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himata4113 2 hours ago [-]
Following some of the comments about switching to linux the big one that enabled it for me is AI. I love to thinker, but sometimes I just want things to work and linux is known for very minor inconveniences that are pain to alter because you have to learn what kind of god forsaken build system the application uses and how it integrates with the desktop environment, but now I can just ask AI and it will be fixed by the time I want to use that feature.
Another big thing is getting lookingglass working. I could not for the life of me figure out what I was doing wrong when I followed the setup guide 1 line at a time, but AI figured out the problem and it it working in 1 hour. And yes it took AI one hour to figure it out so you can assume how long I've sent trying to get this to work.
Now I run a custom kernel with custom KDE and several compiled new packages which would require the effort of a small team, but now it's possible to do with few prompts and it's relatively easy to maintain indefinitely.
Also AI got me off jetbrains onto nvim and I haven't been this happy writing code.
alightsoul 1 hours ago [-]
I am done with windows. WSL is not good enough and will never be enough, to offset the sheer instability and unpredictability of windows on my machine. Even if it were stable and predictable it would never be as free as in freedom like Linux to do whatever you want with it. Apparently windows problems like randomly failing wifi are rather common on the Lenovo legion 5 laptops from 2021.
tills13 39 minutes ago [-]
Anecdata: Windows has been rock solid for me for over a decade, including the latest versions.
Given raw Linux or WSL I'd choose WSL 9 times out of 10.
Honestly I feel the Windows hate is forced or due to self-inflicted issues.
bayindirh 4 minutes ago [-]
I understand where you are coming from, and it's not uncommon. I have never formatted and reinstalled Windows 2000, for example.
On the other hand, given raw Linux or WSL, I'd choose raw Linux 20 times out of 10.
While I had my fair share of problems, for the last 20 years, Linux allowed me to be closer to hardware, allow me what I want to do with it and even more stable and performant than a "rock solid" Windows installation. I dual booted Windows and Linux until ~2022 IIRC, just for gaming, and no, I don't miss that bloated thing.
I have a Windows Laptop for my wife and a VM for specialized software which has no Linux counterparts, and even that limited exposure is enough to remember why I don't miss that thing. The experience is inferior to what I have on Linux.
> Honestly I feel the Windows hate is forced or due to self-inflicted issues.
Uh, no. I can't self inflict ads, bloat, performance issues and other papercuts by installing from an official ISO, using my legitimate license, and playing the Microsoft's way of using my online account during install. These are bundled with Windows itself. I even didn't install Microsoft PowerTools to these installations. They are "that" vanilla.
akkad33 28 minutes ago [-]
No it is not forced. I jumped ship the day they force upgraded "selected" users to windows 11 and left others in the dust because their hardware was "incompatible"
alightsoul 14 minutes ago [-]
I have never messed with the windows registry nor updates. Windows will just randomly like not show you the start menu, not show you icons, mess with file operations etc.
This is a compatibility problem with my hardware. I couldn't believe all issues just went away when I switched over
WarOnPrivacy 20 minutes ago [-]
> Windows has been rock solid for me for over a decade, including the latest versions.
I have many Windows, FreeBSD and Ubuntu instances in use. They're all pretty great but none are the best fit everywhere.
leobuskin 23 minutes ago [-]
Why would you prefer WSL over native Linux? What's the rationale here?
WarOnPrivacy 16 minutes ago [-]
> Why would you prefer WSL over native Linux?
I have a number of both. I like WSL for when I'm working in Windows and need to run some quick bash and handle the output in Windows file explorer.
Today I'm working on a project that runs bash scripts in WSL, it's utilizing multiple unbound servers running in Ubuntu minimal and pfsense.
alightsoul 13 minutes ago [-]
Because you want the best the both worlds, but it makes people think Linux has no GUI so it just keeps them locked to windows
They are very afraid of replacing Linux with windows, don't know how it's done, what it is etc.
esikich 17 minutes ago [-]
It's self inflicted. The type of person that complains about stability is the same person who runs the windows decrapify stuff that fucks with the registry and changes what Windows expects to be true. They'll block updates as well. After they've got their system into a really deep place where it was never meant to be, they are shocked when shit breaks randomly. Windows is not Linux. Leave it alone or don't use it.
alightsoul 16 minutes ago [-]
I have never messed with the windows registry not updates and neither have most of those with windows problems on the Lenovo legion 5, when I put Linux on it, all problems disappeared like magic
jesse_dot_id 8 hours ago [-]
I jumped ship from Windows a couple of years ago after having used it since the early 90's. One of the primary reasons was how much I had to fight with WSL2 in my day-to-day work. But now it's becoming even more apparent that Microsoft does not care about its operating system. I don't even know what they could do to get me back. Trust continues to be a huge problem in the AI era of Microsoft.
throwa356262 8 hours ago [-]
WSL has been god send for corporate employees who get a windows laptop but need to do real work.
But everyone knows that performance of WSL is nowhere near native linux on the same machine.
GuestFAUniverse 4 hours ago [-]
WSL is getting better, even with minor releases. It's the only reason I didn't switch my most recent corporate provided laptop.
Sadly the rest of Windows 11 suffers from those unasked, opt-out feature drops.
Unbearable. So, I'll go pure Linux again.
the__alchemist 5 hours ago [-]
What is "real work" in this context? I'm guessing from the context it's Linux kernel or driver development? Or perhaps bioinformatics workflows which use linux-only programs in some cases, especially with CLI-driven workflows?
xtracto 5 hours ago [-]
I think that because the majority of people in HN work building SaaS, they tend to do Linux server related work heavily. The ones that dont, do iPhone work, so they are in a worst place (with Windows).
Other than that, I believe the productivity tooling is better on Windows.
I myself fall in the SaaS category, so Windows doesn't give me anything. On the contrary for whatever reason after mainly using Linux/OSX for 15 years, Windows just feels clunky and like it "gets in the way". WSL is a good hack/workaround, but unless I MUST have Windows as OS (because of a work provided Laptop that cannot be Linux), i dont see a point of using WSL.
gmassman 2 hours ago [-]
I wholeheartedly agree that Windows just gets in the way. It’s not designed around user ergonomics. It’s designed to maximize clicks and screen-time, which are exactly the opposite metrics an OS should care about if they want good UX.
Luckily my IT staff allowed me to dual boot windows and debian+cinnamon. Everything was going great until I needed to compile and test a legacy firmware using Keil uVision... Gonna be on windows a while longer unfortunately :(
tomnipotent 41 minutes ago [-]
> maximize clicks and screen-time
This doesn't make any sense. I regularly use Windows for a few things, and do not have this problem. Sane corp group policies disable all the annoying things folks complain about on the default consumer install, and there are few things you can't do just using a keyboard and keybindings.
I still prefer Linux and KDE is my daily driver but most of the comments I read here about Windows seem to be people regurgitating second-hand comments they read and passing them off as their own, and it's always the same small list of things every time.
the__alchemist 11 minutes ago [-]
Yea... My experience is Windows is usually a more out-of-the-way OS than Linux distros I've used. I feel like on Linux I fight the permissions system and routine hardware/software setup can break parts of the OS and I end up troubleshooting on forums etc.
Linux to me feels like it's designed for multi-user systems and servers, where I use it as a single person to launch software.
wtallis 30 minutes ago [-]
You say that Windows is fine if you have a whole IT department taking on the burden of fighting against the annoyances, but then accuse people who complain about those annoyances of regurgitating second-hand complaints!?
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Some of us also do real work on Windows, ask Valve.
newsoftheday 3 hours ago [-]
Interesting take since Valve with Proton has done a lot to increase gaming on Desktop Linux also their console devices.
tomnipotent 38 minutes ago [-]
Except they pay CodeWeavers to do most of the work.
mhh__ 7 hours ago [-]
Sure and there are billion dollar systems at every bank that runs entirely on VBA macros in excel doesn't mean its not structurally flawed.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Worse is better, isn't that the UNIX motto?
gchamonlive 7 hours ago [-]
Usually when it's misunderstood
pjmlp 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, it only applies when it is convenient.
gchamonlive 5 hours ago [-]
Yes, software is supposed to be convenient, making user's life miserable is proprietary software's job
ununix 6 hours ago [-]
Do one thing, and do it well.
pjmlp 5 hours ago [-]
Not even UNIX System V userspace obeys a mythical rule that only exists on a worshiped book by the FOSS community, most of which never used anything besides GNU/Linux.
onraglanroad 3 hours ago [-]
Of course they haven't. The old Unixes are dead and gone.
