Best of two worlds, puppylinux on WSL?

[disciple]

From what I've read about WSL, it's more useful for command line/console programs.

That's the official line, but it's trivial to install an x server on windows, and then gui programs work great.
Assuming you don't need alsa or some special kernel module the most likely problem you'll notice is poor IO performance.

Virtualbox or qemu would probably be better options if you wanted the binary compatibility.

WSL is probably a slightly better option in terms of system integration. Or maybe it is possible to share all your Windows drives with the virtualbox client? I haven't tried.
Natively porting a bunch of things would be a whole lot of unnecessary work.

[lmemsm]

That's the official line, but it's trivial to install an x server on windows, and then gui programs work great.

Which X server do you use on Windows?

WSL is probably a slightly better option in terms of system integration. Or maybe it is possible to share all your Windows drives with the virtualbox client? I haven't tried.

Using VirtualBox, there is a way to set up a shared drive with Windows. I use that feature a lot.

Natively porting a bunch of things would be a whole lot of unnecessary work.

Guess it depends on the person. I build most of my programs from source natively (even on Linux). I enjoy reading resources such as the Beyond Linux from Scratch book. I feel like if you want something done right, you do it yourself. If I build it myself, I can make sure everything works the way I want it and fix bugs should they arise. If someone else does it, I'm stuck with whatever they offer and whenever they choose to fix or update the project. Knowing how the various parts of your system work (how the software and libraries integrate and can work together) can be a good learning experience for some. Guess that's why there are some systems like Gentoo where you build everything from scratch and some systems like Red Hat or Ubuntu where someone gives you a polished and supported end result. Some people prefer the former to the latter.

[disciple]

Sorry, I haven't been getting forum notifications lately for some reason. Even changed to using a different email address instead of Gmail and it made no difference..

That's the official line, but it's trivial to install an x server on windows, and then gui programs work great.

Which X server do you use on Windows?

VcXsrv. It seems to be recommended these days, although I don't remember any problems with Xming when I used it years ago.

WSL is probably a slightly better option in terms of system integration. Or maybe it is possible to share all your Windows drives with the virtualbox client? I haven't tried.

Using VirtualBox, there is a way to set up a shared drive with Windows. I use that feature a lot.

Yes, that's kind of the first level of integration. Clipboard sharing is good too. I was think of other things like translating windows to Linux file paths and vice versa, although I suppose there's bound to be a way to do most of it with Virtualbox.

Natively porting a bunch of things would be a whole lot of unnecessary work.

Guess it depends on the person. I build most of my programs from source natively (even on Linux). I enjoy reading resources such as the Beyond Linux from Scratch book. I feel like if you want something done right, you do it yourself. If I build it myself, I can make sure everything works the way I want it and fix bugs should they arise. If someone else does it, I'm stuck with whatever they offer and whenever they choose to fix or update the project. Knowing how the various parts of your system work (how the software and libraries integrate and can work together) can be a good learning experience for some. Guess that's why there are some systems like Gentoo where you build everything from scratch and some systems like Red Hat or Ubuntu where someone gives you a polished and supported end result. Some people prefer the former to the latter.

I can't say I've ever taken the step up from Arch to Gentoo - I'm actually annoyed by all the compiling I need to do in Arch because of using too much software that isn't in the official repositories. So I don't think I'd cope with Gentoo!

[disciple]

Assuming you don't need alsa or some special kernel module the most likely problem you'll notice is poor IO performance.

Looks like some (most?) of that'll be changing soon; not sure about alsa though.

Today we’re unveiling the newest architecture for the Windows Subsystem for Linux: WSL 2! Changes in this new architecture will allow for: dramatic file system performance increases, and full system call compatibility, meaning you can run more Linux apps in WSL 2 such as Docker.
...
Microsoft will be shipping a Linux kernel with Windows
...
WSL 2 uses the latest and greatest in virtualization technology to run its Linux kernel inside of a lightweight utility virtual machine (VM). However, WSL 2 will NOT be a traditional VM experience. When you think of a VM, you probably think of something that is slow to boot up, exists in a very isolated environment, consumes lots of computer resources and requires your time to manage it. WSL 2 does not have these attributes. It will still give the remarkable benefits of WSL 1: High levels of integration between Windows and Linux, extremely fast boot times, small resource footprint, and best of all will require no VM configuration or management.

So they've obviously realised it is too hard to try to reimplement Linux, like they were doing with WSL 1, and they were never going to get performance good enough.
Makes me wonder if they are trying to do "embrace, extend, extinguish" not just to Linux but to VMs.

[s243a]

Assuming you don't need alsa or some special kernel module the most likely problem you'll notice is poor IO performance.

Looks like some (most?) of that'll be changing soon; not sure about alsa though.

