On 1/28/25 11:52 AM, Leonidas Spyropoulos wrote:
On 27/01/2025 23:59, Robin Candau wrote:
Hi everyone,
I'm writing this mail to collect thoughts and interests about providing an official Arch Linux image for WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) [1].
Hello,
Hey,
Thanks for bringing this up for discussion.
You're welcome 🙂
My experience with WSL is limited as my company moved to AWS Workspaces for development and eventually to MacOs as host.
My 2c from the time I used it in a corporate environment was that with all the bloatware that companies install into the OS and the extra layer that WSL brings on top, the performance on IOps was really poor. It could be specific to the bloatware that the companies (experienced that in two companies) install (call it security tools), but I had occasions where simple operations like `git rebase` multiple commits would end up git complaining that the files are locked (cause everything that was accessed in IO it needed to be scanned in real time, cause again "security"). The added WSL layer of files was making that more difficult to have a real `metal` IO performance.
I understand this is probably edge case for most common usage.
Thanks for sharing your experience. Maybe edge cases indeed, at least mine is different, I didn't suffer too much from such IO performance issue. I assume most common usage wouldn't suffer from this, but that's still a valuable input 🙂
Overall though I think it's a good idea to have WSL Arch Linux images, but alas without a windows system I won't be able to support this personally (not even work laptop).
Thanks for sharing thoughts! Indeed, support requires access to a Windows system. On my side, I have my work laptop. Also my wife is still running Windows on her PC, so I could eventually access that if needed :p For what it's worth, wsl2 can be installed / executed from a Windows VM as well, as far as I know. In any case, I think it would be great to get some community involvement regarding support. I have a few people that already expressed their interest to me off-list, both in terms of usage and helping with support :D
Cheers,
-- Regards, Robin Candau / Antiz