alt.hn

6/4/2026 at 7:21:18 PM

WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

 https://www.boxofcables.dev/wsl2-per-device-swiotlb-pools-for-virtiofs-and-virtioproxy/

by haydenbarnes

6/5/2026 at 12:20:48 AM

Proton, Copilot, and literally this single issue are what pushed people to Linux. If I were in charge there would be a team devoted to fixing this a decade ago.

WSL singlehandedly stemmed much of tide of developers moving away from Windows, but WSL native filesystem performance gave devs that magical experience when they boot into Linux the first time and see that the filesystem doesn't have to be ass. There's always been hacks around this, but for many devs the easiest hack was to ditch Windows.

They should have moved heaven to fix this on day one, there's really no engineering excuse. Linux is open source.

by avaer

6/5/2026 at 8:01:14 AM

Onedrive constantly trying to steal all my files, bing in the start menu, windows update hogging resources then rebooting at the worst time, offline updates taking fking forever even with a fast SSD, layers and layers of bloat and garbage we have to click through or remove on new installs, removing customisation features and taking a decade to half-ass a control panel rewrite, I could go on...

by kaelwd

6/5/2026 at 11:00:34 AM

> Onedrive constantly trying to steal all my files

By default setting, windows defender will upload "suspicious files" to Microsoft.

A while back I caught it trying to nab my OpenVPN installer which also contains the certificates.

by SomeUserName432

6/6/2026 at 5:06:53 AM

I turned sample submission off permanently via group policy after catching defender uploading places.sqlite out of my Firefox profile.

by alyandon

6/5/2026 at 11:21:07 AM

Basically the Apple and Google stuff that others like so much.

by pjmlp

6/5/2026 at 3:42:57 PM

All 3 (Apple, Google, Microsoft) share a lot of the same negative behaviors, but only Apple and Google get a free pass for some reason. Microsoft is worse in many aspects, but look at the recent debacle with NightmareEclipse and how shitty MSRC is. Apple pulls the same crap and are even less transparent about security, but they get a free pass in tech circles for some reason.

by thewebguyd

6/6/2026 at 1:21:10 AM

I don't think Google gets a free pass--kind of the opposite, it gets the lion's share of the criticism (especially for privacy stuff) despite being the most open and up front about what they're doing, since they open source most of their operating system.

I don't think there's any company that's done more to support transparent open-source software except Red Hat. Hell, in true Google style, they've built not one, not two, but four separate FOSS operating systems (Android, ChromiumOS, Fuchsia, and at this point it's time to admit Chromium itself has become an OS-within-an-OS), as well as being the second-biggest contributor to Linux.

by Max-Limelihood

6/5/2026 at 11:27:36 PM

I don't think Google gets a free pass--kind of the opposite, it gets the lion's share of the criticism (especially for privacy stuff) despite being the most open and up front about what they're doing. (If you want to know what data Chromeium is collecting, just check the source!)

I don't think there's any company that's done more to support transparent open-source software except Red Hat. Hell, in true Google style, they've built not one, not two, but four separate FOSS operating systems (Android, ChromiumOS, Fuchsia, and at this point it's time to admit Chrome has become an OS-within-an-OS), as well as being the second-biggest contributor to Linux.

by Max-Limelihood

6/5/2026 at 3:07:15 AM

> Proton, Copilot, and literally this single issue are what pushed people to Linux.

This isn't the only issue. I think another big issue is pushing more and more integration with Microsoft cloud services (e.g. Microsoft accounts), advertising, etc, which Microsoft has made increasingly difficult to opt-out of. They could fix every single technical limitation anyone has ever complained about, but if they don't change their corporate culture on forced cloud/advertising/etc, many won't care about those fixes.

by skissane

6/5/2026 at 3:45:12 PM

That their solution is a few winget scripts on github to turn a vanilla Windows install into a "developer optimized" install is telling.

They could have, instead, made a standalone ISO of Windows with all the crap already stripped out. Instead, they are still treating the crap-filled version as the default with an option to strip it down.

If they wanted to correct their reputation, it needs to be the other way around. Ship the stripped down version as standard, and make the crap opt-in.

by thewebguyd

6/5/2026 at 3:21:19 AM

Yeah, my switch to Linux and Mac for most things is more about just finding Microsoft's policies so obnoxious and hostile that I just won't deal with them anymore, even if I have to deal with more technological hassles. The only reason I haven't completely nuked my Windows partition is because I can at least use Rufus to turn off the worst stuff. But frankly, the amount of software that keeps me on Windows is dwindling fast, and every time Windows update resets my browser to fucking Edge or signs me into a Microsoft account system wide without my consent I just get that much closer. It feels like malware at this point.

by overgard

6/5/2026 at 3:28:30 AM

Just a comment on Proton... I've recently shifted to linux (garuda ) as a native OS for gaming (still dual booting, but linux is my main OS now, I used to run linux VMs in windows). My experience with Proton is that only ~30% of my games work out of the box. Some games like dota2, and factorio are native linux and work MUCH better (faster/higher fps) in linux. A bunch of windows games work fine, other's semi work, and I have to spend a bunch of time investigating why I'm getting the issues I'm getting. Others just aren't really supported (it seems anti cheat software is a big blocker) or I just can figure out what is going wrong quick enough that I just abandon it. Overall, everything seems better in linux world, everything is really snappy. I'm hoping more game companies treat linux as a first class citizen as more people switch. It is definitely a great platform for gaming but really just needs game creators to ensure their games work, ideally native, but even just using Proton would be good.

by keithnz

6/5/2026 at 10:03:10 AM

Outside of games using anti cheat, for me the most common fix is to just select Proton Hotfix or Proton Experimental in the game's compatibility settings.

