top | item 24915004

(no title)

With the recent advances in WSL2, I’d say dual booting is hardly worth the effort anymore. This is assuming you need Windows.

discuss

solarkraft|5 years ago

I would like to use Windows as rarely as possible and I think WSL 2 doesn't allow that.

hermitmaster|5 years ago

While I agree, that doesn’t mean that dual booting is the solution. My daily is Fedora Workstation and I have a Windows vm for stuff as needed.

skohan|5 years ago

I mean you have to run Windows as your host system. Personally I would consider this a major drawback which more than eclipses any convenience gains.

hermitmaster|5 years ago

I guess I should have been more verbose in my original comment. Windows is hot garbage, but there hardly exists a good reason for dual booting. Use a Windows VM from Linux if you can, WSL2 from Windows if you must.

ChuckNorris89|5 years ago

Why? It works great. Or is it just personal preference?

arathore|5 years ago

I am considering building a PC for programming and am genuinely curious if WSL2 can be considered a replacement for dual booting Linux and Windows? I am currently rocking a dual boot system (with legacy bios) and haven't had any issues so far.

meddlepal|5 years ago

It's pretty close. Big pain point for me still is that running an IDE from Windows and accessing the Linux FS is not quite as snappy as native-Linux (I use IntelliJ). So for now I still dual-boot.

This is apparently being worked on... in the future I will be able to run the IDE inside WSL and it will bridge X11/Wayland to Windows.

dheera|5 years ago

I gave up on dual-booting a long time ago and 2 OSes fighting over overwriting the MBR every time I wanted to upgrade one or the other. It's just so much easier to maintain 2 machines.

zeta0134|5 years ago

I solved for this by simply giving Windows and Linux a hard drive each. The boot records are completely separate, and neither one tries to read data from the other. (Personally I have no need, my NAS handles any file level syncing, but that's minimal anyway.) Both Windows and the Linux boot are registered in UEFI, so I asked my BIOS to disable the hard drive preference and pop up the boot menu each time, letting me pick which OS to use manually.

josteink|5 years ago

> I gave up on dual-booting a long time ago and 2 OSes fighting over overwriting the MBR every time

This is why UEFI was invented, and if You actually read the post, you would know it details how you set this up with UEFI instead of legacy boot and have none of those troubles.

TeMPOraL|5 years ago

Isn't WSL2 a step backwards from WSL? A thinly veiled VM, vs. proper Linux emulation? What's the performance story and cross-execution (starting Windows programs from Linux side, or vice versa) on WSL2 now?

onlywicked|5 years ago

The interoperability is good except few applications.

File performance is similar to native as long as you store the files in WSL2.

Only issue, I have faced is that port forwarding does not work sometimes and have to restart WSL2 for fix which I solved using a simple script.

Other than that everything has been a smooth sail. Native docker is a huge win in my list.