[GTALUG] Any experience with "Linux on Windows"?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 02:19:51AM +0000, Peter King via talk wrote:
> The real payoff is supposed to come Real Soon Now -- probably April:in WSL
> 2, the Linux kernel itself will receive system calls, running on a trimmed
> down version of the Hyper-V hypervisor, hosting files on a virtual ext4
> disk.  It will be sort of like running VirtualBox, but outside the Box.
> 
> Right now there is a layer that translates kernel calls into Windows calls.
> It works surprisingly well.

Right, I forgot about the terrible filesystem performance in WsL1 that
WsL2 is supposed to fix.

> I have been running Debian-on-Windows (Win10 Pro) for a few months now. It
> doesn't run X11.  There are complicated workarounds for this, but since I
> do most of my work at the console, it doesn't bother me.  YMMV.  Otherwise
> apt-get works as you'd expect, and so far everything runs very smoothly;
> WSL 1 uses an older, conservative version of Debian stable, and I haven't
> been tempted to run testing.  (Well, okay, I've been tempted, but so far
> I haven't given in.)  Have WSL take over the whole screen and it's very
> much like running Debian from the console normally.

I have X410 app for windows 10, so it does run X apps.

> It's pretty easy to share files between WSL and Windows: the normal windows
> drive is automagically mounted at /mnt/c/.  Then you just read/write to it.
> 
> On the whole the integration is rather good.  I haven't tried pushing the
> limits, mostly because I haven't needed to.  Windows 10 Pro seems to be one
> of the occasional "solid" releases of Windows -- I haven't had it crash on
> me yet, or even misbehave, and things work more or less as you'd expect.
> However, I don't really know anything about Windows; this is the first time
> I've even tried it since Win 3.1, so I'm no expert.
> 
> WSL 1 runs fine (in terminal/console mode) on a second monitor.  It's easy
> and seamless to go from the Linux environment to Windows, and vice-versa.

It certainly does work surprisingly well.

Early on in the betas it was glitchy, but they fixed it up rather quickly.

-- 
Len Sorensen