For some reason certain games default to specific older Proton versions. And then of course there are a bunch of older games with a native Linux port that is now unmaintained and stopped working at some point, but they still work just fine with Proton :)

by saint_yossarian

6/5/2026 at 8:23:23 AM

Anticheat is indeed a huge blocker, and given how invasive shady kernel anticheat software is on Windows I kinda hope it stays that way

by poink

6/5/2026 at 4:10:09 PM

I think even Microsoft is getting ready to be done with kernel level anticheat. After crowdstrike they've been planning to kick everyone out of Ring0, making new user mode APIs. They're focused on EDRs right now but have publicly said eventually everyone is going to be kicked out of the kernel.

by thewebguyd

6/5/2026 at 6:28:44 AM

Isn't Garuda an arch distribution? It could be that (less common, so more issues). Running SteamOS likely has better chance of running games, but yeah the linux experience is not streamlined at times (but it is functional!)

by Fire-Dragon-DoL

6/5/2026 at 9:00:46 AM

SteamOS is also an Arch distribution, though I'm not sure how significant the changes are. AFAIK Lutris uses Ubuntu's libraries for better compatibility across distributions, maybe Steam does something similar.

by mzajc

6/5/2026 at 9:32:09 AM

kinda, SteamOS is an arch distribution but it's locked down by default (you can access stuff) and it's run by the company selling games on PC, so they make it work. On a normal arch distribution, you have to deal with installing dependencies yourself, so more of a pain.

by Fire-Dragon-DoL

6/5/2026 at 3:45:38 AM

It's very very rare for me that games don't work. It's almost all competitive games, where the game specifically does not allow anti-cheat.

There's very little fiddling around or configuring. 30% sounds god awful terrible; my success rate definitely >85%. In the rare case something doesn't work right away, https://www.protondb.com/ usually has advice in the top or second comment that works great.

I don't really think the windows vs Linux native debate is worth pursuing. Windows games run better than they do on Windows 4 times out of 5, and that's more than good enough.

by jauntywundrkind

6/5/2026 at 7:28:48 AM

What games don't work? I've never had a game I wanted to play but couldn't due to being on Linux.

by suddenlybananas

6/5/2026 at 12:24:47 AM

[dead]

by Kenji

6/5/2026 at 12:44:30 AM

Perhaps you meant Pluton and not Proton? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25191319

by evanjrowley

6/5/2026 at 12:50:14 AM

Proton is a tool Valve made, based on Wine, to easily run Windows games, on Linux [0]. GP meant Proton.

[0]: https://github.com/valvesoftware/proton

by oofbaroomf

6/5/2026 at 1:03:37 PM

Sorry, I thought you were enumerating gerivances against Microsoft and not better alternatives. Pluton has been controversial because it's been marketed as a "security" solution when in reality is's just doing DRM. Originally greated for the Xbox, it's kind of the antithesis of Valve's Proton.

by evanjrowley

6/5/2026 at 12:16:15 AM

Tangentially , I was a heavy used of wsl and moved to linux a few months ago and LLMs made most of the downsides of using linux as a desktop go away for me. I chatted with claude about the migration to find the best distro, decided on Fedora. After the install I asked everything I wanted to configured and got straight answers. In 3 or 4 hours I had an even more comfortable experience than I had on windows. AI made the annoying parts of trying to figure out how to edit all the config files to have linux behave the way you want very easy. I also had claude code write a bunch of scripts that I could have done but would probably never bring myself to actually do it . WHen you have a coding agent readily available , having an open source desktop environment makes a lot more sense. I encourage everyone to try it.

by phowat

6/5/2026 at 1:20:14 AM

I also did this as well as learned pfSense then OPNSense when pfSense went bad. Also made a pretty complicated XCP-ng setup. Learned all this with the ancient ChatGPT 3.5-4.0 models.

I can hear a subset of people cringe saying "but LLMs are BS machines and you aren't learning anything!" I heartily disagree on both fronts. The main thing holding users like me back from linux was always the snarky RTFM community and the fact that everything has 25 different answers (depending on distro, window manager, and many other factors). LLMs take care of all this friction for you very nicely.

by ragequittah

6/5/2026 at 2:29:25 AM

On the other side, I am a lifelong Linux user, and even with advanced LLMs, trying to get Microsoft Windows to behave sanely takes hours every month for years on end (thanks, day job). Things Linux figured out in 2003 are still magic or completely undoable on Windows.

by markstock

6/5/2026 at 11:26:19 AM

Not my experience. I installed the IoT version of Windows 11 and have changed exactly one setting (put the start menu back on the left where it rightfully belongs). Nothing else has required any changes at all to get sanity, which is more than you can say for Mac (which requires half a dozen extra apps to make it same - SteerMouse, Karabina, Spectacle, etc.), or Linux, where the UI is mostly sane - if you're using KDE anyway - but you're beset by bugs and jank.

And don't say "it works for me". We know some people get very lucky with Linux and stuff just works. In my experience the typical experience is that stuff works much better on Windows than Linux.

E.g. something Windows figured out in 2000 - what happens when your system is low on ram or overloaded? Simple! Press ctrl-alt-del, it will pause other apps and allow you to open the task manager and choose one to kill.

On Linux? There's no task manager in the ctrl-alt-del menu (on KDE anyway), and even if there was it isn't a specially privileged UI so it wouldn't respond. Running low on RAM? No problem we'll just kill a random process and if that doesn't work (it usually doesn't), completely freeze and then hard-reboot. Yeay.

by IshKebab

6/5/2026 at 12:36:23 PM

The Task Manager that many times also stopped responding or was permanently stuck behind a frozen full screen game?

On Linux, KDE has the plasma System Monitor, and if you can't use it for some reason you can switch your entire session to a TTY with CTRL+ALT+F2 and kill any process you want.

by hootz

6/5/2026 at 12:56:41 PM

> you can switch your entire session to a TTY with CTRL+ALT+F2 and kill any process you want.

