[HN Gopher] WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history
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WSL2 corrupting Git repositories and shell history
Author : delduca
Score : 400 points
Date : 2021-01-02 14:17 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| tgbugs wrote:
| While we're on the topic of WSL2 causing issues, I will add one
| that I noted to the pile. If you have WSL2 installed then the
| first bash on PATH is the WSL2 version of bash. For whatever
| reason, this version of bash has a major impedance mismatch with
| Emacs and org-mode. From windows native Emacs (not an Emacs
| installed in WSL2) if you try to run an org babel block that
| contains bash code, whole commands will simply be ignored. The
| end result is that if you blindly execute bash blocks in Emacs on
| windows without checking which bash is being used there can be
| disastrous results because a seemingly safe script like `pushd
| some-folder; rm -r _; popd` suddenly becomes `rm -r_ ` without
| warning. I'm guessing that it has to do with mismatched line
| endings since mingw bash (aka git bash) doesn't have these
| issues. Also, you can't rely on the ordering of your PATH
| environment variable to protect you because updates can change
| it.
|
| tl;dr WSL2 bash is not bash but it pretends to be and there are
| terrifying changes to the semantics of bash scripts as a result.
| DavyJone wrote:
| I only see 1 user confirming it and he had a special or odd disk
| setup (merged disks which also do not show as merged, might be
| the source of the problem).
|
| Is this confirmed by anyone else?
| lights0123 wrote:
| Huh? skhaz, 2n3906, PulsarFox, Annih, Champkinz,
| sidharthramesh, mbrumlow, luigimannoni, and jmfury all confirm
| the problem in the linked GitHub issue.
| gokhan wrote:
| My zsh history on wsl2 got corrupted last week. A friend shared
| a script to fix it, mentioning the same happened him in the
| past. Git is ok though.
| bserge wrote:
| I don't really understand the use case for WSL. What are the
| advantages? You could run a full Linux VM and do everything on it
| on any machine these days. Which is what I do, but I'm just an
| old school hack. Anyone who uses WSL care to enlighten me?
| Thanks!
| syshum wrote:
| Lower overhead, and full integration with the host filesystem I
| believe are the 2 primary reasons many use it
| pjmlp wrote:
| To sell Windows laptops to the same crowd that buys Apple
| laptops to develop GNU/Linux software, instead of supporting
| Linux OEMs, and are unhappy that Apple only cares about
| developers on Apple ecosystem.
|
| Microsoft understood that they only care about having some kind
| of POSIX support, and nowadays being Linux compatible is more
| relevant than straight POSIX, as the BSDs and IllumniOS also
| found out with their compatibility layers.
| jevgeni wrote:
| Or, alternatively, a crowd whose needs aren't completely met
| by Linux.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Then why they develop GNU/Linux software to start with?
| jevgeni wrote:
| One reason might be, is that they might need to in part
| work with a server-side system that runs on Linux and
| it's easier this way.
|
| But maybe they also need to work with stuff thats Windows
| only. Say they need to produce media assets with the
| Adobe suite.
|
| Not everything is vimmable.
| pjmlp wrote:
| SSH and X Windows servers also exist for Windows.
| jevgeni wrote:
| It takes me 2 minutes to install WSL Ubuntu. Or I could
| spend half a day on figuring out a hacky solution to a
| Windows/SSH/XWindows workflow that offers even a
| comparable level of integration. It will grow into weeks
| of obsessive tweaking until I feel compelled to write a
| blog post for HN where I show my sick setup and hours and
| hours I dumped into this, while meaningful work piled up
| in my TODOs.
|
| ... Or I could just install WSL.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Or just install Humming Bird, working just fine for me
| since 2000.
| whenitrains wrote:
| Or just install WSL?
|
| What's the problem with Microsoft having an answer to
| this?
| detaro wrote:
| Because their needs aren't met by developing Windows or
| macOS software?
| pjmlp wrote:
| Then again why they don't support GNU/Linux vendors?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| So if someone installs Linux themselves they don't meet
| this bar you're setting? That seems pretty far from the
| normal open source ethos.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Ah, so using evil commercial OSes is part of that so
| called ethos?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| No, _installing your own OS_ is very open source.
| pram wrote:
| People might get paid money to develop (proprietary!)
| software that deploys to Linux. That doesn't mean they
| enjoy using Linux.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Indeed, I have been doing that for years and am yet to
| install WSL.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I guess you'll have to use it to "believe" ;)
|
| Setup is much less hassle, startup is much faster (one or two
| seconds) and resource usage is much lower than running Linux in
| a VM.
|
| Also little things like VScode (running as Windows UI
| application) automatically detecting WSL and setting itself up
| to connect to the WSL side. To do the same for a VM requires at
| least to configure the SSL ports on the VM.
| omk wrote:
| Being light-weight won it for me. And the hassle free setup
| to use the same disk on both environments.
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| Docker for Windows using WSL2 as its engine is also nice. The
| Docker commands somehow (magically) get added to your Linux
| distro and you can mix and match how you like.
| umvi wrote:
| When I launch my WSL2 Ubuntu shell, I have a CLI prompt in < 1
| second. Clipboard works perfectly since it is a window similar
| to PowerShell, my windows file system is mounted in under /mnt,
| and generally everything is lighting fast.
|
| Getting that same quality of experience under VirtualBox was
| nightmarish. Longer boot times, shared clipboard/filesystems
| were always breaking, random stuff related to hardening made
| update difficult.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| >Clipboard works perfectly
|
| Which one? Secondary? And the primary does not work at all?
| shawnz wrote:
| Primary and secondary selections are specific to X11 which
| is not involved at all when running WSL command line apps
| in a Windows terminal
| Kwpolska wrote:
| The Windows clipboard just works, because WSL2 terminals
| are just regular Windows apps.
| zo1 wrote:
| At this point - Can't you just SSH into the local linux
| VM or a remote linux server?
| pydry wrote:
| Other than the startup time (mitigated by starting the VM
| right after startup) I have no issues with virtualbox. File
| mounts, copy & paste... everything works more or less fine.
|
| WSL, on the other hand, has been nothing but trouble.
| shawnz wrote:
| One downside there is the constantly huge RAM consumption
| of such a setup.
|
| EDIT: At least compared to WSL1. However WSL2 also has some
| advantages in that it can reclaim unused memory and suspend
| the VM when not in use.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| Why would VM-based WSL2 use any less RAM?
| freeone3000 wrote:
| WSL VMs are gen2 (fully paravirtual) hyper-v VMs, so use
| dynamic memory allocation. VirtualBox, even with Hyper-V
| as its engine, doesn't do this. I don't think any
| standalone Linux distros offer a standalone Hyper-V
| paravirtual image that is not a WSL2 image.
| Cu3PO42 wrote:
| The Ubuntu image you can select in the "New VM" dialog in
| the Hyper-V management tool (or whatever it's called)
| absolutely does work with dynamic memory allocation and I
| seem to recall getting it to work on an Arch VM as well.
|
| I believe the "Linux Integration Services" for Hyper-V
| are actually mainlined at this point so I would expect
| most things to work. Setting up RDP for enhanced desktop
| sessions is the only painful thing I remember.
| jayflux wrote:
| It's very useful for projects that require (or work better in)
| a linux environment. I don't want to start up a full linux VM,
| that sounds like a lot of overhead and I'm more likely to not
| bother at all. WSL is much lighter than that (we're not talking
| virtualbox here), if I open windows terminal its up and
| running, there's almost-zero start up cost.
|
| With VSCode I can switch between working in WSL and windows
| easily, without needing a desktop GUI to write code in. There's
| no startup cost, I'm immediately in the correct environment for
| that project. I've found it very useful since it came out.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| You've not explained why you would not run a native Linux
| system in the first place...
| whenitrains wrote:
| I write C# for .Net Core and .Net Framework professionally.
|
| I'm open to suggestions but it simply seems crazy difficult
| to do this outside of Windows. WSL lets me jump into *nix
| quickly when I need it for whatever reason. I don't need a
| desktop machine. Why not just use WSL?
| majewsky wrote:
| Because corporate only allows their sanctioned images.
| easton wrote:
| Office, which doesn't have a good replacement on the web or
| on Linux.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| What is inadequate about Libre Office ?
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| Calc is really not an adequate substitute for Excel if
| you need to use VBA macros - which might be coming from
| your customers! And in the wild I see plenty of older
| Excel documents (before 97) which I don't think are
| compatible with LibreOffice. Obviously this isn't an
| ideal situation but historical data around prices/etc
| from the 90s are often stored as old Excel binaries.
|
| In general I think using Calc (or Google Sheets) instead
| of Excel is a bad idea for a business. Word processing
| and spreadsheets - sure (although there might be some
| things specific to Word/PPT that I am not aware of). But
| Excel is a very specific piece of software and should not
| be thought of as a general "spreadsheet tool."
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Not sure about Calc, but 'modern' Excel doesn't even seem
| to be able to deal with text (UTF-8) in CSV properly :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25015679
|
| (And I know from experience that 2003- versions of Excel
| don't.)
