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Comments (206)

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  himata4113
  Following some of the comments about switching to linux the big one that enabled it for me is AI. I love to thinker, but sometimes I just want things to work and linux is known for very minor inconveniences that are pain to alter because you have to learn what kind of god forsaken build system the application uses and how it integrates with the desktop environment, but now I can just ask AI and it will be fixed by the time I want to use that feature.Another big thing is getting lookingglass working. I could not for the life of me figure out what I was doing wrong when I followed the setup guide 1 line at a time, but AI figured out the problem and it it working in 1 hour. And yes it took AI one hour to figure it out so you can assume how long I've sent trying to get this to work.Now I run a custom kernel with custom KDE and several compiled new packages which would require the effort of a small team, but now it's possible to do with few prompts and it's relatively easy to maintain indefinitely.Also AI got me off jetbrains onto nvim and I haven't been this happy writing code.
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  jesse_dot_id
  I jumped ship from Windows a couple of years ago after having used it since the early 90's. One of the primary reasons was how much I had to fight with WSL2 in my day-to-day work. But now it's becoming even more apparent that Microsoft does not care about its operating system. I don't even know what they could do to get me back. Trust continues to be a huge problem in the AI era of Microsoft.
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  alightsoul
  I am done with windows. WSL is not good enough and will never be enough, to offset the sheer instability and unpredictability of windows on my machine. Even if it were stable and predictable it would never be as free as in freedom like Linux to do whatever you want with it. Apparently windows problems like randomly failing wifi are rather common on the Lenovo legion 5 laptops from 2021.
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  Mabusto
  I moved to Linux 8 months ago because of how crappy windows 11 has become. One of the things I loved about windows was developing on it, WSL2 was great and I loved just having VS Code connect to it and it’s my own little dev box.I’ve really enjoyed the switch so far, having attempted it a few times in the past and ended up going back to windows (once in 2003, another in 2012). It’s encouraging to see MS continue to get the developer experience right with improvements like this, but unless they make significant improvements to the OS itself, I won’t be going back.
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  1718627440
  WSL2 is a different product from WSL1, not a different version. Is WSL3 now a different version of WSL2 or another separate product?
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  armcat
  Great job in benchmarking! I wasn't even aware of the WSLc (WSL3) release. For others, the release info is available here: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/releases/tag/3.0.1EDIT: stumbled on the previous HN post here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49970507
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  KingOfCoders
  I moved to Linux from WSL2. It works surprisingly well today as a desktop OS (using it since ~1992 on servers, 20 years of OS Macs before Windows on desktop). And it looks to be perfect for AI - Claude did build and test a noise gate mic pipeline easily because every config is in plain text files.
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  mellosouls
  I love WSL, but giving this a major upgrade label (2 to 3) seems a bit of a stretch, at least from the viewpoint of an average dev user.Perhaps it reflects the amount of work and thought that has gone into it, but I really think the optics are better if the selling points are immediately obvious to the user.Hopefully some light will be shed in further blogs.
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  binsquare
  Lot of the WSL2 lag is not the VM itself, it's the 9P file sharing and interop.I found that seems like anything under /mnt/c goes through 9P
• anon
  undefined
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  NikolaNovak
  What made a significant jump from WSL2 to WSL3?Unless I'm mistaken, WSL to WSL2 was massive change in complete architecture, with WSL2 now requiring virtualization and making your host-OS run on top of hypervisor, with potential tradeoffs not many users are typically aware of. Basically, WSL and WSL2 were different beasts entirely :)Was there anything that big or note-worthy from WSL2 to WSL3? Or just a natural evolution/upgrade?
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  neals
  Ditch Windows. Install Linux. With Claude, your headaches go away.
• exacube
  Are majority of the perf gains really from tuning from the kernel's `page_reporting_order` param?