How intuitive. That's often disabled, and I've definitely had machines that were so frozen even that didn't work. I guess sysrq keys might have worked but if you're seriously going to suggest that you haven't understood the problem.

> The Task Manager that many times also stopped responding or was permanently stuck behind a frozen full screen game?

Hasn't happened once for me for as long as I can remember.

In fairness Linux has been pretty solid for me too after upgrading to 128GB of RAM and 64GB of swap. But I never needed to do that on Windows.

by IshKebab

6/5/2026 at 4:13:20 PM

> Hasn't happened once for me for as long as I can remember.

I've had it happen to me, but the last time it did was probably around ~2017 or so on spinning rust. Fast SSDs make it a non-issue now.

by thewebguyd

6/5/2026 at 10:14:16 PM

Linux has a lot of inherent advantages here, like much deeper terminal support that let an agent make changes to practically any system setting on your behalf. Most importantly, if all else fails, the LLM agent can always check the source code to debug what's going on at the root, if you're using Linux. They don't have the option in Windows or MacOS.

This could mean that at some point, ironically Linux becomes the most user-friendly operating system for regular people as their AIs can diagnose and fix system issues and problems for them more easily than they can with proprietary operating systems.

by 2001zhaozhao

6/5/2026 at 12:19:45 AM

I did this too, made switching my desktop to Linux so much smoother. I have a Windows laptop for my Windows needs and most of my gaming is fine on the Steam Deck, so I realized I didn't need to always boot into Windows only to use WSL.

by hgoel

6/5/2026 at 2:05:10 AM

This. It is hard to exaggerate how easy Claude Code (or, I'm sure, any number of other harnesses of choice) makes it to migrate to a new operating system.

It is truly a Star Trek-level experience. Nobody who doesn't want to run Windows (and who isn't forced to run it) needs to run Windows anymore.

by CamperBob2

6/5/2026 at 12:55:37 AM

What killed WSL for me was the incredibly janky way I had to share USB peripherals. usb-ipd works 80% of the time, all the time.

by kenz0r

6/5/2026 at 2:26:00 PM

80% is being generous. I gave up on USB for WSL altogether and just pass the whole controller through with Hyper-V. On laptops, though, that is not always possible.

by ryanshrott

6/4/2026 at 11:09:23 PM

If it is as good of an improvement as the first major update, it will be hard to tell from native.

Hopefully, they will just push it out to everyone asap. We make heavy use of symlinks into Windows drives.

by avadodin

6/4/2026 at 11:42:42 PM

They are undoubtly doing this because so many users operate out of /mnt/c with zero clue of that implication.

by chris_money202

6/5/2026 at 12:00:31 AM

Would you mind elaborating (for those of us uninformed)

by alberth

6/5/2026 at 12:57:11 AM

/mnt/c is a mounted C: drive in WSL2, that allows WSL2 guests to read/write files on the Windows host.

The mount is fine and speedy enough, but the underlying reads/writes turn into native NTFS reads/writes through Windows. NTFS file API is incredibly slow - high fixed overhead for initial file access.

So patterns like node_modules with many small individual files (or compiling code in general) are much much slower on Windows or WSL2 /mnt/c due to the fixed overhead adding up over a large number of files.

It's a ridiculous problem that has plagued Windows for years.

by omcnoe

6/5/2026 at 3:07:39 AM

It's the file system filters that are an issue on Windows. It trades performance for extensibility.

NTFS itself is a fast file system.

by 0x1d7

6/5/2026 at 12:41:53 PM

"NTFS itself is a fast file system"

File access is significantly slower on Windows compared to Linux on the same hardware. You can run Linux inside a VM and it will easily beat the host OS in filesystem performance.

If the problem is not NTFS, then it is in how the Windows OS uses it

by throwa356262

6/6/2026 at 1:03:02 AM

> If the problem is not NTFS, then it is in how the Windows OS uses it

Isn't that exactly what the comment you are replying to is saying?

by tssva

6/5/2026 at 12:49:35 PM

This is what I keep hearing. However, I have never had the good fortune of using a Windows installation where NTFS was allowed to be fast.

by NoGravitas

6/5/2026 at 9:50:53 AM

eBPF has opened the door to such bloatware on Linux. Previously there was no easy, stable way for enterprise bloatware vendors to maintain complex file and subsystem filter and analytic modules. Now that market is exploding because of eBPF, and it's a big reason there's so much work around growing eBPF's capabilities.

by wahern

6/5/2026 at 6:31:04 AM

Could you expand? I never understood why this was considered acceptable, how is windows filesystem so slow compared to linux?

I am familiar with the issue, doing any sort of ruby development is a nightmare on windows because each require loads a file becoming increasingly slow at boot time

by Fire-Dragon-DoL

6/5/2026 at 7:58:50 AM

WSL2 operates through a file-level translation layer, not unlike NFS in Linux, which can be a huge performance problem for programs that manipulate lots of tiny files, like git or npm.

by torginus

6/5/2026 at 12:50:53 PM

Programs that manipulate lots of tiny files are a performance nightmare on Windows even leaving aside the issue of WSL2.

by NoGravitas

6/5/2026 at 7:11:56 PM

git and npm install are somewhat slower on vanilla Windows, true, but on WSL2 they're downright unusable

by torginus

6/5/2026 at 12:11:10 AM

One example is that if you have a node modules folder on Windows and you try to delete it from WSL it can take 10 plus minutes whereas if you deleted it directly in Windows it would have just taken a few seconds

Also if you try running Next js from files on Windows from WSL it takes minutes for each page to compile to the point that any local development is impossible so you would have to either run the Next JS server on Windows or move the files to WSL

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 6:17:10 AM

Anything with node_modules takes ages on my Windows machine, whether it is through WSL, Docker or direct, largely in part due to corporate filters, checks, anti-virus and malware protectors and endpoint control.

by rahkiin

6/5/2026 at 9:31:27 AM

Although the stuff you mention is true, it is not the only reason. NTFS is just notoriously bad at reading/writing tons of small files.