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Calc has several options for languages to use for macros,
| for instance Python - I'm not certain about VBA support,
| but it would seem that many industries are slowly
| migrating to Python anyway :
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25588720
| ojnabieoot wrote:
| The point is that _VBA_ macros are portable across Excel
| but not between Excel and Calc. Calc does not support VBA
| macros. As many businesses need to consume spreadsheets
| with VBA macros, and since porting VBA to Python isn't
| sustainable, Calc is simply not a good enough replacement
| for enterprise.
|
| I am not sure that one anecdotal blogpost supports the
| idea that industries are moving from Excel to Python. It
| is more likely that people are _productionizing_ Excel
| spreadsheets with Python these days, instead of C++ or
| Java.
| Reventlov wrote:
| I have been teaching computer related classes to uni students
| for some time. Most of them run Windows. Running a virtual
| machine often means accessing the UEFI to be sure they have
| virtualization extensions enabled. And many of them have shitty
| personal laptops, which means running a VM will really slow the
| "Linux" experience. Sharing files between the host and the
| guest is also sometimes tricky, and I don't want to force them
| to install another OS on their personal laptops. WSL is nice in
| that it allows them to have a bit of Linux world without being
| very intrusive, and runs better than virtual machines on many
| of their laptops.
|
| I'm what is called a "vacataire", which means I'm also not in
| the position of asking the school IT departement to enable
| stuff on the computers for the classes...
| temac wrote:
| > Running a virtual machine often means accessing the UEFI to
| be sure they have virtualization extensions enabled.
|
| Likewise for WSL2.
|
| I hope modern computers with a capable processor are all
| shipped with virtualization enable at firmware level, because
| Hyper-V can be used for tons of things in recent Windows.
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| Enabling hardware virtualisation opens up a significant and
| deep attack surface. Considering the vanishingly small
| percentage of users which benefit from it, I hope it stays
| off by default.
| h_r wrote:
| Are there significant risks from running virtualization
| locally like this? If so, can you provide any links or
| elaborate a bit so I can follow up? Most of what I've
| seen on such vulnerabilities refer to server
| infrastructure.
| jrockway wrote:
| Windows is moving to a model where Windows itself is run
| as a virtualized OS. I believe this is enabled by default
| in new installs.
|
| So having a Linux VM in Hyper-V isn't opening up much new
| attack surface.
| ylor wrote:
| First I hear of this. Source? Googling for this
| predictably returned unhelpful results.
| danieldk wrote:
| _In VBS environments, the normal NT kernel runs in a
| virtualized environment called VTL0, while the secure
| kernel runs in a more secure and isolated environment
| called VTL1._
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/security/blog/2020/07/08/introd
| uci...
|
| https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-
| hardware/design/dev...
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| It's not enabled by default. Enabling Hyper-V still
| causes a battery/performance hit that is going to be hard
| to get rid of.
| smileybarry wrote:
| Virtualization-based security -- a lighter mode of
| Hyper-V sans real VMs -- is enabled by default on new
| installs on recent-enough hardware:
|
| https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/virtualization/vir
| tua...
| 10000truths wrote:
| Erm, explain? What attack can you do with hardware
| virtualization enabled that you cannot otherwise do?
| danieldk wrote:
| In Windows, enabling virtualization actually reduces
| attack surface. E.g. it is used to protect against
| kernel-level malware:
|
| https://www.techrepublic.com/article/how-virtualisation-
| is-c...
| tremon wrote:
| _unning a virtual machine often means accessing the UEFI to
| be sure they have virtualization extensions enabled_
|
| Note that this benefit applies to the deprecated WSL 1 only,
| WSL2 actually runs a VM underneath so it requires the same
| hoops that a VM would require.
| smileybarry wrote:
| I just like being able to work in a Windows IDE and compile in
| a (99%) Linux environment without messing with a VM or mounting
| shares. Like QMK[1] -- develop in Visual Studio, compile in
| WSL, flash in QMK Toolbox (Windows). Or in some very specific
| corner cases, have a Linux-based workflow that suddenly calls
| into a Win32 utility.
|
| In some cases I need to test something that's Linux-only -- an
| idea or a GitHub project that just doesn't run on Windows --
| and it's easier to jump into a WSL console than boot a VM. But
| on the other hand, I don't do that frequently enough to just
| keep a VM running all the time. (Plus there's VM idle RAM
| usage, and I can't use Hyper-V [which can reduce VM RAM] due to
| host performance concerns)
|
| [1] https://github.com/qmk/qmk_firmware
| nijave wrote:
| Business. For better or worse, there are plenty of places where
| the policy and tech allow WSL but installing a hypervisor on
| your machine is much more challenging.
|
| WSL2 is basically just a Linux VM, though (I think it actually
| uses Hyper-V containers which seem to occupy some weird space
| between Linux container and VMs)
| pram wrote:
| Hyper-V is VMs not containers. When you enable Hyper-V it's
| actually the 'operating system' and Windows is a guest VM
| believe it or not.
| nijave wrote:
| Sure but, afaik, the docs originally called the "light
| weight" isolation mode Hyper-V Containers vs the
| traditional Hyper-V VM with more features exposed
| pjmlp wrote:
| This is how every type 1 hypervisor works.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypervisor
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| But it's not how type 2 hypervisors work, and
| traditionally when you used virtual machines on a desktop
| it was type 2.
| pjmlp wrote:
| That was long time ago, most people using VMware also use
| ESXi, and mainframes use type 1 as well.
|
| Just those using Virtual Box for free not.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > most people using VMware also use ESXi
|
| Most people using it are also using servers. Is ESXi on
| desktops/workstations anything other than very niche?
| sdoering wrote:
| To chime in. The company I work for has (after being acquired
| by Accenture) implemented "Endpoint Management" for all
| machines (read monitoring and spyware).
|
| EPM prohibits us from creating virtual machines, but WSL2 is
| possible. So a lot of devs at our shop (at least the 5% or so
| who are using WIN) use this setup.
|
| Personally - I do this on my private machine - I switched,
| because with the EPM software I wanted to separate my work
| machine from my private efforts, as I just do not like
| Accenture to be able to read all mails, read all files and
| install arbitrary software on a machine that I have private
| data on. Before we got acquired my employer allowed private
| use, we were admins on the machines and there was no spyware
| installed - so only using one machine for work and private
| stuff was feasible.
| quaffapint wrote:
| Docker. Docker can use WSL2, so it works much nicer and less
| problematic than when running under standard windows emulation.
| herdcall wrote:
| I used to do all work on Fedora, dual booting to Windows for
| the Windows apps. WSL was OK when I tried long back, so hadn't
| bothered. But for the last few months I was forced to try WSL
| (now WSL2) again due to some Windows work, and have been using
| the Ubuntu app. I've got to say I'm now a believer and don't
| scoff anymore. I can now do ALL my work without problems on
| WSL2: mainly Go/C++/Dart, containers (podman/buildah), Flutter,
| GRPC, etc. The added beauty is that you can go seamlessly
| between Windows and Linux apps: e.g., you can just run an .exe
| from the BASH command line in WSL2 just as you run an Linux
| command. It's insane how they did it, and you have to try it to
| experience it.
|
| There are some issues still: GUI apps are still a pain to set
| up (but they're fixing this), there are some networking issues
| (e.g., accessing servers running on Linux), file path issues on
| some apps (like I guess git here), etc. I never personally
| experienced any of the git issues cited, and I use it regularly
| from the Ubuntu command line. Overall, I very highly recommend
| WSL2 now, Microsoft hit a home run with VSCode with devs and
| IMO WSL2 is turning out into another.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| I can pop open an Ubuntu tab in Microsoft Terminal and use *nix
| utilities as though they were made for Windows. For example: I
| could chain some scripts and commands together to process and
| produce reports on my Ableton Live sets without fussing with
| host extensions in a VM.
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| I use a mix of WSL2, and VMs. WSL2 has a few nice properties
| for some use cases:
|
| a) It comes default with some network binding magic (ok, just
| configuration) that makes your WSL env almost actually behave
| like localhost. I know you can configure this yourself, but
| it's nice out of the box. (on the other hand, sometimes is this
| exactly the opposite of what you want...)
|
| b) My main machine is a bit RAM constrained, and WSL2 will
| "magically" reclaim RAM when I close the consoles (unless I
| left something running...). Once again, not the biggest win,
| especially if you spec'd out your machine to run VMs, but still
| nice.
|
| I think WSL2's biggest wins are not for 'full out development'.
| But it's nice when you need want to jump in and poke at
| something quickly in Linux land. The startup time for the
| console/VM is fast enough (~1-2 seconds), and the cleanup is
| good enough I can quickly jump between, without having a VM
| actually hanging around all the time.
|
| I'm sure the file system integration is useful for some
| usecases... classic one would be if someone emails you data
| files or something. You download in your browser in Windows and
| then can access pretty seamlessly from WSL.
|
| I think I would summarize WSL's advantages as being a bunch of
| little quality of life advantages that are very much suited for
| Windows dominant workflows that periodically jump into Linux.
|
| There are all sorts of other disadvantages though - I would not
| recommend anyone who has a comfortable VM based workflow to
| ditch for WSL. An example of an uncomfortably stupid rough edge
| would be periodically time-desyncing:
| https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4149 . I shit you not,
| my workaround is to manually adjust my linux time forward and
| back with `sudo date --set "${INCREMENT} seconds" until it gets
| close enough that OAuth doesn't shit itself.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Also, I think WSL2 is currently only way to access GPU
| through Cuda API from the guest linux.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| Hyper-V can also do PCI pass-through if you have a compute
| card to assign to the guest. If you're just running the one
| card, though, you need WSL2 to handle the sharing.
| riku_iki wrote:
| Additionally Win Pro is needed for Hyper-V, while WSL2
| can be used in lower level Win versions.
| shawnz wrote:
| Have you tried WSL1? It sounds like it might fit your use
| cases better:
|
| - WSL1 shares the same network interfaces and addresses as
| the host, no proxying like WSL2
|
| - Significantly less RAM usage
|
| - No time sync bug
| icegreentea2 wrote:
| Oh, I use both =P
|
| I use WSL2 for some docker based projects.
