WSL 2 is getting faster Windows file system access

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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

And if it works, I'll wonder why microsoft doesn't make the ubuntu button use terminal.

> 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?

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.