- Joined
- Mar 28, 2023
Out of curiosity, why do people now still prefer cygwin over WSL?
I used cygwin back a decade ago, but I've found WSL more ergonomic, am I missing something?,
The Linux Thread - The Autist's OS of Choice
- Thread starter tehpope
- Start date
-
Want to keep track of this thread?
Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
Create account
I used cygwin back a decade ago, but I've found WSL more ergonomic, am I missing something?,
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
I'm sure you're right - I don't think WSL even existed last time I used Cygwin. :I
- Joined
- Apr 11, 2023
Cygwin (and its IMO superior fork MSYS2) will run under Qemu. Maybe WSL will too. After a couple hours, I couldn't make it. Cygwin and MSYS are GNU-on-Windows, WSL is a Linux kernel running in Hyper-V. Architecturally they are quite different.
- Joined
- Mar 28, 2023
I guess the workflow that introduced me to WSL just favored it. I had to use windows for work, but a lot of my development stuff had to run under linux.
I found it pretty alright, although WSL is really weird about certain configs. For example, your /etc/hosts file is by default autogenerated from a userspace config on windows every time you start up, so you have to go out of your way to make it manually written.
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2019
It's basically generated from the Windows hosts file, so more sensible just to add entries there.
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
I would also suggest WSL but sometimes you want a more isolated environment for learning. You can skip dual booting altogether if you use https://www.virtualbox.org/ to spin up a virtual machine. You attach whichever linux .iso you want to a new VM, and follow the installation instructions.
If you're an absolute beginner and want to dual boot still, back up your files first.
- Joined
- Apr 1, 2024
I personally. think burning an iso to a usb. and just booting into that is a really good option. the only think you need to know is how to get the iso on a usb, and there are plenty of guides a complete beginner could follow.
That and making sure you pick an iso with a graphical live environment, most do have that these days. Mint, fedora, opensuse, I think debian might even offer one, just not by default. Then all of the more new user friendly arch distros should have a gui live environment.
Then you can boot into the usb, have a system that you can play around with. None of the changes will be permanent, it will be pretty close to running on bare metal, and you don't have to worry about any of the virtual machine quirks and nonsense.
I think people should recommend doing that more. Just make sure you don't use the installer, if you don't want to install the distro, and you should be fine.
- Joined
- Aug 9, 2019
Cygwin was written by Cygnus Solutions, unsung FOSS heroes (note that they chose a name that includes GNU because principals). It is therefore good.
WSL was written by MS pajeets (note that my phone autocorrects WSL to ESL because lol). It is therefore bad.
Last edited:
Akerman
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Apr 12, 2023
I personally recommend new users try Linux by installing it on some old laptop from uni or w/e. The laptop is probably e-waste now anyways due to not being officially supported by Windows 11 & awful specs so there is no real loss in messing with it. The upside is you get an actual Linux environment rather than virtualization or having to dual boot which could be difficult to do for some.
- Joined
- Nov 4, 2024
Fucking shit. So I turned off the computer yesterday. Today it got stuck right after decryption. The hardware for my server onto which I intended among other things to do more regular and complete backups will arrive tomorrow. I think some of the more important data is backed up on other computers, but some data that has only sentimental value isn't. Well, I hope a live boot will still be able to fix this. The timing at least makes for a funny story if nothing else... 
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2019
Assuming that something has gone wrong with how you have things set up- an install of a new kernel package/generation of the kernel image, that didn't go quite right, etc, rather than a hardware failure, there should be options.Fucking shit. So I turned off the computer yesterday. Today it got stuck right after decryption. The hardware for my server onto which I intended among other things to do more regular and complete backups will arrive tomorrow. I think some of the more important data is backed up on other computers, but some data that has only sentimental value isn't. Well, I hope a live boot will still be able to fix this. The timing at least makes for a funny story if nothing else...
View attachment 7684175
Assuming you're using Grub like a sensible person who doesn't jack off to the beauty of the UEFI design, simply taking the option of using a slightly older kernel in your grub menu might work.
If not, you should be able to boot into a live environment, and then either use a GUI file manager to mount the volume, or, if that doesn't work, you should be able to open it using the 'cryptsetup open DEVICEPATH MAPPEDNAME' then 'mount /dev/mapper/MAPPEDNAME /mnt' or whatever.
EDIT: If everything mounts up fine, once you've backed up the data, if you can figure out what the issue is you should (now being booted up with a running kernel), be able to chroot to the root install and fiddle fuck around to get the right /dev and other ancilary filesystems set up. At which point you can then work 'normally' (rerunning grub install scripts etc etc or whatever is neccessary to unfuck things). Doing that in whatever way your particular arch setup is set up for of course..
