to work" issue.
Buy computers that were designed for and ship with Linux, and with support you can call to get help. Modern hardware is far too complex to handle multiple OSes without a major effort. Assuming they even want to support anything but Windows, which most don't.
First, that's not the discussion at all. The question is does WSL have valid use cases and benefits over bare metal Linux. The answer is absolutely yes. For whatever reason you have the computer in front of you and you have the choice between the two modalities (many times you don't buy it, employer does, etc.)
Second, if everyone had your attitude, seeing PCs as "Windows computers" and stayed in their lanes in the 90s and 2000s, you would not have the option of three and a half supported "Linux computers" you are alluding to today. Viva hackers who see beyond the label.
The hackers sure. Reverse engineering takes a lot of skill and my hat's off to them.
Almost everyone here, though, are not in either camp. Most have the means and ability to buy a Linux computer if they so choose. But they don't and then complain when Linux fails to run well on a system that never has had a team of dedicated system integration work on it.
not on a shitty wrapper running on an ad-platform.
Sorry but not sorry, it's not easier to run than on linux. It requires the Windows store to work, and to use Hyper-V (which breaks VMware workstation, among other things).
It's in a better package, to be sure, but it's not "easier to run multiple OS on the same computer". It's easier to use multiple OSes (no SSH, GUI forwarding, etc), as long as all those OSes are Linux flavors supported by WSL.
Want FreeBSD or Windows? Nope!
Well, it is windows subsystem for Linux :) not windows subsystem for windows or FreeBSD for that matter :)
Ps I wonder if you can make your own image? After all its really just Hyper-V with some config candy.
I'm pretty sure that with the opensourcing, we'll see freebsd or more exotic systems popping up quite quickly. Heck, macOS would be fun!
Especially in licensing! /sarcasm
That said, the kernel they distribute is open source and you're not limited to just the distros they're working with directly. There are a number of third party (e.g. there's no Arch from Arch or Microsoft, but there's a completely compatible third party package that gives you Arch in WSL2)
No longer true since last month.
https://lists.archlinux.org/archives/list/arch-dev-public@li...
Along with the glibc hacks needed by WSL1.
(I was part of the discussion and also very adamant about this not happening)
The big drawback to WSL to me is the slow filesystem access because NTFS sucks. And having to deal with Windows in the first place.
Ps I wouldn't worry about your karma. It's just a number :P
However it’s not perfect, for example I hit this bug when trying to run node a few days ago https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8219#issuecomment-10... and I don’t think they’re fixing bugs in WSL1 anymore
It’s fine for running small models but when you get to large training sets that don’t fit in RAM it becomes miserable.
There is a line where the convenience of training or developing locally gives way to a larger on demand cloud VM, but on WSL the line is much closer.
The culprit would be the plan9 bits (think of smb or nfs but .. wilder ? why are they using 9P again ?)
The problem is Windows IO filters and whatnot, Microsoft Defender trying to lazily intercept every file operation, and if you're crossing between windows and Linux land, possibly 9pfs network shares.
WSL2's own disk is just a VM image and fairly fast - you're just accessing a single file with some special optimizations. Usually far, far more responsive than anything done by windows itself. Don't do your work in your network-shared windows home folder.
Not the biggest issue of them, 'find' and 'git status' on WSL2 in a big project is still >100 times slower on windows dev drive which avoids those filters than it is with WSL 1 on dev drive.
WSL 1 on regular ntfs with defender disabled is about 4x slower than WSL1 on dev drive, so that stuff does cause some of it, but WSL2 feels hopelessly slow. And wsl 2 can't share memory as well or take as much advantage of the filesystem cache (doubling it if you use the windows drive in both places I think, unless the network drive representation of it doesn't get cached on the WSL2 drive.
WSL2 does not take less advantage of filesystem caches. Linux's block cache is perfectly capable. HyperV is a semi-serious hypervisor, so it should be using a direct I/O abstraction for writing to the disk image. Memory is also balloning, and can dynamically grow and shrink depending on memory pressure.
Linux VM's is something Microsoft has poured a lot of money into optimizing as that's what the vast majority of Azure is. Cramming more out of a single machine, and therefore more things into a single machine, directly correlates with profits, so that's a heavy investment.
I wonder why you're seeing different results. I have no experience with WSL1, and looking into a proprietary legacy solution with known issues and limited features would be a purely academic exercise that I'm not sure is worth it.
(I personally don't use Windows, but I work with departments whose parent companies enforce it on their networks,
Files on the WSL2 disk image work great. They're complaining about accessing files that aren't on the disk image, where everything is relayed over a 9P network filesystem and not a block device. That's the part that gets really slow in WSL2, much slower than WSL1's nearly-native access.
> Memory is also balloning, and can dynamically grow and shrink depending on memory pressure.
In my experience this works pretty badly.
> a proprietary legacy solution with known issues and limited features
Well at least at the launch of WSL2 they said WSL1 wasn't legacy, I'm not sure if that has changed.
But either way you're using a highly proprietary system, and both WSL1 and WSL2 have significant known issues and limited features, neither one clearly better than the other.
My understanding is when you access files on the windows drive, the linuxvm in WSL2 caches it in its own memory, and the windows side caches it in its: now you have double the memory usage on disk cache where files are active on both, taking much less advantage of caches than if you had used WSL1 where windows serves as the sole cache for windows drives.
I'm only comparing working on windows filesystems that can be accessed by both. My use case is developing on large windows game projects, where the game needs the files fast when running, and WSL needs the files fast when searching code, using git, etc. WSL1 was usable on plain NTFS, and now much closer to ext4 with dev drive NTFS. WSL2 I couldn't make fast.
You could potentially have the windows files on a network drive on the WSL2 side living in native ext4, but with that you get the double filesystem caching issue, and you might slow a game editor launch on the windows side by way too much, your files are inaccessible during upgrades and you have to always have RAM dedicated to WSL2 running to be able to read your files. MS store versions of WSL2 will even auto upgrade while running and randomly make that drive unavailable.
WSL is for when you actually need it to be Linux.
I do windows and android gamedev and the server side is Linux.
However, WSL1 is pretty much abandoned and lots of newer distros have moved to forcing systemd or container based stuff that doesn't work in it, and some elf binaries no longer work in it (including newer node.js versions).
I use WSL2 as well when I really need it to be Linux and am doing webdev or something.
I use msys2 for a few things, usually compiling windows dependencies with the gnu toolchain that need GCC's stuff like inline assembly or computed goto (codecs etc.). Maybe possible from wsl1 too but they usually have full build and dependency instructions for msys2.
Watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qbKGw8MQ0i8 please.
But in the end they had to get the OS vendor to bless their process name anyway, just so the OS would stop doing things that tank the performance for everybody else doing something similar but who haven't opened a direct line up with the OS vendor and got their process name on a list.
This seems like a pain point for the vendor to fix, rather than everybody shipping software to their OS
Thats if you are going from VM/host. If you use the allocated space for VM, its pretty fast.
Is VMWare more powerful than Linux?
I know… every year is the year of the Linux desktop… but seriously the AI spyware included was enough to get me gone for good.
Spyware and adware is a government policy / regulation problem. Thanks to GDPR and DMA, using Windows in EU is significantly better experience (try setting a Windows desktop with an EU image). You can remove almost all of the apps including Edge and Copilot. There are no ads in the UI. Neither in Explorer nor in Start menu.
But guess what? Fuck You because that is the old way of doing it now, and now the new command is start ms-chx:localonly
This is a company that fucking hates you.
This is why you pay karma tax. This statement is so clearly representative of a falsity.
My linux can run multiple linuxes as well without VM overhead. Something Windows can’t do. Furthermore WINE allows me to forgo running any vm to run windows applications.
I developed on WSL for 3 years and consistently the biggest issue was the lack of ability to use tooling across the shared OSes.
Your karma depleting statements are biased, unfounded, and it shows as you do not really provide counter evidence. That’s why you lose karma.
OP's statement remains incorrect, because their assumption is that the WSL experience can't be reproduced in Linux.
I can easily do that by using VirtualBox with Seamless Windows mode enabled.
XAMPP did not work out of the box with me on Windows (skill issue on my part, I know), so my preferred setup was to run a Ubuntu Server VM (LAMP stack) and then develop whatever I had on a Windows IDE.
I could have done that under full Linux, I just did not want that. Then Vagrant came into existence, which I'd say was for my use case (but never came around to adopt it).
I'm really happy with my WSL2 setup. I stopped using VMware Workstation when WSL2 broke it, but WSL2 is exactly what I needed to match my use case.
Why wouldn't you have just spent 5 minutes to get XAMPP working?
LAMP stack worked for me perfectly on Linux out of the box, whether Ubuntu Server or any RHEL-based distro (even with SELinux enabled!).
I spent some solid 8+ hours on that, saw it uneconomical and went the VM way.
Is it still broken?
That being said, there is a performance impact.
Also 1980s style X11 widgets on the Windows desktop in their own windows? Cool.
Wayland supports window managers ?
Cool because nothing about how Windows boots is intercepted; you can just nuke the new partitions (or overwrite them with a new Linux installation). I still prefer a native Linux boot with "just in case" Windows option to WSL.
I understand the "roll your own" argument very well. In my time, I've experienced quite the variety of configs and dotfiles, but I'm not young anymore so I've settled with using Regolith which is an opinionated set of tools, including my favourite i3wm, on top of Ubuntu, and I simply use defaults for the most things.
Anyway, it's much easier to use Linux as a daily driver than it's ever been. The choice of distro is simply which package manager to use, and everything else just works, as long as it's in the package manager's inventory.
I haven't compiled my own computer's kernel in 6 years (but I still cross compile for rpi and other IoT), and I haven't used my dotfiles in 3 years, just defaults.
A very big and very incorrect assumption. This reads like you asked the initial question without any actual curiosity behind it.
What gets you that on windows? The builtin stuff is far from cohesive.
I don't have a need to run multiple OSes though. All of my tools are Linux based, and in companies that don't let people run Linux, the actual tools of the trade are almost all in a Linux VM because it's the only reasonable way to use them, and everything else is cross-platform. The outer OS just creates needless issues so that you now need to be a power user with two operating systems and their weird interactions.
> extremely arcane things I had to fix when setting it up involving host DNS and VPN adapter priority not getting propagated into the VM so networking was completely broken
Are you sure you set up the VPN properly? Messing around with Linux configs is a good way to end up with "somehow" bugs like that.
OSX was a bit janky with docker filesystem slowness, homebrew being the generally recommended package manager despite being awful (why do I sometimes tap a cask and sometimes pour a bottle? Don't tell me; I don't care. Just make it be "install". Also, don't take "install" as a cue to go update all of my other programs with incompatible versions without asking), annoying 1+ second animations that you can't turn off that make it so the only reasonable way to use your computer is to never maximize a window (with no tiling support of course), and completely broken external monitor support (text is completely illegible IIRC), but Windows takes jank to another level.
By contrast, I never encounter the issues people complain about on Linux. Bluetooth works fine. Wifi works fine. nVidia GPUs and games work fine. Containers are easy to use because they're natively part of the OS. I prefer Linux exactly because I stopped enjoying "tinkering" with my computer like 10 years ago, and I want it to just quietly work without drawing attention to itself (and because Windows 8 and the flat themes that followed were hideous and I was never going to downgrade to that from Windows 7).
I also have tailscale running on Windows itself and they don't conflict.
wsl works good enough.
You know what's even more convenient than a VM? Not needing a VM and still having the exact same functionality. And you don't need a bunch of janky wrapper scripts, there's more than one tool that gives you essentially the same thing; I have used both Distrobox and toolbx to quickly drop into a Ubuntu or Fedora shell. It's pretty handy on NixOS if I want to test building some software in a more typical Linux environment. As a bonus, you get working hardware acceleration, graphical applications work out of the box, there is no I/O tax for going over a 9p bridge because there is no 9p bridge, and there is no weird memory balloon issues to deal with because there is no VM and there is no guest kernel.
I get that WSL is revolutionary for Windows users, but I'm sorry, the reason why there's no WSL is because on Linux we don't need to use VMs to use Linux. It's that simple...
It requires a bit of work to setup to your liking of course, but hey, at least you have an option to set it up to your liking
Then I was forced to use a Mac for work, so I was using a floating WM again. On my personal machine, ion3 went away and I never fully got around to migrate to i3.
By the time I got enough free time to really work on my personal setup, it had accumulated two huge monitors and was a different machine. I found I was pretty happy just scattering windows around everywhere. Especially with a trackball's cursor throw. This was pretty surprising to me at first.
Anyway this is just my little personal anecdote. If I go back to a Linux install I'll definitely have to check out i3 again. Thanks for reminding me :)
Care to elaborate? I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here.
I make a .desktop file and shell script to move it to the right place. Double click the shell file. It opens a text editor. Search the right click menu; still no way. To the CLI we go; chmod +x, and launch if from the CLI. Then after adding the Desktop icon, I can launch it.
On windows, you just double click the identified-through-file-extension executable file. This, like most things in Linux, implies the UX is designed for workflows I don't use as a PC user. Likely servers?
If you're on KDE, you can right-click the start menu and add the application. Also, right-click menu should give you a run option.
Removing double-click to run an executable binary certainly sounds like something either Gnome or Ubuntu would do, but thankfully that's not the only option in town. In KDE I believe the same exact Windows workflow would just work.
`cargo build --release`
Good to know KDE doesn't do that!
$ cargo --version
cargo 1.86.0
$ cargo new hello-rs
Creating binary (application) `hello-rs` package
$ cd hello-rs && cargo build --release
Compiling hello-rs v0.1.0 (/Users/int19h/src/hello-rs)
Finished `release` profile [optimized] target(s) in 0.73s
$ ls -la target/release/hello-rs
-rwxr-xr-x@ 1 int19h staff 468608 May 20 20:16 target/release/hello-rs*
$ ./target/release/hello-rs
Hello, world!
That sounds like Wayland getting worse, but it's actually been slowly improving and it's pretty good now. Only took a decade+ to get there.
I think the infamous cascade of attention-deficit teenagers (CADT) has slowed down quite a bit in the desktop space because... well, most developers there are over 30 now.
KDE is much more cohesive, stable, and has significantly more features.
I don't think it's silly. Sure, it's a VM, but it's so nice that I barely reboot into Linux. You get the best of both worlds with WSL.
If I were to run an OS on a VM it's gonna be windows, not Linux
No ridiculous start menu spam; a sane, non-bloated operating system (imagine being able to update user space libraries without a reboot, due to being able to delete files that other processes still have opened!); being able to back up my data at the file level without relying on weird block-level imaging shenanigans and so much more.
How is inverting the host/guest relationship an improvement on that?
Windows at its core just does not seem like a serious operating system to me. Whenever there are two ways to do something, its developers seem to have picked the non-reasonable one compared to Unix – and doing that for decades adds up.
But yes, first impressions undoubtedly matter too.
These days I'm avoiding booting into Windows unless I really have no choice. The ridiculousness of it is simply limitless. I would open a folder with a bunch of files in it and the Explorer shows me a progress bar for nearly a minute. Why? What the heck is it doing? I just want to see the list of files, I'm not even doing anything crazy. Why the heck not a single other file navigator does that — not in Linux, not on Mac, darn — even the specialized apps built for Windows work fine, but the built-in thing just doesn't. What gives? I would close the window and re-open the exact same folder, not even three minutes later and it shows the progress bar again. "WTF? Can't you fucker just cache it? Da fuk you doing?"
Or I would install an app. And seconds after installing it I would try to search for it in the Start menu, and guess what? Windows instead opens Edge and searches the web for it. wat? Why the heck I can't remove that Edge BS once and for all? Nope, not really possible. wat?
Or like why can't I ever rebind Cmd+L? I can disable it but can't rebind it, there's just no way. Is it trying to operate my computer, or 'S' in 'OS' stands for "soul"?
Or for whatever reason it can't even get the time right. Every single time I boot into it, my clock time is wrong. I have to manually re-sync it. It just doesn't do it, even with the location enabled. Stupid ass bitch.
And don't even let me rant about those pesky updates.
I dunno, I just cannot not hate Windows anymore. Even when I need to boot in it "for just a few minutes", it always ends up taking more time for some absolute fiddlesticks made of bullcrap. Screw Windows! Especially the 11 one.
I want a OS, not an entertainment center, meaning I want to launch a program, organize my files, and connect to other computers. Anything that hinders those is bad. I moved from macOS for the same reason, as they are trying to make those difficult too.
Exactomundo! I'm a software developer, not a florist. I don't care about all those animations, transitions, dancing emojis, styled sliding notifications, windings and dingleberries. If I want to rebind a fucking key I should be able to. If I want to replace the entire desktop with a tiling manager of my choosing — that should be possible. And definitely, absolutely, in no way, should just about any kind of app, especially a web-browser, be shoved in my face. "Edge is not that bad", they would say. And would be completely missing the whole point.
Dual booting will do that because linux & windows treat the system clock differently. From what I recall one of them will set it directly to the local time and the other always sets it to UTC and then applies the offset.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/networking/...
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/System_time#UTC_in_Microsof...
That's exactly the type of Windows-ism I'm talking about. Two options (use UTC or the local time), and Windows chose to pick the nonsensical one.
nope, that's with a pristine, freshly installed Windows Pro instance.
This isn't even a corpo-sloptop with Qualys and Zscaler and crap running, Just a basic WIndows box I rarely boot. It's deeply offensive to me.
That's much more complicated and error prone than fork.
But also, no, it's not worse than fork. Fork literally breaks every threaded app.
So, basically yesterday, and not default like how it is with execve, and you can never know if the command you're trying to call implements it the same way or does a different escaping.
Care to explain how fork "breaks" threaded apps? You can't mix them for doing multiprocessing, but it's fine if you use one model or the other.
fork() breaks threaded apps by forking the state of all threads, including any locks (such as e.g. the global heap lock!) that any given thread might hold at that moment. In practice this means that you have to choose either fork or threads for your process. And this extends to libraries - if the library that you need happens to spawn a background thread for any reason, no more fork for you. On macOS this means that many system APIs are unusable. Nor is any of this hypothetical - it's a footgun that people run into regularly (just google for "fork deadlock") even in higher level languages such as Python.
