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.
Same experience here. I've dabbled with Linux Desktop in the past but always backed out once I encountered the rough edges. Just because everything is fixable doesn't mean I want to spend a couple of hours on each of the 100 paper cuts. It adds up over time and feels never-ending.
But now, I just open Claude Code and say "this is bothering me" and it runs in the background while I complete other tasks. I get it to document anything it changes and push my custom configs into a private git repo along with my dot files.
In some sense, I'm starting to see Linux almost like a Smalltalk image. Anything permanent is backed up to git and I have documented recipes to go from fresh-install to custom environment in a couple of hours.
There are still a lot of rough edges all over the place but it is a totally workable environment.
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.
I think your experience has been unusual. My experience with windows has been buggy patches that occasionally break my computer, bizarre and hard to track down performance issues, and features that I immediately want to not only disable but completely remove (anything copilot related, for instance)
It's also just plain disrespectful to users. For instance, having to hack the installer to allow for local user accounts, forcing edge on me constantly to the point where even when I change the default browser, things still load in edge, and it still reverts my settings on occassion. Using Windows actively makes me hate microsoft. I'm mostly just on Linux and Mac now, I only use Windows when I absolutely have to.
Linux does have annoying technical issues to fix on occasion, but I'm a lot more tolerant of them because I feel like the creators of it respect me and my rights, whereas Microsoft treats me like I'm renting my own computer.
Agree, I feel you only hear from people who hate Windows and for every such loud opinion, there are probably 20 who are quite satisfied but never mention it.
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"
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
I’m at roughly 7 years without Windows. PopOS has been rock solid for the entire time, and I installed it mostly by accident. I can just click to install games from Steam, my containers run unbelievably fast, as do my games and media. I even replaced the hardware, and the system booted up and just worked. The only issue I had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers, at which point all I had to do was boot into a terminal and run: sudo apt remove drivers && sudo apt install drivers. I rebooted and boom everything worked.
I stopped using Windows when I got an update prompt while playing a game that had two options I had never seen before, and was shocked to see at the time: “Now” or “Ok”. After clicking “Ok” the system waited a few minutes and then rebooted, causing me to lose the game, and get issued a short ban for leaving a game. And that was just the final straw. A few months prior, a Windows update corrupted two drives (NTFS) and I wasn’t able to repair them. Probably six months before either of those I was left with an inoperable system after a botched driver update for my (NVidia) GPU that caused me to do a full reinstall. Those are just issues I can remember.
Windows was a nightmare for me, in a way Linux has not been. In fact Ive had such a good time in Linux, I stopped buying Macs as well.
It’s not self-inflicted or being forced to hate windows, it’s just that for a lot of folks, myself included, Linux is a measurably better experience. If Windows works for you, that’s great, congrats I’m happy for you. But I think it’s weird to say Windows hate is forced or self-inflicted.
Tried a few Linux distrod last year and had endless issues.
MS keep doing dumb stuff with the UI but there's tweaks to solve everything and it's similar to tweaking/ricing Linux so I didn't see any particular advantage of Linux.
NixOs is one that intrigues me though. I absolutely love the idea of OS as config files.
Unfortunately Nix seems to have so much drama and barely any 2 users can agree on the best way to do something.
I heard Rumours DHH/Omarchy might take a crack at simplifying/integrating Nix
Some user friendly Nix concept would make me switch asap
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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?)
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)
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
I get a lot of utility out of windows, the desktop, the browser, Hyper V , MS Excel, RDP, Windows Terminal, Visual Studio + VS Code. A dozen more great apps.
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.
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.
Yes, I don't remember what it was, probably something with file sync, but I remember I kept a WSL1 instance for some stuff for a long time. Rust tooling worked great in WSL2, as long as you stay inside the VM, can confirm.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
... 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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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..
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
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.
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.
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..
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.
Same experience here. I've dabbled with Linux Desktop in the past but always backed out once I encountered the rough edges. Just because everything is fixable doesn't mean I want to spend a couple of hours on each of the 100 paper cuts. It adds up over time and feels never-ending.
But now, I just open Claude Code and say "this is bothering me" and it runs in the background while I complete other tasks. I get it to document anything it changes and push my custom configs into a private git repo along with my dot files.
In some sense, I'm starting to see Linux almost like a Smalltalk image. Anything permanent is backed up to git and I have documented recipes to go from fresh-install to custom environment in a couple of hours.