EDIT 2: I see Arch comes with a couple of nifty scripts for easing the cockpain of chrooting when you've fucked up your install. I wonder why that is! Pretty handy anyway. Guess I'll be installing the debian package for arch-chroot just in case.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2020
The good news is all your data appears to be there, depending on if it's using TPM or not you should be able to just move the drive. Alternately a live boot USB.Fucking shit. So I turned off the computer yesterday. Today it got stuck right after decryption. The hardware for my server onto which I intended among other things to do more regular and complete backups will arrive tomorrow. I think some of the more important data is backed up on other computers, but some data that has only sentimental value isn't. Well, I hope a live boot will still be able to fix this. The timing at least makes for a funny story if nothing else...
View attachment 7684175
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2019
Huh. I was using a program called Upscayl to do AI upscaling of a couple photos, and it took me like 5 minutes per photo on Mint. I had to do some stuff on Windows today, and I got curious and decided to try it on Windows. I did a batch upscale of the same ten photos, and it took like 30 seconds for the full set. Does the Nvidia 3060 ti not do well on Mint? I'm using the 575 driver for it.
- Joined
- Jul 4, 2022
It's been a long time since I've used a linux live CD but my experience was that it was really slow, and did not persist storage. Maybe that's changed, but having a VM open while able to google errors in your "main/dailydriver" OS is a huge plus to me.
- Joined
- Nov 21, 2020
Probably missing one of the 37 packages needed for CUDA and it switched back to CPU mode. Or similar problems.
- Joined
- Jul 21, 2019
Apparently if you don't turn off secure boot, it doesn't matter what driver you install because it'll only let you use nouveau. Very cool, Mint.
Update: My heavier games will actually load now, though I don't have the time to really put them through their paces.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Aug 7, 2021
Hard to guess what the problem is without knowing your distro and version. But for example with the upcoming Debian you now need systemd-cryptsetup to bring up an encrypted volume. See this mailing list thread: https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/07/msg00012.html https://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2025/07/msg00019.html
- Joined
- Sep 7, 2019
WSL is best use as a shell environment, not for GUI. this way you can almost seamlessly use it via windows terminal.
install oracle virtualbox, install debian headless, ssh into the box -> profit. that alone is a nice goal to figure out.
if that's too much at first (web based):
more tutorials games:
https://gitlab.com/slackermedia/bashcrawl (scroll down for online version)
https://github.com/veltman/clmystery (zip needed to unpack)
more stuff beyond the bash:
Last edited:
- Joined
- Dec 17, 2019
I'd recommend using chaiNNer and models from OpenModelDB instead, the ol' reliable method of upscaling from pre-2020 days of ML. Also worth looking into ComfyUI and SUPIR upscaling since it's way better than any standard 4x upscaler model due to it being a glorified ControlNet.
No matter how much I use Vim, I always confuse J and K when navigating. Then again, I only treat Vim as a CLI text editor for simpler jobs like config editing, I much more prefer GUI editors like Sublime Text for most work. I don't think I'd ever get used to using Vim as a full blown IDE, and that is without trying to turn it into one with those Neovim conversion packs. I want to keep my shit simple.
Anyways, some interesting FOSS news.
Google launches OSS Rebuild to boost trust in open source package security
It seems interesting given how those supply chain attacks are getting more and more prevalent, even reaching Linux with shit like xz that would go unnoticed and wreak havoc if not for some autist noticing their SSH session was taking 0.001s longer to initiate than usual. The FOSS supply chain needs to be reinforced, question is whether or not depending on companies like Google is the right way to go. Then again most of what makes the Linux kernel the powerhouse that it is today is thanks to those companies.
- Joined
- Mar 17, 2019
This just seems like something some dirty fucking indians had ChatGPT generate some fluff for.
Reproducible builds are not an 'innovation'. For example, F-Droid, which anyone who isn't insane already uses as much as possible instead of Google Play, does that shit.
This is the most Google-retarded shit possible. Here's my favorite part. It's written in Go because Google.. but none of the documentation mentions supporting whatever clusterfuck is Go packaging. It supports Rust Crates.io packages... as far as I know, you can't distribute binaries through Crates.io. It supports NPM.... if you are somehow downloading random binaries through NPM you should die. It supports Python pip/pypi packages. OK, fair enough, but anyone who would in theory implement this retarded Google shit is already using GitHub actions to automate publishing source and potentially even binary 'wheels' to PyPi.