komorebi VS WSL

I love seeing whenever this is (re)posted.

This article had such a huge impact on my life and led to me creating many pieces of software[1][2][3] that were hyper-specific to myself and my needs at the time, which also later found an audience in others who think and work in ways similar to me.

[1]: https://notado.app - a "content-first" internet bookmarking and highlighting service which has been my second brain since 2020 after growing frustrated with Instapaper, Pinboard and Readwise. Eventually I expanded this to allow for RSS feed publishing on specific topics in an attempt to solve the "firehose" problem when following other peoples' bookmarks/shares, and at the end of last year I added what is now my most used feature of image generation from highlights for sharing on image-first/text-hostile social media platforms.

[2]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi - tiling window manager for Windows. There wasn't really anything fit for purpose on Windows when I started, and I was too spoiled by bspwm and yabai on Linux and macOS that I just had to write something before I could become a truly productive Windows user. I'm astonished that this now has 50k+ downloads.

[3]: https://kulli.sh - I use this to aggregate comments from HN/Reddit/Lemmy/Lobsters on an article I'm interests in in one place to read. This has helped me find some interesting niche communities on Reddit and Lemmy who share and discuss things I'm interested in that I otherwise wouldn't have found.

It's very heartening to see all of the stories here.

I've put the last few years of my life into working on komorebi, a tiling window manager for Windows[1], https://notado.app, a content-first social bookmarking service, and https://kulli.sh, a "bring your own links" comment aggregator which shows you comments from hn, reddit, lobsters, lemmy etc. on an article all in one place.

Unfortunately I was laid off after 5 years with the same company last month, and nobody seems to care about any of these projects when it comes to recruiting. There are people who use them that have reached out to me very kindly offering to make referrals, but the job market values LeetCode more than shipping real code these days.

[1]: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi

In the spirit of full disclosure, I wanted to share that throughout the changeset of this refactor which included 11 files changed, 597 insertions, and 133 deletions (full diff here), a single regression was found due to a logic error I introduced.

The two biggest tiling window manager projects for Windows are komorebi and GlazeWM. Komorebi is probably faster and more resource efficient since it is written in Rust, but I stick with Glaze for now since it has a cool status bar built in I like.

Not too many options for Windows OS, but this one looks decent: https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi.

It's been a while since I last posted here. Since my last post, komorebi passed 3k stars on GitHub, became the most starred Windows twm of all time (surpassing bug.n!) and crossed 20k downloads.

This is pretty depressing. I'm pretty involved in the ricing side of the Windows ecosystem[1] and there is a lot of work going on in this space to allow users to get rid of the start bar entirely and replace it with something more functional. I would love for the day when there could just be a user friendly drop-in replacement.

[1]: I develop one of the two main Windows twms (https://github.com/LGUG2Z/komorebi)

It absolutely 100% can be true.

As an example: Windows Services for Linux 2 used a special init daemon to interact with the host OS.

That meant no systemd. That meant that the `systemctl` program wasn't there.

This baffled legions, armies, of wannabe sysadmins.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55579342/why-systemd-is-...

https://superuser.com/questions/1785697/systemd-in-wsl-on-wi...

https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9477

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1132230/unable-to-run-any-sy...

People on the whole have no idea how this stuff works, and they just copy magic incantations from StackOverflow to get stuff to happen. If that doesn't work, then this OS is broken. The end.

For these guys, WSL was broken.

Result:

MS hired Lennart Poettering.

https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/07/lennart_poettering_re...

He "fixed" it. Systemd now works in WSL2. All those guides for noobs now work. Everyone is happy.

In a world where tools like Flatpak and Snap are proliferating and it's driving deep divisions between Linux distros, if you think the average person struggling with Linux is going to use `ldd` to work out where the dependencies for something live, I'm afraid you are a deep guru who lives on a different plane of existence.

We now have widely-used packaging systems which simply embed an apps entire dependency tree into a package to avoid people having to work out the difference between `apt` and `rpm`. Thousands of terabytes of disk are being burned to make this stuff go away.

Yes, this is too hard. Way too hard.

Better source: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...

One of the bugs where on the Docker side. As I have said, there have been several since release with a lot of impact period overlap. The latest and greatest is not resolved.

It's the issue of abysmal I/O performance in communication between the mounted WSL2 virtual hard disk and Windows mounts inside the WSL2 distro.

I found this github page and I was able to reproduce this from the answer

* Docker engine and not Docker Desktop in a VM. WSL2 works well after some configuration: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6655#issuecomment-11...

Seems to more of a Defender issue than a WSL one, see https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8995

After adding exclusions for the fsnotifier-wsl process and and both variants of the WSL distro path my disk performance was improved.

Adding the idea64.exe process also helped since I was trying to run IntelliJ against projects inside WSL.