But then it looked how Apple and Google did the same thing, successfully, and sailed away in terms of market share and now it wants to replicate the success.
The thing is, I don't think it is going to succeed. The likely thing that is already happening is that power users are leaving Windows and once power users leave the platform will die.
> The likely thing that is already happening is that power users are leaving Windows and once power users leave the platform will die
I would consider myself a power user, but the only reason I stick with Windows still is because I can't find a good reliable video editor on Linux -- and also some games.
Kdenlive makes doing super common things a lot more difficult and time consuming than what's available on Windows video editors and DaVinci Resolve has potential but it's the most crash prone piece of software I've run into on any platform, and also has severe audio quality issues when exporting mp4s (on my hardware at least -- I couldn't use it to create videos due to that).
But I would think at this point, power users are only a drop in the bucket compared to the gaming crowd in terms of audience size. Right now on Linux, gaming comes down to hoping 3rd party tools allow you to run most games you want, or you dual boot (really annoying) or you run KVM with a GPU pass-through to run Windows in a VM with native performance (approaching 1 level above power user level just to set this up and 2 video cards).
After twenty years on Debian I just bought a Windows laptop on the strength of WSL2 and Docker for Windows. Being able to play SimCity has been a bonus, and I feel like I have the best of both worlds thanks to recent Windows additions. It isn't perfect but the Linux Desktop experience isn't either. Nor is OSX, in my experience.
My point being: I've been a very stubborn desktop Linux user for a long time and have migrated to Windows. The traffic, I suspect, is going the opposite way to what you seem to expect, at least for now.
Hardly. Windows is still a superior platform for many tasks in ways that there are no realistic alternatives for in other OSs, not to mention being generally much less of a headache to work with despite its severely degrading user experience.
Accessing mounted drives can be avoided by putting your source code in WSL 2's file system, but it is for sure still a pressing issue since folks tend to have multiple drives and want to access them within WSL.
But to your point, WSL 2 does have some really big issues pending tho, such as https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4166 and https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4699. The TL;DR is that WSL 2 will happily use 80% of your system's memory by default and it never frees disk up in the VM that it runs in. The VM's disk will continue to grow and grow unless you as an end user run some PowerShell incantations to shrink the vhdx. In other words, deleting files from within WSL 2 won't clear the disk space used by the VM.
Within like 2 hours of using WSL 2 for the first time I found my system grinding to a halt because it used 11GB of memory and chewed through 60GB of my SSD since when I copied my source code into WSL 2's file system (to avoid the poor performance documented in your issue) I forgot I had a ton of wave files included in one of the directories since I kept those in a private directory in my podcast site's source code.
I don’t get why WSL is better than a Linux VM in hyper-v or virtual box, until it’s way smoother than it currently is. You can full screen the VM to work entirely in dwm or i3 or whatever if that’s your thing, plus Xpra and SSH exist if you want to run Linux stuff alongside Windows (I assume there are free clients for both in Windows?). With that way of working you can even run Linux somewhere else to offload the resource use almost entirely, and if local it takes seconds to suspend the whole thing.
The last thing I’d want, working with Linux tools, is to have another thing I have to eliminate as a source of trouble when anything breaks.
Power users customize their own installation, they don't download a modified ISO from Yandex. This isn't aimed at power user but at regular users who don't understand what was done to it or the risk of downloading your OS from an untrusted source. It's so easy to turn them into rootkit encrusted ISOs and just call them "NEW! Updated Ninjutsu OS v2.0".
I mean for the fact you have less and less to say with regards to your installation. I have been Windows user for many years but around 4-5 years ago I got fed up with the fact Microsoft decides on a daily basis to change completely the stuff I own and not let me have anything to say about it. I don't want to have any Live accounts to log in to my machine, I don't want significant updates installed without me having anything to say about it. I want to spend time doing actual work and not babysitting the OS because I just got interrupted by another Microsoft idea.
Currently the only Windows I personally use is a VM I use to do my remote work because I am forced to use Windows. Just this weekend I got the very significant Edge update that completely blew my setup and caused me to spend an entire day to fix. As I am paid by the hour this is pretty significant: unhappy client, lots of work stacked.
You would think a backup would help? After all this is VM that I basically don't touch. The only site I open is the one I use for remote connection. The only tool I ever run is Edge. Unfortunately, it was not possible for me to revive the backup and not have it immediately do its thing.
See, this bit about the Live account is where you and I differ. It's now so much easier just to have my Live account that mirrors my Local User account, except I use a PIN to login instead of a password and my Win10 license is bound to my Live account so if I need to reinstall and reactivate I don't have to screw around with manually typing keys or having to call MS to activate, it simply works.
I've just returned to Windows for the first time in 20 years having had a pet VM of the kind you describe for Windows tasks before. I am pretty astonished that I am forced to update so often and that Windows still needs reboots for most of its systems. Compared to only updating for the occasional kernel patch when I was a Linux desktop user on Debian it is almost comical.
That's due to a fundamental difference in how each OS handles files. Linux will let you replace a file that is open in another running process, and Windows won't. Each way of doing things has its pros and cons. It isn't the kind of thing that can be easily resolved.
> I don't see a power-user exodus from Windows, really.
The power users outside of the MS ecosystem already left Windows a while ago you mean. A lot of mainstream tech tools & languages only have a medium support on Windows which is not really prioritized that much compared to the Mac & Linux versions. WSL is a big move to try to win those power users back.
But then it looked how Apple and Google did the same thing, successfully, and sailed away in terms of market share and now it wants to replicate the success.
The thing is, I don't think it is going to succeed. The likely thing that is already happening is that power users are leaving Windows and once power users leave the platform will die.