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Comment by rvz | Hacker News Reader

> I'd further argue that Microsoft should stop developing its windows OS kernel altogether, running wsl2 on top of a boring windows kernel is never the solution. They should build Windows on top of the Linux kernel, I mean let Windows be a good Linux Window Manager.

Well Windows 11 is now already the best Linux Desktop distro with WSL2.

No need to further complicate it with the rube goldberg contraption that the Linux desktop ecosystem brings.

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> Well Windows 11 is now already the best Linux Desktop distro with WSL2.

You'd have a hard time convincing anyone. WSL2 is just a glorified Linux VM on top of a terrible OS.

It doesn’t feel that way. For me it’s all of apt-get and Linux binaries with the hardware support of Windows.

Unless you want to, well, use hardware. I've had a hellish time trying to do USB device development through WSL.

I'll never understand the name - "Windows Subsystem for Linux" sounds like a way to run Windows on Linux, not the other way around.

Marketing.

Windows is based on kernel + NT subsystems, such as console and Win32. There used to be a Unix subsystem too. That's why it's called like that. "Windows subsystem for X" makes sense only with historical context.

It's still not very clear why it started out this way. After all, Subsystem for X, with Windows implied, would have worked too.

Yep. It could have been the other way of course. If it was LSW, I wonder, would people ask the same question? We'll never know, until they decide to do another renaming op.

> Because we don't own the trademark for Linux and so can't lead our product name with it. Try Windows' Subsystem for Linux instead

https://twitter.com/richturn_ms/status/981916165969625088

The best black box, utterly proprietary, spyware Linux distro.

How so? I’m considering switching to a Windows laptop for the first time in 10 years of doing development on MacOS. Mainly because I’m into machine learning/ neural network these days and everyone around me keep saying buy a laptop with CUDAs support

MacOS does not have NVIDIA CUDA:

https://developer.nvidia.com/nvidia-cuda-toolkit-11_6_0-deve...

Could you use this instead?

https://developer.apple.com/metal/tensorflow-plugin/

Is that as slow as it used to be on Windows 10? In my experience it didn't compare at all to a native Linux distro.

ReactOS.iso size: 106 MB. Did not feel slow to me. YMMV.

Win10.iso size: 5.6 GB. Updates are many GBs.

Linux is fastest speed optimized OS anyway.

Ah I think I wasn't clear in my message... I was speaking about the performance of WSL on Windows 10 compared to a native Windows system. The only time I tried ReactOS in a VM I didn't feel it was slow either.

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