It also has a lot of problems with locking files that are open by a process, if you have a rogue process reading your node_modules npm install or rm node_modules can hang until that process finishes.

yarn2 keeps dependencies as tarballs instead of extracting them to disk, imported files get loaded from the tarball at runtime. Makes a massive difference in windows.

by DanielHB

6/5/2026 at 12:04:57 AM

It's difficult to overstate how horrible the performance is.

by yakz

6/5/2026 at 12:11:13 AM

WSL2 is a VM based on a Windows virtual disk file (VHD). inside that VHD IO is quite fast , a couple degrees worse than native. /mnt/c is how you access your windows files, but it's slow like NFS (socket based). anything needing high IOPS will be dog slow e.g. compiles, file scanning, etc.

the rule of thumb without the newest features is to copy work to/from /mnt/c into $HOME as needed.

by tonymet

6/5/2026 at 12:34:45 AM

I was trying WSL years ago and this is one of the reasons I just moved to a full linux server instead. We still have way too many problems interfacing across filesystems. I hope with AI we will see an iteration on ExFAT that has all the journalling, versioning etc. magic of modern FS' and can be adopted across all 3 OSes. Probably a long shot but I can dream :)

by zaptheimpaler

6/5/2026 at 12:06:33 AM

Moved to mac about 7 years ago because of horrible WSL file system speed was.

by thesis

6/5/2026 at 12:09:17 AM

You could just move your files to the WSL file system

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 12:14:59 AM

That kind of defeats the entire purpose of them being accessible from the rest of the system.

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 12:21:29 AM

You can access them from the rest of the system. For normal usage the performance is completely acceptable but for development tasks it matters.

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 2:35:45 AM

People who run WSL are not normal users. The filesystem problems make Windows+WSL feel like a Trabant when you're used to a Porsche.

by markstock

6/5/2026 at 11:28:15 AM

Yes well I felt the same way with how slow Docker file systems were on Mac but I think that's fixed now.

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 11:22:41 AM

Not really, I only care about WSL for containers, zero filesystem problems.

by pjmlp

6/5/2026 at 12:23:03 AM

> Just copy it into the WSL file system

Yea bro totally. Totally. I'm gonna copy 2TB of media into the WSL virtual disk just so ffmpeg can run a little faster but still way slower than simply running linux.

(I beta tested the shit out of WSL1 and 2) before I wised up and just installed Gentoo forever.

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 12:26:33 AM

You can run that directly on Windows.

But either way yeah most people aren't dealing with large media libraries that's obviously a little more difficult. But if you are primarily operating on them with WSL then you would just keep them in the WSL file system and you could access them from Windows whenever you need to...

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 2:33:40 AM

Indeed. I have my agent edited files in podman in Lima, under two layers, and it's fine, because I do most stuff within my podman VMs. (I have shared volumes so I can review things before pushing the changes to my forge in separate containers that the agent can't access. When I need stuff on my mac, which is the exception, not the rule, I just copy them, putting them in a tar or zip if it's a lot of files.

by benatkin

6/5/2026 at 11:23:09 AM

There is ffmpeg for Windows.

by pjmlp

6/5/2026 at 11:51:35 AM

That helps me exactly zero when I'm running something that is compiled for Linux and has no context in which to use the windows version. Which may not even be compiled with the same ./configure settings and would therefor potentially be missing entire codecs available to it.

This ladies and gentleman is the problem with discussing Windows design patterns on the internets. They say "use this" and you say "well it's broken in X, Y, Z" ways and instead of fixing it they say "you're using it wrong". No. Maybe it's just an inferior architecture.

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 2:40:17 PM

This ladies and gentleman is the problem with discussing Linux distros on the internets. They say "install this" and you say "well it's broken in X, Y, Z" ways and instead of fixing it they say "you're using the wrong distro". No. Maybe it's just an inferior desktop OS.

by pjmlp

6/5/2026 at 9:59:35 AM

You are very far from the average WSL user, especially with that Gentoo mention.

by satvikpendem

6/5/2026 at 12:45:30 PM

Everyone in the tech industry should know how to install Gentoo.

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 10:17:08 PM

And yet they don't know, therefore making you outside of the average.

by satvikpendem

6/5/2026 at 11:31:32 AM

Why are you using ffmpeg under wsl?

by ChrisRR

6/5/2026 at 11:45:31 AM

What's the point of this question? It doesn't matter.

The entire point of wsl is to be able to run code compiled for Linux on Windows.

ffmpeg underpins so many things these days. It could be used to extract frames in a PHP based website, convert something to a gif, or a demux an mkv. You may as well be asking me why I'm using a computer.

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 9:27:57 AM

I am not very impressed with macos file system speed when using docker, same problem really.

If you build 100+ megabytes images several times per day it really sucks.

by DanielHB

6/5/2026 at 12:09:05 AM

Same here, though I went to Linux first for several years. WSL file speeds, especially when running npm install, were the impetus that ultimately got me to switch off of Windows.

by nozzlegear

6/5/2026 at 12:12:16 AM

Sounds like you were just doing it wrong

Either you run npm install from Windows if you are operating on the Windows file system or you run it on WSL if you are operating on the WSL file system both cases will be very fast

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 4:35:40 AM

My memory is murky here, but I don't think WSL even had two different file systems at the time.

by nozzlegear

6/5/2026 at 4:43:02 AM

How would you run Linux without Linux having its own file system that doesn't even make sense

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 1:14:24 PM

I can't tell if you're trolling me or just unfamiliar with WSL1?

by nozzlegear

6/5/2026 at 12:16:06 AM

The entire Windows operating system is doing it wrong. Seriously who daily drives windows these days. lol.