The shell grows not old, as we that are left grow old:
Aix shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of Sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
tomnipotent 37 minutes ago [-]
And these VBA macros in excel probably don't have any more bugs and issues than all the software written by the HN community. Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
xattt 6 hours ago [-]
Is the excuse of teenagers every August when they ask for the latest and greatest laptop?
pjmlp 5 hours ago [-]
I can provide other examples of real work done on Windows, like Photoshop, DAW, and so on.
Maybe those are interesting as teenager hobbies as well.
nrr 5 hours ago [-]
I write Ada that targets Windows and COM, which I consider to be real work.
simonjgreen 7 hours ago [-]
Delightful way to write off an enormous cohort of people and huge variety of work.
GuB-42 6 hours ago [-]
Being exactly in GP situation, I would give a more charitable take.
We are not talking about a properly configured Windows workstation. We are talking about corporate PCs configured by an IT department that is completely oblivious to the needs of developers, most likely because developers are not their bosses. WSL is effectively an escape hatch.
Usually the stated reason is "security", and developers tend to do the greatest sin of corporate security: they run arbitrary code, and they even have the nerve to call it "their job"!
I don't work in corp IT, but I am convinced that people there are not stupid and they are fully aware of the "shadow IT" aspect of WSL, but they give it a pass because they are also aware that people have "real work" to do that would be impossible otherwise, given company policies.
newsoftheday 3 hours ago [-]
> We are talking about corporate PCs configured by an IT department that is completely oblivious to the needs of developers
I definitely agree with that part though I've not used Windows at home for many, many years...and I'm a gamer.
moron4hire 6 hours ago [-]
> I don't work in corp IT, but I am convinced that people there are not stupid...
No, not stupid, per se. I generally don't like to blame people for the situations in which they find themselves. But there is something else going on.
I find the folks in such IT departments are generally not very good at their jobs. One potential reading of this is that it is not the people working in the jobs' fault, it's the design of the corporate leadership by not paying well enough for the job to get better people.
But the knock-on effect would be, if corporate paid better, at least my IT department would look completely different. The people we have now would be replaced by much more competent people. These more competent people would also generally be folks who shower and wear clothes that fit, that they don't let one corner of their shirts hang out the waist of their pants, that didn't show up to a service call wreaking of cigarette smoke. I'm not expecting people to spend more money on nicer clothes, I already established they don't have that money. I am expecting people to take care of their basic hygiene and present themselves as best they can. That they don't is a signal they don't really care about their own professional development. If corporate paid better, IT wouldn't be staffed by a bunch of literal slobs.
Though they are in a bad situation, I don't have a lot of respect for the folks in my IT department, because the only job they have, the one they have been sticking to for some time, they are only doing the bare minimum. I've been poor. I've been in jobs I hated. The only way out was to suck it up, present myself well, get better at my job, and go somewhere better. I have a hard time respecting anyone who just gives up.
(To be fair, there actually are a few who do appear to be doing this, but they are few and far between. They also don't last long, because again, they go on to something better. I'm talking about the kind of people who don't put in the effort and then complain they never get anywhere.)
PorciiVorbesc 6 hours ago [-]
>I find the folks in such IT departments are generally not very good at their jobs.
Because their job is keeping their job, not making the 50 developers in the 5000 person org happy, as those are not their bosses.
You judge their competency from the perspective of a dev in the trenches, but the way management judges their performance is vastly different: keeping IT cost center spending as low as possible(hence a lot of IT offshoring) and security as tight as possible (hence MFA, EDMs and MDMs shoved everywhere that don't led you run anything besides notepad and Edge). Whether this hampers the devs or not is irrelevant for them or for management (outside of purely tech companies) since this is the devs' problem to deal with, not IT's problem. The moral is as long as it's seen as a cost center and not a profit center, there will never be right incentives to have a competent IT department staffed by competent people.
And keep in mind that a lot of the hidden champion engineering companies that make the world go round still function on excel sheets with VBA scripts as their "tech stack", and as long as that runs, management is happy. If you tell them you want to run linux, python, node, docker on your notebook, they'll probably laugh in your face thinking it's some hacker alien gobbledygook.
mycall 5 hours ago [-]
Having a dress code would help filter out those who don't fit in.
twobitshifter 5 hours ago [-]
It’s been blocked at companies I have worked at. In one case it briefly worked but thereafter WSL lost network access.
nixon_why69 5 hours ago [-]
Why on earth are you devoting more attention to their clothes and smoking habits than their IT skills? I can believe those are bad too, but come on.
oblio 3 hours ago [-]
Frankly, based on the description above, it's very hard to separate the two. If someone is that unkempt in their day to day life it's very hard to believe they'll have their shit together at work for years and years. It's fine to wear the wrong type of clothes, but clothes that don't fit right and not showering are really bad signals.
throwa356262 6 hours ago [-]
I spend most of time in meetings and updating excel sheets.
Recently I needed a certain agent to help me automate some Excel stuff. Getting it to work in Windows was significantly harder if not impossible compared to WSL.
c7b 5 hours ago [-]
Those machines generally come locked down, so you need permission to install stuff like WSL. I had such a machine and asked if they could unlock WSL, and their answer was no, because Security was busy enough keeping the Windows installs reasonably secure. Which makes sense tbf. Would be surprised if that was much different in other places.
zeryx 7 hours ago [-]
Honestly the performance hit of WSl even being alive and running in the background of my XPS was so bad I just ssh into a workstation and do everything on there instead. Trying to get windows to just be usable is such a massive pain in the ass.
rirze 4 hours ago [-]
Would be ok, except for the fact that I like to run GUI applications on linux as well. Remote access for gui is a pain.
secondcoming 7 hours ago [-]
Luckily I'm allowed use Hyper-V for Linux work
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Guess where WSL runs on?
pizza234 7 hours ago [-]
I had the opposite experience.
I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported. There are some that are very compatible, but generally speaking, I need to trade off software (Linux compatibility) for hardware (laptop choice) or viceversa.
WSL allowed me to choose any laptop I want and run the subset of Linux that matters for me. For my use case (that is, not quickly accessing huge amounts of files, performance was ok - as a matter of fact, the author of the article got a very reasonable performance loss on realworld tasks (-4% ~ -16%).
The only thing that I found truly irritating is attaching USB storages, but I ended living with that.
Athas 4 hours ago [-]
I'm surprised to hear that about laptops. When I first switched to Linux in 2003, laptops were supposedly a somewhat iffy thing. When I got my first laptop in 2007, I had to do a bit of research, but ultimately ended up with a ThinkPad where everything worked fine, modulo the need for proprietary graphics drivers as was common at the time. Since then, I don't think I've ever stressed about whether a laptop would be properly supported. I am easily believe that maybe some things are a little better in Windows (maybe automatic firmware update, or the CPU governor), but which laptops are "not very well supported" by Linux these days?
pizza234 2 hours ago [-]
I never trust people saying "it works well". Heck, even Canonical lies in their certification program, since they may test with custom distros that they may not release (yeah, it's this crazy).
My last machine, according to reviewers, worked "well" on Linux. After I purchased it, I've found that the battery lasts half of what it lasts in Windows. And other stuff.
No doubt that there are 100% compatible machines (Thinkpads, typically), but again, it limits choice.
newsoftheday 3 hours ago [-]
In the mid to 2000's at IBM, many of us developers and even quite a few regular business people in marketing ran Desktop Linux on Thinkpads, it worked extremely well. I assume they still do.
oblio 3 hours ago [-]
Does Linux support hibernate or suspend well, 30 years after both technologies have been introduced?
drnick1 50 minutes ago [-]
I never understood the point of hibernate/suspend. Just turn off your laptop when you are done.
evilduck 3 hours ago [-]
Not even Windows hibernates or suspends reliably. Apple seems to be the only vendor that can get this right.
newsoftheday 3 hours ago [-]
Hibernate and Suspend never worked well for me or my coworkers or relatives when we tried it on Windows.
newsoftheday 3 hours ago [-]
> I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported.