There are still a lot of rough edges all over the place but it is a totally workable environment.
You would love NixOS.
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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.
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.
I think your experience has been unusual. My experience with windows has been buggy patches that occasionally break my computer, bizarre and hard to track down performance issues, and features that I immediately want to not only disable but completely remove (anything copilot related, for instance)
It's also just plain disrespectful to users. For instance, having to hack the installer to allow for local user accounts, forcing edge on me constantly to the point where even when I change the default browser, things still load in edge, and it still reverts my settings on occassion. Using Windows actively makes me hate microsoft. I'm mostly just on Linux and Mac now, I only use Windows when I absolutely have to.
Linux does have annoying technical issues to fix on occasion, but I'm a lot more tolerant of them because I feel like the creators of it respect me and my rights, whereas Microsoft treats me like I'm renting my own computer.
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Why would you prefer WSL over native Linux? What's the rationale here?
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> 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.
Agree, I feel you only hear from people who hate Windows and for every such loud opinion, there are probably 20 who are quite satisfied but never mention it.
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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"
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
I’m at roughly 7 years without Windows. PopOS has been rock solid for the entire time, and I installed it mostly by accident. I can just click to install games from Steam, my containers run unbelievably fast, as do my games and media. I even replaced the hardware, and the system booted up and just worked. The only issue I had was installing conflicting NVidia drivers, at which point all I had to do was boot into a terminal and run: sudo apt remove drivers && sudo apt install drivers. I rebooted and boom everything worked.
I stopped using Windows when I got an update prompt while playing a game that had two options I had never seen before, and was shocked to see at the time: “Now” or “Ok”. After clicking “Ok” the system waited a few minutes and then rebooted, causing me to lose the game, and get issued a short ban for leaving a game. And that was just the final straw. A few months prior, a Windows update corrupted two drives (NTFS) and I wasn’t able to repair them. Probably six months before either of those I was left with an inoperable system after a botched driver update for my (NVidia) GPU that caused me to do a full reinstall. Those are just issues I can remember.
Windows was a nightmare for me, in a way Linux has not been. In fact Ive had such a good time in Linux, I stopped buying Macs as well.
It’s not self-inflicted or being forced to hate windows, it’s just that for a lot of folks, myself included, Linux is a measurably better experience. If Windows works for you, that’s great, congrats I’m happy for you. But I think it’s weird to say Windows hate is forced or self-inflicted.
Yeah Windows is solid for me.
Tried a few Linux distrod last year and had endless issues.
MS keep doing dumb stuff with the UI but there's tweaks to solve everything and it's similar to tweaking/ricing Linux so I didn't see any particular advantage of Linux.
NixOs is one that intrigues me though. I absolutely love the idea of OS as config files.
Unfortunately Nix seems to have so much drama and barely any 2 users can agree on the best way to do something.
I heard Rumours DHH/Omarchy might take a crack at simplifying/integrating Nix
Some user friendly Nix concept would make me switch asap
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.
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.
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My budget Beelink with Windows 11 Pro has been one of the best development workstations I've ever had. Maybe 1 crash in 5 years?
And with WSL, very easy to jump between any linux distro. Debian, Ubuntu, Alpine, Arch -- anything.
À lot of laptops from that era came with unreliable WiFi chips and there was no recall because of supply chain shortages
The problem disappeared when I switched to Linux
> Apparently windows problems like randomly failing wifi are rather common on the Lenovo legion 5 laptops from 2021
Unfortunately I have some bad news for you about random device drivers on linux. I guess with AI you can now fix the driver upstream yourself though.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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Some of us also do real work on Windows, ask Valve.
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Delightful way to write off an enormous cohort of people and huge variety of work.
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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.
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.
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Luckily I'm allowed use Hyper-V for Linux work
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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.
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?
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> 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.
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me when i lie
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.
Did you work out of /mnt/c?
My problems weren't performance related, aside from the occasional catastrophic memory leak; most of my biggest headaches were related to networking.
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I suspect they did. 100% of cases where people complain WSL2 was slow and I helped debug was this specific incorrect usage.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you want a polished OS look thats closeish to Windows I cannot recommend KDE enough.
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.
Which distro did you switch to?
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!
[1] : https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Archinstall
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WSL2 is a different product from WSL1, not a different version. Is WSL3 now a different version of WSL2 or another separate product?
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.
I guess windows containers where dead on arrival?