| smartmic wrote:
| I do not use WSL but see a good reason for WSL. The benefits
| for the users are superficial but the really big thing is on
| the business side for Microsoft. With WSL they try to trap more
| and more Linux developers into their ecosystem. It is all about
| getting more control of the most talented and fruitful
| developer minds. In the end Microsoft and its shareholder will
| benefit if it keeps its hands on this crowd.
| CJefferson wrote:
| WSL2 is "just a full Linux VM", just easy to install and
| integrated nicely with other parts of the OS
| llacb47 wrote:
| I recently upgraded to WSL2. Let's hope this doesn't happen to me
| dpmdpm wrote:
| Huh. I've used WSL2 and got extensively and never had any
| problems.
| mmcnl wrote:
| Me too. I abuse it often as well (hard shutdowns with wsl
| --shutdown, interacting with files from both Linux and Windows
| side, etc.). The only issue I have is that because of the
| virtualization approach it uses more RAM as there is no unified
| RAM pool for both Windows and WSL (as was the case with WSL1).
| But that's perhaps expected behavior.
| f12345g wrote:
| While using Visual Studio (not code) with git in wsl2 with Ubuntu
| 20.04, I saved three open files with changes, committed shutdown
| the laptop. On next start files showed as empty 0 bytes in Visual
| Studio and thought as far as I recall were non-zero size in wls2.
| No way to recover them from git. I stopped using git repos in
| wls2 for now.
| utxaa wrote:
| the scary part is that git reports an error and that's why people
| are noticing. what else is going on with files that are not
| source controlled?
| cracksmoka420 wrote:
| I'm so glad that I don't use Windows LOL
| sdoering wrote:
| I will need to monitor this more closely. I have switched to a
| WIN/WSL2 setup recently from Mac and have not had this problem
| happen to me.
|
| Nonetheless I hope this gets fixed before it hits me.
| uncledave wrote:
| Keep the Mac handy. I just went the other way to you because of
| a thousand paper cuts.
| kowsheek wrote:
| Same here. I want to like Windows but MS just makes it
| impossible.
|
| The MBP M1 has blown me away, I don't think I'll try to go
| back any time soon.
| uncledave wrote:
| Yeah M1 Mini here. Total game changer.
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| After constantly getting caught in bugs between WSL and Docker,
| i'm now running Ubuntu Server headless with a Windows VM (with
| GPU passthrough) on top.
|
| The biggest issue across all these things is filesystems. There
| is simply no good way to share a filesystem between Windows and
| Linux that is both 1. fast 2. fully correct - i.e doesn't break
| some code.
|
| SMB/NFS just never work super well because they are slow, or
| programs think they are local filesystems so things break (e.g
| VScode won't detect new files created on the linux side of a SMB
| mount without a manual refresh). Plenty of details on getting
| permissions right too. Not to mention extended attributes which
| differ slightly and break stuff. Network file systems in general
| are just too different to local FS's for programs to work
| seamlessly.
|
| The 2 non-ideal solutions I've found are 1. keep all files in
| linux + edit over network using VSCode Remote or IntelliJ Remote
| support or 2. keep a copy of the dev workspace in windows, and
| use something like unison (or manual git) to sync.
| ncphil wrote:
| A while back spent about 2 mos mastering WSL2 and came to the
| conclusion that the default of automatically opening up in the
| Windows fs share was... unwise. Besides fs permissions being a
| complete mess, the unstable behavior described here liked to show
| up at the most inopportune moments. Wound up confining my work to
| the virtual Linux fs, but that kind of defeated the whole purpose
| of WSL for me. I'm also back to using a VMware machine on my
| company owned laptop, but my personal systems are still Linux on
| bare metal. As an aside, I struggled with Hyper V to replace
| VMware, but it makes the system unstable on the particular Win 10
| builds my company provides employees. I'd gone at least 8 years
| not seeing a blue screen before that.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| I find wsl2 with docker to be a decent use case. You get a
| reliable terminal that doesn't just background processes you
| ctrl-c to.
|
| The IO is slow but overall manageable. File permissions are a
| joke but they're being ported into a container. I don't see WSL
| as an environment as much as it's just a more reliable terminal
| with a shotty emulated filesystem.
| jaltekruse wrote:
| MS is ridiculous, corrupting the filesystem is an OS mistake of
| the first order. Any systems developer should view corruption of
| a persistent storage system of any kind as totally unacceptable.
| And in this case the whole filesystem is open source! Meanwhile
| the open source people built a decent NTFS driver for linux years
| ago, I haven't seen what specs are released but I assume they
| needed to fill a few doc gaps to make it happen.
|
| Also other nice people did bundle up ext3 and ext4 into an app
| you could run on windows to browse and copy stuff from your linux
| partition years ago.
|
| Now MS finally caves and accepts the defeat of linux being a
| better experience for devs, so they now 'support' it and can't
| check that saving files always works?!?
|
| There is no way this only happens for bash history and git repos,
| some people have files they don't instantly throw on the cloud,
| or consider half-ephemeral like bash history, in this case you
| wouldn't be able to just re-clone as a workaround, I'll keep
| running my desktop linux on my dev machine (although it's not all
| rosey over there either, I trust it to save my files).
| efdee wrote:
| Yes, let's pretend that the 4.19 EXT4 corruption issue in 2018
| never happened.
| kasabali wrote:
| No need to pretend, because it never happened:
|
| > Initially, the problem was thought to be in the ext4
| filesystem, since that is what the affected users were
| using...It took until December 4 for Lukas Krejci to
| correctly bisect the problem down to a block-layer change.
|
| https://lwn.net/Articles/774440/
| efdee wrote:
| I never said the problem was in the EXT4 filesystem. The
| problem resulted in EXT4 corruption.
|
| Quite sure the Git corruption issue WSL2 has isn't in Git
| either.
| barrkel wrote:
| OK, the 4.19 filesystem corruption issue.
|
| The fact that it was in the block layer doesn't exactly
| mean it didn't materialize as a FS corruption issue.
| matt123456789 wrote:
| Not sure how an issue like this doesn't make it into the test
| suite.
|
| Probably another symptom of them firing their QA team [1].
|
| https://www.ghacks.net/2019/09/23/former-microsoft-employee-...
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| Things can't go into the test suite if they don't know what
| causes it
| jaltekruse wrote:
| This was reported back in August and unless the people
| commenting yesterday just haven't updated Windows in a while it
| still isn't fixed.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Filesystems are hard :
|
| https://danluu.com/filesystem-errors/
| 3gg wrote:
| > Mind that I come from a Ubuntu distro, Windows is the most
| energy efficient solution at the moment and allows me to run my
| Dev tools and work on battery for 4 hours straight. Ubuntu (or
| any Debian-based distro) destroy my battery in 40 minutes and
| there's no solution or optimization for that.
|
| I know this is not a solution, but the Librem laptops from Purism
| hold up for hours straight. I also used to run Windows on laptops
| for the same reason, but the obvious solution to this is to buy a
| laptop built with Linux in mind from the ground up, and now we
| have options available.
| indymike wrote:
| I quadrupled battery life when I switched form Windows to
| Ubuntu. No idea why. I'm using a Dell XPS 15 which has factory
| support for Linux. I didn't do a lot of digging into why... was
| just happy to be able to go 4 hours instead of one.
| 3gg wrote:
| As far as I can tell, and I am not an expert, it has always
| boiled down to hardware/driver parity. Laptops ship with
| proprietary hardware and drivers that Windows can tap into to
| optimize battery life, things like turning off hard drives
| and stuff, but that a Linux doesn't have access to. Provided
| hardware/driver parity, a Linux environment should generally
| be more lightweight and last longer. Maybe that was your
| experience with the XPS; those guys also ship with Linux out
| of the box like you said, so the hardware should lend itself
| just as well to Linux distributions.
| colejohnson66 wrote:
| If you were only getting a single hour on a laptop, I'm
| almost certain your battery management settings weren't
| configured correctly (brightness on max, etc)
| trinovantes wrote:
| Another funny interaction I found with WSL2 and Windows is file
| case sensitivity leading to all sorts of weird error messages
|
| I wish I can use a real Linux installation but their display
| drivers don't work well with my multiple displays with different
| resolutions
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| >their display drivers don't work well with my multiple
| displays with different resolutions
|
| Unless you're writing through a time warp from 2004, this is
| not true at all, IME.
|
| But the statement is vague. "Work well" can mean some esoteric
| DPI scaling stuff that I think is only noticeable with 4K
| combinations. What distribution? What's "their display driver"?
| Nouveau, the open-source Nvidia one, is pretty bad, and
| everyone uses the proprietary Nvidia driver (this may be hard
| to come by on some distros, like Debian, but don't use those;
| use Ubuntu or Manjaro). The AMD open-source one is great and
| everyone on AMD GPUs uses that. I've been running triple
| monitor, diagonally-aligned 1080p/1440p configurations for
| years on several distros and DEs with both Nvidia and AMD
| drivers.
| nijave wrote:
| Reading through the issues it seems like the problem is occuring
| when opening the same files from directly inside the WSL2
| container and also through the network device that exposes them
| to Windows at the same time. I'm not very familiar with how WSL2
| exposes files but that seems to be the problem
| crispyambulance wrote:
| I think calling it WSL2 was a mistake.
|
| The predecessor, WSL, "just worked" and it was more a less a
| linux experience for most practical purposes-- and certainly
| better than hoary old cygwin.
|
| This caused a lot of people to believe they could just transition
| to WSL2, lead on by the promise of an even more performant linux
| experience. The documentation didn't say anything about
| complications from attempting this, so a lot of people just tried
| it as soon as they could, thinking it would go as smoothly as
| when they tried WSL. But nope... it many cases, it doesn't just
| work out of the box. There's network configuration and gateway
| issues, snags with vpn, and now this git repo corruption. When
| you look on git issues, it's just people randomly shot-gunning
| suggestions, some of which work, some of which don't. I think
| WSL2 was rushed out too early, or at least it's lacking a
| comprehensive troubleshooting guide to get it up and running.
