[dbacar]

With all respect, why would anyone bother to use these tools when you have a full-blown linux distro at your command with WSL/2?

[nottorp]

Yes, set up a VM and then add 3 levels of nested containers inside the VM just to be sure.

Incidentally next week I have to debug one of our tester's laptop - he installed vmware which stopped WSL from running somehow and now neither option works.

[thingfish]

You hit an important point here. Teaching IT to 16 jear old children is very much like being an admin for a large corporation. Most of them have installed VMWare, VirtualBox, Hyper-V and pfSense, depending on the preference of the other teachers. Most first-graders don't know anything about networking, so I didn't want to add WSL to that. I used Cygwin. Worked perfectly until I started to teach Sendmail. Sendmail runs in unprivileged mode. This means that it starts as root, but then switches to a user with very few rights. Cygwin couldn't handle that at first, but I got it working. But then students couldn't uninstall Cygwin anymore because of changed file ownership in Windows. I had to install a second Cygwin to uninstall the first. With MinC I took extreme care to get all the different models of Access Control Lists that are used in Windows right.

[hughw]

wait, first graders?!?

[nottorp]

He said 16 year old. I was installing Slackware from floppies at 16 so why wouldn't modern kids play with VMs?

[skinner927]

This is pretty common. They turned off hyper-v.

[nottorp]

Thanks, I'll check that when the easter some-people-took-more-time-off period is over.

[dbacar]

yes but you get what you pay for, a real linux environment that you can install any tool. Vmware is kinda problematic as I observe on my windows 11. And I had problems with hyperv . Even for wsl2 i had to do reinstalls till I get it working but now it is pretty cool. It takes around 5-6 seconds for initial vm startup. If you close the terminal the vm shuts down in a couple of minutes. But if you want it always up, I use the tmux trick to make it always stay up.

[cowmix]

WSL/2 has a lot of overhead and it NOT Windows native. I used it all the time, but I also use Windows Git Bash -- which is also like this project.

[dbacar]

I used Git Bash also but it is kinda slowish, does not act like a true terminal always but it is OK. WSL2 is much better in my opinion, and fast.

[Borg3]

Because I want more tight coupling with Win32 OS. Im old Cygwin user here. Actually, I cant work on Windows without Cygwin. Its very first thing installed on fresh system so I can bring all my tools with it :)

I have free access to entire FS, I can run Win32 console tools as well inside bash. If I want true Linux environment, I can always spawn VM and use Xserver on Win32 to work on it (Xming).

[charcircuit]

You can have access to the entire fs (/mnt/c) and run exe files with WSL too

[Borg3]

Probably WSL1.. Yeah.. But why should I bother with it if Cygwin does the work just fine? :)

[butterisgood]

Works in WSL2 - thanks to Plan 9’s 9P protocol

[robohoe]

Many orgs’ security policies don’t permit WSL/2.

[thunder-blue-3]

wow, TIL. Can't believe I've done nearly 40 circles around our sun and never knew about WSL/2.

[orra]

To be fair, WSL/2 didn't exist for most of those circles.

[i_am_proteus]

One reason would be if anyone does not want to, or is not able to, enable virtualization (WSL requires this).

[dehrmann]

Doesn't WSL 2 essentially run Linux in a VM? It's fine when things are in one OS or the other, but gets weird when it crosses over.

[dbacar]

Yes it is in a VM but beautifully handled.Your C drive is mounted and slower than a real linux because it is NTFS but works much better than those cygwin, or git bash tools.

[blueflow]

Better manual pages?

[silverwind]

Because WSL is just a VM, Cygwin is native.

[dbacar]

In my observation, cygwin is so slow to be usable.