> just google for "fork deadlock"
I did, results were completely unrelated to what you're talking about.
Anyway libraries spawning hidden threads… I bet they don't even bother to use reentrant functions? I mean… ok they are written by clueless developers. There's lots and lots of them, they exist on windows too. What's your point?
That's
It's like complaining that Unix is hard to use because I can't just drop a dll into a folder to hook functionality like I can on Windows. It's a radically different design following different ideologies and you can't magically expect everything to transfer over perfectly. If you want to do that on Linux land, you learn about LD_PRELOAD or hook system calls.
If you want to build powerful, interoperable modules that can pipe into each other and compose on the commandline, Powershell has existed since 2006. IMO, passing well formed objects from module to module is RADICALLY better than passing around text strings that you have to parse or mangle or fuck with if you want actual composibility. Powershell's equivalent of ls doesn't have to go looking at whether it is being called by an actual terminal or by an app Pipe for example in order to support weird quirks. Powershell support for Windows internals and functionality is also just radically better than mucking around in "everything is a file" pseudo folders that are a hacky way to represent important parts of the operating system, or calling IOCntrls.
I also think the way Windows OS handles scheduled tasks and operations is better than cron.
I also think Windows Event logging is better than something like dmesg, but that's preference.
Also EVERYTHING in Windows land is designed around remote administration. Both the scheduled tasks and Event Logging systems are transparently and magically functional from other machines if you have you AD setup right. Is there anything in Linux land like AD?
The problem is when you want to click a file on your file manager and you want it to open in the associated application. Because the file manager can only hope the associated application parses the escapes the same way it generates them. Otherwise it's file not found :)
I'm not going to bother to reply point by point since you completely missed the point in the first few words.
But there's also the thing where Microsoft stops supporting older machines, creating a massive pile of insecure boxes and normie-generated e-waste; and the thing where it dials home constantly; and the thing where they try and force their browser on you, and the expensive and predatory software ecosystem, and the insane bloat, and the requiring a Microsoft account just to use my own computer. Oh yeah, and I gotta pay for this crap?!
I went full Linux back when Windows 11 came out and will only use it if a job requires. Utterly disgusting software.
That said, a distaste for advertising goes beyond OCD. Advertisers frequently have questionable ethics, ranging from intruding upon people's privacy (in the many senses of the word) to manipulating people. It is simply something that many of us would rather do without.
That's... a very weird criticism to level at Windows, considering that the advice I've seen for Linux is to reboot if you update glibc (which is very much a user space library).
Having to constantly reboot my computer, or risk missing important security patches, was very annoying to me on Windows.
I've never had to reboot after updating glibc in years of using Linux, as far as I can remember.
This is absolutely not true for Linux kernel updating. While you won't be using the new kernel before rebooting, there's 0 risk in not rebooting, because there's exactly 1 version of the kernel running on the machine -- it's loaded into memory when your computer starts.
There's of course rare exceptions, like when a dynamically linked library you just installed depends on a minimum specific version of the Linux kernel you also just installed, but this is extremely rare in Linux land, as backwards compatibility of programs with older kernels is generally a given. "We do not break userspace"
Most distros leave the current running kernel and boot into the new one next time.
Some, like Arch, overwrite the kernel on an update, so modules can’t be loaded. It is a shock the first time you plug in a USB drive and nothing happens.
Running programs will continue to use the libc version that was on disk when they started. They won't even know glibc was upgraded. If something is broken before rebooting, it'll stay broken after.
For a trivial change to glibc, it won't cause issues. But there's a lot of shared libraries and lots of different kinds of changes in different kinds of libraries that can happen.
I still haven't nailed if it was due to a shared library update, but just the other day, after running upgrades I was unable to su or sudo / authenticate as a user until after rebooting.
Firefox on Linux did not really enjoy being updated while running, as far as I remember; Chrome was fine with it, but only since it does some extra work to bypass the problem via its "zygote process": https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/main/docs/l...
This is correct, but let's not pretend that linux is perfect. 99% of linux _for me_ is my terminal environment. WSL delivers on that _for me_.
I don't see any start menu spam because I rarely use it, when I do I type what I'm looking for before my eyes even move to look at that start menu.
oh, I can play destiny 2 and other games without shenanigans. Also don't need to figure out why Slack wants to open links in chromium, but discord in firefox (I have to deal with edge asking to be a default browser, but IMO it's less annoying).
Oh and multi-monitor with multiple DPI values works out of the box without looking up how to handle it in one of the frameworks this app uses.
That's a /s, right? When I start typing immediately after the windows button, the initial letters are lost, the results are bad either way, and most turn into just web suggestions rather than things named exactly like the input.
No, I rarely have issues with search in start menu.
Having Windows and Linux in the same desktop the way that WSL2 does obviously means that it does add a lot of value, but what you get in the box isn't exactly the same as the thing running natively. Rather than a strict superset or strict subset, it's a bit more like a Venn diagram of strengths.
I am surprised you had such problems with wsl2 graphics acceleration. That just worked for me, including CUDA accelerated workloads on the linux side.
You obviously don't. Maybe WSL is the best compromise for people who need both Windows and Linux.
But it's ridiculous to think that WSL is better than just Linux for people who don't need Windows at all. And that's kind of what the author of this thread seems to imply.
Where is the reverse WSL on Linux, where Windows is deeply embedded and you have all the Windows features in your hands?
You can use Wine/Crosseover, which is cool, but even now the number of software products it supports is tiny. Steam has a lot of games.
You can run a virtual machine with Windows on it. That is identical to what you can do on Windows with Linux.
WSL2-> is a virtual machine with unique tooling around it that makes it easier to use and integrates well with Windows.
Linux, on the other hand, barely supports Windows because the latter is closed, and not just closed, windows issues component updates which specifically check if they run in wine and stop running, being actively hostile to a potential Linux host.
The two are not equivalent, nobody in the Linux kernel team is actively sabotaging WSL, whereas Microsoft is actively sabotaging wine.
Do you have a link to where I can read more about this? My understanding is that Microsoft saw Wine as inconsequential to their business, even offloading the Mono runtime to them [1] when they dropped support for it.
I really don't see it happening any time in the next decade at least, though. While Windows might not be Microsoft's biggest focus any more it's still a huge income stream for them. They won't just give that up.
This approach has been fascinating so far, but yeah not "exciting" from "what crazy things can I do with Windows like put it in a toaster" side of things.
It would be great to see at least a little bit more "middle-out" from Windows Open Source efforts. A minimal build of the NT Kernel and some core Windows components has been "free as in beer" for a while for hobby projects with small screens if you really want to try a very minimal "toaster build" (there's some interesting RPi out there), but the path to commercialization is rough after that point and the "small screens" thing a bit of a weird line in the sand (though understandable given Microsoft's position of power on the desktop and sort of the tablet but not phone).
The NT Kernel is one of the most interesting microkernels left in active use [0], especially given how many processor architectures it has supported over decades and how many it still supports (even the ones that Windows isn't very commercially successful on today). It could be a wealth of power to research and academia if it were open source, even if Microsoft didn't open source any of the Windows Subsystems. It would be academically interesting to see what sort of cool/weird/strange Subsystems people would build if NT were open source. I suppose Microsoft still fears it would be commercially interesting, too.
[0] Some offense, I suppose to XNU here. Apple's kernel is often called a microkernel for its roots from the Mach kernel, but it has rebuilt some monoliths on top of that over the years (Wikipedia more kindly calls it a "hybrid kernel"), and Mach itself is still so Unix flavored. NT's "object oriented" approach is rather unique today, with its more VMS heritage, a deeply alternate path from POSIX/Unix/Linux(/BSD).
https://github.com/Fmstrat/winapps
Enjoy.
( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44025837 )
Seems to be based on very polished https://www.winehq.org , so no full VM, but maybe it's less 'heavy'?
WinApps runs the apps on real native Windows in a VM, but integrates their UI with the host OS.
WINE does this anyway, and it's an inherent property of WINE because there is no host OS. WINE does some fakery and indirection to make Unix filesystems appear on drive letters and things, but the app is still executing on the host OS, just via a translation layer.
Bottles runs the apps on top of WINE, but maintains separate WINE instances for each app and allows different onces to have different auxiliary tools, such as games-compatibility libraries, different versions of WINE, etc.
And because it bubbled up instantly, having read about it before, right here on HN, just ...uhhhmmm...hours ago.
FWIW, I tested Bottles on 2 machines here, one with Ubuntu 22.04 and one with Ubuntu 24.04.
I could not get any app to install in Bottles that wouldn't run under bare WINE. Apart from a friendly GUI -- although it looks awful on any other desktop, like most Gtk 4 apps -- I can't see any benefit to it, TBH.
It also doesn't appear to be the case even now. I searched for laptops available in my country that fit my budget and for each laptop searched "<laptop name> linux reddit" on google and filtered for results <1 year old. Each laptop's reports included some or other bug.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1hfqptw/linu...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1esntt3/leno...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1j3983j/hp_o...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1k1nsm8/audi...
The laptop with the best reported linux support seemed to be Thinkpad P14s but even there users reported tweaking some config to get fans to run silently and to make the speakers sound acceptable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1c81rw4/thinkpad_...
And yeah, it's best to wait a bit for new models, as support is sorted out, if the manufacturer doesn't support Linux itself. Or pick a manufacturer that sells laptops with Linux preinstalled. That makes the comparison with a laptop with Windows preinstalled fair.
I wasn't cherry-picking things. I literally searched for laptops available in my budget in my country and looked up what was the linux support like for those laptops as reported by people on reddit.
> Or pick a manufacturer that sells laptops with Linux preinstalled
I suppose you are talking about System76, Tuxedo etc. These manufacturers don't ship to my country. Even if I am able to get it shipped, how am I supposed to get warranty?
HP, Dell and Lenovo also sell Linux laptops on which Linux runs well.
I sympathize with the more limited availability and budget restrictions, but comparisons must be fair: compare a preinstalled Windows and a preinstalled linux, or at least a linux installed on hardware whose manufacturer bothered to work on Linux support.
When the manufacturer did their homework, Linux doesn't have the issues listed earlier. I've seen several laptops of these three brands work flawlessly on Linux and it's been like this for a decade.
I certainly choose my laptops with Linux on mind and I know just picking random models would probably lead me to little issues here and there, and I don't want to deal with this. Although I have installed Linux on random laptops for other people and fortunately haven't run into issues.
> it's been like this for a decade
Again, depends on the definition of "flawlessly". Afaik, support for hardware accelerated videoplayback on browsers was broken across the board only three years ago.
You first option is to buy a laptop with linux preinstalled from one of the many manufacturers that provides this. This requires no particular knowledge or time. Admittedly, this may lead you to more expensive options, entry grade laptops won't be an option.
Your second best bet is to read tech reviews. Admittedly this requires time and knowledge, but often enough people turn to their tech literate acquaintance for advice when they want to buy hardware.
> Afaik, support for hardware accelerated videoplayback on browsers was broken across the board only three years ago.
Yes indeed, that's something we didn't have. I agree it sucks. Now, all the OSes have their flaws that others don't have, and it's not like the videos didn't play, in practice it was an issue if you wanted to watch 4K videos for hours on battery. Playing regular videos worked, and you can always lower the quality if your situation doesn't allow the higher qualities. Often enough, you could also get the video and play it outside the browser. I know, not ideal, but also way less annoying that the laptop not suspending when you close the lid because of a glitch or something like this.
I have earnestly tried for >20 minutes trying to find such a laptop with any reputed manufacturer in my country (India) and come up empty-handed. Please suggest any that you can find. Even with Thinkpads, the only options are "Windows" or "No Operating System".
>Your second best bet is to read tech reviews.
Which tech reviews specifically point out linux support?
>Playing regular videos worked, and you can always lower the quality if your situation doesn't allow the higher qualities
The issue was never about whether playing the video worked. CPU video decoding uses much more energy and leads to your laptop running hot and draining battery life.
Can we at least agree to reduce the timeframe for things working flawlessly to "less than two years" instead of "a decade"? Yes you were able to go to the toilet downstairs but the toilet upstairs was definitely broken.
If buying with Linux is not an option at your place, you can always buy one of the many models found with this search without OS and install it yourself. Most thinkpads should be all right. Most elitebooks should do. Dell laptops sold with Ubuntu somewhere on the planet should do. I'm afraid I can't help nore, you'll have to do your search. Finding out which laptops are sold with Linux somewhere should not be rocket science. I don't buy laptops very often, I tend to keep my computers for a healthy amount of time, I can't say what it's like in India in 2025.
> Can we at least agree to reduce the timeframe for things working flawlessly to "less than two years" instead of "a decade"? Yes you were able to go to the toilet downstairs but the toilet upstairs was definitely broken.
No. I understand that it can be a dealbreaker for some, but that's a minor issue for me on laptops, even unplugged, and I do watch a lot of videos (for environmental reasons I tend to avoid watching videos in very high resolutions anyway, so software rendering is a bummer but not a blocker). There are still things that don't work, like Photoshop or MS Office, so you could say that it's still not flawless, still, that doesn't affect me.
Many results, including a US-specific page of the Lenovo website.
>If buying with Linux is not an option at your place, you can always buy one of the many models found with this search without OS and install it yourself.
>Finding out which laptops are sold with Linux somewhere should not be rocket science.
It should not. Given the amount of time I have already spent on trying to find one, it is fair to say that there are none easily available in India, at least in the consumer laptop market.
> I understand that it can be a dealbreaker for some, but that's a minor issue for me on laptops
Stockholm syndrome.
Are you failing to see that this US-specific page gives you a long list of models you can consider elsewhere?
> Stockholm syndrome.
Yeah, no. It just appears I have different needs than you and value different tradeoffs. It appears that the incredible comfort Linux brings me offsets the minor inconvenience software rendered browser video playback causes me.
I'm done in this discussion, we've been quite far away the kind of interesting discussions I come to HN for for a few comments now.
Stockholm Syndrome was bullshit made up on the spot to cover for the inability of the person making it up to defend their position with facts or logic, and...that fits most metaphorical uses quite well, too, though its not usually the message the metaphor is intended to communicate.
I have to onboard a lot of students to work on our research. The software is all linux (of course), and mostly distribution-agnostic. Can't be too old, that's it.
If a student comes with a random laptop, I install WSL on it, mostly ubuntu. apt install <curated list of packets>. Done. Linux laptops are OK too, I think, but so far only had one student with that. Mac OS used to be easy, but gets harder with every release, and every new OS version breaks something (mainly, CERN root) and people have to wait until it's fixed.
Fair enough. I think the best way to run Linux if you want to be sure you won't have tweak to stuff is to buy hardware with linux preinstalled. That your choice is more limited is another matter than "linux can't suspend".
Comparing a preinstalled Windows with a linux installed on random laptop whose manufacturer can't be bothered to support is a bit unfair.
Linux on a laptop where the manufacturer did their work runs well.
This isn't really the case, and hasn't been for some years now, especially since Valve started investing heavily in Wine. The quality of Wine these days is absolutely stunning, to the point that some software runs better under Wine than it does on Win11. Then there's the breadth of support which has has moved the experience from there being a slight chance of something running on Wine, to now it being surprising when something doesn't.
This is a list of software I run or have run and that I keep checking on every 6th month or so.
Most of them simply dont work, some have unstable limited features.
https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsof... https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/adobe-cr... https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/corel-pa... https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/corel-pa... https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/visual-s... https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsof... https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/affinity... https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/affinity... https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/affinity... https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/snagit13 https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/evernote...
I’ve been a software developer for 20 years and in _my_ opinion Windows is the best platform for professional software development. I only drop of to linux when need some of the excellent posix tools but my whole work ergonomy is based on Windows shortcuts and Visual Studio.
I’ve been forced to use Mac for the past 1.5y but would prefer not to.
Why would Windows be superior for me? Because that’s where the users are (for the work stuff I did before this latest gig). I started in real time graphics and then spent over a decade in CAD for AEC (developing components for various offerings including SketchUp). The most critical thing for the stuff I did was the need to develop on the same platform as users run the software - C++ is only theoretically platform independent.
Windows API:s are shit for sure for the most part.
But still, from this pov, WSL was and will be the best Linux for me as well.
YMMV.
WSL2 is really handy when you want to run other software though. For example, I use Solidworks, so I need to run windows. Forscan for Ford vehicles also has to run under Windows. Having WSL2 means that I can just have one laptop and run any software that I want.
I've successfully run it with WINE. Thought, my Forscan executable was 3 years old or so and that may have changed, but I doubt it.
That's always true, of course. But, compared to other options, relying on WINE increases the chances of it happening by an amount that someone could be forgiven for thinking isn't acceptable.
It's possible to see what Wine as a great product would look like. No offense to crossover because they do good work, but Valve's Steam Play shows what you can really do with Wine if you focus on delivering a product using Wine.
Steam offers two main things:
- It pins the version of Wine, providing a unified stable runtime. Apps don't just break with Wine updates, they're tested with specific Proton versions. You can manually override this and 9 times out of 10 it's totally fine. Often times it's better. But, if you want it to work 10 out of 10 times, you have to do what Valve does here.
- It manages the wineserver (the lifecycle of the running Wine instance) and wine prefix for you.
The latter is an interesting bit to me. I think desktop environments should in fact integrate with Wine. I think they should show a tray icon or something when a Wineserver is running and offer options like killing the wineserver or spawning task manager. (I actually experimented with a standalone program to do this.[1]) Wine processes should show up nested under a wineserver in system process views, with an option to go to the wineprefix, and there should be graphical tools to manage wine prefixes.
