WSL VS linux

Compare WSL vs linux and see what are their differences.

Our great sponsors
  • WorkOS - The modern identity platform for B2B SaaS
  • InfluxDB - Power Real-Time Data Analytics at Scale
  • SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews
WSL linux
406 980
16,635 170,074
1.4% -
8.3 10.0
7 days ago 4 days ago
PowerShell C
MIT License GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
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

linux

Posts with mentions or reviews of linux. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-17.
  • Linus Torvalds adds arbitrary tabs to kernel code
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 17 Apr 2024
    These are a bit easier to see what's going on:

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e...

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/d5cf50dafc9dd5faa1e61...

    Unfortunately Github doesn't have a way to render symbols for whitespace, but you can tell by selecting the spaces that the previous version had leading tabs. Linus changed it so that the tokens `default` and the number e.g. `12` are also separated by a tab. This is tricky, because the token "default" is seven characters, it will always give this added tab a width of 1 char which makes it always layout the same as if it were a space no matter if you use tab widths of 1, 2, 4, or 8.

  • Show HN: Running TempleOS in user space without virtualization
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 11 Apr 2024
  • PfSense Software Embraces Change: A Strategic Migration to the Linux Kernel
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 4 Apr 2024
    There was also a Gentoo effort to run atop FreeBSD[0]. The challenge of course is that afaik none of the BSD kernel ABIs are considered stable. The stable interface is the BSD libc. That said, with binfmt_misc, I don't see a reason you couldn't just run (at least some) FreeBSD binaries on Linux with a thin syscall translation layer (rather something like qemu-system) and then your layer hooked via binfmt_misc. I'm not aware of anyone who has done this for FreeBSD, but prior efforts existed as alternate binfmts for SysVr4/5 ELF binaries[2]. Either way would take some elbow grease, but you *might* even be able just reuse binfmt_elf and just have a new interpreter for FreeBSD elf.

    [0] https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Gentoo_FreeBSD

    [1] https://docs.kernel.org/admin-guide/binfmt-misc.html

    [2] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/fs/binfmt_elf....

  • Improvements to static analysis in GCC 14
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 3 Apr 2024
    > The original less-than check was deemed incorrect

    It was only deemed incorrect because of an information leak. Not because it's a valid use-case for user space to copy smaller portions of *hwrpb into user space. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/21c5977a836e399fc71...

  • Linus Torvalds accepts a merge commit to the Linux kernel
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
  • TinyMCE (also) moving from MIT to GPL
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 27 Mar 2024
    Correct. And the combined work needs to carry the MIT license text and copyright attributions for the MIT software authors. With binary distribution it must also be overt, not hidden in some source code drop, but directly accompanying the binary.

    Many people who talk about relicensing never credit the MIT developers or distribute the MIT license text. "Because it's GPL now."

    I don't think that you believe that, but many developers do.

    Some don't see the need for source code scans for Open Source compliance, because the license.txt says GPL, so it's GPL. Prime example is the Linux kernel. There is code under different licenses in there, but people don't even read https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/COPYING till the end ("In addition, other licenses may also apply.") and conclude it's simply GPL 2 and nothing else.

    Also be aware that sublicensing is not the same as relicensing.

  • Linus Torvalds is looking for a more modern GUI editor
    1 project | news.ycombinator.com | 28 Feb 2024
    > Does he have something against it?

    He notoriously hates GNU Emacs, yes.

    https://marc.info/?m=122955159617722

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux/blob/master/Documentation/...

  • The Linux Kernel Prepares for Rust 1.77 Upgrade
    9 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 18 Feb 2024
    So If we would only count code and not comments, it is only 9489 LoC Rust. Which would be about 0.03% and if we take all lines and not only LoC it would be around 0.05%

    [0] https://github.com/XAMPPRocky/tokei

    [1] https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/b401b621758e46812da...

  • Proposed Windows NT sync driver brings big Wine/Proton performance improvements
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 25 Jan 2024
    AIUI fsync is built on futex_waitv which has been upstreamed. So this has to be more than that.

    https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/a0eb2da92b715d0c97b...

  • Tell HN: GitHub no longer readable without JavaScript
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 24 Jan 2024
    git clone --no-checkout --depth 1 https://github.com/torvalds/linux.git $dir

What are some alternatives?

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

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

zen-kernel - Zen Patched Kernel Sources

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

DS4Windows - Like those other ds4tools, but sexier

Scoop - A command-line installer for Windows.

winapps - Run Windows apps such as Microsoft Office/Adobe in Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora) and GNOME/KDE as if they were a part of the native OS, including Nautilus integration.

Single-GPU-Passthrough

Open and cheap DIY IP-KVM based on Raspberry Pi - Open and inexpensive DIY IP-KVM based on Raspberry Pi

setup-msys2 - GitHub Action to setup MSYS2

serenity - The Serenity Operating System 🐞

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

DsHidMini - Virtual HID Mini-user-mode-driver for Sony DualShock 3 Controllers