| k__ wrote:
| Wasn't the main purpose of WSL2 to make WSL finally usable
| because before v2 it had really bad IO perf?
| pletnes wrote:
| There are other issues, too. At least at some point,
| absolutely no haskell based apps would run, since their
| stdlib used some syscall which WSL1 did not implement. Broke
| pandoc for me. Stopped bothering with WSL1 there and then.
|
| Other issues which colleagues encountered include abysmal
| performance and broken python installations as PATHs and
| other environment details are wildly mixed inside WSL.
|
| I just don't understand why some people were seemingly happy
| with WSL1, there were so many rough edges. WSL2 is much much
| better in my experience, on virtually all fronts.
| alerighi wrote:
| It didn't have bad IO performance. It had the same IO
| performance as Windows.
|
| The problem is software that is badly written and does bad
| assumptions, like that continuing opening/closing files is
| good just because in Linux is good, that maybe true on most
| UNIX systems but nobody said that.
|
| I think that WSL2 is a very very bad idea, you are no longer
| making a POSIX subsystem of Windows, a way to use the POSIX
| API in the Windows kernel, without any emulation (basically
| the same thing as WINE), you are running a virtual machine.
|
| I would say that WSL2 performance is very bad if you work in
| the Windows filesystem. Sure, if you work from the WSL home
| directory that is mounted in a ext4 virtual filesystem
| performance is good, it's a VM.
|
| But this is useless, you see the main advantage of WSL over
| having a VM or a dual boot was integration with Windows, the
| ability to use bash scripts to manipulate your Windows files,
| the ability to launch Windows executables and pipe the output
| into a POSIX executable.
|
| All of that is useful if there is a strong connections
| between the two systems, if I can work with WSL in the same
| home directory as Windows where I have all my files. How is
| useful if before working on something (that could be a stupid
| thing like running a script to rename a bunch of files) I
| have to first copy the files that I intend to work on in the
| WSL home, run what I have to turn, and copy them back? And
| what if I want my IDE in execution in Windows with the
| project in Windows and I want to launch on the project bash
| scripts?
|
| I hope they will not discontinue WSL1! If they will
| discontinue WSL1, unfortunately I will have to go back to
| cygwin that was not great but worked mostly fine, since I
| need integration between Windows and Linux.
| resfirestar wrote:
| Except they moved performance backwards in WSL2 for accessing
| files shared with Windows:
| https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197
| hvdijk wrote:
| I don't think calling it WSL2 was a mistake. It wasn't
| something that was good for the users, but it had a very clear
| benefit for the people working on WSL: calling it WSL2 allowed
| them to close WSL1 issues en masse as "fixed in WSL2" and never
| look at them again.
| zamadatix wrote:
| You can say "fixed in <name>" regardless if the name is
| numerically sequential.
| hvdijk wrote:
| True, but if MS hadn't presented WSL2 as a variant of WSL,
| any issues fixed in WSL2 wouldn't count as fixed in the WSL
| issue tracker. I would prefer it if their issue tracker
| marked these, more honestly in my opinion, as "This issue
| is will not be fixed in WSL, you can migrate to HVL
| instead" (using HVL as a hypothetical name for WSL2) with a
| separate HVL issue tracker.
| tw04 wrote:
| I guess I don't follow your point. The very reason WSL2
| exists is because there were countless issues that
| COULDN'T be fixed with the way WSL1 was implemented. Why
| would they leave an issue open they fixed, just because
| the fix required a complete re-implementation?
| Furthermore why would they change the name, this is
| literally how they are carrying forward the functionality
| of WSL 1. It's still Linux on Windows, there is still a
| custom subsystem to allow the functionality. It is quite
| literally still Windows Subsystem for Linux. As
| documented:
|
| https://i.redd.it/po98dksksjx21.png
|
| Should Mac Office not be called Office because they
| completely re-wrote it?
| hvdijk wrote:
| They aren't carrying forward the functionality of WSL1.
| Yes, there are issues that cannot be fixed in WSL1. There
| are also issues that aren't, and quite likely can't be,
| fixed in WSL2, that do work in WSL1. The file system
| corruption that happens here in WSL2 is a nice example,
| it is something that could not possibly ever happen with
| WSL1 because of the way it was designed. WSL2 is not and
| will never be a full replacement for WSL1; WSL1 and WSL2
| are two separate products, both with their own advantages
| and disadvantages, and I wish Microsoft would treat them
| as such.
|
| > Should Mac Office not be called Office because they
| completely re-wrote it?
|
| I do not know how different Office for Windows and Office
| for Mac are, but to go with a different example, yes, I
| do think Visual Studio for Mac and Visual Studio Code
| should not have carried the Visual Studio name, it causes
| unnecessary confusion.
| andrew_ wrote:
| A poor argument IMHO. A naming change for the sake of an
| issue tracker that appears to be a net negative for users
| is not a wise choice. Naming and branding doesn't exist
| to serve the project's management tools.
| zamadatix wrote:
| Whether they are counted as fixed in the WSL tracker is
| completely up to them. "Fixed, use HVL" is just as valid
| way to close a WSL1 issue ticket as "Fixed, use WSL2".
| ridiculous_fish wrote:
| Did they really do that? MS's official line is that WSL is
| not deprecated, and can be run alongside WSL2.
| chx wrote:
| Yes they did.
|
| We discussed this here before: I am reasonably certain --
| without having any insider info -- it was various ptrace
| types which broke the camel's back besides the abhorrent
| file system performance. Both PTRACE_SEIZE and
| PTRACE_TRACEME was closed as fixed-in-wsl2
| https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2028
| https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/3031
| ahupp wrote:
| Was that incorrect somehow? WSL2 fixed a ton of issues for
| me.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's a true statement but it's quite unhelpful to tell
| people that a problem they have is fixed in a different
| semi-compatible piece of software.
| ahupp wrote:
| It probably depends a lot on your specific use patterns,
| but I expect for most people this was a change that
| basically fixed a bunch of bugs, introduced negligible
| new issues, and had an identical interface.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Is WSL really so buggy? I never got that impression
| myself. All my problems with things getting fussy have
| been on WSL2.
| ahupp wrote:
| I tried to build two projects in WSL1, one using the Z3
| theorem prover, and one using Chrome for scraping. Both
| ran into kernel issues. So for me it failed about 100% of
| the time on anything non-trivial.
| loeg wrote:
| Chrome uses almost every single Linux syscall under the
| sun. So I guess that's not too surprising.
|
| I am a little surprised that Z3 had difficulties. I did
| not think it used anything exotic.
| ahupp wrote:
| Z3 had a timer to stop the solve if it takes to long and
| that used a specific option of clock_gettime that wasn't
| supported. I hacked around this and it otherwise worked
| fine.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| Cygwin was fast and mostly just worked. I did not find WSL to
| work well, WSL2 seems more usable. Still has warts but
| definitely an improvement.
| [deleted]
| robbyt wrote:
| Rushing half-finished products out, offering little/zero
| support is the new Microsoft.
|
| The reason $MSFT loves open source is because they can get
| press hype over projects that are 75% complete (which is the
| main goal), and they don't even need to support it, document
| it, or make it actually work.
| lallysingh wrote:
| New? Windows 95 comes to mind.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| DOS 3.0 comes to mind as well.
| corty wrote:
| Half-finished releases haven been Microsofts SOP since
| forever. And especially for payware, bugs are only fixed in
| the next release, so you need to buy the subscription or the
| new release.
| mekoka wrote:
| Really?
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4619
|
| https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6069
| corty wrote:
| "haven" should be "have". Sorry, cannot edit it now.
| uncledave wrote:
| Yeah I think you nailed it there actually. That's exactly
| their modus operandi.
|
| What's even worse is they have managed to abstract most of
| the support away in this cycle. You can't get enterprise
| support now because they gutted that entirely. You can't get
| them to do anything on github because they keep moving all
| the projects around and erasing them all or auto closing the
| tickets and no one on first line support knows anything now
| other than how to reset a Microsoft account password.
| pjmlp wrote:
| If it works for Facebook and Google, with its legions of
| coffee shop developers, why not for others.
| naikrovek wrote:
| > Yeah I think you nailed it there actually. That's exactly
| their modus operandi.
|
| They're following the "rules" from "The Cathedral and the
| Bazaar", remember. Specifically, the "Release early and
| often" bit, for the purposes of this conversation.
| Microsoft are considered "good open source citizens"
| because of the changes they've made to follow the written
| non-rules as well as the the unwritten rules.
|
| If you're going to fault Microsoft for following the rules,
| fault EVERYONE ELSE that does it as well.
|
| I want people to realize that they crap on Microsoft hard
| for things that they gladly accept from other developers or
| other companies. The double standards in the IT community
| are absolutely insane.
| delusional wrote:
| I think Microsoft gets more shit exactly because people
| expect more of them. They are the giants. they aren't a
| scrappy startup that needs to release or go bankrupt.
|
| Microsoft are seen as the safe choice, so their stuff has
| to "just work".
|
| That's obviously a bad place for innovation within
| Microsoft, but i don't really think anyone cares about
| the future of Microsoft.
| NineStarPoint wrote:
| It's worth noting that people do crap on google for doing
| this style of stuff constantly. It has basically nothing
| to do with the release early part, and everything to do
| with how things are deal with after that early feature
| light release. The entire point of "release early" is to
| be able to communicate with users about what direction
| the project should go. If you don't keep iterating and
| working with user feedback (as at least google often
| doesn't), then that's why people complain.