To be fair, some of that has existed forever in some forms, but it never really felt that great. I think to feel good, it needs to feel like it's all a part of the desktop system, like Wine can really integrate into GNOME and KDE as a first-class thing. Really it'd be nice if Wine could optionally expose a D-Bus interface to make it so that desktop environments could nicely integrate with it without needing to do very nasty things, but Wine really likes to just be as C/POSIX/XDG as possible so I have no idea if something like that would have a snowball's chance in hell of working either on the Wine or desktop environment side.
Still, it bums me out a bit.
One pet peeve of mine regarding using Wine on Linux is that EXE icons didn't work out of the box on Dolphin in NixOS; I found that the old EXE thumb creator in kio-extras was a bit gnarly and involved shelling out to an old weird C program that wasn't all that fast and parsing the command line output. NixOS was missing the runtime dependency, but I decided it'd be better to just write a new EXE parser to extract the icon, and thankfully KDE accepted this approach, so now KDE has its own PE/NE parser. Thumb creators are not sandboxed on KDE yet, so enable it at your own risk; it should be disabled by default but available if you have kio-extras installed. (Sidenote: I don't know anything about icons in OS/2 LX executables, but I think it'd be cool to make those work, too.) The next pet peeve I had is that over network shares, most EXE files I had wouldn't get icons... It's because of the file size limit for remote thumbnails. If you bump the limit up really high, you'll get EXE thumbnails, but at the cost of downloading every single EXE, every single time you browse a remote folder. Yes, no caching, due to another bug. The next KDE frameworks version fixes most of this: other people sorted out multiple PreviewJob issues with caching on remote files, and I finally merged an MR that makes KIO use kio-fuse when available to spawn thumb creators instead of always copying to a temporary file. With these improvements combined, not just EXE thumbnails, but also video thumbnails work great on remote shares provided you have kio-fuse running. There's still no mechanism to bypass the file size limit even if both the thumbcreator and kio-fuse remote can handle reading only a small portion of the file, but maybe some day. (This would require more work. Some kio slaves, like for example the mpt one, could support partially reading files but don't because it's complicated. Others can't but there's no way for a kio-fuse client to know that. Meanwhile thumb creators may sometimes be able to produce a thumbnail without reading most of the file and sometimes not, so it feels like you would need a way to bail out if it turns out you need to read a lot of data. Complicated...)
I could've left most of that detail out, but I want to keep the giant textwall. To me this little bit of polish actually matters. If you browse an SMB share on Linux you should see icons for the EXE files just like on Windows, without any need to configure anything. If you don't have that, then right from the very first double-click the first experience is a bad one. That sucks.
Linux has thousands of these papercuts everywhere and easily hundreds for Wine alone. They seem small, but when you try to fix them it's not actually that easy; you can make a quick hack, but what if we want to do things right, and make a robust integration? Not as easy. But if you don't do that work, you get where we're at today, where users just expect and somewhat tolerate mediocre user experience. I think we can do better, but it takes a lot more people doing some ultimately very boring groundwork. And the payoff is not something that feels amazing, it's the opposite: it's something boring, where the user never really has any hesitation because they already know it will work and never even think about the idea that it might not. Once you can get users into that mode you know you've done something right.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk. Next time you have a minor pet peeve on Linux, please try to file a bug. The maintainers may not care, and maybe there won't be anyone to work on it, and maybe it would be hard to coordinate a fix across multiple projects. But honestly, I think a huge component of the problem is literally complacency. Most of us Linux users have dealt with desktop Linux forever and don't even register the workarounds we do (anymore than Windows or Mac users, albeit they probably have a lot less of them.) To get to a better state, we've gotta confront those workarounds and attack them at the source.
[1]: https://github.com/jchv/winemon just an experiment though.
> To get to a better state, we've gotta confront those workarounds and attack them at the source.
To my eye, the biggest problem with Linux is that so few are willing to pony up for its support. From hardware to software.
Buy Linux computers and donate to the projects you use!
If you want a stable, repeatable way to wrangle a Windows tool: Wine is it. It's easy to deploy and repeat, requires no licenses, and has consistent behavior every time (unless you upgrade your Wine version or something). Great integration with Linux. No Windows Updates are going to come in and wreck your systems. No licensing, no IT issues, no active directory requirements, no forced reboots.
That all said, I haven't tried CodeWeavers in almost 10 years so it might have improved a lot.
If I were to do it with a Windows VM, I'd need to:
1. Create the VM image and figure out how to build/deploy it.
2. Sort out the Windows licensing concerns.
3. Figure out how to launch my tool (maybe put an SSH server into the VM).
4. Figure out how to share the filesystem (maybe rsync-on-SSH? Or an SMB fileshare?).
1. Install some pinned version of Wine.
2. Install my tool into Wine.
3. Run it directly.Forscan was developed independently by some Russian gentlemen, probably with plenty of reference to FDRS/IDS internals.
* Wine is surprisingly good these days for a lot of software. If you only have an app or two that need Windows it is probably worth trying Wine to see if it meets your needs.
* Similarly, if gaming is your thing Valve has made enormous strides in getting the majority of games to work flawlessly on Linux.
* If neither of the above are good enough, dual booting is nearly painless these days, with easy setup and fast boot times across both OSes. I have grub set to boot Linux by default but give me a few seconds to pick Windows instead if I need to do one of the few things that I actually use Windows for.
Which you go for really depends on your ratio of Linux to Windows usage and whether you regularly need to mix the two.
The possibilities seem endless and kinda confusing with Windows on ARM vs Rosetta and Wine, think there's some other options which use MacOS's included virtualization frameworks.
(Edit: just so you know, the UI is a bit weird, there is a bit of a learning curve. But the app behaves in a very sane manner, with every step the previous state is maintained and a new node is created. It takes time to get used to it, but you'll learn to appreciate it.
May your cloud have oriented normals, and your samples be uniformely distributed. Godspeed!)
Doesn't Linux as well?
I discovered over the weekend that only 1 monitor works over HDMI, DisplayPort not working, tried different drivers. Suspend takes a good 5 minutes, and on resume, the UI is either turn or things barely display.
I might buy a Windows license, especially if I can't get multi-screen to work.
Side note: our main use case is using cuda for image processing.
To be fair I stay away from NVIDIA to, I would probably run a separate headless box for those GPU workloads if I needed to
In my experience, it has zero issues. I use nvidia binary build. I have since 2006 through various nvidia GPU's.
Or use Suse, only distro that manages that well. Forget PopOS. Really, either binaries or Suse.
If someone else here is entrenched on Arch, do this: https://github.com/Frogging-Family/nvidia-all
If on Fedora, just use the binaries... trust me.
Hope this helps someone.
I know people here hate this, but if you want a good Linux experience, you need to start by picking the right hardware. Hardware support is far and away the number one issue with having a good Linux experience anymore. It's, unfortunately, very possible to even set out to pick good hardware and get burnt for various reasons, like people misrepresenting how well a given device works, or perhaps just simply very similar SKUs having vastly different hardware/support. Still, i'm not saying you have to buy something from a vendor like System76 that specifically caters to Linux. You could also choose a machine that just happens to have good Linux support by happenstance, or a vendor that explicitly supports Linux as an option. I'm running a Framework Laptop 16 and it works just fine, no sleep issues. As far as I know, the sole errata that exists for this laptop is... Panel Self Refresh is broken in the AMDGPU driver. It sorta works, but it's a bit buggy, causing occasional screen artifacts. NixOS with nixos-hardware disables it for me using the kernel cmdline argument amdgpu.dcdebugmask=0x10. That's about it. The fingerprint reader is a little fidgety, and Linux could do a better job at laptop audio out of the box, but generally speaking the hardware works day in and day out. It's not held together with ducktape.
I don't usually bother checking to see if a given motherboard will work under Linux before buying it, since desktop motherboards tend to be much better about actually running Linux well. For laptops, Arch wiki often has useful information for a given laptop. For example, here's the Arch wiki regarding the Framework 16:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Framework_Laptop_16
It's fair to blame Linux for the faults it actually has, which are definitely numerous. But let's be fair here, if you just pick a given random device, there is a good chance it will have some issues.
Unfortunately, most (almost all) hardware is Windows hardware. So far, System76 is the only one that I've had actually work.
Big fan of Linux, but saying that Linux works on system76 while they have a tiny sliver of the Linux market share seems like a nonstarter.
You can either get hardware that works or you can deal with breakage.
That's not to detract from the larger point here though. It's pretty funny that all of the replies in this thread identify different causes and suggest different fixes for the same symptom. Matches my experience learning Linux very well.
Sorry you have had such bad luck.
But saying it can vary largely by distro is overstating it by a lot. Mostly, distro issues are going to be based on how old their kernels are.
But definitely, modern hardware is much too complex to just slap Linux on Windows (and vice versa).
Yes, exactly! There are whole teams inside Dell etc. dealing with this. The term is "system integration." If you're doing this on your own, without support or chip unfo, you are going to (potentially) have a very, very bad time.
> This is not the fault of hardware makers.
It is if they ship Linux on their hardware.
This is why you have to buy a computer that was built for Linux, that ships with Linux, and with support that you can call.
I've tried this in the past but I was unable to get the debugger to work from within a VM.
Has this improved, or is there a trick, or are you just going without a debugger?
I’ve got an airgapped Toughbook that I use for the few Windows apps I really need to talk to strange hardware.
Lots of people bitch and moan about Windows problems that only exist because they buy the cheaper "Home" or whatever license and complain that Microsoft made different product decisions for average users than for people who have bought the explicitly labeled "power user" version.
Remember, the average computer user IS a hostile entity to Microsoft. They will delete System32 and then cry that Windows is so bad! They will turn off all antivirus software and bitch about Windows being insecure. They refuse to update and then get pwned and complain. They blame Microsoft for all the BSODs that were caused by Nvidia's drivers during the Vista era. They will follow a step by step procedure in some random forum from ten years ago that tells them to turn off their entire swap file despite running with lots of RAM and spinning rust and then bitch that Windows is slow.
Don't expect Microsoft to not deal with morons using their software. Buy the Pro versions if you don't want the version meant for morons.
I shouldn’t need to spend this much time and energy turning off AI rubbish, bypassing cloud features, or knobbling telemetry and ads because some shitbag at Microsoft decided this was a good way of getting a promotion.
My computer is supposed to work for me, not the other way around.
Right. One of the things a lot of people don't get is the extent to which multidisciplinary workflows require Windows. This is particularly true of web-centric software engineers who simply do not have any exposure to the rest of the engineering universe.
Years ago this was the reason we had to drop using Raspberry Pi's little embedded microcontroller. The company is Linux-centric to such an extent that they simply could not comprehend how telling someone "Just switch to Linux" is in a range between impossible and nonsensical. They were, effectively, asking people to upend their PLM process just for the sake of using a little $0.50 part. You would have to do things like store entire OS images and configurations just to be able to reconstruct and maintain a design iteration from a few years ago.
WSL2 is pretty good. We still haven't fully integrated this into PLM workflows though. That said, what we've done on our machines was to install a separate SSD for WSL2. With that in place, backing-up and maintaining Linux distributions or distributions created in support of a project is much, much easier. This, effectively, in some ways, isolates WSL2 distributions from Windows. I can clone that drive and move it from a Windows 10 machine to a Windows 11 machine and life is good.
For AI workflows with NVIDIA GPU's WSL2 is less than ideal. I don't know if things have changed in this domain since I last looked. Our conclusion from a while back was that, if you have to do AI with the usual toolchains, you need to be on a machine running Linux natively rather than a VM running under Windows. It would be fantastic if this changed and one could run AI workflows on WSL2 without CUDA and other issues. Like I said, I have not checked in probably a year, maybe things are better now?
EDIT: The other reality is that one can have a nice powerful Linux machine next to the Windows box and simply SSH into it to work. Most good IDE's these days support remote development as well. If you are doing something serious, this is probably the best setup. This is what we do.
You cannot claim with a straight face that Virtualbox is easier to use.
I think the two fairly deep integrations are window's ability to navigate WSL's filesystem and wslg's fairly good ability to serve up guis.
The filesystem navigation is something that AFAIK can't easily be replicated. wslg, however, is something that other VMs have and can do. It's a bit of a pain, but doable.
What makes WSL nice is the fact that it feels pretty close to being a native terminal that can launch native application.
I do wish that WSL1 was taken further. My biggest grip with WSL is the fact that it is a VM and thus takes a large memory footprint. It'd be nice if the WSL1 approach panned out and we instead had a nice clean compatibility wrapper over winapi for linux applications.
The filesystem navigation getting partially open sourced is one of the more interesting parts being open sourced per this announcement. The Plan9 file server that serves files from Windows into Linux is included in the new open source dump. (The Windows filesystem driver that runs a Plan9 client on the Windows side to get files from Linux is not in the open source expansion.)
It's still fascinating that the whole thing is Plan9-based, given the OS never really succeeded, but apparently its network file system is a really good inter-compatibility file communication layer between Linux and Windows.
> I do wish that WSL1 was taken further.
WSL1 survives and there's still a chance it will see more work eventually, as the tides shift. I think the biggest thing that blocked WSL1 from more success was lack of partners and user interest in Windows Subsystem for Android apps. That still remains a potentially good idea for Windows if it had been allowed "real" access to Google Play Services and App Store, rather than second rate copy of Amazon's copy of Google Play Services and Fire App Store. An actual Google partnership seems doomed given one of the reasons to get Windows Subsystem for Android competitive was fear of ChromeOS, but Google still loves to talk about how "Open" Android is despite the Google Play Services moat and that still sounds like something that a court with enough fortitude could challenge (even if it is probably unlikely to happen).
Sure, but I never claimed otherwise.
> You cannot claim with a straight face that Virtualbox is easier to use.
I also didn't claim that. I wasn't comparing WSL to other virtualization solutions.
WSL2 is cool. Linux doesn't have a tool like WSL2 that manages Linux virtual machines.
The catch 22 is that it doesn't need one. If you want to drop a shell in a virtual environment Linux can do that six ways through Sunday with no hardware VM in sight using the myriad of namespacing technologies available.
So while you don't have WSL2 on Linux, you don't need it. If you just want a ubuntu2204 shell or something, and you want it to magically work, you don't need a huge thing with tons of integration like WSL2. A standalone program can provide all of the functionality.
I have a feeling people might actually be legitimately skeptical. Let me prove this out. I am on NixOS, on a machine that does not have distrobox. It's not even installed, and I don't really have to install it since it's just a simple standalone program. I will do:
$ nix run nixpkgs#distrobox enter
$ nix run nixpkgs#distrobox enter
Error: no such container my-distrobox
Create it now, out of image registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:latest? [Y/n]: Y
Creating the container my-distrobox
Trying to pull registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:latest...
...
0f3de909e96d48bd294d138b1a525a6a22621f38cb775a991974313eda1a4119
Creating 'my-distrobox' using image registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:latest [ OK ]
Distrobox 'my-distrobox' successfully created.
To enter, run:
distrobox enter my-distrobox
Starting container... [ OK ]
Installing basic packages... [ OK ]
Setting up devpts mounts... [ OK ]
Setting up read-only mounts... [ OK ]
Setting up read-write mounts... [ OK ]
Setting up host's sockets integration... [ OK ]
Integrating host's themes, icons, fonts... [ OK ]
Setting up distrobox profile... [ OK ]
Setting up sudo... [ OK ]
Setting up user groups... [ OK ]
Setting up user's group list... [ OK ]
Setting up existing user... [ OK ]
Ensuring user's access... [ OK ]
Container Setup Complete!
[john@my-distrobox]~% sudo yum install glxgears
...
Complete!
[john@my-distrobox]~% glxgears
Running synchronized to the vertical refresh. The framerate should be
approximately the same as the monitor refresh rate.
302 frames in 5.0 seconds = 60.261 FPS
^C
That's just Fedora. WSL can run a lot of distros, including Ubuntu. Of course, you can do the same thing with Distrobox. Is it hard? Let's find out by using Ubuntu 22.04 instead, with console output omitted:
$ distrobox create --image ubuntu:22.04
...
$ distrobox enter ubuntu-22-04
...
$ sudo apt install openarena
...
$ /usr/games/openarena
On the other hand, even trying pretty hard (and using special drivers) I could never get hardware acceleration for OpenGL working inside of WSL2, so it could be worse.
That aside, everything works. More complex applications (e.g. file browsers, Krita, Blender) work just fine and you get your normal home folder mapped in just like you'd expect.
Except that Distrobox does not require a VM of course as the host kernel is Linux.
For many software engineers, a lot of our work is Linux, and it wouldn't be atypical to spend most of the time doing Linux development. I work on Linux and deploy to Linux, it's just a no-brainer to run Linux, too, aside from the fact that I simply loathe using modern Windows to begin with.
(Outside of that, frankly, most people period live inside of the web browser, Slack, Discord, and/or Steam, none of which are Windows-exclusive.)
My point isn't that Linux is better than Windows, it's that WSL2 isn't better than literally running Linux. If you need to do Linux things, it is worse than Linux at basically all of them.
For anything that is PvP multiplayer, this is very much not a given because of how pervasive kernel-level anti-cheat solutions are today.
> For anything that is PvP multiplayer, this is very much not a given because of how pervasive kernel-level anti-cheat solutions are today.
To be fair, though, you probably still have a better shot of being able to play the games you want to under Linux than macOS and that doesn't seem to be that bad of an issue for Mac users. (I mean, I'm sure many of them game on PC anyways, but even that considered macOS has greater marketshare than Linux, so that's a lot of people either able to deal with it or have two computers.)
I do indeed have two computers with a KVM setup largely for this reason, with a secondary Windows box relegated to gaming console role.
Still, the point is that you can make it work if you want to make it work. Off the top of my head:
- Two computers, completely separate. Maybe a desktop and a laptop.
- Two computers, one desk and a KVM like you suggest.
- Two computers, one desk. No proper KVM, just set up remote desktop and game streaming.
- (on Linux) KVM with GPU passthrough, or GPU passthrough with frame relay. One computer, one desk.
- Game streaming services, for more casual and occasional uses.
- Ordinary virtualization with emulated GPU. Not usually great for multimedia, but still.
