[GTALUG] two or three tricks for installing Linux as a second OS on a Windows box

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 09, 2022 at 09:57:09AM -0500, Warren McPherson wrote:
> I have no experience with WSL but I've been reading up on it as I think my
> main computer should probably be less than ten years old. With Windows 11
> it sounds like WSL now has a full kernel. So I guess that would take disk
> space, but it sounds like a pretty complete implementation. On my existing
> computer, I am using less than a third of the original disk space. Since
> new machines always have moar, I suspect I can live with WSL gobbling up
> its footprint.
> 
> I agree that PowerShell is wrong. And I use both GUI and CLI for file
> management - I'm not sure if I'm a Luddite or not.
> 
> Is there anything else, in particular, we should be cautious about with
> Windows 11 and WSL?

Well both windows 10 and 11 have WSL1 and WSL2.  WSL1 (the only one I
have ever used myself) emulates a linux kernel to handle system calls,
and uses the windows network stack.  WSL2 runs a full linux kernel with
it's own network stack (so it has to get it's own IP address as far as
I understand it, although reading about it seems to indicate it uses
NAT by default, but the IP address is not the same as the windows host,
unlike WSL1) but does mean you can do things like run docker and other
things that require a proper linux kernel, and avoids some of the bugs
that have hit the emulated kernel (basicly things that they hadn't
implemented fully yet in some cases).

WSL1 has really really slow disk IO, while WSL2 is supposed to run
perfectly normal speed.  Doing a git checkout on WSL1 can be painful. :)

WSL1 makes it easy to access the windows filesystem from linux, not sure
how that works in WSL2.  WSL1 has much faster windows file access than
WSL2.  Also WSL1 can launch windows executables from linux, which WSL2
can not as far as I know.

WSL2 can apparently cause some memory issues for now (they are working on
it apparently) in that the page cache memory is not returned to windows
until WSL2 is shut down, so they say that a long session can lead to a
lot of memory being tied up.

WSL2 is supposed to support X11 and wayland apps if you are running
windows 11 build 22000 or higher.  WSL1 does not, although you can use
a windows X server to do it (I use one called X410).

I should give WSL2 a try at some point.

-- 
Len Sorensen