| uncledave wrote:
| The thing is 99% of what I get elsewhere does actually
| work properly. Microsoft are just excessively bad at
| this.
| dariusj18 wrote:
| Wow, you're quite lucky, because everything I use has
| bugs and edge cases.
| uncledave wrote:
| No luck. I look for things where people aren't
| complaining and use those.
| tarr11 wrote:
| Huh, I had the opposite experience trying to use wsl1 with a
| rails app, which required lots of workarounds.
|
| Postgres never worked for example natively. Several npm modules
| would fail when running webpack.
|
| wsl2 worked perfectly for these cases.
|
| I wonder if people are mounting an ntfs volume in wsl2 which is
| really slow and janky?
| tyingq wrote:
| There's examples of people using the Linux filesystem and
| having the issue.
|
| From reading the issue and related ones, it sounds like it
| might be related to some sort of unpredictable unclean VM
| shutdown.
| cambalache wrote:
| I develop Rails in WSL1 just fine.
|
| > Postgres never worked for example natively.
|
| That's a minor incovenience at worst.
|
| I will stay put in WSL1. If I wished a VM I would have just
| installed VMWare and run some Linux ISO image from it.
| pydry wrote:
| I mean, why not do that?
|
| I tried WSL because I thought it would be faster than a
| heavyweight VM. Turned out it's dog slow in comparison.
|
| Honestly don't see a use for it.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| WSL1 is much better integrated, which is useful for some
| things, especially when networking is involved. And it
| wastes less memory as a consequence.
|
| The root partition is slower, but I'm usually
| manipulating windows files anyway so both versions are
| similarly slow.
|
| I use WSL2 right now, but only because I need to mount a
| vhd that's formatted with BTRFS.
| birdyrooster wrote:
| You can't compile anything with WSL1, did you notice
| that?
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Do you mean kernel modules? You can compile programs just
| fine. There's a whole infrastructure around using visual
| studio code to run the UI natively and compile things
| inside the linux environment.
| shawnz wrote:
| I find the opposite, WSL1 is much faster for pretty much
| every usage except workloads that involve reading/writing
| lots of files.
| pydry wrote:
| The difference on I/O is enough to make WSL unusable.
|
| I wasted a day trying to figure out if I had a problem
| with anti-virus or something that was blocking me before
| realizing that WSL I/O is just... well, slow.
|
| People kept telling me to upgrade to WSL2 to solve that
| but the version of windows I had didn't allow it. Might
| have been a blessing in disguise given the data
| corruption bugs.
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| What version of Windows doesn't have WSL2?
| shawnz wrote:
| You need at least Win 10 version 1903
| dmurray wrote:
| > That's a minor incovenience at worst.
|
| What a bizarre claim. It's irrelevant if you don't need
| Postgres, a minor inconvenience if you can easily adopt a
| workaround, and a show stopper if you were relying on
| accessing a local Postgres instance.
| loeg wrote:
| Can't you just run Postgres natively on Windows? It's a
| database, you can talk to it from WSL over a local
| socket, no?
| cambalache wrote:
| Have you developed in this environment? I have developed
| more than 20 sites in WSL1, all with PG as the DB. I have
| it running in the same machine in windows for
| developemnt(which you are running otherwise you wouldnt
| be in WSL).Instead of using "localhost" you use
| "127.0.0.1" in your configuration, that's it.
| dvdkon wrote:
| I have scripts that rely on connecting to PostgreSQL via
| a UNIX socket, I couldn't use these scripts on WSL. A
| workaround wouldn't be too hard, but ideally WSL should
| be 100% Linux-compatible in my opinion.
| dmurray wrote:
| No, I haven't. Thanks for clarifying, that does make it
| sound like much less of a problem. Though it might still
| catch out some people, e.g. on a corporate machine where
| you're permitted to run WSL but not Postgres.
| Normal_gaussian wrote:
| > That's a minor incnvenience at worst.
|
| The level of inconvenience purely depends on your stack and
| how its developed. Often things which don't bother me have
| huge effects on other members of my team, or on people
| working on other projects.
| macdice wrote:
| > Postgres never worked for example natively
|
| We (postgres) did fix an ENOSYS (missing syscall) problem at
| some point so WSL could run Postgres. The surprising thing
| for me was how long it took for anyone to tell us it was
| broken/spewing warnings. That was forced when we changed a
| warning to a panic.
| [deleted]
| ihaveajob wrote:
| Docker support was the main reason to upgrade in my case. IIRC,
| WSL was missing some key functionality that made Docker
| unusable for my purposes. Of course I don't remember the
| details; all I know is I had no real choice.
| ConceptJunkie wrote:
| > and certainly better than hoary old cygwin.
|
| Say what you want about cygwin, but it never did this.
| uranusjr wrote:
| Parent was talking about WSL1, which didn't do this either.
| snarfy wrote:
| I was using WSL to do esp8266 development so I could use linux
| tools. The official esp8266 windows toolchain is based on
| cygwin. If I'm using something that needs a unix environment
| anyway, why use cygwin when you have WSL?
|
| I upgraded to WSL2 because well 2 is bigger than 1 so it must
| be better. But no, nothing worked. Serial ports are not
| supported in WSL2.
| Scene_Cast2 wrote:
| I literally spent the last couple of days getting ESP32 to
| work under WSL. Was not painless.
|
| You can have WSL1 and WSL2 side by side IIRC. And there are
| scripts out there to pipe serial into WSL2.
| sz4kerto wrote:
| http://matevarga.github.io/esp32/m5stack/esp-
| idf/wsl2/2020/0...
|
| Here's how you can flash ESP devices under WSL2.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > why use cygwin when you have WSL?
|
| Well. Has cygwin ever corrupted get repos?
| shawnz wrote:
| No, but WSL1 (which they are referring to in that quote)
| also has never done that.
| sys_64738 wrote:
| If you drop WSL then you get confused branding of what they
| are. WSL1 and WSL2 make it pretty clear you're getting the
| Hyper-V thing for the latter and the former is a Linux sys call
| API layer.
|
| I'm actually surprised they can't be used together.
| freeone3000 wrote:
| There's a few exclusive portions, like the executable load
| error handler that triggers ELF to load under the subsystem,
| and the binding of the 'bash' executable. But mostly, to
| prevent a great deal of confusion.
| archsurface wrote:
| Agreed. Whatever the implementation the name indicates the
| next step in this solution. To do otherwise would be like
| naming windows95 something other than windows after
| windows3.1. Marketing.
| javajosh wrote:
| Those names don't imply anything about their implementation.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| Tangent: they imply running on Linux; a Wine substitute.
| pletnes wrote:
| Same difference in my experience - WSL1 git screwed up git
| repos for me, broke git lfs, +++. I guess it's more of the
| same-ish on WSL2, just different edge cases due to different
| edges.
| shaklee3 wrote:
| I agree. I tried wsl2, and while it's nice, it has issues wsl1
| didn't have. For instance, networking almost never worked until
| I applied a common workaround of resetting the ip stack. Wsl1
| always worked fine for that. It's just not ready for primetime
| yet.
| harikb wrote:
| File system corruption is unforgivable mistake, but FS work is
| really hard to get right. Even stuff like VMware corrupts
| shared folders ... wherever they try to bypass a driver
| translation layer. Just Google for "vmware shared folder
| corruption"
| smileybarry wrote:
| My experience was locked files or lost shared folders (VM
| doesn't see them until you say the magic words, aka randomly
| stop and start services until it works). Both happened so
| (relatively) frequently that I just lost confidence in the
| feature until version 16 where read-only folders works fine.
| (I stopped using it in version 9)
| dmw_ng wrote:
| Reminds me of an infuriating old bug in VirtualBox where it
| wouldn't notice the size of a file had changed. Devs were
| working in some Windows editor then using Git within
| VirtualBox to commit changes, resulting in inexplicable
| trailing nulls and garbage turning up in the repo
|
| Took quite some time to figure out what was causing it.
| "Everyone is somehow corrupting files except for me, wtf?"
| Magic filesystem translation layers always suck
| ficklepickle wrote:
| I'm now in the habit of doing a git diff before every
| commit. Even if I don't thoroughly read the diff, I at
| least skim it for sanity.
|
| I can't recall what made me start doing that, but now it's
| a habit.
| Someone wrote:
| Is this file system corruption? The article isn't 100% clear
| it 'only' loses some data writes, but it also doesn't
| explicitly say files not being written are affected,
| directory structures are corrupted, etc.
|
| So, to me, it looks like WSL2 not completely flushing writes
| to the underlying file system. Bad, but not as bad as file
| system corruption (which could lead to losing all data on the
| disk)
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Not my area but I seem to remember bitches that Linux lies
| about fsync. As in it'll swear up and down that it flushed
| everything to disk, but it's lying.
|
| Also over the years it seems like everyone I've seen that
| habitually edits files remotely ends up with this sort of
| pain and butthurt.
| cmurf wrote:
| There's no enough information to know if all the reported
| problems are the result of the same defect. But in:
| https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5895
|
| The first instance of a problem is: [
| 1.956835] JBD2: Invalid checksum recovering block 97441 in
| log
|
| And that's corruption that leads to log replay failing,
| i.e. rejecting it because honoring the replay in the face
| of checksum errors could make things much worse.
| Subsequently mount fails: [ 21.151232]
| ERROR: MountExt4:1659: mount(/dev/sdb) failed 5
|
| That's good because the purpose of journal replay is to
| make the file system consistent following a crash/power
| fail. And if the file system is dirty, replay is called
| for, but can't happen due to a corrupt journal, so now an
| fsck is required. i.e. it is in an inconsistent (you could
| say partly broken) state and needs repair.