No, that isn't a fact at all. I use Dell laptops and have run Desktop Linux on them (Ubuntu past years and more recent switched to Kubuntu) and all of the hardware has worked well, even for gaming, even for my laptop with nVidia built in.
beart 2 hours ago [-]
Dell, having one of the most popular engineering laptops of the past decade (xps). It's not surprising that it would have better than average support.
nicman23 2 hours ago [-]
me when i lie
specproc 5 hours ago [-]
Yeah, WSL was the gateway to daily driving for me. I'd played with Linux as a kid, came back via WSL, and quickly came to the conclusion I'd be best off without Windows.
Haven't regretted it for a second.
chris_money202 7 hours ago [-]
Did you work out of /mnt/c?
jesse_dot_id 7 hours ago [-]
My problems weren't performance related, aside from the occasional catastrophic memory leak; most of my biggest headaches were related to networking.
ninkendo 6 hours ago [-]
They finally fixed the networking thing a while back.
In current WSL2, Windows owns the IP address, the NIC, DHCP, ARP, etc, and it’s shared with the Linux VM.
It’s really kinda magic… Linux sees the same IP address as windows does, and you actually get address-in-use errors if Linux tries to listen on a port Windows is already listening on, and vice-versa. So there’s no NAT going on or any internal 172.x net within the Linux VM, you just run “ip addr show” and you see the same real IP addresses that “ipconfig” shows you in windows.
(I no longer have a windows installation but WSL2 got noticeably better with networking some time before I gave up on windows.)
jesse_dot_id 7 hours ago [-]
Also no, I didn't.
DiabloD3 7 hours ago [-]
I suspect they did. 100% of cases where people complain WSL2 was slow and I helped debug was this specific incorrect usage.
gravelboard 4 hours ago [-]
I did the same, fighting WSL constantly with some other random conflicting stuff. Moved to Ubuntu and honestly things just work. _Maybe_ 2026/27 will finally be the year of linux desktop.
shevy-java 8 hours ago [-]
For me Win11 was the final stop.
I still use Win10 for a few things, including testing stuff works there too, via java. I switched to Linux in 2004 or so, though.
Mabusto 3 hours ago [-]
I moved to Linux 8 months ago because of how crappy windows 11 has become. One of the things I loved about windows was developing on it, WSL2 was great and I loved just having VS Code connect to it and it’s my own little dev box.
I’ve really enjoyed the switch so far, having attempted it a few times in the past and ended up going back to windows (once in 2003, another in 2012). It’s encouraging to see MS continue to get the developer experience right with improvements like this, but unless they make significant improvements to the OS itself, I won’t be going back.
y-c-o-m-b 3 hours ago [-]
After many years of failed switching attempts, I finally made the move to CachyOS 2 months ago. Windows 11 updates constantly force-feeding copilot and not letting me shut down my system without updating is what finally pushed me to give it another honest go.
I want to caution people though because I see posts like this all the time, but nobody mentions just how tough it is to mimic the "polished" look and feel of Windows in Linux. Even getting it installed in a dual-boot setup was an absolute nightmare. If it had not been for Claude, there's no honest way I could have made this transition. It would have ended just like all my other previous attempts: going back to windows.
Here's a list of issues I documented along the way (with many more that I didn't document), some of them resolved with other methods (I game on Windows VM with GPU Passthrough now) and some I live with:
- Not able to choose same display resolution as Windows, especially when mirroring my laptop to my monitor. Most offered resolutions are too slow or too blurry with text also.
- Having to force browsers to use my dedicated nvidia GPU instead of the Intel one, rendering simple web games in browsers is still choppy even with this solution.
- Choppy games (RDRD2, Last of us 1 and 2) when using Proton/Lutris/Wine despite 3080 GPU (these games run smooth in Windows). Kind of expected this...
- Blocky artifacts showing up in most games (tried multiple drivers and Proton flavors)
- Have to disable secure boot in BIOS for some reason otherwise bootloader doesn't work
- Come up with hacky solutions to not get prompted for root password every time I connect a removable drive that is Bitlocker Encrypted
- For some reason when shutting down/rebooting, my CPU fan just stops cold turkey and it makes a "thud" noise. I've found no resolution and it only happens with linux.
- I can't control where applications on my taskbar live. If I place a pin in the middle and click it, the app launches a separate instance at the far end of the taskbar. Tried different sort options, no fix. Some apps work fine, others don't.
- Can't click shutdown/reboot when screen is locked. Need to click "Switch User" first.
EDIT: should mention some other pain points: support for broken software is very slow moving due to so many distros and flavors. If you update a package for security reasons and it breaks functionality, you could be stuck waiting quite a while (sometimes a month) for it to get fixed.
Also earlier this week CachyOS black-screened users that updated their OS, we could not even get to the login screen. The solution for me was obvious, just rollback to a snapshot, but some people couldn't even get that to work. When users complained or offered solutions, I saw one of the mods get snappy and basically blame users for updating too quickly. I mean, I get WHY that would occur, but it seems like such a weird thing to scold people for. The community is still very abrasive to Linux newcomers, but this has been the case for decades.
chausen 2 hours ago [-]
I setup a new main PC (Nvidia GPU) with Arch and GNOME a couple of years ago and had quite a few problems. I switched to KDE and have had almost 0 problems for day-to-day work and gaming. Every once in a while I’ll run into an issue with running a game that I can usually resolve pretty easily with AI. It seems the work Valve has done with KDE and Proton has really added a lot of polish to the experience; I’ve always preferred Linux over Windows but now the tradeoffs for me are almost non-existent.
Mabusto 2 hours ago [-]
This is absolutely true, and was my experience as well, it did take quite a bit of work to get something as functional as windows setup.
I went with Arch and wanted to take a few days to actually go through the Wiki and setup something completely from scratch and learn along the way. I had my laptop next to me and AI was a huge help. I went with Hyprland(Fish for shell, Kitty for terminal, Ashell for my bar, Walker for launcher, Yazi for explorer) and tried installing a bunch of pre-made .config files, but that was a big mistake, just take the time and get everything setup yourself, it's worth it in the long run to learn how all this works under the hood.
I think it's important to point out that my switch was also motivated by a desire to learn about the guts of a linux system and not just go with Ubuntu or a ready made one. I run Ubuntu on a home server and it runs great, but I am a full blown Arch snob now and I could never daily drive it.
giancarlostoro 2 hours ago [-]
If you want a polished OS look thats closeish to Windows I cannot recommend KDE enough.
tonymet 2 hours ago [-]
Which distro did you switch to?
Mabusto 2 hours ago [-]
Arch, I took a few days and just did the full walk through from the Arch Wiki (there is a streamlined install process someone made[1]). I had my laptop next to me and AI was a huge help, but I learned a ton doing it and it was satisfying booting into a graphical interface for the first time!
WSL2 is a different product from WSL1, not a different version. Is WSL3 now a different version of WSL2 or another separate product?
whs 7 hours ago [-]
It's the same thing. Seems like the major version bump is to advertise WSLc, which is like Apple containers - an SDK for launching Linux containers as part of a Windows app.
ununix 6 hours ago [-]
I guess windows containers where dead on arrival?
nrr 5 hours ago [-]
Windows Containers, owing to how NT itself is put together, are incredibly awkward to use. Container images have to go all the way down to smss.exe (the NT equivalent to init), which ties you to a particular kernel patch level.
Upgrade the container host? Re-bake your container images. It's a massive pain in the ass.
generichuman 6 hours ago [-]
Not dead on arrival, just extremely expensive on arrival for commercial/production use-cases, unless you're using Windows Containers on Azure.
They're missing things like winget as well, but that's mostly an inconvenience rather than a blocker.
doctorpangloss 5 hours ago [-]
Not dead, but they are ridiculously buggy. Much like WSL.
pilif 8 hours ago [-]
Looks like a different version of WSL2 with a newer kernel and newer VM host software
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
An evolution, better said.
