WSL VS garden

Compare WSL vs garden and see what are their differences.

garden

Automation for Kubernetes development and testing. Spin up production-like environments for development, testing, and CI on demand. Use the same configuration and workflows at every step of the process. Speed up your builds and test runs via shared result caching (by garden-io)
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WSL garden
406 40
16,635 3,248
1.4% 1.7%
8.3 9.9
5 days ago 6 days ago
PowerShell TypeScript
MIT License Mozilla Public License 2.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

WSL

Posts with mentions or reviews of WSL. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-02-28.
  • GoboLinux
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2024
    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.

  • Why Linux utilities tend to run poorly on Windows
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Jan 2024
    Better source: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
  • Weird graphical glitch/problem in Ubuntu WSLg (OpenGL)
    1 project | /r/bashonubuntuonwindows | 10 Dec 2023
  • RamRamRamEveryoneSleepingOnDocker
    3 projects | /r/ProgrammerHumor | 7 Dec 2023
    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.
  • Laravel dev in Windows - Laragon vs Docker?
    1 project | /r/laravel | 7 Dec 2023
    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.
  • WSL freeze seems fixed in 2.0.12
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 6 Dec 2023
  • What's the right way to open files in the system's default program from Ubuntu 22.04 in WSL 2 please?
    1 project | /r/bashonubuntuonwindows | 6 Dec 2023
    I found this github page and I was able to reproduce this from the answer
  • Ask HN: Best Docker open source alternative?
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 5 Dec 2023
    * Docker engine and not Docker Desktop in a VM. WSL2 works well after some configuration: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6655#issuecomment-11...
  • Broadcom to Cut Almost 1,300 VMware Jobs in California After Takeover
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 30 Nov 2023
    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.

  • Bricked WSL 2 after 2.0.9 / Windows 10
    1 project | /r/bashonubuntuonwindows | 21 Nov 2023

garden

Posts with mentions or reviews of garden. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2023-11-21.
  • Build pipelines always seem to take longer than doing the same locally
    1 project | /r/cicd | 9 Dec 2023
    Hey there! Have you tried garden.io for caching? We also cache tests. Pretty much anything that's possible to cache. We're open source at https://github.com/garden-io/garden
  • Streamlining CI/CD Pipelines with Code: A Developer's Guide
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Nov 2023
    To add to what's already been said: If you think about it, CI pipelines are typically a complete description of how your system is built, tested, and deployed.

    Which is pretty fantastic except for how walled off they are. You can't really re-use these descriptions for e.g. development, they're not vendor agnostic, and they only way to run them is by pushing your code.

    Maybe it's a silly analogy but it's almost like being a web dev that doesn't have a browser and needs to send their code to a friend who can tell them if that font size looks good.

    I think we're way over due for freeing these "blueprints" of our system from the confines of CI and making them portable and flexible. And containers are the technology that's enabling that.

    Full disclaimer (as always): I work at Garden[0] where we're also solving that problem but taking a slightly different approach to Dagger (it's still a DAG). Garden config is declarative and the jobs (we call them actions) have a semantic meaning. You can e.g. have a Build action of type container or a Deploy action of type Helm and Garden will figure out what to do with it.

    [0] https://github.com/garden-io/garden

  • GitHub Actions Are a Problem
    19 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 12 Nov 2023
    Yes, there's us over at https://github.com/garden-io/garden! We're big believers in pipelines that run anywhere. I even made a short little video that should give you the gist. [1]

    Some of the short-list of differences: we use YAML for our configuration language, Dagger can use full-fat languages to define its pipelines. Our feature scope is broader: you can use us to vend IDP-like stacks to your developers if you're a Platform Team; we make development with remote Kubernetes clusters very easy, including all the remote image builds; and we have a number of integrations so you can bring your IaC tool of choice (Pulumi, Terraform) into your pipeline and set up service -> infra dependencies.

    [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFnan6s2cDg

  • The Icelandic Saga Database
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Jun 2023
    Me too. In fact Garden (dev tooling for the Kubernetes)[0] is a Berlin start-up with three Icelandic founders.

    And if I'm not mistaken, two of us worked briefly with @halldorel (above commenter) at an earlier Icelandic start-up. It's a small world (if you're Icelandic).

    [0] https://garden.io

  • Local development set up for microservices with Kubernetes - Skaffold
    3 projects | /r/kubernetes | 31 May 2023
    There are dedicated tools just for that. Apart from skaffold check also tilt.dev, garden.io, devspace.sh, okteto.com
  • is anyone using garden.io for Kubernetes development?
    1 project | /r/devops | 16 Mar 2023
    Would appreciate any insights on garden.io. Thanks.
  • Garden – The DevOps automation tool for K8s
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 13 Feb 2023
  • Best way to run k8s apps locally
    2 projects | /r/devops | 28 Dec 2022
    Telepresence, tilt, garden.io, okteto, skaffold etc.
  • Local Development with hot reloading, what does your team do?
    7 projects | /r/kubernetes | 14 Dec 2022
    - https://garden.io/
  • Digital nomad x Cyclist in the Balkans on my way to Japan (more info in the comments)
    1 project | /r/bicycletouring | 26 Oct 2022
    haha, do my pictures give off a strong not-web-dev vibe? Either way your right, I'm focusing on devxp and automation for kubernetes. Because my work is open source you can see it here https://github.com/garden-io/garden (btw we're also hiring another open core dev like me)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing WSL and garden you can also consider the following projects:

wslg - Enabling the Windows Subsystem for Linux to include support for Wayland and X server related scenarios

okteto - Develop your applications directly in your Kubernetes Cluster

genie - A quick way into a systemd "bottle" for WSL

skaffold - Easy and Repeatable Kubernetes Development

Scoop - A command-line installer for Windows.

telepresence - Local development against a remote Kubernetes or OpenShift cluster

Single-GPU-Passthrough

wsl-vpnkit - Provides network connectivity to WSL 2 when blocked by VPN

setup-msys2 - GitHub Action to setup MSYS2

tilt-extensions - Extensions for Tilt

mkcert - A simple zero-config tool to make locally trusted development certificates with any names you'd like.

UTM - Virtual machines for iOS and macOS