- And of course, Steam Play/Heroic Launcher/WINE. Not as applicable on macOS, but I know CodeWeavers does a lot to keep macOS well-supported with Crossover. With the aforementioned limitations, of course.
Obviously two computers has a downside, managing two boxen is harder than one, and you will pay more for the privilege. On the other hand, it gives you "the real thing" whenever you need it. With some monitors having basic KVM functionality built-in, especially over USB-C, and a variety of mini PCs that have enough muscle to game, it's not really the least practical approach.
I suspect for a lot of us here there is a reasonable option if we really don't want to compromise on our choice of primary desktop OS.
IDK how many VMs you've used, but there has been a lot of work specifically with x86 to make VMs nearly as fast as native. If you interact with cloud services everything you do is likely on a VM.
Apparently Linux VMs on other people's computers is very much appreciated.
It's a feature of the NT-family of kernels where you can create many environments sharing the same underlying executive and HAL.
It's a quite interesting way to build an OS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT
If you have control over where you put your git repo, WSL2 will hit max speed. If you want it shared between OSes, WSL2 will be slower.
Turns out that it's easier to emulate a CPU than syscalls. The CPU churns a lot less, too, which means that once things start working things tend to keep working.
I don't think WSL2 supports CPU emulation. It might not even support (or at least rely on) driver emulation, though Hyper-V itself does.
I like Linux, and I use Linux as my daily desktop, but it's not because I think Linux or even UNIX is really that elegant. If I had to pick a favorite design it would be Windows NT for sure, even with all its warts. That said, the company behind Windows NT really likes to pile a lot of shit I hate on top of that pretty neat OS design, and now it's full of dubious practices. Automatic "malware submission" on by default, sending apps you download and compile yourself to Microsoft and even executing them in a VM. Forced updates with versions that expire. Unbelievable volumes of network traffic, exfiltrating untold amounts of data from your local machine to Microsoft. Ads and unwanted news all over the UI. Increasing insistence in using a Microsoft account. I could go on and on.
From a technical standpoint I do not think the Linux OS design is superior. I think Linux has some amazing tools and APIs. dmabufs are sweet. Namespaces and cgroups are cool. BPF and it's various integrations are borderline insane. But at its core, ... It's kinda ugly. These things don't all compose nicely and the kernel is an enormous hard-to-tame beast. Windows NT has its design warts too, all over, like the amount of involvement the kernel has in the GUI for historical reasons, and the enormous syscall surface area, and untold amounts of legacy cruft. But all in all, I think the core of what they made is really cool, the subsystems concept is super cool, and it is an OS design that has stood up well to time. I also think the PE format is better than ELF and that it is literally better for the capabilities it doesn't have w.r.t. symbols. Sure it's ugly, in part due to the COFF lineage, but it's functionally very well done IMO.
I feel the need to say this because I think I probably came off as a hater, and tbh I'm not even a hater of WSL2. It's not as cool as WSL1 and subsystems and pico processes, but it's very practical and the 9p bridge works way better than it has any right to.
Thanks for pointing this out.
The new WSL1 uses kernel call translation, like Wine in reverse and WSL2 runs a full blown Linux kernel in a Hyper-V VM. To my knowledge neither of these share anything with the aforementioned POSIX subsystem.
But having Windows tightly integrated when needed is nice.
If only I could run replace the Windows shell with a Linux DE...
It is... I'm working these days on bringing a legacy windows only application to the 21st century.
We are throwing a WSL container behind it and relying on the huge ecosystem of server software available for Linux to add functionality.
Yes that stuff could run directly on windows, but you'd be a lot more limited in what's supported. Even for some restricted values of supported. And you'd have to reinvent the wheel for a few parts.
So, for me Windows + WSL is more productive than just using Linux. The UI is still better on Windows(basic utilities like File Explorer and Config Management is better on Windows). No Remoting Software beats RDP. When I remote to a Windows workstation through RDP, I can't tell the difference. VNC is always janky. Of course there is Word/Excel/Illustrator which is simply not available on Linux
Any recent distro running Gnome or KDE has built-in support for connecting and hosting an RDP session. This used to be a pain point, you don't need to use VNC anymore.
It's actually worse on windows since you need to pony up for a pro license to get RDP hosting support...
5 years ago, we would be comparing old GNOME 3 or KDE Plasma 5 on X11 and Windows 10. I would be forced to agree. The Windows UI was better in many ways at that point.
Today we have KDE Plasma 6.3 on Wayland and Windows 11. This is an entirely different ball game. It's hard to explain. Wayland feels like it has taken an eternity to lift off, like well over a decade, but now things change dramatically on the scale of months. A few months ago HDR basically didn't work anywhere. Right now it's right in front of me and it works great. You can configure color profiles, SDR applications don't break ever, and you even get emulated brightness. Display scaling? Multiple monitors with different scale factors? What about one monitor at 150% and another at 175% scale factor? What about seamlessly dragging windows between displays with different scale factors? Yes, Yes, Yes, and Yes. No `xrandr` commands. You configure it in the GUI. I am dead serious.
File Explorer? That's the application that has two context menus, right? I think at this point Windows users might actually be better off installing KDE's Dolphin file manager in Windows for the sake of their own productivity. If I had the option to use Windows File Explorer on KDE I would impolitely decline. I have not encountered any advertising built into my file explorer. I do not have an annoying OneDrive item in the menu on the left. I have a file tree, a list of Places, and some remote file shares. When I right click it does not freeze, instead it tends to show the context menu right away. And no, I'm not impressed by Tabs and Dark Mode, because we've had that on Linux file managers for so long that some people reading this were probably born after it was already supported.
Windows still has the edge in some areas, but it just isn't what it used to be. The Linux UI is no longer a toy.
> When I remote to a Windows workstation through RDP, I can't tell the difference. VNC is always janky.
I don't really blame you if you don't believe me, but I, just now, went into System Settings, went to the Remote Desktop setting, and clicked a toggle box, at which point an RDP server spawned. Yes, RDP, not VNC, not something else. I just logged into it using Reminna.
Not everything on Linux is seamless and simple like this, but in this case it really is. I'm not omitting a bunch of confusing troubleshooting steps here, you really can do this on a modern Linux setup, with your mouse cursor. Only one hand required.
> Of course there is Word/Excel/Illustrator which is simply not available on Linux
True, but if you want to use Linux and you're held back by needing some specific software, maybe it's not the end of the world. You have many options today. You can install VirtualBox and run your spreadsheets in there. You can use Office 365 in a browser. You can run Crossover[1] and emulate it. You can use an office alternative, like possibly WPS Office. You can dual boot. You can go the crazy route and set up a KVM GPU passthrough virtual machine, for actually native performance without needing to reboot.
The point I'm making here is not "Look, Linux is better now! Everyone go use it and get disappointed ASAP!" If you are happy with Windows, there's literally no point in going and setting yourself up for disappointment. Most people who use Linux do so because they are very much not happy with Windows. I'm sure you can tell that I am not. However, in trying to temper the unending optimism of Linux nerds, sometimes people go too far the other way and represent Linux as being in far worse of a state than it actually is. It really isn't that bad.
The worst thing about modern Linux is, IMO, getting it to work well on your hardware. Once you have that part figured out, I think modern Linux is a pretty good experience, and I highly recommend people give it a shot if they're curious. I think Bazzite is a really nice distro to throw on a random spare computer just to see what modern Linux is actually capable of. It's not the absolute most cutting edge, but it gives you a nice blend of fairly up-to-date software and a fairly modern RPM ostree base system for better stability and robustness, and it's pretty user-friendly. And if you don't like it, you can easily get a full refund!
[1]: https://www.codeweavers.com/compatibility/crossover/microsof...
Or ONLYOFFICE, which is FOSS (and what I use personally). Or LibreOffice (also free/libre software, of course). I don’t miss MS Office one bit, the compatibility is nothing short of excellent nowadays, and the speed and UX both surpass it.
There are specialized software packages that are Windows-only, of course, but at least office programs ain’t it.
I mean this is basically heresy now.
most code is virtualised, or sandboxed, or in a VM, or a docker container, or several of the above at the same time.
Full hardware support is still not a given, and Windows emulation is still need for so many cases (e.g. games, specialized software etc).
Until I can choose any machine based on form factor and specs alone and just run Linux on it, WSL will the best version of Linux it can run.
If you're not buying your hardware from a vendor you can call and get support with Linux from, you're going to have a hard time.
Fingerprint sensors and IR login cameras that are pre-installed on many laptops, and have Windows-only drivers.
As an end-user (yes, I'm an engineer too, but from the perspective of the OS and driver developers I am an end-user) I don't care who is in charge of getting the device to work on an OS—I only care that it works or not. And these devices don't, on Linux. So, they are broken.
What may hap be your workload? The only thing that aren't working on Linux day 1 are GPU's, and it's mostly because kernel/distro timings (we haven't had a GPU release without support for mainline kernel in years).
The absolute best built laptops on the market right now don't come with Linux support...
This is totally laptop vendors' fault, but that doesn't change the fact of the matter.
PS: it would be fine if there was a few good options in all categories. Right now I see nothing comparable to an Asus Z13 but with first class Linux support for instance.
I was holding hopes for the Framework 12" but they cheaped on the screen to target the student market, with no upgrade option at this point.
I use Linux as my primary OS, and while Proton/Steam are pretty good now I'm still rebooting into (unactivated) Windows for some games. It's fine. It's also the only thing I use Windows for.
On an unrelated note, I'm frankly confused about who wants Apple's janky OS, because I've been forced to use it for work and it is very annoying.
I bought an iphone and then got angry it didn't run android
Just use Linux.
I use WSL extensively, with lots of languages, and I’ve never had anything do that.
It’s running in a VM, so that would be some kind of weird VM escape?
[interop]
appendWindowsPath=false
section in /etc/wsl.conf.
Then everything will go flawlessly.
Sounds a lot like a picnic problem but you didn’t give nearly enough details.
One of the most common issues is calling a windows executable from within wsl… it’s a “convenience” feature that takes about 2 seconds to disable in the wsl config but causes these kinds of weird bugs
Exactly.
I actually just tried WINE for the FIRST time (surprisingly, I have been out of the Windows world for so long)
And as long as I installed the binaries from their repo, not Debian 12, it worked very well
Wine is an impressive project too. It's not a VM, which has upsides and downsides, but I was able to run GCC-TDM, Python 3, and git bash in it!
So for me, updates practically doesn't affect my workflow at all.
My setup/config has NOTHING special usually - got laptop(s), start bundled Windows (10/11) Pro, run "reset this PC" to ensure fresh like install, use for several years. No magical steps involved or whatever "bloatware cleanup" people do.
I use linux. I don't need WSL at all. Not at work nor at home.
So you praise WSL because you use Windows as your main system? Than yes its great. It definitly makes the Windows experience a lot better.
OpenSSH for Windows was also a game changer. Honestly, i have no clue why Microsoft needed so long for that.
Iterating on improvements and polishing on Screens and Design that they haven't touched in the past 30 years. Improving on ARM support etc. And STOP adding Ads on the OS.
And the Surface Laptop continues to push Hardware quality forward. From Speaker, Touchpad, Screen, Motherboard etc.
I honestly think Microsoft could win back some mind share from Apple if they:
* Put out a version of windows without all the crap. Call it Dev edition or something and turn off or down the telemetry, preinstalled stuff, ads, and Copilot. * Put some effort into silicon to get us hardware with no compromises like the Macbooks
I'm on Mac now, and I jump back and forth between Mac laptop and a Linux desktop. I actually prefer Windows + WSL, but ideologically I can't use it. It has potential - PowerToys is fantastic, WSL is great, I actually like PowerShell as a scripting language and the entire new PC set up can now be done with PowerShell + Winget DSC. But, I just can't tolerate the user hostile behavior from Microsoft, nor the stop the world updates that take entirely too long. They should probably do what macOS and Silverblue, etc. do and move to an immutable/read-only base and deploy image based updates instead of whatever janky patching they do now.
Plus, I can't get a laptop that's on par with my M4 Pro. The Surface Laptop 7 (the arm one) comes close, but still not good enough.
That said I'd pay for a dev edition as you described it, that would be fantastic.
I get customers and most people don't know about it but it's kind of ridiculous that techy people in a tech forum don't know how to do it.
Why? HN has traditionally always largely been a macOS and Linux crowd. Why do we have to care about fixing an OS that is broken out of the box (that most of us don't use anyway)?
Far too many Linux users, especially, make fun of Windows and if you dig a bit you see that most of their complaints are things that are solved with 5 minutes of googling. Some complaints are philosophical, and those I agree with, but even in that case, I'd be curious how consistent they are with their philosophy when for example Linux desktop environments due weird things.
Summarizing a bit: Linux users with years or decades of experience of tinkering as sysadmins with Linux frequently make junior-level user complaints about Windows usage, frequently based on outdated information about it.
I say this who has been using both Linux and Windows for a few decades now and has a fairly decent level of sysadmin skills on both.
as far as MS are concerned, that crap is their business.
Or, possibly, that crap is the multitude of little software empires build by the management layer now in control..
This is the only reason I have not requested a windows laptop from my company. WSL is better for docker development in basically every way than a mac can be (disclaimer: haven't tried orbstack yet, heard good things, but my base assumption is it can't be better than WSL2) except it is literally impossible to get hardware as good as the M3 or M4 for any other OS than macOS.
The MacBook Air M4 supports two external displays now (with the lid open):
https://support.apple.com/guide/macbook-air/use-an-external-...
My SOs MacBook Air can only do one external monitor, even though it has the same specs as her work Pro.
The MacBook Pro with the non-Pro/Max chip (i.e. MacBook Pro M3) has the same limitations as the corresponding MacBook Air (i.e. MacBook Air M3).
Funny how that was the other way around just a few years ago. Macs had inferior hardware, but they were supposed to have better software. At least that's what the Mac users claimed.
No. This is just you repeating marketing.
No Nvidia chip = B tier at best.
I have a $700 Asus with a 3060 that is better. Go ahead and scale up to a $2000 computer with an Nvidia chip and its so obviously better, there is nothing to debate.
No one cares about performance per watt, its like someone ran a 5k race, came in 3rd and said "Well at least I burned fewer calories than the winner!"
Not only that, but being able to run very intensive work (Pro Audio, Development...) seamlessly is an absolute pleasure.
Its screen is one of the best screens out there.
The trackpad (and some keyboards) are an absolute pleasure.
The robustness of the laptop is amazing.
I don't care about the marketing of Apple, I don't buy anything new they launch, and I condemn all of their obscure pricing techniques for the tech they sell. But my M1 is rocking like the first day, after four years of daily use. That's something my Windows laptops have never delivered to me.
Apple has done a lot of things wrong, and I will not buy another Apple laptop in the future, but I don't want Nvidia on a Laptop, I want it to be portable, powerful and durable.
That is changing now, and it's amazing. I want my laptop to be mine, and to be able to install any OS I like. New laptops with arm64 and Intel Lake cpus are promissing, but we're not there yet, at least not that I have experienced.
Each to their own for sure, and for you, the nvidia requisite is important. For me it's not about brands, but usability for my work and hobbies.
Also, is it powerful enough to have it run a development environnent (docker compose/k3s with db & cachd, intellij/vscode, etc) without having issues?
Genuine questions, I am no fanboy of anything
Instead of slack I normally use localslackirc, so that alone probably saves a ton of battery rather than using the electron one.
When I compile a lot I still manage to get half a day on battery. If I want to save power I just ssh to a server and do everything there :)
edit: that model has also hotswap battery so if you really really need more battery life you can buy a spare.
But why?
I mean I can see why some want that. But why would I or most or devs in general want that? I very rarely code on laptop, and almost never when not at a desk.
But it's just not that big a deal. Sure, I COULD spend a day working without power, but it's 2025 and USB-C power delivery is a mature spec. My desk has power. My work desk has power. My living room has power. My bedroom has power. The coffee shop has power. Airplanes have power. My fucking CAR has power.
Where are you working that you need a full 6 hours of hard working power without occasional access to a power outlet and a battery bank won't meet your needs?
I would be satisfied with 2 hours of hard working battery, which is what Ryzen powered Windows laptops deliver. My girlfriend uses her $800 mid range Ryzen laptop to play games and other power hungry things off charger every single day. It's also what work laptops other than Macs have always provided. Sure, my Thinkpad from 2012 needed a giant tumor of a battery to provide that, but it was always an available option, and you could swap it out for a tiny battery if you really wanted to slim it down.
Never an option in apple land. Battery not good enough? Fuck you, too bad.
Nvidia chip = 45 minutes of battery life
1. Turning them on/off ala bumblebee isn't a solved problem. It's buggy, especially on not-windows. Even on windows, it's going to be buggy especially in regards to sleep.
2. You obviously lose the advantage of a nvidia GPU that way. If you have to always have it off to get decent battery life, which you do, then it's kind of moot. If you turn it on for your 30 minute workload then there goes 70% of your battery.
In reality, he probably just want to play CS2 :D
https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide
LTSC is a version like that
https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/windows-11/what...
But the increasing market share of Macs and even Linux these days plus the ever increasing of OSS initiatives from Microsoft points out that Microsoft knows a lot fewer of their users are as captive as they were in the 90's, for example.
In other words, specifically those of a former Microsoft CEO (who understood the problem but not the solution):
DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS ... YES
- "creatives" have always been a core Apple market and they've grown, so that market has grown; plus, since Windows is globally less dominant, a lot of "Photoshop/video editing software/3D modeling + Windows" folks are now on Macs
- gamers now have Proton + Steam on Linux + SteamOS so quite a few more of them are on Linux now, especially since Valve is pushing in this direction to keep Microsoft honest
- large number of regular office workers have iPhones, especially as you move towards the top of the hierarchy, and are far more tempted than they would have been in the past to try or use a Mac
- in many schools there are now Chromebooks instead of Windows laptops; this is primarily a US thing, but it does pop up in some other places, too
Windows is sort of stable but probably still bleeding users slowly.