Now there is virtio support, finally no need to depend on external CLI tools for what should have been in the box on day on.
Until now, even for Windows containers, we needed some Docker compatible CLI tool.
KingOfCoders 3 hours ago [-]
I moved to Linux from WSL2. It works surprisingly well today as a desktop OS (using it since ~1992 on servers, 20 years of OS Macs before Windows on desktop). And it looks to be perfect for AI - Claude did build and test a noise gate mic pipeline easily because every config is in plain text files.
hansonkd 3 hours ago [-]
I love Linux and use it for everything except my desktop for 20+ years now. Too many times even in the past I do an update the distro and then something stops working and then I have to spend a day fixing. Last time (6mo ago) it was my sound card. Small little annoyances that steal hours of productivity. LTS was going good until I wanted to update to the next LTS then the can of worms gets opened. It’s fantastic when it’s fresh and everything works and you can blow it away easily and reinstall. I’ve never found upgrading packages to be reliable long term without eventually having to do some manually recovery or reinstall OS
newsoftheday 3 hours ago [-]
> Too many times even in the past I do an update the distro and then something stops working and then I have to spend a day fixing.
On Ubuntu starting in 2006 and Kubuntu the last several years, what you're describing doesn't and hasn't happened to me.
When I've tried other distros over the years, the issue you described has happened to me on:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux
Fedora
SuSE
Debian (yes, even Debian but it was with the unsupported drivers and the issue was in a WiFi driver)
But it has not happened on Ubuntu or Kubuntu since I started using them in 2006. We use desktop Linux on several machines here and have for a long time, from Dell to HP to Lenovo.
hansonkd 3 hours ago [-]
Yup, tried ubuntu. Probably gotten over a hundred of their free CDs in the mail over the year to give out. Milage may vary based on exact hardware. It works until it doesn't is the story. Too much variation in consumer hardware for linux to ever be reliable for majority. So many combinations of motherboards, graphics cards, wifi cards, sound cards, etc. I even bought lenovos officially linux supported laptop etc to try to fix the issues.
I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.
newsoftheday 2 hours ago [-]
> It works until it doesn't is the story.
No, that's not my story nor is it the story of the vast majority of Ubuntu/Kubuntu users.
> Too much variation in consumer hardware for linux to ever be reliable for majority.
That's a false statement, too many of us out here using Desktop Linux to try and make such a claim in 2026 (or even 20 years ago for that matter).
> I even bought lenovos officially linux supported laptop etc to try to fix the issues.
Tens of thousands of us developers in IBM used Desktop Linux on Thinkpads and later Lenovos for your statement to not ring true with me.
> I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.
Those statements do not represent a truthful reality the majority of Desktop Linux users experience. This isn't 1996 in a random Linux IRC channel.
goodmythical 2 hours ago [-]
I honestly can't remember the last time an update broke anything for me in 20 years of linux, and rolling back to last stable has always been easy.
That's across various Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and even a crunchbang install.
In the past, especially on my custom desktop with uncommon GPU, sound card, and wifi chip, I'd check for compatibility and give it a few days after releases were announced to see if there were any user reported bugs. Knowing that devs prioritize compatibility for the most common devices first, I may have to wait my turn. If no, update. If yes, check for available solutions, update, apply solutions. If no solutions, wait.
But, for instance, currently I've been updating this Fedora 44 lenovo with the crunchy kernel roughly weekly for about a year, have been doing so blindly (just sudo dnf update && reboot before bed), and have not had a single problem in all of that time.
It's the same model as Windows- don't do shit before you know. You don't just install random garbage on a Windows machine, and you certainly don't allow automatic updates that re-enable features you've disabled, disable your ability to disable those features, break your menus, put ads on your lockscreen, put ads on your desktop, put ads in your menu, break hibernation, break wifi printing, or whatever other insane shit they've done in the last few years. You wait to update until you know all that broken shit has been removed or stay on XP until they pry it from your bloody knuckles or trust that some random dev doesn't have spyware in that de-bloated iso you've been thinking about.
Linux currently receives development from Intel, AMD, nvidia, google, facebook, qualcomm, amazon, and even Microsoft. Long gone are the days of the wild west governed by but a few.
2 hours ago [-]
KingOfCoders 3 hours ago [-]
"my sound card."
Yes, for me today though this is usually fixed in 5min by Claude.
No I think it's more accurate to call it WSL Containers, or WSLc, but the release is indeed WSL 3.0.*.
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
That is quite relevant, and compose ability is on the way, or for some workloads Aspire would be an alternative I guess.
Unfortunately most companies are too cheap to pay for Docker Desktop, and having Windows containers depend on a third party tool has been a problem in such customers.
Because using Rancher Desktop or Podman isn't also a given, due to similar issues.
ununix 6 hours ago [-]
Dockefile is still a thing.
pjmlp 5 hours ago [-]
And?
tonymet 2 hours ago [-]
great to hear it thanks. I stumbled upon it on that HN article on containers, and since I’ve run doing other WSL benchmarks lately (testing kernel mitigations , which have a huge performance impact on the guest container), I re-ran those benchmarks on the upgrade.
mellosouls 4 hours ago [-]
I love WSL, but giving this a major upgrade label (2 to 3) seems a bit of a stretch, at least from the viewpoint of an average dev user.
Perhaps it reflects the amount of work and thought that has gone into it, but I really think the optics are better if the selling points are immediately obvious to the user.
Hopefully some light will be shed in further blogs.
omnicognate 4 hours ago [-]
Especially given 1 -> 2 was a complete rewrite that changed the entire architecture to the extent that there are still reasons to run WSL 1 in some cases. Talking of which, the one thing I'd be excited about (if I ever expected to do any dev on Windows again, which I don't) would be a way of sharing local storage between Windows and Linux processes without incurring a massive slowdown on one side, which WSL 1 achieves, but it doesn't sound like this has that. (Or does it?)
tonymet 2 hours ago [-]
I think MS is calling it Wsl2 still (3.x series) . Let’s see if they shift the naming like MacOS did with the numbering. (It was 10.x for the longest time then they ditched it)
NikolaNovak 3 hours ago [-]
What made a significant jump from WSL2 to WSL3?
Unless I'm mistaken, WSL to WSL2 was massive change in complete architecture, with WSL2 now requiring virtualization and making your host-OS run on top of hypervisor, with potential tradeoffs not many users are typically aware of. Basically, WSL and WSL2 were different beasts entirely :)
Was there anything that big or note-worthy from WSL2 to WSL3? Or just a natural evolution/upgrade?
hrunt 3 hours ago [-]
WSL3 is the app version. The underlying mechanism of how Windows runs Linux hasn't changed. The change from WSL to WSL2 was in that mechanism (WSL: run via syscall translation, WSL2: run via VM). This is an app change, so it covers the interfaces of how you can start running Linux code, but underneath the hood, it's still a kernel running within a VM.
The big addition here is the support for containers. The app now provides a simple way to run containers directly. Underneath the hood, there's still a kernel running on a VM, though. There's also some improvements to the filesystem layer, a kernel upgrade, etc.
I had to speculate using the changelog, since MS hasn’t released performance tests . Kernel 6.18 has a better scheduler and other refinements. WSL3 improved the clock routines to use a synthetic clock. There are quite a few others.
virtiofs is the biggest change, it was experimental in 2.x. It doesn’t affect my application, but most new users who want to share files between windows + Linux will see a huge bump.
6 hours ago [-]
binsquare 8 hours ago [-]
Lot of the WSL2 lag is not the VM itself, it's the 9P file sharing and interop.
I found that seems like anything under /mnt/c goes through 9P
chris_money202 7 hours ago [-]
You’re not supposed to work out of the /mnt/c. A lot of people make this mistake and then complain that WSL is slow. On the native linux file system WSL is 100x faster for everything
LeBit 7 hours ago [-]
On my work laptop I made the lazy/naive mistake of mounting my projects from macOS into devcontainers running in Colima.
vscode extensions using ripgrep in parallel in the background (there are many!) are killing the vm.
I now decided to follow Mitchell Hashimoto choice and use VMware Fusion and simply do all my work inside of it.
meinersbur 4 hours ago [-]
That's the entire appeal of WSL (for me). A single source checkout I can work on from both sides; no inconsistency of forgetting that I need to apply changes twice.
