Most WSL users I know all run Linux at home; WSL is the best they can get at work.
True
This is me looking at myself cause I use both lol
WSL is Linux On a Budget. Its rough as hell but hey, if its all you have practical access to.
Linux on a Budget
Have… Have I been accidentally pirating Linux all this time? Who do I owe money to?
Linus and Stallmann
WSL is great. I get to do my weird little niche Linux stuff and also have working drivers for my mouse, use decent audio mixing software with a well designed GUI, run FL Studio, and decide based on my needs what the best software for any given task would be. I can also run any game without worrying about whether the score on ProtonDB is actually accurate or not.
If Linux had the same functionality as Windows I’d be all about it, but I have an actual workflow I need to be able to perform and I can’t be bothered troubleshooting random shit at a moment’s notice. Nothing breaks my flow more than realizing that a piece of software I need to operate flawlessly is missing some fundamental functionality. I literally can’t even draw as effectively in Linux because my precision mode doesn’t work properly. And there’s no way in hell I’m going to spend the hours or days or whatever fucking around with JACK to try to get it to do half of what Voicemeeter does.
WSL is awesome because it enables me to do everything I want at the same time from the same operating system. I use Linux for functionality, not to be in a club. High school was a looong time ago. Who has time to center their lives around trying to be cool enough for some internet people?
Also like, way to pick the incel fuckboy rapist murderer to represent you in this meme. Bravo.
I’m quite fucking good at Linux. I’m fine with embracing open source, and I think Proton is the best thing ever.
I drew the line at audio, video and graphics on Linux, especially anything realtime.
I bought a MacBook for that. I feel dirty, but all my ”work” is done on remote Linux systems anyway, so my Mac just needs to provide an editor and a terminal emulator, and I can even make do with my editor over SSH given reasonable latencies. On the other hand, all my audio/video/graphics work flawlessly on MacOS, and that’s what I need locally.
For once I think I agree with Linux purists.
Fuck I might need a shower.
fuck it
run windows in a virtual machine in Linux, then run wsl within it.
Linux community: why don’t more people use Linux? Also Linux community: LOL LOOK AT THESE STUPID FUCKERS TRYING LINUX WRONG, LETS ALL GO SHIT ON THEM
goddamn do yall deserve eachother and your 0.01% OS share or whatever meaningless percentage of the OS market you represent.
As a counterpoint to all of the people saying that you’re overreacting:
They’re right.
However, I think the sentiment of your comment is valid and correct. Memes like this do ultimately serve to alienate newer Linux users.
I think people are mostly responding to the way that your comment is worded, which conveys a much stronger reaction than is necessary for something that ultimately doesn’t cause very much harm.
Nobody is happy when you call them out for marginalizing people they view as inferior. I get the same reaction when call out family members being blatantly racist at family gatherings. I don’t care about the reactions of people who choose to engage only with my tone, they’re not here to interact with me or my opinions in a meaningful way. Last, I don’t believe I overreacted at all. I called out shitty alienating behaviour in response to a meme that implies an outgroup community is disgusting or inferior based on their operating system choice. As I see it the tone of the meme was significantly more insulting than the tone of my response.
You have to consider that your tone is important when trying to make a point.
It doesn’t help to call someone out in a way that’s callous and without any consideration toward how they may feel about being called out. All it does is elicit a strong emotional reaction which often results in them doubling down and being defensive of their behavior.
If you call someone out gently, and they’re not willing to listen, then you can ratchet it up a little depending on the severity of the behavior… until you reach a point where it’s clear that you’re not going to get anywhere.
So yeah, again, it’s toxic behavior to alienate a subset of Linux users when the community is already very fragmented. But your comment wasn’t just saying the behavior was shitty, it was also implying that the people who engage it in are shitty people. I understand that’s (hopefully) not what you meant, but humans tend to think that behavior==identity and it takes effort to override that. Naturally, when the quality of one’s person is in question, they’re going to be quite defensive.
I feel like I’m being admonished by a schoolteacher and honestly I probably deserve it. You’re probably right but I’m grumpy about it and need to re-read this later when I’m less grumpy about it
All I know is that the WSL is a massive step-up from Cygwin or Mingw32. We’ve been here before. The most recent incarnation before WSL was a klunky VirtualBox VM steered by Packer. The idea that you can mash a few buttons and get an Ubuntu VM with filesystem mapping that “just works” is a huge improvement.
Edit: I really don’t get the vitriol anyone gets for using the WSL when it’s a problem the FOSS community has tried to solve three times over in the last 25+ years or so.
People in glass housed shouldn’t throw stones.
Do you realize it’s just a funny meme picture on the internet? We are on [email protected] and the picture is so mild, it’s just a friendly poke for fun and you just try to tear us a new asshole for that, damn, chill.