|
| I haven't seen syslog/systemd journal for other cases to
| know if there's instances of ext4 log replay that succeeds,
| but with missing files. That's not file system corruption,
| even if it leads to an inconsistent state in a git
| repository (or even a database). But this is still
| concerning, because to get a situation where log replay is
| clean but files are missing suggests an entire transaction
| was just dropped. It never made it to stable media, and
| even the metadata was not partially written to the ext4
| journal.
|
| qemu-kvm has a (host) cache setting called "unsafe".
| Default is typically "none" or "write back". The unsafe
| mode can result in file system corruption if the host
| crashes or has a power failure. The guest's IO is faster
| with this mode, but the write ordering expected by the file
| system is not guaranteed if the host crashes. i.e. writes
| can hit stable media out of order. If the guest crashes, my
| experience has been that things are fine - subsequent log
| replay (in the guest) is successful, because the guest
| writes that made it to the host cache do make it to stable
| media by the same the guest reboots. The out of order
| writes don't matter... unless the host crashes, and then
| it's a big problem. The other qemu cache modes have rather
| different flush/fua policies that can still keep a guest
| file system consistent following a host crash. But they are
| slower.
|
| So it makes me suspicious that for performance reasons,
| WSL2 might be using a possibly volatile host side caching
| policy. Merely for additional data point, it might be
| interesting to try to reproduce this problem using e.g.
| Btrfs for the guest file system. If write order is honored
| and flushed to stable media appropriate for default out of
| the box configuration of a VM, I'd expect Btrfs never
| complains, but might drop up to 30s of writes. But if
| there's out of order writes making it to stable media,
| Btrfs will also complain, I'd expect transid errors which
| are also a hallmark of drive firmware not consistently
| honoring flush/fua and then you get a badly timed crash.
| (And similar for ZFS for that matter - nothing is
| impervious to having its write order expectations blown
| up.)
| rleigh wrote:
| Is this the reason why they have deprecated shared folders in
| Workstation 16?
| Qerub wrote:
| I don't think they deprecated shared folders, only shared
| VMs (a function that enables Workstation to act as a
| virtualization server).
|
| Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VMware_Workstation#Ve
| rsion_his...
| nikanj wrote:
| That's a shame. I have a high-powered desktop and
| sometimes it's nice to work from the patio by opening a
| few VMs on my laptop. I get the oomph of the big box with
| the mobility of the laptop.
|
| To be fair, this feature always felt..rickety. But it was
| very nice.
| wila wrote:
| You can still use remote desktop for accessing remote
| VMs.
|
| You would be missing the remote power operations.
|
| FWIW, I am working on a product called Vimarun [0] that
| is aimed to replace most of that missing functionality
| over time.
|
| No remote power operations yet, but that will come.
|
| [0] https://vimarun.com
| wila wrote:
| Interesting. I basically live at the VMware community forums
| and could not remember this issue...
|
| FWIW I am a user moderator down there and VMware desktop
| products (Workstation/Fusion/Player) has my focus and as a
| result I basically read almost every post that would report
| this issue.
|
| I just DDG'ed it and see one report from 2014 [0], ok some
| more from around 2008 when using google.
|
| Looks like this was resolved in 2015 as that was the last
| time I see it being mentioned.
|
| [0] https://communities.vmware.com/thread/485062
| sys_64738 wrote:
| FS corruption is the worst as you lose total confidence in
| the product. This is a mega process escape that the WSL team
| would need to transparently detail why it happened, what the
| remedy is, and why it'll never, ever happen again.
| dvfjsdhgfv wrote:
| > WSL team
|
| I'd say WSL2 team, because it worked well in the original
| WSL.
| AaronFriel wrote:
| My guess is it's the result of shutting down the virtual
| machine that runs the Linux kernel too soon, leaving writes
| to the virtual hard disk in an inconsistent state. This
| coincides with "shutdown /r /t 0" being able to cause it as
| well as blue screens or power loss. And explains why I've
| never seen it, despite using WSL2 on insider preview builds
| on multiple machines daily: I almost never shut down, only
| for updates and new builds.
| admax88q wrote:
| The kernel should and can handle unexpected ahutdowns
| without corruption. Data loss sometimes, but not
| corruption.
| ylyn wrote:
| This is data loss. A few object files in the Git
| directory are truncated.
|
| Which results in a corrupted repository, from Git's point
| of view.
| TylerE wrote:
| That's corruption. Data loss would indicate an entire fs
| transaction getting dropped entirely - but not breaking
| the principle of atomic ops. A write should either happen
| entirely or not at all.
| Someone wrote:
| "A write should either happen entirely or not at all."
|
| I think many modern file systems try really hard to make
| that true, but I don't think you can count on it. "man
| write" (https://man7.org/linux/man-
| pages/man2/write.2.html) still says:
|
| "Note that a successful write() may transfer fewer than
| count bytes"
|
| It also says
|
| "A successful return from write() does not make any
| guarantee that data has been committed to disk. On some
| filesystems, including NFS, it does not even guarantee
| that space has successfully been reserved for the data"
|
| That should be handled by calling _fsync_ , but of
| course, if that fails, there's not a lot you can do (even
| if you exactly know what happened) (https://research.cs.w
| isc.edu/adsl/Publications/atc20-cuttlef...)
|
| I also don't think calling data loss due to writes that
| do not make it to disk "file system corruption" is
| correct. For file system corruption, the file system data
| structures have to be overwritten (e.g. the boot record
| or directory data structures)
| megous wrote:
| Corruption is when you write data and you read back
| different data of the same size. Data loss is when you
| write data and you read back correct data of the smaller
| size or nothing.
|
| Not sure what you mean by _entire_ fs transaction. But
| Linux doesn 't have transactional fs interface, so open,
| write, close can be interrupted at any point with result
| of just having a new empty file after open, being one of
| the valid outcomes after crash.
| bonzini wrote:
| Filesystems don't try to order writes to different files.
| So you get HEAD pointing to a truncated commit, or a
| commit pointing to a truncated blob.
|
| The same happens if you have a power loss or kernel crash
| on Linux (as a kernel developer, it happened to me
| several times when testing freshly-committed code).
| stretchcat wrote:
| Does git actually attempt to write all objects
| atomically?
| throwaway201103 wrote:
| The last job I had where I had a Windows desktop (about a
| decade ago, now) I used Cygwin extensively and never had any
| big issues. That includes running X11 not just shell stuff. It
| was quite solid.
| gabrielblack wrote:
| I experienced this problem and a ext4 corruption, too. Because my
| company force me to use Windows for internal policy, my previous
| solution was a VMware VM , accessed "remotely" by my IDE. Then I
| wanted try the new sauce. My colleagues working to legacy code on
| SVN also experienced problems (anyone else ?). So I switched back
| to VMWare VM. The other considerations were that a VM can be
| easily backupped copying a directory and, if I need to change
| computer or an additional environment, the migration of the whole
| environment is extremely easy. Moreover i use snapshots, so if
| something goes wrong at OS level I can go back with a click.
| kohlerm wrote:
| I haven't had a problem so far, but I do use only Linux binaries
| (including VS code)
| dboreham wrote:
| Important I think to point out that these are (numerous) user
| reports of files "corrupted". There isn't afaics any confirmation
| yet as to exactly what's happening nor the underlying cause.
| smarx007 wrote:
| Acked by the MSFT folk:
| https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5026#event-416012748...
| sedatk wrote:
| Are you sure this person is MSFT? There is zero information
| about them on GitHub.
| mrharshley wrote:
| WSL2 was promised as a good working extension for a Linux dev
| environment on windows by my peers. Sadly, a whole host of issues
| specific to my dev environment meant that it was useless as I'd
| spend more time fixing it than getting any valuable use out of
| it. More importantly, this became the very reason I switched to
| arch full time, and haven't looked back since. I still hope that
| it becomes what it was promised to be, although I don't see
| myself going back to windows any time soon.
| beervirus wrote:
| > Sadly, a whole host of issues specific to my dev environment
| meant that it was useless as I'd spend more time fixing it than
| getting any valuable use out of it.
|
| Sounds like last time I tried Linux on the desktop.
| Railsify wrote:
| Agreed, I can't use virtualbox and WSL2 at the same time, epic
| fail.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| Can you expound on this? Windows doesn't let you use
| VirtualBox and WSL2 at the same time?
| strombofulous wrote:
| WSL2 uses hyper-v. You can only run either hyper-v or ESXi
| (VB's hypervisor) at the same time.
| gutino wrote:
| i have three different/language dev setup, in one of them, i
| hit a known bug with ulimit. but the two rest worked well. I
| guess with time it will get fixed, we have to be patient,
| report try/use it so we can report bugs.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Opposite anecdata - I got a gaming PC and i migrated all my
| development to it and WSL(2) has been a godsend. VS Code has a
| "WSL Remote" mode that works really well (where a vscode server
| runs in Linux and the windows GUI access it "remotely"). I even
| use the Windows Github app for the occasional GUI-assisted
| commit, and apart from being slow its fine.
|
| I've had only two problems with this set up:
|
| - Occasionally VS Code Typescript features slow down, but it
| fixes itself a few days later (maybe after a restart). I
| presume this is due to the WSL Remote, but not certain.
|
| - The occasional line endings snafu, but this is more of a
| tooling issue.
| gavinray wrote:
| Also opposite anecdote, I switched from Pop!_OS to Windows
| after getting into music production recently as a hobby (MIDI
| controller driver software doesn't always play well, even
| with WINE-devel) after over a decade on Linux.
|
| I expected to hate it, but I'm asking myself why I didn't do
| this sooner.
|
| It's the same sort of scenario as before -- I have Windows
| running the games I occasionally play, and music stuff, and I
| do all of my code stuff in WSL2/Ubuntu.