Without it, I can just as well ssh into another box.
chris_money202 3 hours ago [-]
Trust me, its not worth the performance cost. Just use git push and pull across the /mnt/c boundry
joe_guy 3 hours ago [-]
I do this on wsl1 without issue. wsl2 has an experimental new virtual (or just remote?) fs you can enable but I have not tested it.
binsquare 7 hours ago [-]
From the perspective of user empathy, wsl seems to be designed for that use case. but the implementation/defaults can be improved
tester756 4 hours ago [-]
>You’re not supposed to work out of the /mnt/c.
Source?
chris_money202 3 hours ago [-]
Microsoft now launches a pop-up discourging this, so that is my source. Also my own personal experience using WSL for 8 years.
You can very easily measure this as well, use any disk benchmark
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
There is virtio support now, and to be fair 9P was never an issue for me.
DiabloD3 7 hours ago [-]
9P is very slow for certain operations (such as, for example, git from either direction).
virtio is not enabled by default because its buggy in certain corner cases, and will be enabled by default when it stops doing that. That said, I do have that enabled, it is certainly faster.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Since nowadays I use WSL to run immutable containers, and not really classical Linux Desktop, it isn't something that bothers me.
Agents take more time than building Docker images.
tonymet 3 hours ago [-]
That feature is faster as well (using virtiofs instead of 9p), but i use the native VHDX IO for my work, which is adequately fast.
usrusr 8 hours ago [-]
And yet I had results perfectly within the range of "good enough" having an ai harness muck about in a work folder in a docker mount on a 9P mapped drive under permanent observation by an intelliJ instance on the Windows side before some buggy Windows update made it occasionally lock up under `npm i` sized filesystem loads. Crazy how far we've come.
isityettime 1 hours ago [-]
for those intrigued by the name: WSL3 is just WSL2 3.0; it's still just Linux under Hyper-V, not a new architecture.
neals 2 hours ago [-]
Ditch Windows. Install Linux. With Claude, your headaches go away.
akkad33 30 minutes ago [-]
People still use Windows? What is it like now? Everything AI? AI in textpad?
jordand 26 minutes ago [-]
Many industries are sadly coupled to Windows, for years to come. There's no getting rid of a lot of legacy software/code. Oddly enough, Microsoft has rolled back their forced Copilot, in a rare step in the right direction.
exacube 4 hours ago [-]
Are majority of the perf gains really from tuning from the kernel's `page_reporting_order` param?
This is great, this is some good work. But, like an issue I described before with Linux kernel io-uring[1], this fails to test and demonstrate performance with a healthy server load.
This obviously fails to depict a healthy server load because it's just way too specific.
My memory is a bit foggy, but the original WSL promised a much more ambitious integration with Windows, sort of container-like. It had a lot of rough edges when I first tried it, but they promised they'd work on it. That, together with their promise that W10 would be the 'last' Windows and they'd switch to a more OSX-style rolling release model was what pushed me to adopt Windows in ~2016. In the first years of Nadella it really felt like MS would listen to developers. Within less than two years iirc they'd given up on the WSL ambition, with WSL2 being a mere VM with noticeably worse performance for some of my workloads, and completely reneged on their W10 promise, even vowing to make my newly purchased hardware obsolete.
In summary, I really couldn't care less what improvements they make to WSL, and neither should anyone else, imho. If you want Linux, for the love of god just use Linux. Emulation works great the other way round by now.
okanat 4 hours ago [-]
Do you run your workloads on Windows partitions/filesystem but using WSL2 as the runner? That's how you end up with abysmal performance.
We tested this in the office with equal laptops. CPU workloads have almost no VM overhead and the C++ / Rust compilation workloads on purely WSL2 virtual disk image is only 2% slower.
Yes WSL1 was more ambitious but the fundamental differences in the NT and POSIX makes it quite hard and CPU workloads suffered.
psd1 4 hours ago [-]
MS Office is notoriously resistant to running in Wine (haven't tried it myself) and, with all love to LubreOffuce, it's clearly the poor relation.
I've usually been able to get windows software running, but it's not always easy. I borrow my wife's laptop to reprogram my gaming mouse, for example. Couldn't be bothered any longer to dick about with wine.
But this is slightly beside the point: many have to use the allotted machines at work, which will tend to be windows (or maybe mac). That's the audience for WSL. It is an escape hatch for wage slaves.
The original WSL translated syscalls. It was a very tight integration. It was not perfect, and i should think it was a massive ongoing effort. I think it's an elegant approach bit i can see why wsl2 is essentially a vm. I never did any benchmarking, but i suspect that what wsl2 loses in disk performance, it gains in kernel performance. I never found either variant slow, and my corporate laptop was shit. My vagrant stack was diabolically slow, though.
c7b 4 hours ago [-]
Try WinBoat, it's different technology and works really well. Haven't tested with Office specifically though.
stefan_ 4 hours ago [-]
I have no problem with WSL2 being a VM of sorts if thet at least had VirtualBox of 2010 vintage features like properly integrating USB devices, not whatever this usbipd crap is, or a window manager that doesn’t inexplicably die and require a full machine restart.
hurril 1 hours ago [-]
I just hate the fact that I am to start a new contract at a Windows shop because IT hates Mac. Most people there would want a Mac given the choice, among the other developers, there is also a Linux crew. But no! It dept says no, so they hold the rest of us hostage.
Why are you like this?
drnick1 58 minutes ago [-]
> Most people there would want a Mac given the choice
I don't think so. A PC with Linux is always the right choice. Macs don't even give you the option of a tower with a dedicated GPU, they are pathetic nowadays.
xaduha 8 hours ago [-]
I find that stuff that it offers over a normal Hyper-V VM is stuff that I don't need, leaky abstractions galore.
pjmlp 7 hours ago [-]
Nowadays I use it mostly for Linux containers.
shevy-java 8 hours ago [-]
Well, you can use linux-tools on windows too. I kind of compiled most of LFS/BLFS on it, and it works. So it just gives you more options.
tonymet 3 days ago [-]
Despite the container support getting most of the attention, I discovered a measurable performance improvement with WSL3 by accident. Luckily I had another machine to upgrade so I ran an AB test comparing WSL 2 to WSL3 .
If you want a real bump in performance, I have a clever trick . Hardware isn’t cheap these days, so we demand the most of our software.
Leonard_of_Q 7 hours ago [-]
> If you want a real bump in performance, I have a clever trick . Hardware isn’t cheap these days, so we demand the most of our software.
Good trick: get rid of the superfluous Windows layer which stands between that expensive hardware and your target OS. It takes up valuable memory, CPU time and storage space, introduces latency where you don't want it, exfiltrates data to unknown destinations and can decide to "upgrade" itself without warning.
Good tricks need catchy names to succeed so how about NoSL?
psd1 4 hours ago [-]
"Arch btw" vibes
8 hours ago [-]
lacuno-cloud 6 hours ago [-]
I am not sure about WSL in general right now - no matter if WSL3 is more performant.
For me, Claude bypassed my sudo security by executing `wsl.exe -u root`.
The Claude does not need any sudo password :)
chris_money202 3 hours ago [-]
You need to start Claude in WSL, not from outside in Windows. Windows user has complete ownership over the WSL it launches
lacuno-cloud 2 hours ago [-]
The funny thing is: I launched it from within WSL. But it can call wsl.exe -u root from within WSL.
I was very surprised this works, but that was Claude’s solution to editing a config file that needs sudo access without knowing the password (it edited /etc/fstab)
sys_64738 6 hours ago [-]
Isn't this just WSL2 v3?
tonymet 3 hours ago [-]
I’ve never been good at marketing. And that was tongue tying
tonymet 3 hours ago [-]
But you’re right the core wsl2 architecture (run the kernel in a VM and a bunch of distros off of it) is the same.
la_fayette 8 hours ago [-]
ok great benchmark! I work with herdr/pi for dev work and need to use a windows machine from my company. WSL currently unfortunately lags so much when typing, not sure why when using herdr... Using powershell, some features are missing, so i can't wait to try WSL3 and hope for improvements.