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 12:22:59 AM

Well before Windows I spent years with both Linux and Mac and I found Windows to be a good mix of stability and suitability for development now that WSL is a thing. Also for gaming it's the best by a long shot so just all around I've found it to be best and WSL made me never miss Linux.

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 12:26:07 AM

Nah my frames on Linux beat yours easily.

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 12:28:44 AM

Unlikely due to the better and more stable NVIDIA drivers available to Windows and the greater compatibility with every game without having to mess around with configuration files or other hacks. But you do you.

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 12:36:18 AM

Linux drivers are now first class and are faster and easier to install than any Windows drivers. There's no bullshit extras with them. They just work. Plus steam launches games in containers so there's zero configuration. If you don't know what you're talking about it is in fact better to say nothing than to just make shit up.

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 12:55:54 AM

It's great that gaming on Linux has gotten a lot better over the last several years but let's not pretend like Windows still isn't far ahead on this

Also how can drivers be easier to install than on Windows when updating my GPU driver is one click?

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 1:05:22 AM

Here's a pre-configured Fedora based distro that is zero clicks. You sign into Steam and go. Drivers are preinstalled. You literally sign into steam and hit play.

https://nobaraproject.org/

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 12:51:27 PM

Your answer to "GPU driver updates on Windows are one click, how can Linux be easier" is "here's another distro, install this instead"? This is ridiculous

by dwattttt

6/5/2026 at 5:26:02 PM

He wanted it pre-configured and I pointed him to the one distro maintained by a Red Hat employee based on one of the most popular and supported distros.

Ya'll will complain about anything.

It is a live USB you can game on. You don't even really need to install it.

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 3:40:58 AM

It's easier than windows (generally) because it'll just update with your OS. It's in the repo (sometimes) or a third party repo. It's automatic.

by thewebguyd

6/5/2026 at 5:33:29 AM

Oh yes, I distinctly remember having to use an outdated driver from a third-party repository to fix some sort of compatibility issue. Never had to do that on Windows

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 7:40:08 AM

Well, my integrated GPU has a hard time with external 5k screens on Windows fairly often. I need to manually install the Intel drivers, which work for a while, but then Windows helpfully updates them to the earlier, borked version.

At least now this sometimes works if I turn the laptop on with the screen plugged-in. If I go to the toilet and the screen turns off, it's back to some low resolution. When my computer was new 5 years ago, it never did work in 5k, so... baby steps, right?.

Worked perfectly OOB on Linux.

by vladvasiliu

6/5/2026 at 3:13:43 AM

What? You need to _download_ drivers? They come pre-installed in modern distros.

by cyberax

6/5/2026 at 3:26:38 AM

I'm obviously referring to upgrading drivers. Important especially when playing new games since they come with specific optimizations.

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 5:35:41 AM

It's also usually automated.

by cyberax

6/5/2026 at 6:29:11 AM

It can be automated on Windows too so I don't really understand what your point is here?

by weird-eye-issue

6/5/2026 at 8:05:45 AM

I, who has to professionally support installs running Linux with Nvidia hardware, would personally say the situation is very far from ideal on Linux. I dislike this 'my dad can beat yours' kinda competition when it's very clear Linux still has significant issues to resolve.

by torginus

6/5/2026 at 8:36:04 AM

Out of interest are they running OKM or proprietary driver?

by rounce

6/5/2026 at 9:17:09 AM

Proprietary for now, not sure how good the open source one is. But the proprietary has many quirks/bugs and limitations especially when i comes to things like Linux specific Vulkan extensions.

I don't know the full story, but afaik, AMD/Intel Mesa based drivers are fully open source and are built in a much more Linux-native way. But unfortunately hardware choice is out of my jurisdiction.

by torginus

6/5/2026 at 6:22:06 AM

Of course just a personal experience, but I feel like I'm getting a much more stable experience with AMD in arch+sway/i3. Some of my friends with RTX5080s and such frequently crash on alt-tab or just simply from opening Steam overlay in their W*ndows setup.

Even with tiled windows I haven't had any game crash like that once. "alt-tab" equivalent takes 1ms and it just works. I can throw around the game window between workspaces, resize etc.

It's worth giving it a try. Unfortunate if games with certain AC setups are wanted, like GTA:O or LOL, but I can live without them.

by k4rli

6/5/2026 at 1:00:18 AM

> better and more stable NVIDIA drivers available to Windows

Huh? It's the same driver. It works the same on every platform. There's no consistent difference in performance (at least not between FreeBSD and Windows, it's been a while since I ran Linux).

by lmm

6/5/2026 at 10:00:30 AM

I really find these takes hilarious. HN users are so far removed from the average person it's comical.

by satvikpendem

6/5/2026 at 11:23:59 AM

For one, the game developers that don't care about SteamDeck.

by pjmlp

6/5/2026 at 12:50:48 AM

I do and I have no problems. Feel free to ask me anything.

by flaunf221

6/5/2026 at 2:11:24 AM

Oh, you know, about 70+% of the global desktop/laptop market. Nearly every F500 company.

But yeah sure, no one runs windows these days.

by thewebguyd

6/5/2026 at 2:33:08 AM

Because Windows is the operating system of Not Getting Fired. Fear is a stronger motivator than creativity or productivity.

by markstock

6/5/2026 at 11:25:30 AM

Nah, some of us gave up on The Year of Desktop Linux, especially on laptops, and decided to make use of desktop VMs instead.

by pjmlp

6/5/2026 at 3:34:23 AM

Believe it or not, there's plenty of people that specifically choose windows, not just out of fear of getting fired or inertia. The idea that all devs use a mac and that windows is garbage for any kind of development is purely a silicon valley bubble thing.