|
| But this way, I never have to fiddle with weird WINE patches
| or googling bugs, everything "just works". Asking myself why
| I didn't do this sooner to be honest.
|
| I had one big complaint which is that copying files from
| Windows to WSL2 would create ".ZoneInfo" file copies of every
| file, that was downloaded from the web, but they patched this
| recently too.
|
| With the support for Linux GUI apps that launched with
| Windows Insider Preview recently, I have a hard time making
| arguments against it now. The taste of crow is a little
| bitter, eh.
|
| Linux + WINE/Proton basically felt like shittier, more bug-
| ridden Windows + WSL2. With the one notable exception that as
| an OS/host, Windows 10 "feels" a bit slower in general.
| kalium-xyz wrote:
| I've recently come across the same issue with DAWs. Settled
| on having multiple machines and switching the drives if I
| need to reuse a workstation for something else. Most of the
| time you can dedicate cheap systems to specific
| utilizations, it will save you time and effort. e.g. There
| is no reason for your DAW machine to also be your gaming
| machine as the hardware requirements are pretty different.
| nijaru wrote:
| I've always solved this issue by keeping windows on one
| drive and linux on another. It does have an upfront cost,
| but keeping my dev work / linux environment setup has
| always worked well for me. Lately I've thought of trying
| WSL, but I don't see any real benefit over my current setup
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| gavinray wrote:
| Oh you need to fucking disable Window's Defender though, or
| add exclusions for your Linux distro/WSL2 folder, because
| when installing "node_modules" it will attempt to do realtime
| scans for threat-protection which absolutely cripples the
| speed.
|
| https://www.cicoria.com/improving-windows-subsystem-for-
| linu...
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/bashonubuntuonwindows/comments/eok7.
| ..
|
| _" I noticed a significant performance difference after
| adding exclusions to the Windows Defender. My Rails server
| and NPM installs sped up dramatically (I mean like 4x faster,
| no joke)."_
|
| Stupid.
| searchableguy wrote:
| Tip: Add a separate SSD and format it as ext4. Mount it to
| wsl2 and do all your work there.
|
| Windows defender won't bother you and the performance will
| be miles better than what you could get working with
| windows file system.
| ubercow13 wrote:
| This is nothing specific to WSL though, Windows has always
| had this problem. I expect there are many Windows
| developers who have no idea how much time they spend
| waiting for their code to be virus scanned every day.
| 0x138d5 wrote:
| Some IDEs have started warning about this performance
| hit. IntelliJ + Gradle for example, but I'm guessing
| other Jetbrains products do the same.
| johnchristopher wrote:
| > Feel like booting Linux on a separate disk because of these
| issues.
|
| It always seemed strange to me that people would rather use WSL
| than the real thing when Windows doesn't bring much advantage.
| What am I missing ?
| smoldesu wrote:
| WSL1 was loads convenient back in the day. All you had to do
| was pop open a terminal instance and you'd have access to
| authentic GNU tooling, on any Windows PC. I use Linux full-time
| now, but I have several friends who use Windows, and almost all
| of them have WSL installed.
| topranks wrote:
| My work PC with Office on it.
| zamalek wrote:
| > What am I missing ?
|
| Visual Studio.
|
| The other thing on my Windows VM is Affinity Photo/Designer
| (because GIMP is _not_ a realistic Photoshop alternative).
| indymike wrote:
| I'd buy affinity designer, photo and publisher again if they
| ship a Linux version. I have it both for Windows and Mac.
| zamalek wrote:
| Absolutely, I would too. They are fantastic products.
|
| I did some Googling yesterday and the last word on the
| matter is that Photo would cost $500k alone, which they
| couldn't see recuperating.[1]
|
| [1]: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/626-
| affini...
| indymike wrote:
| I'm pretty sure they could recoup the cost if they made
| sure their installer could install on ChromeOS's Linux
| container. The number of Chromebooks out there is
| staggering, and is starving for great graphics software.
| This would also be a great way to get ahead of Adobe in
| the education space, as it appears Chromebooks have taken
| over education (at least k-12 in the US).
| mattwad wrote:
| Linux support for touchscreen is measly, and it's a really nice
| feature of many Windows laptops. IMO Windows GUI has the best
| out-of-box features, OSX second and Linux third. Now, if you
| like working from the terminal, that order is reversed.
| alexhutcheson wrote:
| Windows Terminal is roughly on par with GNOME Terminal, and
| PowerShell is actually pretty decent once you learn it.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > It always seemed strange to me that people would rather use
| WSL than the real thing when Windows doesn't bring much
| advantage.
|
| Windows brings lots of advantage to some things (including
| interfacing with the large number of people who rely on people
| having software that works only or best on Windows; in anything
| other than very tech-focussed firms this probably includes your
| employer, and even in such firms it often includes your
| customers, which can matter a lot even in tech roles), and not
| switching between physical machines or rebooting between
| different tasks brings advantages.
| kbar13 wrote:
| being able to play video games and alt tab into writing and
| testing code during queue times is huge for me
| JosefAssad wrote:
| I remember when we used to write code and alt tab into a
| game while it compiled.
|
| How the world has changed!
| mlazos wrote:
| My team has to support both windows and Linux builds of our
| product. WSL1 was a godsend for this - I no longer had to ssh
| into a VM and could build both the Linux and windows versions
| from the same source, which was amazing. I hit one issue with
| wsl2 and then I reverted because I learned that this scenario
| (different builds from same source) would always be slower on
| wsl2.
| [deleted]
| pottertheotter wrote:
| This is why I like macOS so much. I understand that it's not
| the same as having Ubuntu in WSL, but using the Mac terminal is
| so close to the experience I have when I SSH into my Ubuntu box
| that it's nearly 1:1 for me.
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| Oh, blessed are those who never had to deal with the
| assumption that every shell is bash despite using /bin/sh in
| shebangs of their scripts, or with the assumption that all
| core utilities (like find or grep) are of the GNU flavor.
|
| Ignorant they are, yet their ignorance is a bliss.
| mmcnl wrote:
| macOS is not perfect. Brew is inferior to apt-get (which WSL2
| offers), and Docker needs virtualization in macOS as well.
| Windows + WSL2 is a strong competitor for the Unix experience
| on Mac, and sometimes even better (because it is actual Linux
| and not just a POSIX-compliant Unix terminal).
| weswpg wrote:
| Games and MS Office are a big draw but the deal killer app for
| me is OneNote because unlike Note-taking options on Linux, it
| syncs to iOS and screenshots go straight into my current note
| (no need to copy and paste)
| semicolon_storm wrote:
| Company IT policies. Can't make *nix the main OS, can't easily
| dualboot, and running the dev workspace in a VM is slow.
|
| The answer, at least in my case, has been using Windows where I
| must and WSL for whatever I can.
| nhumrich wrote:
| > What am I missing
|
| Being able to use both at the same time. Being able to open
| windows apps, and have them use the linux filesystem and
| executables (like IDEs)
| jniedrauer wrote:
| A lot of people out there don't get to choose their workstation
| OS. Their only options are a linux VM in virtualbox, or a linux
| VM in WSL2.
| pineconewarrior wrote:
| This is it for me. We're a 'windows shop'. I think only the
| IT guy is happy about that.
| INTPenis wrote:
| I'm one of those people who is forced to keep Windows around
| because of my employer. Our VPN only works in Windows.
|
| Some people have made Juniper Pulse Client work in Linux, even
| a co-worker has posted some instructions. But I already have a
| setup where I start the VPN client in a Windows VM and tunnel
| through it.
|
| I feel like any Linux solution would take a lot of time to
| setup and might not be as robust.
|
| Another reason I still need Windows around is we only support
| S/MIME encryption in the Outlook client. Part of this is
| because of how our internal IT configures the cert, there is a
| way to make it work in the webmail but our IT guys have either
| opted out of that or not gotten around to it.
|
| That's pretty much it though. I can happily use Linux for
| 99.99% of my time.
| javajosh wrote:
| You are missing Office, Outlook, Visual Studio, and any
| enterprise nonsense IT requires on company computers. All of
| that requires Windows.
| rodelrod wrote:
| I get most of that running a Windows VM inside Linux.
| Granted, if there's enterprise IT involved there's no escape.
| larrik wrote:
| The web version of Outlook has come a long way, and in my
| opinion has become the superior product (for my use cases, at
| least).
| chrisandchris wrote:
| The web version does work until you need to sign into more
| than 2 accounts per day (1 in regular, 1 in private). If
| you need more than 2 accounts, it does not work anymore.
|
| Edit: it does work, but it will sign you out from all M365
| services which requires a lot of logins for nothing.
| dlgeek wrote:
| Firefox container tabs are great for this sort of thing.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| Couldn't you just use Firefox Containers for that? Seems
| to work fine for Google stuff.
| larrik wrote:
| Fair, I'm only using it on one account. Also, I have a
| special Firefox plugin to make notifications louder.
| thethimble wrote:
| You're also missing Adobe products as well as most games.
|
| Using Linux without a reboot is an incredible convenience.
| Glossing over the value of proprietary software that only
| runs on Windows is narrow minded.
| larrik wrote:
| My comment was really only about Outlook itself (using
| the web vs the desktop version, I prefer the web
| version).
|
| that said, I hate Adobe products with a passion. When I
| build identical computers for my wife and I, the moment I
| install the Abode shit on hers, it becomes noticeably
| slower at everything. I don't truly understand it.
| mmcnl wrote:
| The desktop experience Windows offers is often a lot better
| than the desktop experience of Linux. Then there's also the
| issue of Linux hardware support which often is not optimal.