It’s not funny, it’s gatekeeping.
this homeless trans is laughing because of all the concerns in the world you’re bent over a weak joke that contains nuance considering the character showing disgust and disdain. he’s a baddy! 🤣
I’m glad you found a laugh and a moment of lightness while you’re struggling, and I hope the world becomes a kinder place for you as soon as possible. This is still a joke where the punchline is “windows user (ie, outgroup) disgusting”, and I hope you can understand why it’s bad to put that kind of energy out in the world then pretend it’s a joke.
You’re gatekeeping.
its funny even if its a dead horse. don’t sweat it. folks will tell on themselves given the right prompt.
One of the main points of using Linux is so that you don’t have to use Windows. Like I get WSL is useful in certain scenarios, but it’s whole existence is basically counter to why the majority of Linux users use Linux.
Whoooooooooooooooooooooooooosh
How?
Encouraging the use of WSL to new Linux users is asinine. It’s a niche tool with a shitload of bugs and caveats, not something that should be widely used as a daily driver. It’s not “shitting on” anyone to tell them they shouldn’t be using WSL as their daily driver distro, just like it’s not “shitting on” someone to tell them not to use a hammer to drive in a screw.
I made a comment about the gatekeeping attitude of the community and you responded to me with a critique of WSL. The point I made sailed entirely over your head, hence the whoosh.
Saying “don’t use WSL as your first Linux distro” isn’t gatekeeping though, it’s just good advice.
Sure, that’s a valid position to have. Your position only relates to the OP meme in the loosest possible sense; the meme presents WSL users as inferior objects of disgust, which is clearly distinct from a claim that WSL is not the right starter distro for most people. As I see it you’re effectively whitewashing an elitist talking point by pretending it’s about helping new users, or you just didn’t notice the elitism because you are not part of the targeted out-group.
I tried to get the *arr stack running on it at one point, using Docker.
Do not do this. Just install the Windows apps. Yes, it’s a mess. Yes, they work.
Just curious, what were the issues?
It was a while ago now, bit I think it was trying to get all the individual bits to talk to each other (radarr to prowlarr, etc). I was following some guide and that’s where it all fell apart.
Sounds like a network configuration issue of the containers - you either have to use the host network (probably not recommended) or to map the necessary ports of each app. But trying to do that in WSL sounds like an extra layer of fuckery that you don’t necessarily have to deal with. Running Docker directly on Windows sounds like the more sane thing to do in that case.
Jokes on you, docker on windows uses wsl too :')
I know, but it’s managed by Docker, i.e. you don’t have to do anything special.
Yeah, it was blocking the networking between them, and after Google failed me for an hour, I realised they all had Windows installers so there wasn’t really a lot of point persevering with weird half-broken versions of Linux and Docker.
Look what they have to do to mimic a fraction of our power
Look what they have to do to mimic a fraction of our power
I think that sounds more like Cygwin.
I forgot about Cygwin… ugh
it’s a unix system on top of a windows system; i know this!
Yo dawg…
We don’t talk about
Brunothe Microsoft POSIX subsystem
When using WSL, be sure to not mention anything about that when reporting bugs because that’ll just confuse the issue for the maintainers. They like having that casually mentioned about 20 messages into the troubleshooting process.
Pff, issue reports should ask for the output of ‘uname -ar’. It clearly shows its wsl as wsl runs a special kernel
I’m a big fan of going on WSL forums and letting them know everything is working well for give or take 20 messages, then I let them know I need help troubleshooting.
I still don’t know what WSL is for.
I don’t know what WSL is.
Anecdote: I have an IDE that only works on Windows that can build applications for Linux. I use MinGW as part of the packaging process (AND I FUCKING HATE IT OH MY GOD. All of the pathing is broken!). As of yesterday I learned that WSL is a thing that might replace MinGW and make some processes of packaging for linux targets a little easier.
I’ve used both. What I can tell you is that moving to WSL is like moving to Linux wholesale. Treat it like porting your toolchain.
IIRC, MinGW tools will happily take windows style paths (e.g. “C:\Users~myuser\projects”). If your tooling/scripting depends on being able to use Windows style paths, you’ll have to fix that first or you’re going to have a really bad time. There may be other small differences between MinGW tools and what ships on Ubuntu (or whatever Linux you decide to use in the WSL).
My company only allows us to use the company-provided Windows image, so I do all my work inside a WSL2 tmux session.
JetBrains IDEs and VSCode also have WSL connectors so it works acceptably well.
It also handily dodges all the Windows security policies (like installing software). You can even run Xorg apps from it.
I’m still forced to use MS Teams and Outlook, though…
yup!
its for when the reqs include azure ad and the whole office has a m$ fetish yet you still gotta get your bag without losing your decades-built toolset AND you have a choice at all
I only use Windows because I have to work with a corporation’s IT helpdesk staff to get on their VPN if I want to do contract work for them. They are not likely to help me get connected from Linux; they’ll just find another contract dev. Once in, I do everything in Linux because my code will ultimately run in a Linux cloud container of some sort. WSL works well enough for me to do this. I’d rather have Linux on bare metal, but whatever. I’m in; I’m coding; I’m getting paid. I’ll put up with a little bit of suck.
Run Linux stuff on Windows.
