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by StableAlkyne 473 days ago
The WSL2 has been fantastic. It takes the unixy environment of a Mac and puts it on the Windows ecosystem my IT imposes. It fixes everything I hate about Windows by letting me avoid using Windows while using Windows.

It's a huge step up from Cygwin, too, since it's a proper Linux instead of just POSIX compatibility.

If you want a fun rabbit hole, look into how the WSL2 and 1 interact with Windows. WSL1 was a whole new shell around the NT Kernel. WSL2 is more of a VM, but using the Plan 9 (yes, that plan 9) filesystem implementation to talk with Windows.
2 comments
ohgr 472 days ago
Until it breaks. I watched a colleague have to reinstall his laptop the other day because whenever he opened a WSL terminal, nothing happened and it banged the CPU at 100% and wouldn’t even shut down.

Have seen that a few times from different people.

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rhdunn 472 days ago
My experience with that is that 100% CPU can happen if the WSL2 image is using more memory than available, and is then swapping. You should be able to check that by looking at the VmmemWSL process. There's also an option in the WSL config you can specify to limit the amount of memory it can use.
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ohgr 472 days ago
Machines have 64 gig of memory. vmmem uses only 8. That process just jams at 100% and kills it. You can’t terminate it as it’s not actually a process as such. WSL shutdown does not work.
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StableAlkyne 472 days ago
Never heard of that happening myself, and I've been on a few teams that used it going back to the WSL1 days.

Not saying that it didn't, either. Just that it might not be a widespread issue

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thebruce87m 472 days ago
> fixes everything I hate about Windows

It fixes the forced reboots? Or are these a thing of the past?

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