| Also a lot of people need to use Windows for work and don't
| have a choice. And then there's the possibility people actually
| like using Windows. Having a full Linux terminal in your
| Windows desktop environment is the best of both worlds for a
| lot of people.
| shrimp_emoji wrote:
| >The desktop experience Windows offers is often a lot better
| than the desktop experience of Linux.
|
| Shockingly, this is untrue if using KDE. Almost everything in
| it is better than a multi-billion-dollar company's
| monopolistic OS shell somehow, from the taskbar customization
| to the features (disable compositing, deep customization of
| effects and behavior, have windows remember size/position,
| etc.) to the file manager, Dolphin, which has split views,
| tabs, had a dark theme a dozen years ago, more file metadata
| to show optionally like date modified and size, thumbnails
| for even text files, terminal integration, and more (although
| technically that's an independent package available on any
| DE). The exceptions are how "smoothly" windows glide around
| the screen when dragged and that the Windows taskbar looks
| slightly better.
| k_bx wrote:
| I need to use Windows for Visual Studio, Unity Editor and other
| things targeting Windows, but I've been a Linux person for 14
| years now and would like to still do as much as possible via
| the tools I'm used to.
| bg117 wrote:
| Having trouble with WSL2 networking. Suddenly stopped working.
| Looking into Ubuntu Multipass.
| delduca wrote:
| More:
|
| - WSL2 sometime corrupt .zsh_history and git
| https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5026
|
| - WSL2 corrupts ext4 filesystem
| https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5895
| tutfbhuf wrote:
| But why? WSL1 was something like wine but reverse, but WSL2 is
| actually linux.
| dehrmann wrote:
| FreeBSD has native support for Linux binaries by mapping
| system calls, and it's fairly reliable when it works. What's
| nice is that when it works, it works, adding support for
| system calls improves coverage, and since underlying things
| like the FS aren't virtualized, it tends to be pretty
| reliable.
| loeg wrote:
| Yeah; Windows had something like that, too. It was WSL1 (or
| just "WSL"). I also tend to think that was the better
| approach.
| bonzini wrote:
| It didn't extend to use cases like containers, that would
| have basically required MS to rewrite large parts of the
| Linux kernel's core code for namespaces, mount points
| etc.
| temac wrote:
| Wild guesses:
|
| * the kernel is not properly shutdown (and sometimes some
| buffers are not flushed)
|
| * the virtual block device and/or its linux driver has bugs
| cesarb wrote:
| That's probably the cause.
|
| WSL2 being Linux means that, unlike WSL1 which directly uses
| the host NTFS filesystem, it's probably using an emulated
| block device to hold its filesystem. If that emulated block
| device doesn't correctly honor write barrier requests from
| the Linux kernel, it could explain the corruption.
| tremon wrote:
| The problem is likely not in the Ext4 code, but in the block
| I/O driver (which is Hyper-V specific, IIRC) or even in
| Hyper-V itself. Several reports mention Windows shutdowns,
| sleep or hibernation, so it may be a simple unclean shutdown
| of the VM.
|
| A bigger problem would be if Hyper-V is either ignoring
| memory barriers, or caching writes to the disk and losing
| them when the Hyper-V service is shutdown. But that would
| likely affect more than just WSL, so we'd have seen the
| problem sooner (or so I vehemently hope).
| magicalhippo wrote:
| I recall ext4 had[1] some issues[2] with data loss due to
| unclean shutdowns.
|
| I assumed that had all been fixed by now, but yeah, these
| things can get tricky fast.
|
| [1]: https://lwn.net/Articles/322823/
|
| [2]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/3
| 17781/...
| the8472 wrote:
| Virtualbox has (had?) similar issues in certain
| configurations where it maintains a small write cache and
| doesn't honor IO barriers which lead to journaled/cow
| filesystems reporting an inconsistent state that should
| have been prevented by journaling.
| bmurphy1976 wrote:
| Huh, interesting. I run a variety of linux based services
| at home. For years I ran them on a Hyper-V VM (because my
| computer was technically my gaming machine). I only
| recently migrated everything to a cluster of Raspberry Pi
| devices.
|
| I used to have occasional problems with this setup, and it
| was always some kind of drive corruption or mounting issue.
| I wonder if this is related?
| kurare wrote:
| I use arch linux.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Execute order 66.
| uncledave wrote:
| This is probably HyperV. I've seen exactly this ext4 corruption
| in production on windows server 2012R2 with CentOS 7. Even to
| the point that the machine remounts root read only.
| Unfortunately our windows operations guys are severely lacking
| in diagnostic savvy and just reboot the machine over and over
| again or blast it and provision a new one and don't analyse the
| problem.
|
| From what I've seen it's a combination of the storage drivers
| and the storage virtualisation in HyperV rather than a specific
| issue. I imagine it's something similar in WSL.
|
| I really don't trust it as a platform at all. It's barely
| better with windows guests.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| I can confirm that hyper-v snapshots break ext4 just about
| everytime
| dehrmann wrote:
| After upgrading to WSL2, I started having issues with a
| Virtualbox VM. Turns out it didn't play nicely with HyperV. I
| went back to WSL1.
| uncledave wrote:
| That's because HyperV is a type 1 hypervisor and vbox is a
| type 2 hypervisor. They don't mix well :)
|
| Best option is still vbox and putty IMHO. VScode will work
| with it and SSH fine.
|
| Or say fuck it, buy a Mac and do all your Linux work in the
| cloud.
| noisem4ker wrote:
| Newer VirtualBox releases can run virtual machines on top
| of Hyper-V as a virtualization engine. It is slower than
| VirtualBox' own engine, but overall it is still a better
| experience than Hyper-V Manager.
| ncphil wrote:
| Had a serious talk a Unix manager over a decade ago who was
| convinced Windows ops didn't require as much expertise as
| Unix/Linux. It was a common misconception that MS seemed to
| encourage. As someone who came over from Windows, I knew
| better. That attitude continues to influence standard
| practices, hiring and, most importantly, training and
| education opportunities for Windows admins -- to the
| detriment of all. I've also had my collisions with Hyper V,
| and have come away with the same impressions as you have.
| uncledave wrote:
| Agreed. I've done both and if you ask me Windows ops is
| vastly more difficult because everything is brittle,
| inconsistent and unreliable and rarely repeatable almost
| all of the time. It requires great skill, determination and
| persistence to navigate issues like this. Unfortunately as
| you suggest, the outcome is hiring as cheap as possible and
| fixing all issues by not changing anything other than
| replacing everything every few years. There is rarely any
| day to day admin I see other than planning the next major
| rollout with some vain hope it'll have less problems than
| the last one.
| oblio wrote:
| I don't know if I'd call it brittle, I would call it
| super complex (when you get into wmic & friends) and
| harder to get info online, compared to Linux, because
| everyone has to tinker with Linux while only a minority
| of power sysadmins dig that deep into Windows.
| pram wrote:
| MCSE was a punchline 20 years ago so this is a
| misconception almost as old as the entire profession of
| Windows Admins.
| craftinator wrote:
| > Unfortunately our windows operations guys are severely
| lacking in diagnostic savvy and just reboot the machine over
| and over again
|
| What are you talking about, that is how you diagnose a
| Windows box...
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| Reminds me of this e-mail chain at Microsoft, on September 27,
| 1991:
|
| Brad Silverberg: "drdos has problems running windows today, and I
| assume will have more problems in the future."
|
| Jim Allchin: "You should make sure it has problems in the future.
| :-)"
| intricatedetail wrote:
| I only use Windows because of a couple of tools there is no
| equivalent version for Linux. Unfortunately companies think there
| would be not enough customers to warrant development for that OS
| so I am kind of stuck with maintaining dedicated Windows PC. I
| have mixed feelings about Microsoft appropriation of Linux.
| Whatever they touch turns to excrement with a few exceptions.
| facorreia wrote:
| The fact that this can even happen is enough for me to never
| touch this for doing work.
|
| I stopped developing on Windows after the Windows 8 fiasco and I
| don't see myself ever coming back.
|
| Both Mac and Linux are faster, more convenient, and more solid in
| my experience.
|
| I considered advising my son to buy a Surface for his school work
| and developing on WSL2, but I'm glad the M1 Mac came out with a
| much better cost/performance, so he got one. At least his git
| repos won't get corrupted.
| smarx007 wrote:
| I am a macOS user myself (daily driver since circa 2016,
| Arch/Ubuntu 2013-2016 and Win 7 before that) and I can tell you
| that the honeymoon is surely over. On top of that, I have my 2
| old laptops running as Win10 and Ubuntu 20.04 LTS home servers
| and I can say they have not given me any grief. I feel that
| Windows and Ubuntu LTS are getting more and more stable while
| macOS is going towards "move fast and break things" with every
| release (both still require some group policy fu and command
| line fu respectively but that's not a big deal). Back in the
| days, you'd snapshot your Windows XP with Acronis or something
| similar every time you'd install something major and these days
| I am contemplating downgrading to Mojave from Catalina. Big Sur
| is out of the question with things like firewall bypass and
| many others.
|
| P.S. You simply cannot make this stuff up: as I was typing this
| comment in Safari, my input field text became blurred just like
| that in an instant https://imgur.com/a/2Ae0QpZ
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Reminded me of a different issue:
|
| If you have 2 different git clients (different git versions)
| accessing the same shared .git directory, bad things can happen
| -- incorrect file status, iirc.
| nedsma wrote:
| WSL2 works until you need it really, and then it starts giving
| you problems. The networking problems are the worst. Installed a
| Linux VM under VMWare and called it a day.
| fartcannon wrote:
| Yah, or use Linux.
| jarym wrote:
| _poor quality joke alert_ Maybe Microsoft still believe Linux and
| the GPL are a 'cancer' and WSL2 is there to attack it?
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