Today we’re unveiling the newest architecture for the Windows Subsystem for Linux: WSL 2! Changes in this new architecture will allow for: dramatic file system performance increases, and full system call compatibility, meaning you can run more Linux apps in WSL 2 such as Docker.
...
Microsoft will be shipping a Linux kernel with Windows
...
WSL 2 uses the latest and greatest in virtualization technology to run its Linux kernel inside of a lightweight utility virtual machine (VM). However, WSL 2 will NOT be a traditional VM experience. When you think of a VM, you probably think of something that is slow to boot up, exists in a very isolated environment, consumes lots of computer resources and requires your time to manage it. WSL 2 does not have these attributes. It will still give the remarkable benefits of WSL 1: High levels of integration between Windows and Linux, extremely fast boot times, small resource footprint, and best of all will require no VM configuration or management.

So they've obviously realised it is too hard to try to reimplement Linux, like they were doing with WSL 1, and they were never going to get performance good enough.
Makes me wonder if they are trying to do "embrace, extend, extinguish" not just to Linux but to VMs.

I find VMs quite fast for lightweight versions of linux. For instance on this forum strechdog, fatdog64 and tazpup/64 all work well in virtualbox and don't consume that many resources. I've had some issues with a standard puppy in virtualbox. I think that with a standard puppy that we need to remove the part where it hides the cursor in the .xinitrd script:

Code: Select all

#v2.01 hide cursor when not moving... (setup in /usr/sbin/input-wizard)
if [ -f /etc/mousehide ];then
 IDLETIME="`cat /etc/mousehide | cut -f 1 -d ','`"
 [ ! "$IDLETIME" = "0" ] && unclutter -idle $IDLETIME &
fi

but I here that standard puppies work well in other virtualization tools like KVM and VMWare. Anyway, I like the isolation aspect of a virtualmachine and the guest additions of vitualbox allows sufficient OS integration.

Anyway, I'm sure that WSL will be quite useful but I'm sure it will come at the cost of more influence on linux by microsoft than we want. I don't use it yet because I'm still on windows 8.1 and I'm not very excited about the prospect about moving to windows 10, which is more than likely whenever I eventually get a new computer.

Also I suspect that microsoft will put annoying non standard restrictions on WSL (i.e. a non standard security model) that one won't have to worry about in a VM. Actually this is one annoying thing about microsoft. They keep breaking the features that they invent by changing the security model. Historically Microsoft has been "too unstable" and for this reason there could be maintenance nightmares for systems which depend on WSL.

As for systems getting extinguished by WSL, the more likely victums are cygwin and mingw. Both of these have helped make code portable from linux to windows systems and if WSL leads to the obsolescence of these systems the consequences might not be good.

[disciple]

As for systems getting extinguished by WSL, the more likely victums are cygwin and mingw

Yes - I'm not using them these days because I have WSL - even on a non-technical level, I figure it's easier to justify to anyone who has an issue with me installing it on my work machine i.e. I can say "but it's just a feature of windows".

The major difference with cygwin and mingw is that they don't run Linux binaries so you can't just install something from e.g. the massive Debian repo. Because of this I'm guessing it is much more common for people to install virtualbox than either of them,

Hypothetically, if WSL killed them, in the long term it is Windows which would suffer, because it would be harder to port software to Windows (as a native build). WSL might already have a side effect of encouraging developers not to bother worrying about portability, because "Windows usrs can just use a linux build"

[disciple]

FWIW WSL2 is obviously a lot more like Colinux.

[s243a]

Hypothetically, if WSL killed them, in the long term it is Windows which would suffer, because it would be harder to port software to Windows (as a native build). WSL might already have a side effect of encouraging developers not to bother worrying about portability, because "Windows usrs can just use a linux build"

The danger is that either Microsoft won't support WSL long term or alternatively they will make changes to WSL (e.g. the security model) to make it incompatible with many linux applications.

Regarding cygwin, I think it is fun to play with but given how much easier WSL is to use there is now much much less incentive to use cygwin. I don't trust Microsoft to support WSL long term in a tightly integrated way. For instance look at all the restrictions that they put on PowerShell. This makes PowerShell hard to use because one has to decide what security policy they want and depending on the security policy they might have to sign the applications that they use. Will Microsoft in the future do something similar to WSL and if not will they add additional levels of segregation between WSL and windows for security reasons. For now here is a google search which might give clues about what is coming:

wsl security concerns

[s243a]

[disciple]

The key here is that the attack requires an elevation of privilege but if you can elevate privileges you can do many different attacks and so called "bashware" is just one option.

Not to mention that it is surely a more complicated option.

The danger is that either Microsoft won't support WSL long term or alternatively they will make changes to WSL (e.g. the security model) to make it incompatible with many linux applications

Yeah, that's the "extend and extinguish" part.

[s243a]