The biggest difference between OSX and Windows is, Apple adds (some say steal) functionality from competition, and open source. They make it neat. On windows to have something working, you need a WezTerm, Everything for search, Windhawk for a vertical taskbar on the right, Powertoys for an app starter, Folder Size for disc management etc. If you spend a lot of time, Win11 can be ok to work with.
If Powerpoint and Affinity would work on Linux, I'd use Linux though.
Huh? Windows supports vertical taskbar.
Each OS is going to have extension applications to improve on the OOTB experience. This is an invalid argument to choosing one over the other.
Interesting enough, that beyond release upgrades, happening may be once a year, all or may be 99% of updates took ~5 minutes of interruption of me, including needed reboot. I really wonder how others manage to have "entirely too long" updates.
I've not being using Debian setups lately, but on Ubuntu, alert on need-to-reboot packages after daily unattended upgrades run is happening almost every month. I'm kinda sure that Debian is on similar schedule here.
I find it dismaying that people on Hacker News willingly submit to incredibly user-hostile behavior from Microsoft and call it "the best of both worlds". Presumably a nontrivial proportion here are building the next generation of software products - and if we don't even respect ourselves, how likely is it that we will respect our users?
And I find it funny that the crowd that spends whole days implementing user-hostile features in yet another SaaS crapware has so much to say about Microsoft's bad behavior.
I honestly can't imagine anyone preferring all that. </rant>
I've often said that if Microsoft had just iterated on Windows 2000 forever I'd probably still be a full-time Windows user. If Microsoft had maintained an LTSC-like Windows variant that was installable from the normal retail installation media and with a normal retail product key (at the very least Pro, but ideally Home), that also likely would have kept me on Windows full-time instead of switching to Linux as my daily driver.
When I used to have free time it was great for games too
I on the other hand cannot get an affordable Mac that has the same GPU, disk space and memory size as my workstation class laptop.
At least the nags in Windows look like modern web-based UI (so far that ‘use Electron’ seems to be the post-Win 8 answer to ‘how to make Windows apps’) in contrast to MacOS which drove my wife crazy with nag dialogs that look like a 1999 refresh of what modal dialogs looked like on the classic Mac in 1984.
I have since moved to macbooks for the hardware, but until not too long ago WSL was my linux "distro" of choice because I didn't want to spend time configuring my computer to make basic things work like suspend/wake on lid down/up, battery life, hardware acceleration for video playback on the browser, display scaling on external monitor and so on.
> solved a while ago
Can not be the case because I was facing these issues less than a couple of years ago.
I was responding to the "Stockholm syndrome" comment specifically because there are a number of hardware and software problems (e.g. https://jayfax.neocities.org/mediocrity/gnome-has-no-thumbna...) with using linux as a desktop operating system that linux users have to find their way around, so I found the comment rather full of irony.
PS: I already know that the file-picker issue has been fixed. That does not take away from the fact that it was in fact broken for decades. It is only meant as an example.
Just like with Mac and Windows, you choose the supported hardware, and everything is flawless.
And it's not clear what the Linux ones are. Like, our dept ordered officially Linux-supported Thinkpads for whoever wanted them, and turns out they still have unsolved Bluetooth audio problems. Those people use wired headphones now.
Just like Mac, though, the key is to buy from a vendor that ships hardware designed for Linux, with Linux preinstalled, and with support for Linux.
Unlike, Mac, though, Linux won't block you from installing it on Windows hardware, so it's not as obvious that you're on your own.
People whose main environment is Linux intentionally buy hardware that works flawlessly with Linux.
People who try Linux occasionally do it on whatever hardware they have, which still almost always works with Linux, but there are occasional issues with sketchy Windows-only hardware or insufficiently tested firmware or flaky wifi cards, and that is enough for there to be valid anecdotes in any given comments section with several people saying they tried it and it isn't perfect. Because "perfect" is a very high bar.
There is also the quiet part to this. People who religiously use Linux and think that it is the best OS that can ever be, don't realize how many little optimizations go into a consumer OS. They use outdated hardware. They use the lower end models of the peripherals (people still recommend 96 DPI screens just for this). They use limited capabilities of that hardware. They don't rely on deeply interactive user interfaces.
The older machines I've owned since around 2014 and I remember the hardware support was fairly competent but far from perfect and graphics and multimidia performance was mediocre at best and ZERO support for accelerated video encode/decoder. Fast forward to around the last year or two and linux on both of these machines is screaming fast (within those machines capabilities...), graphics and multimidia is as good as you could get on windows (thanks wayland and pipewire!) and acc. video decode/encode works great (still have to do the rigmarole in fedora, but it's ootb in manjaro).
Both the 2014 machine and the 2025 sport a 4k display @120hz (no frame drops!) with no issues using 200% scaling for hi-dpi usage. Pretty much all of the apps are hi-dpi aware, with the exception of a few running on WINE which until a few months wasn't HI-DPI aware. (this feature is experimental and among many other improvements in WINE may take another year to mature and be 100% stable)
I got a Thinkpad to just run this setup under Linux 2020. AMD didn't solve the problem in their driver until 2022 when I was able to drive all of them at 60 Hz.
Fractional scaling has been a problem across all platforms, but I agree Linux has taken its time to get it right and still have some gotchas. You should try to avoid it in any platform honestly, you can get sometimes get blurry apps even in Windows. AFAIK KDE is the first to get it right in this complex situations where you mix multiple monitors with different fractional scaling ratios and have legacy apps to boot. GNOME has had experimental fractional scaling for a while but it's still hidden behind a flag.
It also helps to not have nVidia trash on your old (and sometimes even new) computers if you want longevity. My old machines have intel and AMD graphics with full support from current kernel and mesa.
Hm, recently I bought a random "gamer PC" for the beefier GPU (mainly to experiment with local LLMs), installed Linux on it, and everything just worked out of the box. I remember having tons of problems back in 2009 when I first tried Ubuntu, though. I have dual boot, just today I ran a few benchmarks with Qwen3. On Windows, token generation is 15% slower. Whenever I have to boot into Windows (mainly to let the kid play Roblox), everything feels about 30% slower and clunkier.
At work, we use Linux too - Dell laptops. The main irritating problem has been that on Linux, Dell's Dock Stations are often buggy with dual monitors (when switching, the screen will just freeze). The rest works flawlessly for me. It wasn't that long ago when my Windows (before I migrated to Linux) had BSODs every other day...
Anecdotes are like that.
It also doesn't appear to be the case even now. I searched for laptops available in my country that fit my budget and for each laptop searched "<laptop name> linux reddit" on google and filtered for results <1 year old. Each laptop's reports included some or other bug.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1hfqptw/linu...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1esntt3/leno...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1j3983j/hp_o...
https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxhardware/comments/1k1nsm8/audi...
The laptop with the best reported linux support seemed to be Thinkpad P14s but even there users reported tweaking some config to get fans to run silently and to make the speakers sound acceptable.
https://www.reddit.com/r/thinkpad/comments/1c81rw4/thinkpad_...
Which Linux? Each distro is essentially a different operating system.
Modern means systemd, pipewire, Wayland, Gnome, an up to date kernel, etc... So the current Ubuntu and Fedora releases.
I've had 100% working laptops for 15 years now. Because I always run the newest Ubuntu.
Maybe I was too positive on Fedora (I was going by it's reputation, I use Ubuntu for work). Ubuntu is solid.
Link 1: screen only updating every 2 seconds, visual glitches. Link 2: brightness reset to full on screen unlock, fans turning on when charging. Link 3: bluetooth troubles, speakers cant be muted if headphone jack is on mute. Link 4: audio quality and low volume, wifi not coming back after sleeping. Link 5: fans being too loud, poor sound quality.
Either your Stockholm syndrome is affecting your reading comprehension or you just take bugs like these as part of the normal "working perfectly" linux experience.
Previous laptops (all ThinkPads) used to be able to get everything all to work (debian) but it did take effort and finding the correct resources. Unfortunately all the old documentation about this stuff is pre-systemd and UFI and it's not exactly straightforward anymore.
Note that NVIDIA drivers didn't get better since they are more open source now. They are not. GPUs are now entire independent computers with their own little operating system. Some significant parts of the driver now runs under that computer.
Yes the manufacturers may allocate some people to deal with it and the corrosiveness of the kernel community. But why? Intel and AMD uses that as a marketing and sales stragtegy. If the hardware manufacturer is the best one there is, where is the profit for supporting Linux? Even Thinkpads don't have 100% support of all the little sensors and PMICs.
HiDPI issue hasn't been solved yet completely. Bluetooth is still quite unreliable. MIPI support should be the best due to the number of devices, until you realize everybody did their own shitty external driver and there are no common good drivers for MIPI cameras so your webcam doesn't work. USB stack is still dodgy. Microsoft in 90s had a cart of random hardware populating the USB tree completely and they just fucked with the NT kernel plugging and unplugging until it didn't break anymore for love's sake. Who did that level of testing with Linux?
Except for Apple (and maybe Framework), all laptops are designed by contract original design manufacturers (ODMs) Taiwan, Korea and China. Your usual Linux laptop OEMs like System76 and Tuxedo just buy better combinations of the whitelabel stuff. They are inferior to actual big OEMs designs which contain more sophisticated sensors and power management and extra UEFI features. This includes business laptops Dell Latitudes, HP Elitebooks and Lenovo Thinkpads. None of those manufacturers actually do Linux-based driver development. All the device development, manufacturing and testing is done under Windows and only for Windows. The laptops are booted with Windows to do functional tests at factory not Linux.
Linux is an afterthought for all OEMs. After Windows parts are released and tested, the kernel changes to Linux is added. They are rudimentary support which doesn't include 100% of the featureset. Many drivers today have quite proprietary user-space side. You'll get none of that from any laptop manufacturer. You may say you don't care about those and you're okay with 10 - 20% power loss. That's not the definition of out-of-the box for me.
That is not what that means. At all.
> Your usual Linux laptop OEMs like System76 and Tuxedo just buy better combinations of the whitelabel stuff.
This is not what System76 do, actually.
> Many drivers today have quite proprietary user-space side. You'll get none of that from any laptop manufacturer.
Not with System76
> You may say you don't care about those and you're okay with 10 - 20% power loss.
I'm not. That's why I stopped buying Windows hardware and started buying Linux hardware!
I'd at least try Linux cause I abhor Microsoft, but idk if it'd work out.
Indeed, it does. Having stable system and not dealing with Linux on Desktop, clear tradoffs (like "just add another 16gb RAM stick in laptop/desktop and you are golden") is great for peace of mind.
The average uptimes on my laptops (note for plural) is ~3 weeks, until next Windows Update to be applied. I don't have nostalgia on the days of using Linux on desktop (~2003 student times, ~2008 giving it one more try, ~2015 as required by dayjob)
Of course it adds up that I can tell people around me (who are not tech guys often, but smart enough to know basic concepts and be able to run bash scripts provided to them) - "yep, machine with 32GB+ of RAM will work fine, choose any you like" - and it works.
The suspend/hibernate on laptops isn't that great, but tbh I never had great results on windows either (macos is decent though).
And uptimes for desktop systems are similarly just limited by whenever there's a kernel update.
There's also debootstrap which is useful for this technique, not sure if it also works on Ubuntu.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/connect-usb
I regularly run ADB through WSL2 using this.
I love WSL because it lets me have the best of Windows and Linux.
In fact, I'm a little annoyed that I can't get a comparably smooth experience on my MacBook without spinning up a full QEMU VM. I know it's a bit hypocritical since, like most people, I run WSL2 (which is container/VM-based), not WSL1 (the original magic syscall translation vision).
Does anyone know why there's no lightweight solution on macOS - something like LXC plus a filesystem gadget - that would let me run stuff like "apt-get install chromium"?
Actually, the OG "magic syscall translation" is Cygwin[0], which dates back to 1995[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cygwin
Edit: Fixed prose.
But Qemu (via UTM) starts up pretty quickly for me. No slower than WSL2 under Windows. My only issue is that it seems to drain power even when idle.
>Native performance Tart is using Apple’s native Virtualization.Framework that was developed along with architecting the first M1 chip. This seamless integration between hardware and software ensures smooth performance without any drawbacks.
I use WSL2 to handle Linux (and Windows cross-) compilation regularly, along with running a number of native tools that are specific to Linux.
I've never had any issues with that, even to the point that I've been able to run MAME natively from Linux and have it show up like any other windowed app.
Another, smaller, gripe is networking. Because of how WSL is networked, I've run into edge-case issues with connecting to networked applications running in WSL from Windows.
https://www.amazingcto.com/upgrading-wsl-with-zsh-and-comman...
This is not often discussed, so it took me a lot of digging a couple of years ago, but I'm still surprised this is never discussed as a consequence / side effect / downside of wsl2. There are performance impacts to turning on hyper V, which may or may not be relevant to user (e.g. If this is also their gaming machine etc:)
Or on a macOS Desktop. Bonus: doing so on either platform doesn't also mean your host OS is running under a hypervisor, as it does with WSL2.
Bigger bonus: you don't have to run fucking Windows.
Why do you think, technologically, this is some form of "bonus"?
You can run multiple Linux distributions in chroots or containers, such as docker containers. I have showed people how to build packages for Ubuntu 22.04 on Ubuntu 20.04 for example.
For this part, I just create systemd-nspawn containers.
Last time I wanted to test something in a very old version of WebKit, creating a Debian Jessie container takes a few minutes. Things run at native speed.
... but WSL is an excellent piece of work. It's really easy to deploy apps on. Frankly, it can be easier to a deployment there than on a Linux or macOS system, for example the reasons detailed above.
It might be due to my corpo's particular setup etc. but for me 95% of the value of WSL would be the ability to run it on "corporate" Windows boxes. Alas.
For a person who will not invest the time to learn, e.g., how to avoid or minimise dependencies, indeed something like Windows with WSL may appear "more powerful".
The point of this comment is that "power" comes from learning and know-how as much as if not more than simply from choice of operating system. That said, some choices may ultimately spell the difference between limitations or possibilities.
I have been using it since the beginning of WSL 1 with a very terminal heavy set up but it has some issues.
For example WSLg's clipboard sharing is buggy compared to VcXsrv. It doesn't handle pasting into Linux apps without introducing Windows CRs. I opened an issue for this https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/1326 but it hasn't gotten a reply.
Also, systemd is still pretty sketchy. It takes over 2 minutes for systemd services to start and if you close a WSL 2 terminal for just a few minutes systemd will delay a new terminal from opening for quite some time. This basically means disabling systemd to use WSL 2 in your day to day.
Then there's this 6 year old issue with 1,000+ upvotes https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699 around WSL not reclaiming disk space. It means you need to routinely shut everything down and compress your VM's disk or you'll run out of space.
Beyond that is does work well so I'm happy it exists.
That doesn't sound good. I was planning to set up a Windows/WSL2 box, but this gives me second thoughts. Where can I read more about this?
I can't find a definitive source with an open ticket but if you Google around for "WSL 2 systemd delay startup" you'll find assorted folks talking it about with a number of different reasons.
I just went by my end results of there is a delay with systemd enabled and no delay with it disabled.
not sure what would be the correct test here, but:
root@LP-T16:~# uname -rn
LP-T16 5.15.167.4-microsoft-standard-WSL2
root@LP-T16:~# time systemctl restart ssh
real 0m0.039s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m0.001s
Maybe it's specific to Windows 10 Pro, who knows. I'm using the latest WSL 2 from the MS app store.
I just know when I installed Docker directly into WSL 2, when I launched a terminal I could not run `docker info` and connect to the Docker daemon for 2 minutes. The culprit was the Docker service was not available. I was able to reproduce this on Arch and Ubuntu distros.
Separate to that systemd also delayed a terminal from opening for ~15 seconds (unrelated to Docker).
After ~10 minutes of the terminal being closed, both issues happened. They went away as soon as I disabled systemd.
It takes me more time to fill passwords for ssh keys to agent anyways.
Granted, I'm not using native docker inside.
I'd venture to say this depends on which OS you're more comfortable with. I'm more comfortable with Linux, so I'd say it's easier/better/less janky to use Linux as a host OS.
> Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24. You don't have to stress "do I update my OS?"
Once you're a developer who's been burned by this enough times, you do this with containers or dedicated dev VMs. You do not develop on your host OS and stay sane.
Here's the main difference between making Windows vs Linux the main OS from my POV: Windows is a lot of work and only the corporate editions can be converted into not-a-hot-mess-of-distractions (supposedly). Out of the box Linux doesn't have all of the bullshit that you have to spend time ripping out of Windows. You can easily re-install Linux to get the "powerwash" effect. But if you powerwash Windows you have to go back and undo all the default bullshit again.
Having said that Windows+WSL is a very nice lifeline if you're stuck in Windows-land. It's a much better combo than MacOS.
Have you tried lxd? It's far less janky than Docker (IMHO) to achieve what you describe. Docker is uniquely unsuited to your use case.
The Linux on Desktop is finally approaching, in more than one "shape", none of which is the shape some people expected/wanted.
This is the kind of statement that makes you pay the karma tax. WSL is great, I use it on a day to day basis. I also use Linux on a day to day basis. And as great as WSL is, for running Linux software on supported hardware, Linux beats WSL hands down. And I mean, of course it does, do you expect a VM to beat native? In the same way that Windows software runs better on Windows. (with a few exceptions on both sides).
Compared to Linux, WSL I/O is slow, graphics is slow and a bit janky, I sometimes get crashes, memory management is suboptimal, networking has some quirks, etc... These problems are typical of VMs as it is hard for the host and guest OS to coordinate resource use. If you have an overpowered computer with plenty of RAM, and are mostly just using the command line, and don't do anything unusual with your network, then sure it may be "better" than Linux. But the truth is that it really depends on your situation.
Hardware performance counters basically do not work in WSL2, which among other issues, makes it extremely difficult to use rr. https://github.com/rr-debugger/rr/issues/2506#issuecomment-2... Some people say they got it working, but I and many other users encounter esoteric blockers.
The Dozen driver is never at feature parity with native Linux Vulkan drivers, and that's always going to be the case.