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Looks like a different version of WSL2 with a newer kernel and newer VM host software
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.
Great job in benchmarking! I wasn't even aware of the WSLc (WSL3) release. For others, the release info is available here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49970507
Is it accurate to call this WSL3? WSL 2 was released in 2019, but WSL 2.0.0 was released in 2023 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/2.0.0
It happens to be the major version reported by `wsl --version` on my system.
No I think it's more accurate to call it WSL Containers, or WSLc, but the release is indeed WSL 3.0.*.
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.
Dockefile is still a thing.
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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.
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.
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
> 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:
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.
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"my sound card."
Yes, for me today though this is usually fixed in 5min by Claude.
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.
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?)
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)
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
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
On top of the performance issue you mentioned, /mnt/c will be case-insensitive and trip up lots of Linux software!
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.
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.
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From the perspective of user empathy, wsl seems to be designed for that use case. but the implementation/defaults can be improved
I do not really follow how you would avoid this if you are using WSL containers with dev containers. Wouldn't this be the default?
>You’re not supposed to work out of the /mnt/c.
Source?
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There is virtio support now, and to be fair 9P was never an issue for me.
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.
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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.
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.
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?
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.
This article[0] does a nice job explaining it.
[0] https://zenn.dev/yohakucode/articles/wsl3-wsl2-wslc-update
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.
Ditch Windows. Install Linux. With Claude, your headaches go away.
I've never enjoyed Linux desktop. I love Linux command line tools. WSL is the best of both worlds for me.
for those intrigued by the name: WSL3 is just WSL2 3.0; it's still just Linux under Hyper-V, not a new architecture.
Could get all the performance back if you just ran Linux natively.
Are majority of the perf gains really from tuning from the kernel's `page_reporting_order` param?
syscall/basic getppid() throughput 1,474,691 ops/s 1,533,399 ops/s +3.98% Entry/exit latency 0.6781 µs/op 0.6521 µs/op -3.83% sched/pipe 100k process ping-pong 48,445 ops/s 54,589 ops/s +12.68% Context switch latency 20.64 µs/op 18.32 µs/op -11.25% sched/messaging Hackbench (20 groups, 800 tasks) 14.507 s 13.047 s -10.06% mem/memcpy glibc default bandwidth (1GB) 7.84 GB/s 12.64 GB/s +61.35%
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
I find that stuff that it offers over a normal Hyper-V VM is stuff that I don't need, leaky abstractions galore.
Nowadays I use it mostly for Linux containers.
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.
Isn't this just WSL2 v3?
I’ve never been good at marketing. And that was tongue tying
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.
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.
> 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?
I get a lot of utility out of windows, the desktop, the browser, Hyper V , MS Excel, RDP, Windows Terminal, Visual Studio + VS Code. A dozen more great apps.
I came here to praise both Windows and Linux.
"Arch btw" vibes
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.
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.
Yes, I don't remember what it was, probably something with file sync, but I remember I kept a WSL1 instance for some stuff for a long time. Rust tooling worked great in WSL2, as long as you stay inside the VM, can confirm.
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.
Try WinBoat, it's different technology and works really well. Haven't tested with Office specifically though.
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.
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 :)
You need to start Claude in WSL, not from outside in Windows. Windows user has complete ownership over the WSL it launches
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)
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Can we just flag every “omg just switch to linux” post this is supposed to be about WSL not Why Linux Is Great And MS Sux thread 736748166488391
People still use Windows? What is it like now? Everything AI? AI in textpad?
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.
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.
... 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...
The TUIs alone work fine, so something must be done by herdr to make it slow...
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.
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?
seems like a self-imposed constraint.
> 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.
I have talked to them, it is a dev shop, this is what they said.
You can Linux all you want, I prefer Mac and I have done Linux extensively.
Too bad Windows 11 is a crapware
Win11 adds crapware; it also makes some of that crapware difficult to remove.
But once that crapware is exorcised, Windows can be useful.
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.
WSL is one of the few good ideas Microsoft had in the last ... 5000 years or so.
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.
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)
Interesting, hacker News has truly become the new slashdot :)
-1, Flamebait
And yet it's still factors faster without a whole Windows around it.
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.
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..
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
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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.
Links to benchmarks?
Amazing they managed to make virtualisation that slow in WSL2
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Microsoft still refuses to fix the most obvious issue here - Windows should be rebuilt on top of a linux kernel.
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.
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..