TZubiri 8 hours ago [-]
... does it lag on the shell or does it lag when you are in some vibecoded "TUI" njs monstrosity? Because if the latter, the issue is probably not cause of wsl...
la_fayette 8 hours ago [-]
The TUIs alone work fine, so something must be done by herdr to make it slow...
ricardobeat 8 hours ago [-]
herdr might be the culprit there, it can significantly slow down tui apps with its terminal capture. This happens on mac/linux, WSL will surely make it worse.
phendrenad2 2 hours ago [-]
I switched back to Windows after using Linux for years, simply because the promises of better software never emerged. Maybe AI reverse-engineered apps like that Adobe Creative Suite clone in Rust will start to change things, but I don't really want to hang my hat on an app that could go away at a moment's notice.
shevy-java 8 hours ago [-]
WSL is one of the few good ideas Microsoft had in the last ... 5000 years or so.
psd1 3 hours ago [-]
Typescript, vscode, LSP, powershell, kernel subsystems, the HAL, C#, F#, DirectX, side-by-side libraries, a VMM that fucking works. Exchange, SQL Server. Great hardware.
It's a crappy company, like all corporate giants. It has a lot of crappy products. But the case is usually overstated.
tonymet 3 hours ago [-]
Even going back 10 some good ones
* Windows Terminal
* Powershell 7
* Including OpenSSH client + server with windows
* the Visual Studio command line build toolset distribution
* Hyper V and bundling it with Windows Pro
* RDP
* MS Edge (basing on chromium, same extensions, same dev platform)
hougaard 4 hours ago [-]
Interesting, hacker News has truly become the new slashdot :)
ok123456 2 hours ago [-]
-1, Flamebait
cdud3 8 hours ago [-]
And yet it's still factors faster without a whole Windows around it.
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
Unfortunately that acquisition option isn't available in most physical stores, where normies buy their computers, even though there isn't a single OEM not running some distro on their data centers.
Leonard_of_Q 6 hours ago [-]
You can get a refund for that useless Windows licence but that is a bridge too far for most "normies" whether they buy their computers in brick-and-mortar stores or online. If that process could be streamlined somehow..
TZubiri 8 hours ago [-]
everything I use it for executes virtually instantly, 60% slower than virtually instantly is still virtually instantly.
If something is slow on WSL, but not on bare metal linux, it means that the application is slop that only works when MAXING OUT your CPU, it's slop, the app is the slop
dspillett 7 hours ago [-]
Most of the overhead in virtualisation of the sort used by WSL2+ is not CPU throughput, but other hardware access (mostly IO, but for GUI apps display access can have a significant penalty). Things that are just spinning a couple of CPU cores doing number-crunching work and similar see significantly less penalty in VMs than those that perform much IO, unless of course there is much competition for host resources or for some other reason they get passed around cores so see many more L1 cache & TLB misses.
Some things need to max out the CPU, certain compile steps for instance, that is not slop that is code doing its job. Others need significant IO, often random IO, certain other compile/link steps for example, that is not slop. Sometimes if you knew your code was likely to be run in a VM rather than on bare metal you might design it slightly differently to reduce its sensitivity to the detrimental effects, but not having done so doesn't make your code slop. There might be some room to blame slop for UI slowness as a lot of code out there updates their display in an in inefficient manner that is actually noticeable on bare metal too, especially when it unnecessarily uses 3D accelerated compositing or similar and something causes that to fall back to software rendering, but even then if it works well enough in the intended environment calling it slop is perhaps unfair.
pjmlp 8 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I haven't dual booted in decades, it started with Windows 7 and VMWare Workstation for me.
The Year of Desktop Linux is delivered on VMs.
tonymet 2 hours ago [-]
There’s always going to be a tradeoff with usability. Even on Linux you’ll run containers or VMs to prepare your developer environment (servers aren’t running Arch).
You’d be impressed by how fast WSL runs. I’ve got other optimizations on the blog for even more performance tuning with pretty massive 2x-5x gains.
TiredOfLife 6 hours ago [-]
Links to benchmarks?
PunchyHamster 7 hours ago [-]
Amazing they managed to make virtualisation that slow in WSL2
ContinuityLab 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
bewareofscams 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
tw1984 5 hours ago [-]
Microsoft still refuses to fix the most obvious issue here - Windows should be rebuilt on top of a linux kernel.
okanat 4 hours ago [-]
As someone develops for both systems, I would argue doing the opposite is better from the OS design perspective. NT has a much better paradigm than Linux or any POSIX-system. We should move away from POSIX in the age of AIs. The OS should be more granular in its permission handling to its core. NT can do this. Linux requires a complete rethinking and rewrite to have this in the syscall layer. Current extensions like SELinux are hacks. Something like seL4 should be the basis of future OSes. NT is simply closer to that.
asanineassasin 1 hours ago [-]
And one update later.. its goone.. wasted.. some jscript horror of add riddled always on game took it and ran with it. Imagine a department winning performance and one department squandering it meet for lunch in ms cafeteria. Akward..
Another big thing is getting lookingglass working. I could not for the life of me figure out what I was doing wrong when I followed the setup guide 1 line at a time, but AI figured out the problem and it it working in 1 hour. And yes it took AI one hour to figure it out so you can assume how long I've sent trying to get this to work.
Now I run a custom kernel with custom KDE and several compiled new packages which would require the effort of a small team, but now it's possible to do with few prompts and it's relatively easy to maintain indefinitely.
Also AI got me off jetbrains onto nvim and I haven't been this happy writing code.
Given raw Linux or WSL I'd choose WSL 9 times out of 10.
Honestly I feel the Windows hate is forced or due to self-inflicted issues.
On the other hand, given raw Linux or WSL, I'd choose raw Linux 20 times out of 10.
While I had my fair share of problems, for the last 20 years, Linux allowed me to be closer to hardware, allow me what I want to do with it and even more stable and performant than a "rock solid" Windows installation. I dual booted Windows and Linux until ~2022 IIRC, just for gaming, and no, I don't miss that bloated thing.
I have a Windows Laptop for my wife and a VM for specialized software which has no Linux counterparts, and even that limited exposure is enough to remember why I don't miss that thing. The experience is inferior to what I have on Linux.
> Honestly I feel the Windows hate is forced or due to self-inflicted issues.
Uh, no. I can't self inflict ads, bloat, performance issues and other papercuts by installing from an official ISO, using my legitimate license, and playing the Microsoft's way of using my online account during install. These are bundled with Windows itself. I even didn't install Microsoft PowerTools to these installations. They are "that" vanilla.
This is a compatibility problem with my hardware. I couldn't believe all issues just went away when I switched over
I have many Windows, FreeBSD and Ubuntu instances in use. They're all pretty great but none are the best fit everywhere.
I have a number of both. I like WSL for when I'm working in Windows and need to run some quick bash and handle the output in Windows file explorer.
Today I'm working on a project that runs bash scripts in WSL, it's utilizing multiple unbound servers running in Ubuntu minimal and pfsense.
They are very afraid of replacing Linux with windows, don't know how it's done, what it is etc.
But everyone knows that performance of WSL is nowhere near native linux on the same machine.
Sadly the rest of Windows 11 suffers from those unasked, opt-out feature drops. Unbearable. So, I'll go pure Linux again.
Other than that, I believe the productivity tooling is better on Windows.
I myself fall in the SaaS category, so Windows doesn't give me anything. On the contrary for whatever reason after mainly using Linux/OSX for 15 years, Windows just feels clunky and like it "gets in the way". WSL is a good hack/workaround, but unless I MUST have Windows as OS (because of a work provided Laptop that cannot be Linux), i dont see a point of using WSL.
Luckily my IT staff allowed me to dual boot windows and debian+cinnamon. Everything was going great until I needed to compile and test a legacy firmware using Keil uVision... Gonna be on windows a while longer unfortunately :(
This doesn't make any sense. I regularly use Windows for a few things, and do not have this problem. Sane corp group policies disable all the annoying things folks complain about on the default consumer install, and there are few things you can't do just using a keyboard and keybindings.
I still prefer Linux and KDE is my daily driver but most of the comments I read here about Windows seem to be people regurgitating second-hand comments they read and passing them off as their own, and it's always the same small list of things every time.
