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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Not exactly the same thing, but the xone (XBox One controller driver for Linux) project disabled Issues on Github and uses a Discord server instead. Which is stupid as heck, because I’m not going to join a Discord server just to check if someone has already encountered the same issue as me.


  • The naming of WSL sort of makes sense because it’s actually build upon a kernel feature, which hass been mostly unused for more than a decade, called subsystems. There’s the ‘subsystem for Win32’, which is the primary one that all Windows applications use, and then there were also the ‘subsystem for POSIX’ as well as the 'subsystem for ‘OS/X’. WSL was simply a reboot of that technology.

    The funny part is that this turned out to be too complex so WSL 2 ditched all that and simply uses a VM running the actual kernel in the background, so the name isn’t even accurate anymore.




  • The way WSL1 worked is actually quite interesting: The NT kernel always had the capability to run multiple subsystems, with Win32 only being one of them and there were subsystems available for OS/2, POSIX and later UNIX. WSL1 was pretty much a revival of that feature. So WSL1 is indeed somewhat like Wine, but making heavy use of some features built into the kernel. So yeah, no real boot process happening.

    (Also it’s kinda stupid that the ‘S’ in WSL2 still stands for ‘subsystem’, despite not using that feature anymore.)