I read this comment to a news about The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source —
Every time I praise WSL on hn I pay the karma tax but I will die on this hill. WSL is more powerful than Linux because of how easy it is to run multiple OS on the same computer simultaneously. It’s as powerful as Linux with some janky custom local docker wrappers for device support, local storage mapping, and network mapping. Except it’s not janky at all. It’s an absolute delight to use, out of the box, on a desktop or laptop, with no configuration required. Edit: for clarity, by “multiple OS” I mean multiple Linux versions. Like if one project has a dependency on Ubuntu22 and another is easier with Ubuntu24. You don’t have to stress “do I update my OS?”
— and realised that the modern development (was it any different at any other time in history?) is mostly trying to combine the output from many not very competent people.
I’m in Linux since 2007, which is 18 years by now. Well, with some huge gaps. I’m in Linux every day since 2019. Which is 6 years by now. And I still don’t understand who are those people who run Ubuntu on servers. I still don’t understand what’s in the Ubuntu. It’s built on top of Debian.
I may understand Ubuntu as a desktop, but I see no point in it, as Fedora is much better, I’d say. Yep, still, folks may need choice, so I’m not saying I’m against it. But why Ubuntu on a server? I cannot grasp it. Either I’m over qualified for this topic, or I’m the opposite, not experienced enough to understand. Maybe one day I’m installing Ubuntu on some of my servers. These days they run Arch Linux (x64) and Armbian or DietPi (for Arm 32/64). Both Armbian and DietPi based on Debian.
I’m eyeing FreeBSD and NixOS, but it looks like it would take me a long time to delve into them properly. I see both as something worth investing my time into.
But Ubuntu? Right now I stand by the point that these people are simply incompetent, having their servers running Ubuntu.
Developing and testing software for Ubuntu Desktop, sure no issues with me.
Also, liked the reply to this original Windows lover:
“More powerful than Linux” is silly. It’s a VM. The most useful thing is that it does a bunch of convenience features for you. I am not suggesting that it is not extremely convenient, but it’s not somehow more powerful than just using Linux. You know what’s even more convenient than a VM? Not needing a VM and still having the exact same functionality. And you don’t need a bunch of janky wrapper scripts, there’s more than one tool that gives you essentially the same thing; I have used both Distrobox and toolbx to quickly drop into a Ubuntu or Fedora shell. It’s pretty handy on NixOS if I want to test building some software in a more typical Linux environment. As a bonus, you get working hardware acceleration, graphical applications work out of the box, there is no I/O tax for going over a 9p bridge because there is no 9p bridge, and there is no weird memory balloon issues to deal with because there is no VM and there is no guest kernel.
I get that WSL is revolutionary for Windows users, but I’m sorry, the reason why there’s no WSL is because on Linux we don’t need to use VMs to use Linux. It’s that simple…