Linux to me feels like it's designed for multi-user systems and servers, where I use it as a single person to launch software.
The shell grows not old, as we that are left grow old:
Aix shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of Sun and in the morning
We will remember them.
Maybe those are interesting as teenager hobbies as well.
We are not talking about a properly configured Windows workstation. We are talking about corporate PCs configured by an IT department that is completely oblivious to the needs of developers, most likely because developers are not their bosses. WSL is effectively an escape hatch.
Usually the stated reason is "security", and developers tend to do the greatest sin of corporate security: they run arbitrary code, and they even have the nerve to call it "their job"!
I don't work in corp IT, but I am convinced that people there are not stupid and they are fully aware of the "shadow IT" aspect of WSL, but they give it a pass because they are also aware that people have "real work" to do that would be impossible otherwise, given company policies.
I definitely agree with that part though I've not used Windows at home for many, many years...and I'm a gamer.
No, not stupid, per se. I generally don't like to blame people for the situations in which they find themselves. But there is something else going on.
I find the folks in such IT departments are generally not very good at their jobs. One potential reading of this is that it is not the people working in the jobs' fault, it's the design of the corporate leadership by not paying well enough for the job to get better people.
But the knock-on effect would be, if corporate paid better, at least my IT department would look completely different. The people we have now would be replaced by much more competent people. These more competent people would also generally be folks who shower and wear clothes that fit, that they don't let one corner of their shirts hang out the waist of their pants, that didn't show up to a service call wreaking of cigarette smoke. I'm not expecting people to spend more money on nicer clothes, I already established they don't have that money. I am expecting people to take care of their basic hygiene and present themselves as best they can. That they don't is a signal they don't really care about their own professional development. If corporate paid better, IT wouldn't be staffed by a bunch of literal slobs.
Though they are in a bad situation, I don't have a lot of respect for the folks in my IT department, because the only job they have, the one they have been sticking to for some time, they are only doing the bare minimum. I've been poor. I've been in jobs I hated. The only way out was to suck it up, present myself well, get better at my job, and go somewhere better. I have a hard time respecting anyone who just gives up.
(To be fair, there actually are a few who do appear to be doing this, but they are few and far between. They also don't last long, because again, they go on to something better. I'm talking about the kind of people who don't put in the effort and then complain they never get anywhere.)
Because their job is keeping their job, not making the 50 developers in the 5000 person org happy, as those are not their bosses.
You judge their competency from the perspective of a dev in the trenches, but the way management judges their performance is vastly different: keeping IT cost center spending as low as possible(hence a lot of IT offshoring) and security as tight as possible (hence MFA, EDMs and MDMs shoved everywhere that don't led you run anything besides notepad and Edge). Whether this hampers the devs or not is irrelevant for them or for management (outside of purely tech companies) since this is the devs' problem to deal with, not IT's problem. The moral is as long as it's seen as a cost center and not a profit center, there will never be right incentives to have a competent IT department staffed by competent people.
And keep in mind that a lot of the hidden champion engineering companies that make the world go round still function on excel sheets with VBA scripts as their "tech stack", and as long as that runs, management is happy. If you tell them you want to run linux, python, node, docker on your notebook, they'll probably laugh in your face thinking it's some hacker alien gobbledygook.
Recently I needed a certain agent to help me automate some Excel stuff. Getting it to work in Windows was significantly harder if not impossible compared to WSL.
I'm a hardcore Linux user, but it's a fact of life that laptops are not very well supported. There are some that are very compatible, but generally speaking, I need to trade off software (Linux compatibility) for hardware (laptop choice) or viceversa.
WSL allowed me to choose any laptop I want and run the subset of Linux that matters for me. For my use case (that is, not quickly accessing huge amounts of files, performance was ok - as a matter of fact, the author of the article got a very reasonable performance loss on realworld tasks (-4% ~ -16%).
The only thing that I found truly irritating is attaching USB storages, but I ended living with that.
My last machine, according to reviewers, worked "well" on Linux. After I purchased it, I've found that the battery lasts half of what it lasts in Windows. And other stuff.
No doubt that there are 100% compatible machines (Thinkpads, typically), but again, it limits choice.
No, that isn't a fact at all. I use Dell laptops and have run Desktop Linux on them (Ubuntu past years and more recent switched to Kubuntu) and all of the hardware has worked well, even for gaming, even for my laptop with nVidia built in.
Haven't regretted it for a second.
In current WSL2, Windows owns the IP address, the NIC, DHCP, ARP, etc, and it’s shared with the Linux VM.
It’s really kinda magic… Linux sees the same IP address as windows does, and you actually get address-in-use errors if Linux tries to listen on a port Windows is already listening on, and vice-versa. So there’s no NAT going on or any internal 172.x net within the Linux VM, you just run “ip addr show” and you see the same real IP addresses that “ipconfig” shows you in windows.
(I no longer have a windows installation but WSL2 got noticeably better with networking some time before I gave up on windows.)
I still use Win10 for a few things, including testing stuff works there too, via java. I switched to Linux in 2004 or so, though.
I’ve really enjoyed the switch so far, having attempted it a few times in the past and ended up going back to windows (once in 2003, another in 2012). It’s encouraging to see MS continue to get the developer experience right with improvements like this, but unless they make significant improvements to the OS itself, I won’t be going back.
I want to caution people though because I see posts like this all the time, but nobody mentions just how tough it is to mimic the "polished" look and feel of Windows in Linux. Even getting it installed in a dual-boot setup was an absolute nightmare. If it had not been for Claude, there's no honest way I could have made this transition. It would have ended just like all my other previous attempts: going back to windows.
Here's a list of issues I documented along the way (with many more that I didn't document), some of them resolved with other methods (I game on Windows VM with GPU Passthrough now) and some I live with:
- Not able to choose same display resolution as Windows, especially when mirroring my laptop to my monitor. Most offered resolutions are too slow or too blurry with text also.
- Having to force browsers to use my dedicated nvidia GPU instead of the Intel one, rendering simple web games in browsers is still choppy even with this solution.
- Choppy games (RDRD2, Last of us 1 and 2) when using Proton/Lutris/Wine despite 3080 GPU (these games run smooth in Windows). Kind of expected this...
- Blocky artifacts showing up in most games (tried multiple drivers and Proton flavors)
- Have to disable secure boot in BIOS for some reason otherwise bootloader doesn't work
- Come up with hacky solutions to not get prompted for root password every time I connect a removable drive that is Bitlocker Encrypted
- For some reason when shutting down/rebooting, my CPU fan just stops cold turkey and it makes a "thud" noise. I've found no resolution and it only happens with linux.
- I can't control where applications on my taskbar live. If I place a pin in the middle and click it, the app launches a separate instance at the far end of the taskbar. Tried different sort options, no fix. Some apps work fine, others don't.
- Can't click shutdown/reboot when screen is locked. Need to click "Switch User" first.
EDIT: should mention some other pain points: support for broken software is very slow moving due to so many distros and flavors. If you update a package for security reasons and it breaks functionality, you could be stuck waiting quite a while (sometimes a month) for it to get fixed.
Also earlier this week CachyOS black-screened users that updated their OS, we could not even get to the login screen. The solution for me was obvious, just rollback to a snapshot, but some people couldn't even get that to work. When users complained or offered solutions, I saw one of the mods get snappy and basically blame users for updating too quickly. I mean, I get WHY that would occur, but it seems like such a weird thing to scold people for. The community is still very abrasive to Linux newcomers, but this has been the case for decades.
I went with Arch and wanted to take a few days to actually go through the Wiki and setup something completely from scratch and learn along the way. I had my laptop next to me and AI was a huge help. I went with Hyprland(Fish for shell, Kitty for terminal, Ashell for my bar, Walker for launcher, Yazi for explorer) and tried installing a bunch of pre-made .config files, but that was a big mistake, just take the time and get everything setup yourself, it's worth it in the long run to learn how all this works under the hood.
I think it's important to point out that my switch was also motivated by a desire to learn about the guts of a linux system and not just go with Ubuntu or a ready made one. I run Ubuntu on a home server and it runs great, but I am a full blown Arch snob now and I could never daily drive it.