And there's still a big niche that Windows is your only choice since the move to Apple silicon. If you need both a dGPU and access to commercial software, its literally your only choice. Game dev especially comes to mind if you're jumping between maya, after effects, etc. Windows is also huge in finance.

by thewebguyd

6/5/2026 at 6:20:10 AM

Windows _is_ garbage for a lot of modern development (except thise targeting Win32). But that does not matter to the ICT department tasked with controlling and securing all endpoints, preferring a single, very well known and controllable OS over freedom and performance.

by rahkiin

6/5/2026 at 11:26:14 AM

At least it isn't Wayland, or having to mix and match configurations until hardware video decoding on Chrome finally works.

by pjmlp

6/5/2026 at 12:11:34 PM

Wayland is a protocol. Not a program.

The top compositors right now for desktop are KDE Plasma, Hyprland, Gnome/Mutter and all of them implement the Wayland protocol independently.

For game wrappers Valve makes Gamescope (https://github.com/ValveSoftware/gamescope) which is also a Wayland compositor.

When you run a game through a wrapper like GameScope it will draw to the Wayland Server that GameScope is running and then that subsequently writes to the parent display server (which can actually be X or Wayland).

Anyway it's a far superior and more secure protocol than whatever Windows is doing and you should for sure have ChatGPT explain it to you.

by hparadiz

6/5/2026 at 2:38:58 PM

No need, I am fine running Linux distro headless for containers, or having Android and WebOS userspace instead on my other devices.

Gemini told me it was a good decision.

by pjmlp

6/5/2026 at 4:38:00 PM

You do know that one is literally the worst one right? It's like you walked in and went "I'm using Netscape"

Well whatever you'll find out.

by hparadiz

6/6/2026 at 8:04:15 AM

Nah the worst one is the Nazi Grok.

by pjmlp

6/5/2026 at 1:42:36 AM

Or, as they said, they didn't want to have to think about it so they chose to switch.

by lelandbatey

6/5/2026 at 2:13:22 AM

I was always disappointed with the design of wsl2. The wsl1 design of a syscall layer atop NT had greater architectural purity. They way I heard it, they introduced a virtual machine into the design specifically in order to bypass poor NT filesystem performance. I'm sure it's easier said than done, but it would have been nice if they instead fixed the issues on the NT side, rather than side step them with a VM.

by asveikau

6/5/2026 at 4:10:10 AM

My (possibly uninformed) understanding at the time was that it was Docker, not solely filesystem performance.

WSL1's file performance is pretty much as good as it gets on Windows, since open(2), read(2), etc are all translated directly in-kernel from Linux to Windows API calls. It's still slower than a real Linux kernel since Windows' filesystem filter drivers add a lot of overhead to every operation, and Windows Defender and its realtime scanning in particular makes it 10x worse. (NTFS itself is fine.)

WSL1's filesystem situation is now "fixed" by Dev Drive, which is just a new partition with most filters disabled and Defender is put in to a different mode where scanning is asynchronous instead of blocking every open(2).

WSL2's mounts of Windows disks still has to deal with all of the above, plus the overhead of serializing every operation over a VM socket, which is largely fixed by what this article describes. So even if you've enabled virtiofs to speed up WSL2's cross-VM transfers, you're still going to hit the same Windows filesystem caveats that apply to WSL1 and native Windows apps.

On the other hand, the WSL2 in-VM ext filesystem (ie, the / mount) will be the fastest to Linux apps since it never touches the Windows side, but accessing those files from Windows sucks since they're buried in a VHD image, accessed over a slow 9p (I think) network-like mount on \\wsl.localhost\distro\

All of that to say filesystem perf may or may not have been a factor in the switch from WSL1's very cool NT persona architecture to WSL2's decidedly more boring VM design, but it was pretty clear that Docker was the real showstopper.

Devs needed to run containers, and WSL1 couldn't (and still can't) do it.

I imagine Microsoft took a look at what it would take to implement container support in the NT kernel to the point that Docker would work, and decided it was simply too much work when they could just slap a VM in and get the entire Linux kernel API surface for free. So thus we got WSL2.

I still use WSL1 for light work like running ssh, since there's basically no overhead at all (5 MB of RAM total to run ssh), compared to needing to run an entire second OS in WSL2. And as long as you don't need any containers, even heavier work runs nicely on WSL1 since there's no VM overhead or network NAT shenanigans.

But if you need containers, you need WSL2.

by josh3736

6/5/2026 at 4:51:48 AM

> Windows' filesystem filter drivers add a lot of overhead to every operation, and Windows Defender and its realtime scanning in particular makes it 10x worse. (NTFS itself is fine.)

Are there a lot of Microsoft operating systems that feature NTFS without filesystem drivers and Windows Defender?

by fragmede

6/5/2026 at 5:09:08 AM

It's the filesystem filter drivers that slow things down, not the filesystem drivers (ie NTFS) themselves.

Filter drivers sit a layer above the filesystem driver and allow you to hook file operations to do things like antivirus scanning, transparent encryption and compression, realtime backups, and implement virtual files (à la Dropbox and OneDrive cloud files that are deleted from local storage and JIT downloaded when accessed).

Those are all useful features, but you pay for the extensibility with performance.

To answer your question, obviously no—at least not in a default configuration—but all that stuff can be disabled if you're so inclined, which would leave you with a Microsoft operating system featuring NTFS without the filters and Defender.

