WSL VS GWSL-Source

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.

That vsock thing can be done with GWSL/VcXsrv too. Check this out: https://github.com/nbdd0121/wsld

Install an X server in Windows (that page mentions VcXsrv and/but I recommend GWSL which also uses VcXsrv for a little nicer experience).

and GWSL https://github.com/Opticos/GWSL-Source with settings:

With OpenInWSL, possibly using alonside GWSL.

I don't know but if all you want is a working X server and you don't need Xming specifically then give GWSL/VcXsrv a try instead.

You may instead want to use an X server and I recommend GWSL for that.

I don't feel like troubleshooting that issue any further so if all you needed was GUI app support and not necessarily GPU compute capabilities (CUDA etc) then use this: https://opticos.github.io/gwsl/.

Also, if for some reason you decide that you aren't big on the idea of Wayland yet (as in if you don't have a care for the Wayland features and/or WSLg's PCIe partitioning based direct GPU access etc) then you can opt to disable the guiApplications setting in your .wslconfig file and instead install an X server (like VcXsrv, or GWSL that uses it and provides some nice to have GUI controls etc for it) and be able to set your preferred titlebar/border via the said themes from Pling etc from within your WSL distro environments themselves (install lxappearance or GNOME Tweaks Tool to set them up).

Yeah, all of that seems to be available if you use WSL1 and pair it up with an X server (GWSL is a handy FOSS package for that and the dev's OpenInWSL app makes the integration even more seamless).