[1] : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
Upgrade the container host? Re-bake your container images. It's a massive pain in the ass.
They're missing things like winget as well, but that's mostly an inconvenience rather than a blocker.
Now there is virtio support, finally no need to depend on external CLI tools for what should have been in the box on day on.
Until now, even for Windows containers, we needed some Docker compatible CLI tool.
On Ubuntu starting in 2006 and Kubuntu the last several years, what you're describing doesn't and hasn't happened to me.
When I've tried other distros over the years, the issue you described has happened to me on:
But it has not happened on Ubuntu or Kubuntu since I started using them in 2006. We use desktop Linux on several machines here and have for a long time, from Dell to HP to Lenovo.I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.
No, that's not my story nor is it the story of the vast majority of Ubuntu/Kubuntu users.
> Too much variation in consumer hardware for linux to ever be reliable for majority.
That's a false statement, too many of us out here using Desktop Linux to try and make such a claim in 2026 (or even 20 years ago for that matter).
> I even bought lenovos officially linux supported laptop etc to try to fix the issues.
Tens of thousands of us developers in IBM used Desktop Linux on Thinkpads and later Lenovos for your statement to not ring true with me.
> I bent over backwards for ubuntu, suse, fedora over the years. Sometimes it would be years of stability in between, but it would always come back to bite me if i ever tried to trust it as my primary machine.
Those statements do not represent a truthful reality the majority of Desktop Linux users experience. This isn't 1996 in a random Linux IRC channel.
That's across various Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora, and even a crunchbang install.
In the past, especially on my custom desktop with uncommon GPU, sound card, and wifi chip, I'd check for compatibility and give it a few days after releases were announced to see if there were any user reported bugs. Knowing that devs prioritize compatibility for the most common devices first, I may have to wait my turn. If no, update. If yes, check for available solutions, update, apply solutions. If no solutions, wait.
But, for instance, currently I've been updating this Fedora 44 lenovo with the crunchy kernel roughly weekly for about a year, have been doing so blindly (just sudo dnf update && reboot before bed), and have not had a single problem in all of that time.
It's the same model as Windows- don't do shit before you know. You don't just install random garbage on a Windows machine, and you certainly don't allow automatic updates that re-enable features you've disabled, disable your ability to disable those features, break your menus, put ads on your lockscreen, put ads on your desktop, put ads in your menu, break hibernation, break wifi printing, or whatever other insane shit they've done in the last few years. You wait to update until you know all that broken shit has been removed or stay on XP until they pry it from your bloody knuckles or trust that some random dev doesn't have spyware in that de-bloated iso you've been thinking about.
Linux currently receives development from Intel, AMD, nvidia, google, facebook, qualcomm, amazon, and even Microsoft. Long gone are the days of the wild west governed by but a few.
Yes, for me today though this is usually fixed in 5min by Claude.
EDIT: stumbled on the previous HN post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49970507
Unfortunately most companies are too cheap to pay for Docker Desktop, and having Windows containers depend on a third party tool has been a problem in such customers.
Because using Rancher Desktop or Podman isn't also a given, due to similar issues.
Perhaps it reflects the amount of work and thought that has gone into it, but I really think the optics are better if the selling points are immediately obvious to the user.
Hopefully some light will be shed in further blogs.
Unless I'm mistaken, WSL to WSL2 was massive change in complete architecture, with WSL2 now requiring virtualization and making your host-OS run on top of hypervisor, with potential tradeoffs not many users are typically aware of. Basically, WSL and WSL2 were different beasts entirely :)
Was there anything that big or note-worthy from WSL2 to WSL3? Or just a natural evolution/upgrade?
The big addition here is the support for containers. The app now provides a simple way to run containers directly. Underneath the hood, there's still a kernel running on a VM, though. There's also some improvements to the filesystem layer, a kernel upgrade, etc.
This article[0] does a nice job explaining it.
[0] https://zenn.dev/yohakucode/articles/wsl3-wsl2-wslc-update
virtiofs is the biggest change, it was experimental in 2.x. It doesn’t affect my application, but most new users who want to share files between windows + Linux will see a huge bump.
I found that seems like anything under /mnt/c goes through 9P
vscode extensions using ripgrep in parallel in the background (there are many!) are killing the vm.
I now decided to follow Mitchell Hashimoto choice and use VMware Fusion and simply do all my work inside of it.
Without it, I can just as well ssh into another box.
Source?
You can very easily measure this as well, use any disk benchmark
virtio is not enabled by default because its buggy in certain corner cases, and will be enabled by default when it stops doing that. That said, I do have that enabled, it is certainly faster.
Agents take more time than building Docker images.
This is great, this is some good work. But, like an issue I described before with Linux kernel io-uring[1], this fails to test and demonstrate performance with a healthy server load.
This obviously fails to depict a healthy server load because it's just way too specific.
1.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44604793
In summary, I really couldn't care less what improvements they make to WSL, and neither should anyone else, imho. If you want Linux, for the love of god just use Linux. Emulation works great the other way round by now.
We tested this in the office with equal laptops. CPU workloads have almost no VM overhead and the C++ / Rust compilation workloads on purely WSL2 virtual disk image is only 2% slower.
Yes WSL1 was more ambitious but the fundamental differences in the NT and POSIX makes it quite hard and CPU workloads suffered.
I've usually been able to get windows software running, but it's not always easy. I borrow my wife's laptop to reprogram my gaming mouse, for example. Couldn't be bothered any longer to dick about with wine.
But this is slightly beside the point: many have to use the allotted machines at work, which will tend to be windows (or maybe mac). That's the audience for WSL. It is an escape hatch for wage slaves.
The original WSL translated syscalls. It was a very tight integration. It was not perfect, and i should think it was a massive ongoing effort. I think it's an elegant approach bit i can see why wsl2 is essentially a vm. I never did any benchmarking, but i suspect that what wsl2 loses in disk performance, it gains in kernel performance. I never found either variant slow, and my corporate laptop was shit. My vagrant stack was diabolically slow, though.
Why are you like this?
I don't think so. A PC with Linux is always the right choice. Macs don't even give you the option of a tower with a dedicated GPU, they are pathetic nowadays.
If you want a real bump in performance, I have a clever trick . Hardware isn’t cheap these days, so we demand the most of our software.
Good trick: get rid of the superfluous Windows layer which stands between that expensive hardware and your target OS. It takes up valuable memory, CPU time and storage space, introduces latency where you don't want it, exfiltrates data to unknown destinations and can decide to "upgrade" itself without warning.
Good tricks need catchy names to succeed so how about NoSL?
For me, Claude bypassed my sudo security by executing `wsl.exe -u root`. The Claude does not need any sudo password :)
I was very surprised this works, but that was Claude’s solution to editing a config file that needs sudo access without knowing the password (it edited /etc/fstab)
It's a crappy company, like all corporate giants. It has a lot of crappy products. But the case is usually overstated.
* Windows Terminal
* Powershell 7
* Including OpenSSH client + server with windows
* the Visual Studio command line build toolset distribution
* Hyper V and bundling it with Windows Pro
* RDP
* MS Edge (basing on chromium, same extensions, same dev platform)
If something is slow on WSL, but not on bare metal linux, it means that the application is slop that only works when MAXING OUT your CPU, it's slop, the app is the slop
Some things need to max out the CPU, certain compile steps for instance, that is not slop that is code doing its job. Others need significant IO, often random IO, certain other compile/link steps for example, that is not slop. Sometimes if you knew your code was likely to be run in a VM rather than on bare metal you might design it slightly differently to reduce its sensitivity to the detrimental effects, but not having done so doesn't make your code slop. There might be some room to blame slop for UI slowness as a lot of code out there updates their display in an in inefficient manner that is actually noticeable on bare metal too, especially when it unnecessarily uses 3D accelerated compositing or similar and something causes that to fall back to software rendering, but even then if it works well enough in the intended environment calling it slop is perhaps unfair.
The Year of Desktop Linux is delivered on VMs.
You’d be impressed by how fast WSL runs. I’ve got other optimizations on the blog for even more performance tuning with pretty massive 2x-5x gains.