WSL VS setup-msys2

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.

Other pages provide complementary information on that same topic.

Another thing I appreciated was the explanation of MSYS2's environments:

https://www.msys2.org/docs/environments/

Being able to painlessly switch away from MSVCRT to UCRT was helpful in solving some UTF-8 difficulties I was experiencing at the time.

Package management with pacman is rather pleasant, and the setup-msys2 GitHub Action makes it simple to provide your GHA workflow with the tools and libs you want:

https://www.msys2.org/docs/package-management/

https://packages.msys2.org/queue

https://github.com/msys2/setup-msys2

> Actions reduce workflow steps by providing reusabe[sic] “code” for common tasks. To run an action, you include the uses keyword pointing to a GitHub repo with the pattern {owner}/{repo}@{ref} or {owner}/{repo}/{path}@{ref} if it’s in a subdirectory. A ref can be a branch, tag, or SHA.

Aside from the typo, I wonder how many packages could be backdoored at once, if an action maintainer went rogue, seeing as there's no pinning for actions by default, and (according to https://github.com/msys2/setup-msys2/blob/main/HACKING.md) moving a tag is the default way to push updates to an action. (Interestingly get-cmake/run-cmake/run-vcpkg are all operated by the same person.)