By default, WSL security mitigations cause GCC trampolines to just not work, which partly motivated the opt-in alternative implementations of trampolines last year. https://gcc.gnu.org/git/?p=gcc.git;a=commit;h=28d8c680aaea46...
gWSL is also a terrible X11 server that makes many very basic window management configurations impossible, and while I prefer VcXsrv, it has its own different terrible issues.
I can imagine that WSL2 looks attractive if all you want to do is run command line apps in multiple isolated environments, but it is miserable for anything graphical or interactive.
Indeed, that's my case - using CLI mostly for ssh/curls/ansible/vim over ansible and Puppet, so on.
For GUI part, Windows is chosen and shines for me.
Hmm...
> WSL is more powerful than Linux
Oh.
Are you a Windows user who is happy to have a good way to run Linux on Windows, or are you a Linux user trying to convince other Linux user that instead of using Linux, they should use Linux in a VM running on Windows?
I am a longtime Linux user, and I can't see a reason in the universe why I would want to access my Linux through a VM on Windows. That seems absolutely insane.
But WSL2 is just a VM, no more, no less. You can do the same with VMware Workstation or similar tools, where you even get a nice accelerated virtual GPU.
I do that with KVM too, and each has their own kernel, not one shared kernel made and controlled by one vendor.
1. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57580420/wsl-using-a-wsl... 2. https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5118 3. https://github.com/microsoft/wslg/issues/22
I also run other Linux instances with KVM.
I even run a Linux x86_64 executable on an ARM SBC using QEMU.
I just feel that Linux is so much more flexible than Windows.
WSL2 has been such a pain. You're basically managing a VM with VMWare Tools somewhat more integrated. I gave up on WSL2 after a few months and went back to booting my arch installation most of the time. Now I'm on a mac for the first time in a long time because windows has gotten so bad.
This is doubly sad because the NT kernel is so well designed to host multiple OSes due to the OS/2 stuff decades ago. All wasted.
You can do the same thing with many other technologies on most other operating systems. I've used, in chronological order: FreeBSD jails, VMs, Cloud-hosted VMs, Docker, K8s, and Nix flakes. WSL is probably somewhere in around K8s.
My point is, we've had the ability to run "subsystems" for decades, by different names, on every OS. WSL is cool but quite late to the game, far from being "more powerful than linux".
Linux or *BSD give so much more respect to the user, on windows you are the product! Stand up for yourself and your data!
This setup automatically backs up my data and is resilient to disk failures. It’s the ultimate form of power and bliss.
And WSL is a limited VM using HyperV anyway. If you want to run a VM, you can as a well run a proper one which isn't limited and runs a full blown distro with sane configuration.
So WSL is definitely not more powerful than normal Linux.
But you're definitely not crazy for liking it. And people should chill out instead of downvoting for someone who just says what works for them.
I haven't tried Win11 and probably won't unless my employer forces me to. But if Win11+WSL2 works for you, more power to you.
- Linux that works great on a laptop / does the right thing when closing the lid - Linux that doesn't have worse battery life than Windows / macOS - Seamlessly runs Windows when you need to run something (e.g. click on Excel) - Isn't necessarily free (prefer quality over low price in this situation)
Windows of course has many of these traits and WSL is a pretty good compromise, but I would prefer to boot into Linux and use Windows only when necessary (since my need for it is less common).
When the answer to a "how do I do X on windows" question begins with "start WSL", my primary reaction is frustration because they're basically saying "there's not a good way to do that on Windows, so fire up a Linux VM".
Just to pick my most recent example, from today. I wanted to verify the signatures on some downloaded rpm files, and the rpm tools work on linux. I know, rpm files are native to a family of linux distros, so it's not surprising that the tools for retrieving and verifying their signatures don't work on windows but... it also seems reasonable to want a world where those tools can install and run on windows, straight from a PowerShell session, with no VM.
Multiply that by all the little utilities that that can't be deployed across multiple operating sytems, and it just seems like some incompatibility headaches are never really going to go away.
Sounds like you could benefit from Qubes OS, which runs everything in VMs with a great UX. Including Windows.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/vzl...
P.S. They also specifically built Rosetta for Linux to compile x64 Linux binaries into aarch64 to run inside Linux VMs on their machines.
Would be just better to have linux but doesn’t seem realistic how everything works so flawlessly in macos, touchpad, sound etc.
Otherwise, it is just using qemu interpreter to emulate x86 in software.
Rosetta2 on my host OS enables the guest OS to run x86 binaries... that's interesting, I'll try it too, but I'd be surprised if it's truly hassle-free. At the very least would have to reconfigure apt-get to allow x86 binaries. Then idk about dynamically-linked x86 libs (I'm not a Linux expert).
I suspect if your use case is more esoteric, it's likely not going to be worth the time. I'd just SSH to a second linux box.
To correct your statement on one key thing: Rosetta2 in this case is not running on host OS. Apple provides a Linux version of Rosetta 2 which runs inside your VM and is registered as a binfmt interpreter for ELF x86 binaries[1]. This is similar to how `wine` or `java` or `mono` can execute their respective binaries directly.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/virtualization/run...
In any case, I've run bare metal Asahi on M1 (and M1 Pro) and they work amazingly well too. Installation was quite straightforward too.
Also the network would cut out and I would have to restart the vm periodically.
Just using a linux laptop is way better but then I don’t have a nice touchpad, excellent battery life etc.
Everything has trade-offs. The baseline in this subthread was not bare metal Linux but WSL, which has the same exact issues. It might not give you the full RAM, but it should be smooth and the network should work.
Apple could just have gone and do a straight port of the iOS boot procedure to their ARM Mac lineup... and we'd have been thoroughly screwed, given how long ago the latest untethered bootrom exploit was.
Or they could have pulled a Qualcomm, Samsung et al and just randomly change implementation details between each revision to make life for alt-os implementers hell (which is why so many Android BSP dumps are the way they are, with zero hope of ever getting anything upstream). Instead, to the best of my knowledge the UART on the M series SoCs dates back right to the very first iPod.
The fact that the Asahi Linux people were able to create a GPU driver that surpasses Apple's own in conformance tests [1], despite not having any kind of documentation at all is telling enough - and not just of the pure genius of everyone involved.
[1] https://appleinsider.com/articles/23/08/22/linux-for-apple-s...
Could've been worse. At least they're not locking you out of your device like on iPhones and iPads. They don't stop you from running Asahi, they just aren't interested in helping anyone run Asahi.
Microsoft, on the other hand, sells laptops that actively prevent you from running Linux on them. Things get a little blurry once you hit the tablet form factor (Surface devices run on amd64, but are they really that different from an iPad?) where both companies suck equally, though Microsoft also sells tablets that will run Linux once someone bothers to write drivers for them.
Which is... not necessarily wrong.
Also, it's really annoying that macOS switched to zsh. It's not a drop-in for bash. Yeah you can change it back to bash, but then any Mac-specific help/docs assume zsh because defaults matter. Pretty fundamental thing to have issues with.
If Apple hadn't opened iBoot in some way then I don't know how they would handle a secure reinstall process. If that's "to actually help them" then they very clearly didn't try too hard. Without driver code or UEFI support they're basically telling the community to pound sand, and modern Asahi efforts reflect that.
Parallels also has a commercial offering that does some nice GUI-level integration with both Windows and Linux VMs.
My understanding is that these are both built on top of some Apple API, and Parallels actually collaborates with Apple on making it work for their use case. So it's not the first-class support that you get from Microsoft with WSL, but it's still pretty good.
Exactly same experience to WSL - great out of the box experience, easy to use, and insist on using their own patched kernel.
That must be the reason hackers(even here) still insist on buying apple hardware.
In this case who except Microsoft would have paid for development here.
(Also, I'm surprised that WSL 1 is still supported. It must be in maintenance mode though, right?)
I'm also still using WSL1 and was hoping to be able to fix some of it's quirks :(
MacOS has a lot of issues (mostly by Apple recent policy changes), but posix systems are more alike than different. =3
It makes it sound like Microsoft is giving some capability to Linux whereas it's the other way around.
Source: https://x.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610?s=19
https://xcancel.com/richturn_ms/status/1245481405947076610?s...
“ I still hope to see a true "Windows Subsystem for Linux" by Microsoft or a windows becoming a linux distribution itself and dropping the NT kernel to legacy. Windows is currently overloaded with features and does lack a package manager to only get what you need...”
Now I only experienced something close to that when I set up multiseat on single PC with AMD and Nvidia GPUs and one of them decided to fall asleep. Or when I undervolt GPU too much.
However, there are certain APIs like WDDM timeout detection and recovery: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/drivers/d... . It is like a watchdog that'll restart the driver without BSOD'ing. You'll get a crash dump out of it too.
I swear sometimes progress goes backwards..
Under Windows everything including the GPU driver can crash. As long as it didn't take the kernel with it, causing a BSOD. Your applications can keep running.
The only way to get this compatibility in Linux would be to port those features all over to Linux and if that happened the entire planet would implode because everyone would say “I knew it! Embrace Extend Extinguish!” At the same time.
Os/2 basically ran a copy of windows (either the existing one or bundled one) to then execute windows programs side by side with os/2 (and DOS) software.
That said, to address the grandparent comment’s point, it probably should be read as “Windows Subsystem for Linux (Applications)”.
That's not what I say, that's what the former PM Lead of WSL said. To be fair, Windows Services for UNIX was just Unix services for Windows. Probably the same logic applied there back then: they couldn't name it with a leading trademark (Unix), so they went with what was available.
WSA and WSL both coexisted for a time.
It was called Project Astoria previously. Microsoft releasing the Windows Subsystem for Android for Windows 11 is news to me. I thought that they had killed that in 2016.
Anyway, Astoria was an internal product which management ultimately killed, and some of the technology behind it later became WSL and much later, WSA. WSA's inital supported OS was Windows 11.
Microsoft being Microsoft, they artificially handicapped WSA at the outset by limiting the Android apps it could run to the Amazon App Store, because that's obviously the most popular Android app store where most apps are published. [rolls eyes] I don't think sideloading was possible. [rolls eyes again]
I don't work for Microsoft and I never have; I learned all of this from watching Windows Weekly back when it was happening, and from a few videos by Dave Plummer on YouTube.
The NT kernel was always designed to host multiple subsystems. This Windows subsystem is for Linux. And that’s why it’s named like that.
We run Linux on top of Windows. Windows is the subsystem for the Linux environment.
Still a dumb name.
When it works, it's great! When it doesn't....oh man it sucks. It has been non-stop networking and VPN problems, XServer issues, window scaling issues, hardware accelerated graphics not working, etc. this whole time. I've spent more time trying to fix WSL issues then actually developing software. It's never gotten better.
It's fast. It's powerful. But using it as a daily driver is very painful in my experience. I avoid it as much as possible and do most of my work in MSYS2 instead. Sure, it's much slower. But at least it works consistently and has for years.
It was possible under wsl1, but wsl1 is an entirely different thing.
"never had any issues" is a meaningless statement. I "never had any issues" with infinite things I never tried to do in the first place.
I have been using WSL to develop Firmware in Zephyr, no problem so far.
[1]: https://blog.golioth.io/usb-support-in-wsl2-now-with-a-gui/
I will have to see if it actually works in my case. The devices are intolerant of timing. Even using usb-serial instead of legacy hardware, let alone the ip stack, can be a problem unless using real ftdi adapters.
Basically virtualizing rs-232's hardware flow control into usb packets was always technically invalid since the beginning, but if the host is overwhelmingly fast enough, you get away with it, usually, and by now all new serial devices have adapted to expect the behavior of usb-serial adapters since that's what everyone has. For that reason, new devices generally tolerate even worse timing and you can even get away with going over ip. But the fact is the timing is garbage by that point and not everything works.
Still, I'm sure it's working well enough for most things or else there would be more reports that it doesn't work.
Now do NT.
Given what Windows has become and already discussed here on HN I would even hesitate to run it in a virtual machine.
Edit: more than 15 years.
I used to do VFIO with hardware passthrough so I could have linux but still run windows software like CAD that takes advantage of the gfx card. That was a pain to set up and use.
The other way, its very simple. WSL2 can run ML tasks with just a tiny bit of overhead in moving the data to the card.
I'm not a novice either, $dayjob has me working on the lowest levels of Linux on a daily basis. I did linux from scratch on a Pentium 2 when I was 12. All that to say yes I happen to agree but edge cases are out there. The blanket statement doesn't apply for all use cases
I would have switched over to Linux if it wouldn't be because of that one.
I set it up originally for gaming, but nowaways I install a lot of disposable software there.
I use Linux guests VMs too (a la Qubes), but sadly there's no guest support for looking-glass on Linux. Native rendering speeds on VMs are something hard to let go.
1. I use UWF on windows (Education Edition). All disk writes to C:/ are ephemeral. On every single reboot, all changes are discarded and my pc is back to the exact same state as when I first set it up. I do keep a separate partition for documents that need persistence.
2. Miracast for screen mirroring.
and 2...hm I know i've done Miracast before with GNOME Network Displays https://flathub.org/apps/org.gnome.NetworkDisplays
Also, VBoxManage was created by someone who firmly subscribes to the "git UX is awesome" school of thought :-(
> We currently package our virtual machines for four different virtualization software options: Hyper-V (Gen2), Parallels, VirtualBox, and VMware. These virtual machines contain an evaluation version of Windows that expires on the date posted. If the evaluation period expires, the desktop background will turn black, you will see a persistent desktop notification indicating that the system is not genuine, and the PC will shut down every hour.
Edit: Oops, dead link -- the dev tools evaluation VM hasn't been released for 6+ months. But they do offer Windows evaluations ISO's after registration.
So, if you don't have a secondary GPU, you'll need to live without graphics acceleration in the VM... so for a lot of people the "oh you just need to use a VM!" solution is not feasible, because most of the software that people want to use that does not run under WINE do require graphics acceleration.
I tried running Photoshop under a VM, but the performance of the QEMU QXL driver is bad, and VirGL does not support Windows guests yet.
VMWare and VirtualBox do have better graphics drivers that do support Windows. I tried using VMWare and the performance was "ok", but still not near the performance of Photoshop on "bare metal".
However now that AMD is including integrated GPUs on every AM5 consumer CPU (if I'm not mistaken?), maybe VMs with passthrough will be more common, without requiring people to spend a lot of money buying a secondary GPU.
I could disable it I guess. It could provide 0.05% faster rendering if I ever get back into blender.
If the card is running its own OS, what's the benefit of combining them that way? A high speed networking link will get you similar results and is flexible and cheap.
If the card isn't running its own OS, it's much easier to put all the CPU cores in the same socket. And the demand for both x86 and Arm cores at the same time is not very high.
Good point about high speed networking. I guess that’s a lot more straightforward.
.. isn't this just a laptop or a NUC? Isn't there a massive disadvantage in having to share a case or god forbid a PCIe bus with another computer?
I'd say even passing through a GPU is not that hard these days though maybe that depends on hardware configuration more.
“ or a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. From Windows or Mac, this FTP account could be accessed through built-in software.”[1] vibes.
Convenience features in software are huge and even if a system is well designed a system that abstracts it all away and does it for you is easier, and most new users want that, so it often wins. Worse is better etc
virt-manager is a bit more involved than GNOME's Boxes, I'm not sure I could recommend it to someone that doesn't know what they're doing.
I'm pretty sure there are solutions to assign an entire GPU to a VM, which ofc is only useful if you have multiple. But those are specialized.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23229275
This probably isn't even the best dang comment about the situation, it's just the one I could find quickly.
>Jeez, we’ve had that forever. When did the first sync web sites start coming out? 1999? There were a million versions. xdrive, mydrive, idrive, youdrive, wealldrive for ice cream. Nobody cared then and nobody cares now, because synchronizing files is just not a killer application. I’m sorry. It seems like it should be. But it’s not.
That's just what a lot of competent people thought back then. It seems hilariously out of touch now.
Before Dropbox, the closest thing we had was "the dropbox," a default network-shared write-only folder on Mac. Of course you could port-forward to a computer at home that never sleeps, but I knew that wasn't a common solution. I started using Dropbox the same month it came out.
Sure, it’s trivial to set the switch in BIOS for virtualisation, and download a couple of libraries but people like computers doing things for us, we like abstractions even if they sacrifice flexibility because they facilitate whatever the real world application we are attempting.
I think power users of any technology will generally overvalue things that 80% to 95% of the user base simply don’t care about.
I admit that having touched Windows twice in the last 5 years I wouldn’t know but I would be willing to wager that WSL has very few drawbacks or shortcomings in the minds of most of its users.
[0] https://github.com/cryinkfly/Autodesk-Fusion-360-for-Linux
https://www.phoronix.com/news/AMD-GIM-Open-Source
Windows can run GPU accelerated Windows VMs with paravirtualization. But I have no use case for two Windows machines sharing a GPU.
Also note some brave soul implemented 3D support on KVM for Windows. Still in the works and WinUI apps crash for some reason.
I will do anything to avoid Windows but I miss Premiere.
Every Windows thread on HN is a reminder of the stark divide between people who need to use Windows for productivity apps and those who don’t.
The apps I need a Windows machine for are not the kind that virtualize nicely. Anything GPU related means Windows has to become the base OS for me.
If you’re running an occasional light tool you can get away with Windows in a VM, but it’s a no-go for things like CAD or games.
LibreOffice has gotten quite good over the years, including decent(ish) MSO file format interoperability, and Thunderbird seems to support Exchange Server.
So, I suppose things like MS Project or MS Visio many not have decent counterparts (maybe, I don't really know), but otherwise, it seems like you don't need-need to use Windows for productivity apps.
It also only support email and not calendaring/contacts.
That being said, Office365 Web Client is pretty good at this point and someone who doesn't live in Office all day can probably get along fine with it.
I personally have a desktop PC with an AMD GPU and then another Nvidia GPU that I pass through to windows hosts. I have a hook that changes the display output and switches the inputs using evdev.
I hate the half assed commercialised approached for software on both Mac and Windows where you download 50mb+ of electron bullshit for a bash 2 liner with default tools on Linux.
