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by butokai 821 days ago
WSL1 was what made me stick to Windows at the time, when I had a new laptop and didn't want to mess much with it. WSL2 was what convinced me to switch back to Linux, since I felt that WSL1 was going to be abandoned. What is its current situation? Is it still maintained?
4 comments
w0m 820 days ago
WSL1 was kind of amazing, IIRC it attempted to map all unix calls to their windows equivalencies. But there were edge cases and bugs when it just had serious problems. WSL2 came in, and is basically a simple local container. it isn't a buggy mapping, it is Ubuntu (or whatever you want to run).

Once i moved over; 99% of my (non time SKU related) quirks went away, and it's only vaguely heavier. Honestly, as a terminal-creature, I prefer WSL2 + Apt to OSX + Homebrew as my macs always tend to turn into a local package nightmare and I'd end up wasting a day/mo untangling. My WSL feels pristine still ~20mo later, and I know i could wipe and recreate it in ~30m if I needed to (but i haven't felt a need).

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WorldMaker 820 days ago
I've heard indirectly and off hand that some Microsoft PMs still regret calling it WSL1 and WSL2 instead of something like WSL-A and WSL-B.

My understanding from documentation is that WSL1 is "feature complete" but not "maintenance ended": they think they hit a strong Pareto Principal 80/20 for features in WSL1 and realize it won't support everything but often supports "enough" and any further compatibility issues are out of scope both because the tail is extremely long and the risk/reward of time invested into long tail issues are rarely worth it.

I don't think WSL1 will be "abandoned" any time soon, but the list of "Known Issues" will only continue to grow and a lot of people get pointed to WSL2 simply because the long-tail Kernel compatibility is hard to beat if you are directly running the Linux kernel.

But the many tools that work brilliantly in WSL1 still work brilliantly in WSL1 and there are still benefits to its barer/stranger metal approach.

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baq 820 days ago
WSL2 is Linux, running a kernel tweaked to co-exist with the Windows kernel instead of being a pure vm. It's a VM with some container-like features like using the host's gfx drivers (which are like 100x better validated than Linux, except for compute workloads).
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dataflow 820 days ago
> What is its current situation? Is it still maintained?

It still works for me on Windows 10. No idea what it'll be like beyond then.

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