But I'm not sure what point you're trying to make. Different operating systems make different trade-offs?

by josh3736

6/5/2026 at 9:46:35 PM

NTFS itself is actually pretty good, but unless you disable the filter drivers and Windows Defender, overall system performance of NTFS isn't great. Except that you can't really run NTFS without those things. Technically you can, but you're not running without Windows Defender enabled except in very very specific circumstances. So the performance of NTFS itself without those things is a moot point because of that.

by fragmede

6/5/2026 at 8:10:00 AM

Imo it was the right call. Linux filesystems, file attributes are different from Windows, and the two never would've been completely compatible. The two big ones, are the execute bit, and the very fact that windows files represent the data on disk, while Linux ones are just a hardlink to the inode.

It is what it is. My workflow is that I rsync the relevant files from Windows to Linux, do the work, and rsync them back. It's clunky but works well enough.

by torginus

6/5/2026 at 7:47:06 PM

> The two big ones, are the execute bit, and the very fact that windows files represent the data on disk, while Linux ones are just a hardlink to the inode.

This contrast is somewhat true of FAT but not NTFS.

Which is to say, in FAT, the direntry defines the first entry in the cluster chain, and the file size. But NTFS is not like this. There is a concept of inodes, which they call file IDs. Hardlinks are also a thing. You can also create a file, then delete its name, but leave the handle to the inode open. You can also open by file id.

by asveikau

6/5/2026 at 2:16:29 PM

This really isn't factually based. MFT entries are conceptually equivalent to i-node table entries. And the execute bit is what traversal checking bypass is all about.

by JdeBP

6/5/2026 at 2:44:16 AM

I switched from WSL (reconn'd to WSL1) to WSL2 because I thought that WSL1 would be abandoned.

However, the shell for WSL2 runs in a window that grabs things, such as ^V.

So, ssh from WSL2 (to AWS for example) is awkward. For exampl, Emacs on the AWS box is almost unusable.

by anamax

6/5/2026 at 4:09:48 AM

Are you using the Windows Terminal app? CMD or Powershell are yanky but Windows Terminal solved a few icks for me.

https://github.com/microsoft/terminal

    winget install --id Microsoft.WindowsTerminal -e

by foepys

6/4/2026 at 10:51:09 PM

I can’t find any benchmarks on this, anyone have a sense of the speedup that can be expected here?

And for what it’s worth, that version isn’t available yet when I try to update WSL.

by themeiguoren

6/5/2026 at 1:10:20 AM

a test compile of hugo (moderate go app) on a AMD Ryzen 7 7735HS with SSD

WSL filesystem = 50s

virtiofs = 75s

it seems a lot faster. I don't use drvfs (windows files) usually. 50% performance gap is good.

And MS Defender kicked in beforehand losing about 10 seconds. with some config you could turn off defender and get this down to 60s

by tonymet

6/5/2026 at 2:59:50 AM

> WSL filesystem = 50s > virtiofs = 75s

> 50% performance gap is good.

I am somewhat confused by this. How much time did the default DrvFs take? Or did you mean DrvFs when wrote virtiofs?

by cheema33

6/5/2026 at 5:51:44 AM

I didn’t test plan9 because I don’t use it

by tonymet

6/5/2026 at 5:51:17 AM

Devfs = virtiofs(for this test ) . Drvfs is the param given to mount , which chooses virtiofs or 9p (plan9/ /slow)

The results above are wsl vhd vs virtiofs, the new file system for accessing windows files . Plan9 /9p is the old one , not tested .

by tonymet

6/5/2026 at 1:11:01 AM

wsl version 2.7.7 seemed to work with the listed config + reboot

by tonymet

6/5/2026 at 4:52:56 AM

it's kinda shocking how both WSL2 file perf and Docker for Mac file perf are so horrendously bad that you can just tank performance and have a 3x better local dev setup on most projects by using "normal" Linux.... and yet it's been the status quo for so long.

I don't get how people are so comfortable with dev tooling being as busted as it is.

by rtpg

6/5/2026 at 5:33:42 AM

Docker sucks on the mac, orbstack is great if you need docker. If you are on linux, use podman too vs. docker.

by rcleveng

6/5/2026 at 5:42:33 AM

Nice to see a bit of good news here, WSL is an underrated component in enterprises, and quite often the only way you can get close to Linux. Windows and Macs feel like trading one cancer for another with different logos.

by politelemon

6/5/2026 at 1:49:05 AM

I had no idea they used the Plan 9 file server for accessing files in WSL. I wonder what the original reasoning for choosing 9P was.

by cmovq

6/5/2026 at 2:29:21 AM

9P is in the kernel and provides a simple, fast networked VFS without many of the drawbacks of NFS. In particular, 9P-over-virtio is already used in Linux virtualization environments to expose parts of the host file systems to the guest. Since this solution was widely adopted and lying around, Microsoft's WSL2 solution also used 9P-over-virtio to expose the Windows file system to the guest Linux.

by bitwize

6/5/2026 at 3:12:06 AM

Nice, FWIW this is currently pretty easy to solve by just keeping your stuff on a separate EXT4 volume and then mounting that under Windows. Windows accessing a mounted EXT4 volume through WSL is much faster than the other way around.

by thot_experiment

6/5/2026 at 12:44:49 PM

WSL2 is honestly the only thing keeping me sane having to work with a Windows 11 desktop environment at work.

The new container capability also looks magical, and being able to access that directly from windows apps seems pretty cool too. Not sure it would be worth the time investment vs. docker desktop, but interesting none the less.

by flumpcakes

6/5/2026 at 2:48:25 AM

WSL1 was really really fast! It was quite unique system too totally customized for the Linux kernel and windows interfacing!

Was really disappointed when WSL2 came along and just virtualized everything; fs performance took a shit.

