WSL supports a kernel-based DirectX to Mesa bridge. It is better than any other VM implementation. However the latest releases caused some problems with auto detection mechanism in Mesa. Sometimes the Linux kernel module also fails to load.
You need to ensure that DirectX driver is used with tools like eglinfo. Most of the time, the main culprit is LLVMpipe software driver being used due to wrong detection.
You can't run a proper VM there though, something like a normal distro with systemd, KDE Wayland session and etc. At least from what I've figured out so far. Basically I need a normal full featured VM, not some gimped variant and with graphics acceleration preferably.
Umm you must be rather inexperienced in Windows and didn't do much search for that to happen.
1. WSL2 mounts Windows drives under /mnt/ . You can just cp things
2. WSL2 Distros are exposed as Network shares. WSL installs a virtual "Linux" shell folder to Desktop and explorer navigation bar. It is hard to miss. Moreover a simple search query would show you \\wsl$ share
I will start by saying I haven't used Windows as my full time desktop in 20 years. I did use VS/Windows for 2 years while I did a C# project in 2013-2014, managed a bunch of windows servers, used (and liked) powershell, everything, but that was inside a VM on my mac. And the other two windows full-time devs I was helping had never used linux or WSL (and one of them was not terribly keen on the whole idea). But we were all new to WSL. I knew WSL was very easy, and even many devs at MS use it.
So to provide more detail, things were slowed down further because this was one of those teams meetings where you can't just take over, but have to tell someone to type another command and wait for them to type it. The second thing was that the user didn't tell me that they were switching to another user when escalating to admin (cuz I couldn't see that elevated system dialog in the screen share). So it turned out they had installed WSL as a different admin user, so when they went to \\WSL$ (as their original user), it wasn't showing any shares. That set off a lot of googling and claude'ing that went nowhere.
Suffice to say I was ready to end the day after that meeting :-)
A red flag early on was when a bun install took 8 mins when trying to run it on /mnt/c, when it took 200ms on my machine. So I knew there had to be some weird filesystem overhead stuff going on. So then when we got it working beautifully by just using the VM's filesystem, I was personally happy with it but the person on the other end felt this was all too cumbersome and was soured on WSL, even though I tried to explain the differences.
I kept thinking that WSL was the greatest thing since sliced bread and got the message that MS had found a way to make them work beautifully together (especially in WSL2). I'm sure I could've figured this all out on my machine in probably 10 mins.
Vista wasn't that bad from purely OS side. On a VM it runs pretty stable.
However, Microsoft made a huge change to how the OS and drivers worked. If you still use Windows, you are still benefitting from some of the changes.
However HW vendors usually ship rather broken drivers, it was doubly bad since Vista overhauled the driver interface. By the time all vendors fixed their shitty and badly tested drivers we already had 7. It is also partly Microsoft's fault since they had absolute chaos in Vista development due to shitty hacks on top of hacks that was the consumer OS (XP).
Similarly Vista was very heavy for its contemporary average hardware. By the time HW caught up, 7 was released.
Windows 7 and Vista unified almost all of the control panel. Windows had pretty good design language then and the other Microsoft software used native frameworks that shared it. Moreover neither Vista nor 7 removed features or dumbified the settings when the switch happened.
Compare that with the half-arsed switch that started from 8 and still continues today with 11. Windows 11 actively removes features and implements the system programs with multiple clunky UI frameworks. While chasing the whatever techbro trend, Microsoft jumped into multiple design trends. Win 11 Settings, Excel, OneNote, Teams, core utilities like Disk Cleanup each of these use a different UI language. I do understand slowly upgrading certain components but newer and actively maintained apps using different UX, come on.
Each of their UI frameworks are suffering from lack of maintenance. For example, WinUI 3 still draws white symbol on white background for window controls and the bug exist in many Microsoft apps including Powertoys and their showcase apps. 11 actively forces users to use Powershell to do almost any medium level customization where 7 had nice UIs for advanced network configuration, extra Bluetooth functions (you could proxy calls on Win 7 over BT, now you have to have a MS account).
Either the author lacks taste or just judges things very shallowly.
From memory I believe it was windows 7 that broke the taskbar - before that you could put it on any side of the screen and also embed folders on it.
I used to have it on the left side of the screen with my actual documents folder (not “My Documents” which even then was full of other crap) embedded in it. Kind of like vertical tabs in the browser, but better
I was really annoyed when they took that functionality away for no apparent reason. Win 7 was the start of the slide for me, windows steadily got worse with them removing more and more functionality. Was it seven that removed all the customisation you used to be able to do as well and replaced it with much more limited themes?
Newer laptops come with extra power peripherals and sensors. Some of them are in ACPI tables, some are not. Most of them are proprietary ASICs (or custom chips, nuvoton produces quite a bit of those). Linux kernel or the userspace has poor support for those. Kernel PCIe drivers require some tuning. USB stack is kind of shaky and power management features are often turned off since they get unstable as hell.
If you have a dGPU, Linux implementation of the power management or offloading actually consumes more power than Windows due to bad architectural design. Here is a talk from XDC2025 that plans to fix some of the issues: https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/10/contributions/425/
Desktop usage is a third class citizen under Linux (servers first, embedded a distant second). Phones have good battery life since SoC and ODM engineers spend months to tune them and they have first party proprietary drivers. None of the laptop ODMs do such work to support Linux. Even their Windows tooling is arcane.
Unless the users get drivers all the minute PMICs and sensors, you'll never get the battery life you can get from a clean Windows install with all the drivers. MS and especially OEMs shoot themselves in the foot by filling the base OS with so much bloat that Linux actually ends up looking better compared to stock OEM installs.
You need to ensure that DirectX driver is used with tools like eglinfo. Most of the time, the main culprit is LLVMpipe software driver being used due to wrong detection.
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