• ReDress
  syscall/basic getppid() throughput 1,474,691 ops/s 1,533,399 ops/s +3.98% Entry/exit latency 0.6781 µs/op 0.6521 µs/op -3.83% sched/pipe 100k process ping-pong 48,445 ops/s 54,589 ops/s +12.68% Context switch latency 20.64 µs/op 18.32 µs/op -11.25% sched/messaging Hackbench (20 groups, 800 tasks) 14.507 s 13.047 s -10.06% mem/memcpy glibc default bandwidth (1GB) 7.84 GB/s 12.64 GB/s +61.35%This is great, this is some good work. But, like an issue I described before with Linux kernel io-uring[1], this fails to test and demonstrate performance with a healthy server load.This obviously fails to depict a healthy server load because it's just way too specific.1.https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44604793
• isityettime
  for those intrigued by the name: WSL3 is just WSL2 3.0; it's still just Linux under Hyper-V, not a new architecture.
• gdevenyi
  Could get all the performance back if you just ran Linux natively.
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  xaduha
  I find that stuff that it offers over a normal Hyper-V VM is stuff that I don't need, leaky abstractions galore.
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  tonymet
  Despite the container support getting most of the attention, I discovered a measurable performance improvement with WSL3 by accident. Luckily I had another machine to upgrade so I ran an AB test comparing WSL 2 to WSL3 .If you want a real bump in performance, I have a clever trick . Hardware isn’t cheap these days, so we demand the most of our software.
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  sys_64738
  Isn't this just WSL2 v3?
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  c7b
  My memory is a bit foggy, but the original WSL promised a much more ambitious integration with Windows, sort of container-like. It had a lot of rough edges when I first tried it, but they promised they'd work on it. That, together with their promise that W10 would be the 'last' Windows and they'd switch to a more OSX-style rolling release model was what pushed me to adopt Windows in ~2016. In the first years of Nadella it really felt like MS would listen to developers. Within less than two years iirc they'd given up on the WSL ambition, with WSL2 being a mere VM with noticeably worse performance for some of my workloads, and completely reneged on their W10 promise, even vowing to make my newly purchased hardware obsolete.In summary, I really couldn't care less what improvements they make to WSL, and neither should anyone else, imho. If you want Linux, for the love of god just use Linux. Emulation works great the other way round by now.
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  lacuno-cloud
  I am not sure about WSL in general right now - no matter if WSL3 is more performant.For me, Claude bypassed my sudo security by executing `wsl.exe -u root`. The Claude does not need any sudo password :)
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  la_fayette
  ok great benchmark! I work with herdr/pi for dev work and need to use a windows machine from my company. WSL currently unfortunately lags so much when typing, not sure why when using herdr... Using powershell, some features are missing, so i can't wait to try WSL3 and hope for improvements.
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  akkad33
  People still use Windows? What is it like now? Everything AI? AI in textpad?
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  hurril
  I just hate the fact that I am to start a new contract at a Windows shop because IT hates Mac. Most people there would want a Mac given the choice, among the other developers, there is also a Linux crew. But no! It dept says no, so they hold the rest of us hostage.Why are you like this?
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  mococa
  Too bad Windows 11 is a crapware
• phendrenad2
  I switched back to Windows after using Linux for years, simply because the promises of better software never emerged. Maybe AI reverse-engineered apps like that Adobe Creative Suite clone in Rust will start to change things, but I don't really want to hang my hat on an app that could go away at a moment's notice.
• ZekeSulastin
  Can we just flag every “omg just switch to linux” post this is supposed to be about WSL not Why Linux Is Great And MS Sux thread 736748166488391
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  shevy-java
  WSL is one of the few good ideas Microsoft had in the last ... 5000 years or so.
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  hougaard
  Interesting, hacker News has truly become the new slashdot :)
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  cdud3
  And yet it's still factors faster without a whole Windows around it.
• PunchyHamster
  Amazing they managed to make virtualisation that slow in WSL2
• ContinuityLab
  [flagged]
• mmwon
  [dead]
• bewareofscams
  [dead]
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  tw1984
  Microsoft still refuses to fix the most obvious issue here - Windows should be rebuilt on top of a linux kernel.
• asanineassasin
  And one update later.. its goone.. wasted.. some jscript horror of add riddled always on game took it and ran with it. Imagine a department winning performance and one department squandering it meet for lunch in ms cafeteria. Akward..