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Comment by fb03 | Hacker News Reader

Genuine question: Why not just virtualbox/vmware it up with an ISO ? That's how I've been doing for years and it works just fine.

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Virtualbox reserves system resources for itself.

This runs fully alongside the Host OS, from what I can see.

This is one (windows) kernel instance running apps built for linux. VMWare just starts a new OS instance on the same PC - but it has a separate memory/FS/scheduler/drivers/etc. a lot of overhead, duplication and sync work.

Say there's a tool that doesn't have a Windows version, like Facebook Flow didn't have - you can just install the necessary packages and run the linux app on your project folder - plenty of dev tools are built on top of *nix and Windows is a second class citizen in OSS - this solves that problem nicely. Or you can use linux GCC/clang to build the linux binaries on Windows and not muck around with cross compiling.

It's a different approach. WSL is more like CoLinux back in the day, in that Windows and Linux kernels run alongside each other. Even a bit better integrated because processes across both worlds can run each other, and see and talk to each other.

No one is taking away your VM, don't worry.

Ah, nice, thanks for the explanation! I do remember CoLinux.

This should provide way better latency than my VM tho, right?

Theoretically, yes, but WSL is still beta and performance (especially filesystem I/O) is mediocre at best. They'll get there eventually!

Nice, because right now altough I use a linux VM for dev work, I am still bummed by the latency and stuff. For tty based work it is there but any X.org workload is still laggy as fuck, which kinda bothers me a little while coding (I'm using Xubuntu with all the VirtualBox additions on).

WSL doesn't run a Linux kernel – a Windows Subsystem just provides a different API to the underlying Windows kernel, in this case the API Linux applications expect. So arguably, it's even further from a VM than CoLinux.

Do you know if they already have proper X support? Or is it just a matter of compiling X.org and running it yourself?

I haven't followed this, but last I've seen a while ago was that you could run an X-server for Windows and then have Linux applications talk to that (and the normal environment didn't have dbus and things like that)

Indeed. For years now, I've been running MobaXTerm - which is a toolset, including a proprietary X server for Windows. Quite convenient.

(Full disclosure: no relation to product, user only)

Well, CoLinux ran Linux as a kernel-mode driver under Windows. WSL is a Windows kernel subsystem providing the Linux kernel API. That's why I made that comparison. I do know that they're very different things technically.

> CoLinux

Oh, that brings up some fond memories. During my training, I would use CoLinux to run Debian on my Windows XP desktop. Good times... ;-)

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