A big use case is development with Docker containers.
Thanks - I can kind of see that, as docker on windows is majorly broken. I think I’d just run it in a linux vm, as I do with most of my developing, but I can see some might not want that overhead.
Consider dropping Windows instead
That’s the best bit about WSL (at least, version 2) is that it is a VM running a full version of Linux using Microsoft Hypervisor. There’s a bunch of drivers included that allow Windows and Linux to share filesystems and if you run Wayland/X apps in Linux they run on the Windows desktop.
Sharing filesystems could be useful, I can see that.
I do that with target dev platforms anyway, using things like NFS, samba and sftp, but I do see that it could work well for this.
WSL these days is basically linux running on hyper-v tech natively in Windows.
I love having it at work, so I can write and run bash scripts on my Windows work PC.
I have dozens if Linux servers available to me but sometimes it just is easier to run a script locally.
I too do that, working from a windows vm and writing code for linux - but I push it to a linux vm for testing. Never occurred to me to use WSL and have another environment to configure and maintain for dev that’s different to the target one.
But fair play if that suits you! Each to their own, and I’m sure I do things that make no sense to others.
To keep developers on the platform, because their own ecosystem is shit.
Honestly if it frees me from MinGW I would be happy
I’m happy the Cygwin and Mingw days are over. WSL2 works very well.
Windows Stolen Linux
Serious answer,
Windows subsystem for Linux.
I do know what it is, I just don’t know why you’d use it instead of proper linux, or a vm.
Bad management
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Subsystem_for_Linux
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a component of Microsoft Windows that allows the use of a GNU/Linux environment from within Windows, foregoing the overhead of a virtual machine and being an alternative to dual booting.
Them tryna suck us back into their dysfunctional os, not gonna work on me Mr Micro
Oddly enoigh, they recognize this and are patching the hundreds of tiny holes. I would argue they began trying (IMO malformed) fixes back since the launch of windows 8 and .NET. It’s backwards compatability means tiptoing around some pretty huge tech dept. (Windows was DOS and had no security model at one point) Each time they try to pull people off of their older SDKs. If and when they dont stick, the pile of stuff to support grows one more.
(Also WTH where they thinking with windows 8 apps!? The oversimplicity of the UI leading to huge patches of unused screen space, the art design or lack thereof, the janky unpolished UI elements. It’s embarrising for how much pride they had for it.)
I don’t think anyone is a “wsl user” so much as they’ve found themselves in a position where the lowest friction solution is utilizing wsl for a given situation.
Around 2019, even up until like 2022 if you wanted to run docker in windows, that was how to do it.
That’s where I was a few years ago, and then I switched back to proper Linux. I was only keeping Windows at all for games, but then most of the games I played started working fine on Linux (thank you, Valve).
Plus, I tried doing some TensorFlow stuff with CUDA (Nvidia) GPU acceleration. In theory, you can do it in pure Windows, but nobody has bothered trying to do that. You’re on your own if you try it. The usual way is to do GPU passthrough to WSL. There have been three different ways to do that over the years, only one of which currently works. If you happen to Google a page that tells you one of the wrong ways, there’s a good chance you’ll need to reinstall to get it working the right way.
Using pure Linux for this stuff is no problem. Just use Nvidia’s server drivers instead of gaming drivers. All the AI datacenters are using Nvidia GPUs on Linux, so Nvidia is highly motivated to make this work. Someday, Windows might be as easy to use as Linux.
I learned the shell in wsl before I switched to Linux full time. I wasn’t trying to learn it intentionally. Just didn’t want to develop software on windows. It’s a great gateway drug that reduces friction by a lot.
The terminal is a pathway to many abilities some consider to be unnatural.
It’s not a story the Vibe Coders would tell you
Pretty much my situation. Work stuff, Windows machine, but Linux/Docker workflow and I refuse to let go of my POSIX shell.
All the good stuff available and you choose a POSIX shell? To each their own I guess.
Granted, I still prefer it to PowerShell, but only in how it feels, not conceptually.
Eh I’m not hard set on full spec compliance. I use ZSH, it’s not technically POSIX compliant but close enough that I virtually never have to think about it. Technically correct would probably have been “sh derivative” or something.
I still prefer it to PowerShell
Who hurt you?
Why?
Not enough caffeine. Please disregard.
What’s the current best way to run docker on Windows?
I’m still using wsl(2) for that in 2025 because it seems to be the path of least resistance on Win11.
Just install the docker engine in wsl like anywhere else and avoid docker desktop if you can
That could very well be the best practice. I haven’t had to run docker in windows since then.
When someone ask for help with a Linux issue: 🤩
It’s a wsl bug: 🤭
Open source now tho
What’s the benefit for that? Can you fork it and run a copy in windows (or is it too integrated in wondows) or is it just Microsoft wanting your free labour (bugfixes etc)?
At least you can look at how it works under the hood I guess
Mom! Windows is doing EEE again.
Oh yeah, that is true !
Born to Gentoo+i3, forced (by work) to WSL
