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Comment by cbdumas | Hacker News Reader

I too was really sad to see WSL 1 be replaced by what seems to be just a built-in VM. One of the great things about WSL 1 is that I can run Linux tools on my laptop without the memory overhead of a VM. My laptop only has 8GB of ram which is not enough for Windows and a Linux VM to comfortably share, but plenty to run the Linux tooling I want under WSL 1.

On my desktop with 16GB of ram I can just run Virtualbox. WSL 2 solves nothing for me. Like the author I am very skeptical that WSL 1 will be maintained going forward but I hope it is.

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While still being a VM, WSL2 works much better than a Virtualbox VM: boots in 1 second (!) on my machine, as attested by uptime and dmesg, has dynamic memory reclamation, out of the box file sharing through \\wsl$, VSCode integration.

Same technology, yeah, but much more ergonomic.

My Linux VM in Hyper-V also boots in 1 second (well, 1.5 seconds actually but that includes networking, docker, samba and various other services):

    $ systemd-analyze
    Startup finished in 76ms (firmware) + 38ms (loader) + 461ms (kernel) + 967ms (userspace) = 1.544s

So 1 second by default is impressive, but not really special for those who can already run a VM.

Dynamic memory reclamation is turned on by default for any modern Linux distributions running in Hyper-V. Last I checked the performance of \\wsl$ is terrible (certainly not on par with NFS).

I can see it might be slightly more ergonomic for casual users though, but certainly not to the point WSL 1 has already been at.

Most windows laptop has user-accessible ram slots. You might be able to upgrade your ram and save yourself some trouble.

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