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Comment by easygenes | Hacker News Reader

I have to say that WSL is an absolute nightmare. I just cannot stand it. Not only that, but Microsoft has deeply embedded Hyper-V into Windows, to the point that you can't run another hypervisor. I tried to get away from WSL by using VMware Workstation and found that Hyper-V was still under the hood and bogging down the system. All the documents I could find, including recent official ones from Microsoft, on removing Hyper-V so you could run another hypervisor were incomplete. I eventually got the VMware hypervisor running though, and it is so much better.

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WSL was a nightmare for me too. Hacks piled on top of other hacks, required to make Linux CLI work on Windows but it's just that, a hacky way to use Linux.

Sometimes the system broke, sometimes the filesystem limitations and the performance was always bad, especially with anything involving a large number of files. It was just an awful experience all around. I think anybody who uses WSL over real Linux is only doing it because they either do not want to learn something better & different or they have hardware issues with Linux.

So glad I moved to a real installation after wasting a whole month on WSL. Couldn't be any happier.

Yeah, it doesn't have to be so hacky though. I really don't understand the architectural choices Microsoft made to make it so kludgy to work with, and half the problem is just that Hyper-V is slow and buggy compared to VMware's hypervisor. VMware Workstation just works, quite well, when it gets to use the proper VMware hypervisor.

Given the friction and cost involved in getting that working, it's probably smart to just run Linux bare metal unless you're doing work akin to what led me to that (e.g. needing to work with a Windows corporate environment while configuring Linux test clusters).

> (e.g. needing to work with a Windows corporate environment while configuring Linux test clusters).

I don't wanna imagine this. Would be too stressful for me to use Windows for development, PTSD.

That would explain why my recent-ish attempt at running an ubuntu VM in windows was so bad. I was kind of shocked, how could performance have degraded so much over the years?

10 years ago I was running that workload just fine, but today, on a ryzen 5950, it's slow?

I wonder if Hyper-V is the culprit.

Probably. Also make sure the proper configuration are set in VMWare, more specifically, the Virtualize AMD-V/RVI option. If it gives you an error when enabling that, MS Hyper-V is most likely the culprit.

You can try running it with Hyper-V directly, or disabling Hyper-V (although that doesn’t seem to work on my Windows 11 box, perhaps because of the fancy virtualization-based security features?)

The last time I looked into doing that there was no good way to support anything but headless due to the lack of GPU acceleration.

It is possible, but a bit difficult to fully remove Hyper-V. It does have to be fully removed or the whole OS will actually be sitting under it from boot time and you won’t be able to run another hypervisor. You’d have to search around the VMware Workstation forum for the solution though.

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