Mostly for windows but when I installed 5+ tools from untrustworthy websites (which they all look like if you aren't used to that) it feels like my computer is likely forever busted with some scamware. But there is no dd, no proper editor, no removing adware and "news" without these tools.
On windows if you want to configure something it's like going into a computer museum where you start in the metro area and end up in UIs straight out of win 95. That's better on Mac, but the UI is depressing (in my opinion) and I always had the feeling my Mac wouldn't need to run that hot if it wouldn't draw shadows, mirroring and weird effects I haven't asked for.
That said. Linux is not a panacea
I'm using Forklift [2] on my mac at work, but it's a pale imitation of what a file explorer can truly be. I did some searching for Linux but it's all pretty pedestrian.
[1]: https://www.gpsoft.com.au/ [2]: https://binarynights.com/
We need to remember why Microsoft uses WSL. Microsoft wants to prevent users (i.e. developers) to migrate on Linux. It is the old approach Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish [2].
Monopolies are made by users and politics, because we don't consider vendor lock-in and mass-effect. I wish strong regulation for all information-technology. We saw the wonderful effects of regulation with AT&T {UNIX, C, Open-Source, Open-Documentation} and then a mistake was done. The company was split up, looking back a complete failure.
[1] Means: It is a better operating-system and adapt to users needs. Either novice user or programmer.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguishOver time though more and more small issues with it came up. Packages working not quite right, issues with the barriers between the two, etc. It always felt like there was a little bit more friction with the process.
With Valve really pushing Proton and the state of linux gaming, I've recently swapped over to Ubuntu and Nixos. The friction point moved to the gaming side, but things mostly just work.
Things on linux are rapidly getting better, and having things just work on the development side has been a breath of fresh air. I now feel that it's a better experience than windows w/ WSL, despite some AAA titles not working on linux.
One problem that was unsolved last time I checked: Saving highlight videos. It used to work if you told Overwatch to use webm format instead of mp4, but Blizzard broke that somewhere along the line, possibly in the transition to Overwatch 2. (I worked around this with OBS Studio and its replay buffer feature.)
E.g. "I'm going to go to the beach all day" and "I'm going to keep my job" are both likely the results of ideal type wants whereas "I'm going to go to my job today and then the beach tonight" would likely be the result of a constrained want.
One of the boons of console hardware is also the strict execution environment that is presented on the system. While this of course doesn't prevent all cheating behavior in online games, a large selling point of it as a platform to publishers is not only the market segment available, but the security aspects of the runtime environment.
Scrolling to Medals, 50% of all 25.000+ games tracked by the site are playable, either working perfectly or mostly (Platinum or Gold ratings). Another 20% can be alright under specific circumstances, and with compromises (Silver rating).
At some point, Proton users reported success using some patch, then that stopped working, then there was a different patch... A lot of user reports say "thumbs up" then have a comment explaining how it goes out-of-sync unless you fiddle with it, so it's hard to trust.
Seems the root of the problem is this game's picky netcode, which is similar to the original 1998 game I played as a kid. If your game state diverges from the other players' at all, it goes oos and ends the game for everyone. And yes this happened often enough that people had an abbreviation for it.
Oos can till happen, but as you said it can also happen on Windows, hard to blame Wine for that.
Since gold means "works as good as Windows with workarounds" I think that's a correct rating.
Also, "gold" should mean that it works by default, not that you have to patch in a DLL. The only place the site even says "playable with tweaks" is in a tooltip if you hover over the gold symbol, right above a separate list of details that doesn't mention tweaks. I didn't even know until now.
We can argue all day over what a rating means, but if it would work without a tweak I'd say it should be rated platinum. (The only other thing I know is missing is Xbox live login, but I don't really care about that)
That was as far as I was able to take it. Another much more skilled dev at CW dug in a lot deeper and wrote a blog post about it[1], but as far as I know the problem remains unsolved.
[1] https://www.codeweavers.com/blog/rbernon/2022/9/12/ucrtcring...
Anyway it'd be great if the game devs included their own math libraries instead of relying on the OS's. That would fix the problem quite nicely.
For a practical solution, just using the Windows dlls seems to work fine. Without AoE2:DE goes out of sync immediately, with I've played hour long games.
Anything "denied" won't work ever unless they change their minds. Anything "broken" is...well...broken.
The former ran slowly at low settings, with the occasional complete single digit slowdown. On the same laptop in Windows 10, it ran medium settings and easily twice the frame rate, no issues.
The latter wouldn't connect to multiplayer, and would occasionally just crash out.
(Comment written from memory, but I enshrined my experiment here: https://retorch.com/blog/linux-mint.htm )
i have some 2012 projects were the makefiles also build in msvc. never again.
then 2015 projects with build paths for cygwin. never again.
then some 2019 projects with build scripts making choices to work on msys2/git-bash-for-windows. never again.
now we can build on WSL with just some small changes to an env file because we run a psql container in a different way under wsl... let's see how long we endure until saying never again.
I actually switched to Linux full-time when Starfield wouldn’t run on Windows but worked in Proton. We are now in a world where Valve provides a more sable Windows API than Microsoft. The only limitation now is anti-cheat but that’s a political problem, not a technical one.
No, Windows is not about games, Windows is about being an objectively the most stable pile of garbage there is.
Totally hear you though for things like CNC milling software that's meant to stay static for the lifetime of the mill - that's not going anywhere.
The compromise of using SaaS in the cloud in lieu of regular, native software, is affecting both you and society directly.
It doesn't have to be slow and bad, that's just a ""skill issue"" (poor prioritization by the companies making it).
How do Deepin and such solve this?
How many months can you use a Linux desktop to do daily externally mandated processes and not drop down to a bash shell at some point?
Average consumers and users do not want to use the unix utilities that Linux people love so much. Hell, developers barely want to use classic unix utilities to solve problems.
Users do not know what a "mount point" is. Users do not want a case sensitive file system. Users do not want an OOM killer that solves a poor design choice by randomly culling important applications at high utilization.
Users do not care for something that was designed in the 60s before we understood things like interface design and refuses to update or improve due to some weird insistence on unix purity.
Users do not care about ABI stability. They care about using the apps they need to use. That means your platform has to be very easy to support, Linux is not at all easy to support, and at least part of that is a weird entitlement Linux users feel and demonstrate in your support queue.
Hilariously, users DO WANT a centralized app repository for most day to day apps! Linux had this forever, though it had mediocre ergonomics and it was way too easy for an average computer user to manage to nuke their system as Linus Sebastian found out in a very unfortunate timing situation. Linux never managed to turn this potential victory into anything meaningful, because you often had to drop into a bash shell to fix, undo, modify, or whatever an install!
Assumming everything is setup the way I usually do when someone asks me for a new Windows PC (Setup an account, install basic utilities, Office suite, automatic updates, etc)
More or less everything
- ThunderBird + OnlyOffice is close enough for regular usage (Coming from Outlook + Office)
- Flatpaks and system updates are on the background by default and only take when you restart, so they're more or less invisible (And for someone else, I'll usually do the oldest channel available, maybe even the CentOS based LTS when that's out of beta)
- Discord, Teams, Stuff like that is electron based anyway
- Steam for games is reasonably good (Depending on your library, Everything in mine works, but not everything in my wishlist)
- Windows only utilities are on a case by case basis (Depending on the program, they'll usually call me to procure it, because god knows, no sane person wants to deal with the likes of adobe)
For the sake of transparency, I would use the CLI to setup quite a lot, but I wouldn't expect them to use it for anything
I guess you meant Linux here
For a gamer... still not quite, but very close.
For the corps ... it's a legacy issue, but that may slip away as a side effect of Trump destroying global soft power and making it a hard sell to remain on a US led platform, purely op sec concerns, the spyware issue will add more weight to that.
I've been using windows since I was 6 or 7. I currently work in a Mac environment and hate it. I worked in a linux one for 5 years. Nothing feels like the first language you learned I guess?
My home computer is windows and it'll be that way until windows stops existing.
Edit: when I say we I mean the people still on windows.
Switched my main Linux and desktop environment multiple times as well.
Yeah, the spyware is annoying and stupid. But once you strip it out (it can be removed/blocked), Windows 11 is absolutely rock solid.
I'm convinced that many these people saying Nvidia has serious issues on Linux must be (by no fault of their own) going by habit and downloading the driver installer .bin from the Nvidia website and trying to install drivers that way. So yes, if you do that you're going to have issues.
Learn to do things the way your distro does them (use a package manager) and most problems go away.
It's MOSTLY painless. Some GNOME extensions seem to randomly hang everything on startup (I'm currently investigating which ones, I believe Dash to Dock and/or Unite are to blame) and there's a weird issue with VR when streaming via ALVR: SteamVR launches, but games crash unless I disable the second monitor (no such issues with WiVRn, so not entirely sure if it's a driver problem or not)
Besides that in my daily driving I saw no other issues.
Their GTX series cards all used proprietary blobs that required unmanageable device specific interfaces.
Starting from the RTX series cards, they still have proprietary blobs but instead of having device specific interfaces, they all use a shared public interface which makes compatibility and performance much better.
It's not across the board, but there are instances of gaming benchmarks showing more performance under linux than windows.
Now, it's been barely a couple of months since I reinstalled Ubuntu, and a couple of weeks since I found out the latest release runs even worse, so this is new to me. I don't plan to use Windows at home ever again, so I could sell my GPU and buy AMD, but so far I'm simply disappointed.
I probably would, in this context. Well, maybe not WinME, because that was a dumpster fire. But any Windows coming down from NT line, which is what's relevant in the past 20 years, sure. Same bucket.
Also feels a lot less intrusive for light terminal work.
And the subsystems concept was quite common in micro-computers and mainframes space, Microsoft did not come up with the idea for Windows.
It got actually somewhat usable with the 2k/XP version, slightly better in Vista (notably: the utilities installer had option to use bash a default shell) and IIRC with 7 MS even again mentioned existence of the thing in marketing (with some cool new name for the thing).
I am aware it got much better later on, but given the way it was introduced, the mess with third party integrations, as Microsoft always outsourced the development effort (MKS, Interix,..), it never got people to care about afterwards.
First impressions matter most.
As there is another alternative one where Microsoft doesn't sell Xenix and keeps pushing for it, as Bill Gates was actually a big fan of.
IIS and SQL Server (Win) boxes are fairly typical, still.
[1]: In fact, Active Directory was specifically targeted by EU antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft.
If Microsoft had wanted, Windows could have officially been Unix too-they could have licensed the test suite, run it under their POSIX/SFU/SUA subsystem, fixed the failures, paid the fee-and then Windows would be a Unix. They never did-not (as far as I’m aware) for any technical reason, simply because as a matter of business strategy, they decided not to invest in this.
Whatever computer people would be getting at the local shopping mall computer store already had UNIX support.
Lets also not forget that UNIX and C won over the competing on timesharing OSes, exactly because AT&T wasn't allowed to sell it in first place, there was no Linux on those days, and had AT&T not sued BSD, hardly anyone would have paid attention to Linux, yet another what-if.
But WSL2 is freaking incredible, I'm super excited to see this and just wish the rest of windows would move to a Linux kernel and support bash natively everywhere. I was never a fan of powershell, sh/dash/ash/bash seem fine
The whole point of Windows right now is having a kernel that a) does not shove GPL down the device manufacturer's throat and b) care about driver API stability so that drivers actually work without manufacturer or maintaner intervention every kernel upgrade.
And thanks to no ABI/API stability guarantees, Linux can innovate and doesn't care about what others might say. Considering Linux is developed mostly by companies today, the standard upkeep of a driver is not a burden unless you want to shove planned obsolescence down the throats of the consumers (cough Win11 TPM requirements cough).
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
https://creativecommons.org/faq/#is-creative-commons-against...
Closed source is protected in other ways besides copyright. Trade secrets, confidentiality, NDA, proprietary ownership, obfuscation, and in the case of hardware, big globs of epoxy and other countermeasures to ensure nobody can get in and reverse-engineer it.
While I'm a strong Free Software proponent, I'm not a zealot and insist on a black or white approach.
Yes, some software can be closed source, I agree, but it shouldn't be the bedrock software, i.e. anything required to enable hardware (firmware, OS, and preferably the utilities).
For the record, I'm paying for a couple closed source software packages on Linux which provide very unique feature s. These are inSync and Pagico.
On top of that, you can always sell GPL software (remember, you shall ship the source with the product. opening it it to everyone is not a requirement). On top of it, you can sell support or special versions. curl has a special version for paying customers, and ccid driver developers sell ccid compliance testing.
So, there are always alternatives, and the reality has more shades of gray than two distinct colors.
I was working as a freelancer wher a lot of my job meant interfacing with files other people made in Software that only runs reliably on Windows or Mac (and I tried regularly).
So WSL provided me with a way to run Linux stuff without having to run a fat VM or dual boot. In fact my experience with WSL is probably why I run Linux as my daily driver OS in academia now, since here the context differs and a switch to Linux was possible.
Whether a thing is useful is always dependent on the person and the context. WSL can absolutely be a gateway drug to Linux for those who haven't managed to get their feet wet just yet.
We tend to forget that "Horses for Courses" and "Your Mileage May Vary" applies way broader than we think.
But you're asking the wrong question. It should be "why not use MacOS?" if you need a stable UI with UNIX underneath :).
Other than that, macOS plus some tools (Fileduck, Forklift, Tower, Kaleidoscope to name a few), you can be 99% there.
I use macos as my daily driver, but any real work on it happens on a linux container or VM. Using one of {cursor, vscode, windsurf} with a devcontainer is a much better approach for me.
Why not both? Like me?
It depends on what you're doing. PowerShell is incredible for Windows sysadmin, and the way it pipes objects between commands rather than text makes it really easy to compose pretty advanced operations.
However, if I'm doing text manipulation, wrangling logs, etc, then yes, absolutely I'm going to use a *nix scripting language.
It's good. But if/when you start using it as your main work platform nagging issues start cropping up. The native linux filesystem inside it cannot actually reclaim space. This isn't very noticeable if you aren't doing intensive things in it, or if you are using it as a throwaway test bed. But if you are really using it, you have to do things like zero out a bunch of space on the WSL disk and then compact it from outside in the Windows OS. Using space from your NTFS partition / drive isn't very usable, the performance is horrible and you can't do things like put your docker graph root in there as it is incompatible. It also doesn't respect capitalization or permissions and I've had to troubleshoot very subtle bugs because of that. Another issue is raw network and device access, it basically isn't possible. Some of these things are likely beyond the intended use of WSL2, in its defense. Just be aware before you start heavily investing your workflow in it. For these use cases a traditional dual boot will work far better and save you much frustration.
But VMware still excels at running desktop Linux on Windows. Especially for distros that use 3D accelerated desktops (aka literally anything that uses a recent GNOME or KDE release).
They didn't prioritize it until fixing at a late stage, barely before WSL 2 came out. Sometimes i do wonder if they made a premature decision to move to WSL2 since there was quite a lot of basic applications/runtimes that were crashing due to this fix lacking (Naturally a lot of other new Linux API's like io_uring probably would have made it an api chasing treadmill that they just wanted to circumvent).
I thought you could do it using ntdll functions, no?
https://www.jeremyong.com/winapi/io/2024/11/03/windows-memor...
Regardless this led WSL1 to have fatal incompatibilities for a long time, iirc basic stuff like the rpm system or something similarly fundamental for some distros/languages relied on it. And once WSL2 existed people just seems to have gone over.
As for NTFS: it's not NTFS specifically, it's the way the I/O system is designed in the NT kernel. Imagine any call from outside that layer transitioning through a stack of filter drivers before actually reaching the implementation. Very powerful stuff, but also very bad for performance.
1. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/blogs/wsl/pico-pro...
Regarding Steam, do you install it with distro provided or through Flatpak?
What is the spec of your machine that you do Linux gaming on? I've noticed a notable performance penalty (around 10%, even higher on GPU heavy games) when running games with Proton, which is mainly why I haven't dropped Windows yet.
I don't mean to dismiss your comment at all, but I'm surprised that such a low overhead would be the primary reason holding you back from switching. The difference between, say, 100 FPS and 91 FPS seems so negligible in my mind that it would be pretty near the bottom on the list of reasons not to switch to Linux.
But I'm hunting for reasons here. A gaming setup should be using adaptive sync so those concerns mostly go away. But there may be problems with Linux support.
Regarding fps, it's around 15fps diff, and it's bad in my case because I had a potato machine.
CachyOS provides packages for Steam, handles nvidia drivers for you and they even provide their own builds of proton and wine, allegedly compiled with flags for modern hardware + some patches (not sure how much they help though - before Cachy I used Pop OS and also had no problems with performance).
Cachy is based on Arch though, so unless you're ready for your system to potentially break with an update - maybe used something more stable (again - I quite liked Pop OS, it was extremely stable for me)
It gets worse. When we go to the manufacturing side of the building, there's a high chance they're still using Windows 7. Yeah, still! And IT or Controls has no idea what to do with it since, well, it's still working. Is it secure? They don't know because the team is comprised of kids who memorized the CompTIA exams and use Windows 11 at home.
Trying to get the business world to switch to Linux with all that in mind is an impossible task. It's the same as asking an American city to rip out all its old infrastructure at once and replace it with new instead of patching the old. The cost and knowledge required for such a task is unthinkable, to them. Believe me, I've tried.
Microsoft was quite brilliant in the way that they shoehorned their way into the fabric of the way we do business, not just in the US, but on a global scale.
I mean, think about it - most companies are still stuck on Windows 10 or 11, and they're using all those Microsoft services like Teams, Outlook, and Exchange. It's like they're trapped in this Microsoft ecosystem, and it's gonna take a lot more than just a few people saying "hey, let's switch to Linux" to get them out of it.
And don't even get me started on the IT departments in these places. A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing. They're using Windows 11 at home, but they have no idea how to deal with all the outdated Windows 7 machines that are still being used in manufacturing.