Anyway I don't care about windows these days, all Linux all the time.

by psyclobe

6/5/2026 at 1:34:47 AM

Do the audio buffers to the host device next!

by agentultra

6/5/2026 at 3:54:11 PM

Any benchmarks and comparisons done? am I overlook it?

by xela79

6/5/2026 at 4:36:50 PM

If I get enough updoots here I’ll try to do a more empirical plan9 vs virtiofs test.

by tonymet

6/5/2026 at 4:34:24 PM

I put one below comparing native WSL FS to virtiofs. 50s build time on native vs 75s build time on virtiofs. Virtiofs came to about 50% slower, and likely only 25% slower than native (i saw MS defender kick in, which you can disable). The older “plan9” aka “9p” is likely 10x slower. I don’t use plan9 (the current windows file system in WSL), but I would guess that same build would take 3-5m or more.

by tonymet

6/5/2026 at 12:44:44 AM

Hasn’t this always been the case? I have always run builds under WSL2 in Windows because of this.

by sanp

6/5/2026 at 1:17:20 AM

when you mount "drvfs" (the automounting feature, or you can call mount -t drvfs) , it's usually plan9, which is like NFS.

with the new wsl version, kernel and config from that blog, it will mount virtiofs, or warn you

by tonymet

6/5/2026 at 2:28:16 PM

i've never noticed slow file access through wsl, but ive also only used it to compile small c programs tbh

by p-t

6/5/2026 at 4:34:58 AM

Upgraded and saw faster WSL launches straight away

by thomasswilliams

6/6/2026 at 1:06:13 AM

Wouldn't using NTSYNC on the Linux kernel side also improve filesystem performance?

by ranger_danger

6/5/2026 at 9:13:47 AM

Give me one good reason why anyone would bother with any of this at all?

by rdwrrr

6/5/2026 at 9:15:15 AM

Can't run bare metal Linux at work, can run WSL on Windows. That's probably 80+% of use cases.

by hiAndrewQuinn

6/5/2026 at 10:23:38 AM

Also lack of specific software on the Linux side.

Adobe suite (I used Figma and Adobe tools in my webdev career), PDF editing is a huge issue and lackluster on Linux, most of the office suite is not available natively on Linux (no, there's no valid replacements when your company is deep into VBA tooling, etc), PowerBI, but also many specific internal tools that many businesses have and have been developed as Windows-only applications, I had anything ranging from specific VPNs to screen sharing utils. But there's also more dev-focused tooling, from game development frameworks like Unreal Engine (for which I had to develop UIs in the past) and the related Visual Studio to FPGA tooling and USB debugging.

The list is long and generally based on your domain, but in a career I had almost always moments where I could not avoid having a Windows machine.

WSL allows you to generally have both of the words.

I don't dislike Windows in general to be honest, Power Toys, WSL, a great Terminal, it's an okay machine to develop and I like it better than MacOS from which I still have nightmares for being locked out of my hardware for 2 months due to an apple account issue.

by epolanski

6/5/2026 at 9:58:12 AM

Windows is good for gaming, especially multiplayer, and coding via WSL which is what many people use it for, there's really not much need to run desktop Linux.

by satvikpendem

6/5/2026 at 1:04:14 PM

Corporate mandate to use windows. Crowdstrike scans make doing anything on the command line a non-starter. For example, adding mise to my powershell prompt adds multiple seconds! to each powershell command execution... it's just not even feasible at that point to work in Windows. WSL resolves these issues.

by beart

6/5/2026 at 11:29:09 AM

I got fed up using Linux bare metal on laptops, moved into a mix of Virtual Box and VMWare Workstation.

WSL saves me to install them.

Additionally, I only care about running Linux containers, everything else I run on native Windows, so the filesystem performance isn't an issue.

by pjmlp

6/5/2026 at 11:26:25 AM

Some corporate demand Windows as host (contractual/compliance bs) but I want to work in Linux.

by bel8

6/5/2026 at 9:48:23 AM

as terrible as windows has gotten, i'm not switching my desktop to linux until it has perfect game + nvidia driver support, something that will probably never happen due to anti-cheat. until then, WSL is great.

by pdantix

6/5/2026 at 12:46:22 AM

counterpoint: WSL is great. I like it. I enjoy & prefer Windows desktop & Linux terminal. very happy.

by tonymet

6/5/2026 at 12:29:37 AM

Where are we on the embrace/extend/extinguish curve right about now?

by mattkevan

6/5/2026 at 12:31:01 AM

Microsoft is almost done extinguishing Windows.

by protocolture

6/5/2026 at 12:45:03 PM

Now if only Windows would also get faster Windows file system access.

by NoGravitas

6/5/2026 at 4:43:31 PM

Use Windows Dev Drive. Much faster for development workloads.

by tonymet

6/5/2026 at 10:02:30 AM

Sick, I can stop using `pwd -P` based switching between /usr/bin/git and git.exe (and for some other stuff like ripgrep). Hell, I can probably stop using PowerShell completely.

by ta8903

6/5/2026 at 12:34:51 AM

Hopefully they're heading towards a "boot to Linux" mode.

by phendrenad2

6/5/2026 at 2:31:02 AM

Are you sure you want to:

( ) Shut down the computer?

( ) Restart the computer?

(*) Restart the computer in Linux mode?

( ) Close all programs and log on as a different user?

by bitwize

6/5/2026 at 6:12:38 AM

Now that virtualization exists you don't need to restart to use another OS.

by charcircuit

6/5/2026 at 2:53:21 AM

why don't they just switch completely to Unix, lol

by ernsheong

6/5/2026 at 7:29:23 AM

It's always good to see improvements around WSL2, but especially this one is not so relevant IMHO, since it only affects WLS2 file access to Windows file system. If you store your dev environment in WSL2 anyway, this won't help you.

by jstrebel