Comments on: CDE on WSLv1

By: GL1zdA

GL1zdA — Tue, 27 Jun 2023 09:27:06 +0000

It’s fun to see the desktop environment from all the big Unices of the nineties. And every time I see it’s I’m glad I can use KDE now ;). CDE was probably the clunkiest desktop I’ve used.

BTW, if WSL v1 is a thing for you, maybe you should try CoLinux? I remember using it for a while in the noughties.

By: M. Hansen

M. Hansen — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 14:10:38 +0000

Actually I kind of like the idea behind WSLv1 and that it’s in some ways more elegant. Why? WSLv2 is close to just running Linux in a VM as has been possible for decades. It’s just wrapped up more nicely and received a lot of love so you get better integration between the file systems, easy and more integrated way to install/start/stop the “VM” etc. and now perhaps better paravirtualized drivers.

WSLv1 is quite clever – there’s not even a Linux kernel running, there’s only the Windows kernel in charge of all the kernel stuff. It just offers the same interface to user space. Yet achieves the same thing – you can have a full Ubuntu user space running. In theory it should be more efficient since you have zero virtualization overhead. In practice, v1 had some limitations, but I don’t think it was more due to the execution than the concept. Yes you couldn’t run graphical application etc. because only the standard POSIX interface was exposed and – due to the inherent nature – you couldn’t load Linux drivers etc. But that could have been overcome by just simulating the graphical interfaces normally offered by the Linux subsystem towards userspace – basically same strategy as v1 took in the other areas. Only difference with v2 is that some of the implementation work might have already been done in the existing virtualizer.
There were also some shortcomings in performance. But all cases I saw were related to file system performance because you had a direct 1-1 mapping between Linux file and Windows file, and NTFS just happened to be slower. That’s again not a shortcoming of v1 in itself, Microsoft could have made NTFS faster 😉 Or just added some way to more easily mount ext4 which wouldn’t have required taken the v2 route and simulated a whole machine for a kernel to run in.

By: neozeed

neozeed — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 06:59:27 +0000

In reply to raijinkai. I need to find my draft, and finish it, but what if I told you that this site is running on WSLv1!

By: raijinkai

raijinkai — Fri, 23 Jun 2023 04:32:10 +0000

Glad to see you posting new stuff done with WSL1.
And it isn’t useless. It is just harder to configure, and 32bit stuff needs setting up binfmt and userspace qemu. For stuff doesn’t need to access devices or hardware, it is slim than the WSL2 thing, and can run on LTSC 1803, which will have support until 2029, longer than even the last Win10 based LTSC.