Microsoft, on the other hand, has been really smart about this. They've managed to get their products and services woven into the fabric of how we do business on a global scale. It's gonna take a lot more than just a few open-source projects to change that.
> A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing.
Well, this is true throughout IT, even those who went to college for a CS or IT-based degrees. People want to make money, and IT has been a safe haven so far to do so.
Yep, it's mostly this. Especially for businesses under 300 users, you get Exchange, EntraID, Defender EDR, InTune(MDM) + the Teams/SharePoint/OneDrive/Copilot all integrated for $22/user/month. For a little extra you get a half way decent PBX for VoIP too.
If you tried to piece all that together yourself with different services, then integrate them to the same level, it's going to cost a hell of a lot more than that.
Microsoft is smart too, as none of that requires Windows either. Even of these companies switched to Linux or macOS en masse, they'd still be using Microsoft.
Plus, there's still no competitor to Excel for business types. We might be able to use Google Sheets to great effectiveness, but the finance department at the behemoths can't. The world runs on Excel, like it or not.
> A lot of them are just kids who memorized some CompTIA exams and don't really know what they're doing.
This is true for all fields not just tech/IT. Competent windows sysadmin work nowadays isn't all that different from macOS endpoints or Linux. Everything can be scripted/automated with PowerShell, or just using the Graph API for 365 stuff. You can effectively manage a windows environment and never touch a GUI if you don't want to.
Microsoft usually isn't the best at anything, but what they excel at is being "good enough" and checking boxes.
When company is forcing you to use something out of inertia, then it's probably not for a good reason.
Actually regarding the "global scale" – I'm not really sure it's true, I think MS has influence mostly in US. Many EU and Asian companies I worked with were using OSX/Linux.
There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.
You can't just edit Excel files in Libre Office Calc, Google Sheets, or Numbers without any problem whatsoever.
If the only problem is migrating from XLSX to some other format I'm sure this is trivial and some tooling must be available.
As Google's JavaScript API also doesn't work in open office and whatever else they all have in extra layers.
However i am not sure when and why I encountered such a software last time, but my dad is a Visual Basic guy and has done a lot of these weird sheets for internal business stuff.
macros, vba, onedrive/sharepoint/office integration
I think you highly underestimate the Microsoft Office ecosystem and the tight integration in enterprises.
> I'm sure this is trivial [...].
nope.
But you're right, they surely added a bunch of smaller stuff to keep everything connected, and I'm kind of underestimating it since I never used that ecosystem but heard rumors and complaints from other people who had to use it :)
>There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on its advanced features.
this is just silly, it really means "There's no serious alternative to Excel for those who rely on exclusive Visual Basic macros"
Not true. Sharepoint and OneDrive are key enablers for real time collaboration. It lets multiple people work on the same file at the same time using native desktop applications. Dropbox has tried to bolt stuff like that on, but it is janky as heck. OpenOffice, etc can't integrate with Excel for real time collaboration (honestly, I'm not sure they support any level of real time collab with anything). Google Sheets won't integrate with Excel for real time. Google is great for collaboration, but sticking everything in Google's cloud system isn't dramatically better than being stuck on Microsoft's stuff. Also Google Sheets just doesn't work as well as Excel.
You don't seem to have much of a familiarity with this ecosystem. If you're curious, I'd suggest hunting down these things on learn.microsoft.com, but to dismiss them is only showing your lack of understanding.
I get it, it would be a technically better solution, remove Microsoft lock-in etc, but the cost-benefit analysis isn’t that good in this case.
There is a cottage industry of fintech firms that issue their clients with a generator for each of these reports. These generators will be (a) an excel template file and (b) an excel macro file.
The regulators are not technically sophisticated, but the federated technology solution allows each to own its regional turf, so this is the model rather than centralised systems.
If the regulator makes a mess of receiving one of your reports, they will probably suggest that you screwed up. But if you are using the same excel-generator as a lot of other firms, they will be getting the same feedback from other firms. If you did make a mistake, you can seek help from consulting firms who do not understand the underlying format, but know the excel templates.
There are people whose day-to-day work is updating and synchronising the sheets to internal documentation. It gets worse every year.
Sometimes the formats are defined as XBRL documents. Even then, in practice it is excel but one step removed. On the positive side - if you run a linux desktop you have decent odds to avoid these projects, due to the excel connection.
Google Sheets didn't even support tables until fairly recently.
Power Query the language is nice, I kinda like it. I've read the UI and engine works quite well in PowerBI, but I haven't used it.
The Excel engine is way too slow though. Apparently they're two entirely separate implementations, for some architectural reason, not exactly sure why.
Excel's Power Query editor on the other hand, is an affront to every god from every religion ever. Calling it an "advanced editor", while lacking even the most basic functionality, is just further proof of their heresy.
CFO was/is an excel wiz, so he would whip up crazy Rube Goldbergs with Power Pivot (And Power Query), that couldn't be modified by mac users (They can open the files, but they can't interact with it, not even changing filters
PowerQuery is another one, also not available outside of Excel for Windows, not Mac or Web
A lot of it is stuff that should be handled by SQL more properly, but the data people usually can't keep up with the Excel wiz
Which is 5% of its users probably.
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The percentage difference in usage between the #100 command ("Accept Change") and the #400 command ("Reset Picture") is about the same in difference between #1 and #11 ("Change Font Size")
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vs.
--- start quote ---
How much data have we collected?
- About 1.3 billion sessions since we shipped Office 2003 (each session contains all the data points over a certain fixed time period.)
- Over 352 million command bar clicks in Word over the last 90 days.
https://web.archive.org/web/20080324235838/http://blogs.msdn...
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I wish there were more recent studies on this, but they would paint the same picture
Sure Photoshop and Gimp both edit pictures, but the workflow is so different that professional users of Photoshop aren't going to switch just because it's FOSS.
Personally i don't really believe in AAA (or UbiSoft's AAAA) titles that much anymore. Strange exclusivity for some console or device may bring some money early on, but i have plenty games in my Steam libary that could run perfectly under many platforms. And most AAA games heavily drop in price after a few months, Nintendo being the sole exception.
I enjoy older, smaller games nonproportionately more when compared to big titles which require much more resources and time. Yes they look nice, yes they use every documented and undocumented feature of my GPU, yes "it's so fluffy", but it is not enjoyable, esp. with shoved down microtransactions.
If we're talking FPS, give me any Half-Life (and Portal) title and I'm good. Gameplay first, unique art direction, good story, and a well built universe which is almost palpable with lore.
If we're talking RTS, C&C series, Dune Emperor, Supreme Commander and StarCraft is enough.
I have more than 2000 games on Steam and i love my Steam Deck which i got for pretty cheap. It's a very fun game system and you can tinker a lot with it. Upgrading (bigger disk capacity) is very easy.
Just bought Black Mesa for two bucks. Works almost flawlessly. Ten year old game , but much fun to be had. Most games i buy on the very very cheap. Bought Skyrim couple of weeks ago for five bucks.
Sure, i click on the free thursday game on the Epic Games store, but i hate that interface with great passion.
But i also believe there's a lot of special software for laboratories etc, that run on windows only
And this is coming from a very Linux-hesitant newbie who mostly uses Windows.
I have not tried Fortnite.
https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/ppgk04/starcr...
Fortnite doesn't work because Sim Tweeney doesn't want it work: both BattleEye and EAC can work on Linux, Epic just chooses not to enable that functionality.
Microsoft releases the important parts of VS Code under proprietary licenses. Microsoft doesn’t release the source code for Windows or Office or the github.com web app under free software licenses.
Don’t get it twisted. This is marketing, nothing more.
While right now I enjoy the privilege to develop on Linux, things may change.
Occasionally I'll use File Explorer to manage my Linux file system or Linux tools on the Windows file system but really not the degree in which any quirks would be an issue.
Other tools like VSCode IDE, has special handling (extension) to work _inside_ WSL and only keep GUI frontend on the Windows side (very close to how it works over SSH).
On the other hand, I quite often use "explorer.exe ." inside WSL to open File Explorer and jiggle around with files downloaded/created/modified (say with sed) in WSL and it works fine too.
Or use MarkText markdown editor on folder inside WSL being some git repo and I'm adding docs/instructions there.
exactly why I use WSL, lf-only line endings, UTF-8, everything a basic debian bookworm iso can provide, plus docker with GPU Access
When you activate it, it also makes you host windows OS virtualized as well, albeit with native access for some components like GPU etc.
That's why all other Windows Hypervisor (Virtualbox, VMWare Workstation) will experience one issue or another when WSL2 is activated, because more abstraction is happening and more things could go wrong.
Oh I thought your parrent post was asking general overview on why Virtualbox will have severe performance impact if WSL2 is activated. I posted the reason due to multiple abstraction conflicting with each other and there you go.
> Why VirtualBox couldn't be made to run on top of Hyper-V. You might as well tell me Linux apps can't be made to run on Windows because Windows isn't Linux
AFAIK it's already possible but still experimental on Virtualbox, also it's hard issue to solve, and have tiny ROI I suppose. And why would they spent time fixing this slowness that only impact some small userbase like you?
It seems like you're just making guesses and don't actually know the answer? The reason I asked wasn't that I couldn't make the same guesses; it was that I had read online that there are technical obstacles here that (for reasons I don't understand, hence the question) they've had a hard time overcoming. i.e. "tiny RoI" or "small userbase" don't fully explain what I've read.
I was hoping someone would actually know the answer, not just make guesses I could have made myself.
This whole thread is basically frogs praising the cozy warming water in the pot.
I personally don’t use it, pretty much just cause I’m comfortable with my current development environment, and nothing has spurred me to migrate in a while. I’ve been vaguely suspicious to see Microsoft rapidly gain such a huge market share with VS Code, but I don’t know any specific criticisms about it.
But isn’t Cursor a wildly successful VS Code fork, done legally? (I assume if it were in violation of licenses, Microsoft would have already destroyed them.) Seems like a glaring exception to this argument.
Microsoft ist really terrible at naming things, that's for sure.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_POSIX_subsystem
While WSL2 isn't implemented as an architectural sub-system (it uses a VM instead), WSL1 was far closer to the original architecture, providing a Linux compatible API for the Windows kernel.
Can anyone chime in - is this still a concern? Was it ever a concern?
In general, the utilities on posix systems heavily rely on a standardized permission and path structure fundamentally different than windows registry paradigms.
Even something as simple as curl... while incredibly useful on windows, also opens a scripting ecosystem that side-channels Microsoft signing protections etc.
Linux VM disk image files can be very small (some are just a few MB), simply copied to a physical drive/host later given there is no DRM/Key locks, and avoids mixing utf8 with windows codepage.
Mixing ecosystems creates a Polyglot, and that is going to have problems for sure... given neither ecosystems wants the cost of supporting the other.
Best method, use cross platform application ports supported on every platform. In my opinion, Windows should only be used for games and industry specific commercial software support. For robust system privacy there are better options now, that aren't booby-trapped for new users. =3
Right?
Right?…
All development is done on Windows laptop via SSH to those VMs. When I tried using Ubuntu via WSL, something didn't feel right. There were some oddities, probably with the filesystem integration, which bothered me enough to stop doing this.
Nevertheless, I think it's really great what they now did.
Now all what's missing is that they do it the other way around, that they create a 100% windows compatible Wine alternative.
1997 to 2001 (IE 4 to IE 5 SP1)
Commoditize your complements: https://gwern.net/complement
The thing is: I consider myself a real Linux user, and I don't want it to look like Windows. And I hate it when Windows people try to push Linux there, just because they want a free-with-no-ads version of Windows.
In that sense, if WSL can keep Windows users on Windows such that they don't come and bother me on Linux, I'm happy :-).
And I hope that you don't use WSL for servers :).
WSL 2 is a special purpose VM which has ties into Windows in a few key ways to make interoperability easier. You can run a program on Windows and pipe its output to a Linux program for example. Windows and WSL can trade system RAM back and forth as needed. Networking between the two is very smooth.
You can recompile the kernel for WSL all you want, and many do. Microsoft make their changes public as required by the GPL. You can use your own kernel without anything from Microsoft. You can easily create your own WSL distributions, customized to your hearts content.
It’s more than the sum of its parts, really. Feels that way to me, anyway.
now how about mainlining the kernel patches?
so we get a chance of a more current and Linux distro provided wsl kernel :-)? https://github.com/issues/created?issue=microsoft%7CWSL%7C11...
Shame for all of the people who worked hard on WSL1 only to be virtualized into nonexistence.
This isn't open source, and considering that this is probably what ties into/sets up WSL as a windows subsystem that's a bit of a bummer.
The rest is just a Virtual Machine for the most part, isn't it?
Here's how you can lose all your data - and Microsoft engineers won’t care: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8992 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9830 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9049#issuecomment-26...
Windows NT itself has had an architecture supporting environment subsystems for things like Win32, POSIX, OS/2 for decades. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Architecture_of_Windows_NT for more details. Later, it made it relatively easy to host Linux and Android too.
You can imagine they commonly called these things "subsystem for XYZ". So "Windows subsystem for Linux" made sense for those in the know.
Does sound weird outside of the world of NT though
At home I still need to have a native Windows laptop because of one application that I use a lot (a backgammon analyser) that runs natively on Windows and is heavily cpu driven. I could run it in a VM but the performance penalty is just too heavy.
- Work (heavy usage of Microsoft office apps)
- Audio / recording studio
- Some gaming
- Software development
Unfortunately for me, that's three uses where Windows excels, versus one for Linux.
I am not that proficient, I tried it three times, first hurdle is trying to find a distro, making all that research about which ones have more pre-configuration and which ones would be less buggy for your hardware can be a pain.
The thing that attracted me to Linux is the file system and customization. I just wanted to daily drive it, not really for any work. But bugs are just a reality using most DEs available.
In my case once, it even was related to performance, I had to stay the whole day trying to find out why Kubuntu was slower than Windows on my laptop, ended up just being one line in some config file that forced battery-saving performance, I failed to find the post online after encountering the same issue months later after reinstalling the system.
Believe it or not, it's not all sunshine and rainbows, I just realized I use Windows more and more in my dual boot system, so I gave up on using Linux after that.
As a software dev I understand that having telemetry is a good thing. I dont believe it is "extremely invasive".
And I have no idea what AI features you mean (at least on Win10).
Apocryphally, a lot of this was apparently developed at the direct insistence of Steve Jobs who had some run ins with very angry visually impaired people who struggled to use the early iphone/ipad.
That said, my source for this is one of the men who claims to have spoken to Mr Jobs personally, a visually impaired man who had lied to me on several fronts, and was extremely abusive. However I couldn't find anyone inside apple management or legal who would deny his claim. And he seemed to have been set the expectation that he could call the apple CEO at any time.
KDE Plasma is IMO the best grapical desktop environment at the moment, including MacOS.
Before I say anything, Windows 11 is bad.
I remember playing with Win98, XP , I would modify many many registry settings, mod binary files to do something with games, you could access all sorts of weird hardware which only had drivers for windows!
Windows 98-7 were best for learning stuff about computers (inner workings etc).
I remember, to remove viruses (XP)I was trying to hard delete system 32 folder, it deleted lots of files and it continued to run!
qemu-system-x86_64 -enable-kvm -smp cores=4 -drive file=windows.qcow2,index=0,format=qcow2,if=virtio -display gtk -usb -device qemu-xhci,id=xhci -device usb-tablet -m 8G -vga std Win10_1803_EnglishInternational_x64.iso -netdev user,id=net0,restrict=off,hostfwd=tcp::5555-:22 -device virtio-net,netdev=net0I did this in about 20 minutes, with the help of chatgpt.
In the end I was able to keep working through the trip and provide some demos to clients which landed us some big deals.
Go WSL!
I'd much prefer a proper compatibility layer that converts Linux system calls to their equivilent Windows calls and those calls be exposed from the Windows kernel itself.
That way I could just run Linux applications, bash, zsh and development tools directly on top of Windows without needing any "remote development tools" in my IDE or whatever.
Something closer to MSYS2/git bash/busybox for win - but where tools can ignore their Windows specific stuff like the filepath seperator.
It's fine I guess
pjmlp•2mo ago
90s_dev•2mo ago
> This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this
pjmlp•2mo ago
jayd16•2mo ago
tgma•2mo ago
jayd16•2mo ago
tgma•2mo ago
littlestymaar•2mo ago
tgma•2mo ago
littlestymaar•2mo ago
Sigh, and company keep them for sentimental reasons I guess…
tgma•2mo ago
[1]: the real debate is not “who’s my lowest performer” for each manager. It is about why I should cut rather than my sibling manager. If you force everyone to cut one person they all know who it will be.
littlestymaar•1mo ago
The duds who are the best at telling stories about how important their project is are the ones who can get the budget their team growing, and they are also the ones who are the most likely to defend their interests in the event of a layoff. Because, as you noted yourself, it is never about every individual manager selecting their lowest performers and laying them off, and much more about individual managers (at all levels) defending their own perimeter.
And in practice, being good at this type of games isn't a good proxy for knowing which managers are good at fostering an efficient team under them.
tgma•1mo ago
It does, however, make a difference on the promotion side.
littlestymaar•1mo ago
That's not how it works! You'd have entire projects or department being sacked, with many otherwise very competent people being laid off, and projects deemed strategic being completely immune from layoff.
And even inside departments or projects, the people best seen by management will be safe, and the people more focused on actual work will be more at risk.
The harsh truth is that an organization simply has no way to even know who the “bottom 10% performance-wise” are. (And management assessment tend to correlate negatively with actual performance)
magicalist•2mo ago
But the latest layoffs were not performance based. Are you just confidently commenting without knowing about the event being discussed?
tgma•2mo ago
(Also I was responding to a more generic comment saying doing layoff is bad and makes org more political.)
bitmasher9•2mo ago
int_19h•2mo ago
tester756•2mo ago
Decisions, preparations and execution to open source such projects in big corporations to not happen within a week, two or month.
dec0dedab0de•2mo ago
tester756•1mo ago
Managers learn about lay offs day or two before engineers