in classic Microsoft fashion [0], WSL1 is not officially abandoned, but seems to be planned to be left in half-finished mode forever. bugs are closed as "fixed-in-wsl2" without further comment: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues?q=label%3Afixed-in-w..., including serious bugs causing incorrect computations: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/830.
[0] see the dozens of official Windows GUI frameworks: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16736720 (and since then, it's gotten worse: https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=uwp%20deprecated)
In Installing Windows and Linux into the same partitionmicrosoft
WSL
C++2016–2026
microsoft / WSL
WSL
Windows Subsystem for Linux
222Distinct people
260Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
34.4KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Windows Subsystem for Linux
GitHub
Where it is used
- Docker Desktop — Docker Desktop uses WSL 2 as its engine so docker commands run via the WSL 2 engine on Windows. This is a shipped integration enabled in product settings. Source
What people are saying
My main issue is the lack of support for serial (so, no USB support): https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2195. Other that this I love Windows 10 + WSL2 as a dev environment.
dgellow used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
- microsoft/wslg · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 4:00:59 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year260 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2016-04-18 14:55:26 UTC to 2026-10-10 10:32:09 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 23 | 4 | 19 |
| 2017 | 2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 33 | 2 | 31 |
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 1 | 12 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 23 | 0 | 23 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 40 | 4 | 36 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 37 | 3 | 34 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 18 | 3 | 15 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 27 | 4 | 23 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 13 | 0 | 13 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 22 | 5 | 17 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 11 | 5 | 6 |
From the project README
An excerpt from the repository, fetched Nov 12, 2026.
Read the project’s introduction
Welcome to the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) repository
Learn more about WSL | Downloads & Release notes | Contributing to WSL
About
Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a powerful way for you to run your Linux command-line tools, utilities and applications, all unmodified and directly on Windows without the overhead of a traditional virtual machine or dual boot setup.
You can install WSL right away by running this command inside of your Windows command line:
wsl --install
You can learn more about best practices for setup, overviews of WSL and more at our WSL documentation page.
Related repositories
WSL also has related open source repositories:
microsoft/WSL2-Linux-Kernel - The Linux kernel shipped with WSL
microsoft/WSLg - Support for Linux GUI apps in WSL
microsoftdocs/wsl - WSL documentation at aka.ms/wsldocs
Contributing
This project welcomes contributions of all types, including coding features / bug fixes, documentation fixes, design proposals and more.
We ask that before you start working on a contribution, please read our Contributor's Guide.
For guidance on developing for WSL, please read the developer docs for instructions on how to build WSL from source and details on its architecture.
Code of Conduct
This project has adopted the Microsoft Open Source Code of Conduct
Trademarks
This project may contain trademarks or logos for projects, products, or services. Authorized use of Microsoft trademarks or logos is subject to and must follow Microsoft’s Trademark & Brand Guidelines. Use of Microsoft trademarks or logos in modified versions of this project must not cause confusion or imply Microsoft sponsorship. Any use of third-party trademarks or logos are subject to those third-party’s policies.
Privacy and telemetry
The application logs basic diagnostic data (telemetry). For more information on privacy and what we collect, see our data and privacy documentation.
The software may collect information about you and your use of the software and send it to Microsoft. Microsoft may use this information to provide services and improve our products and services. You may turn off the telemetry as described in the repository. There are also some features in the software that may enable you and Microsoft to collect data from users of your applications. If you use these features, you must comply with applicable law, including providing appropriate notices to users of your applications together with a copy of Microsoft’s privacy statement. Our privacy statement is located at https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=824704. You can learn more about data collection and use in the help documentation and our privacy statement. Your use of the software operates as your consent to these practices.
Note on localization
All key CLI texts in WSL are localized, but some detailed error outputs are not fully localized. Specifically in wslc.exe we make use of lower level open source libraries that do not have full localization. We've kept these unlocalized strings in the error output to provide richer failure context so that end users can more easily resolve issues.
Read the full README on GitHubWhat Hacker News says
37 sourcesI'm also not sure why I'd use WSL2 and there are at least three big problems I ran into with it straight after upgrading:
* It broke my ability to flash my ESP32 via USB (guessing WSL2 has trouble accessing USB devices)
* It uses significantly more RAM than WSL1
* There is performance problems when working on NTFS partitions, or at least there were when I tried it: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4401
In WSL2 can now mount Linux ext4 disks directlyShould be enough from a FS perspective yes, although:
(1) the WSL distros don't have systemd
(2) they ship with a custom kernel that doesn't support custom kernel modules
First point is trivial to fix but (2) may be painful. You could even share the desktop environment as WSLg uses X11/Wayland.
edit: apparently compiling modules is (kinda) working with wsl2: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4425
In WSL2 can now mount Linux ext4 disks directlyGit pull/push stuck forever on WSL2
1 points · Open discussionThe Linux VM on Chrome OS supports IPv6, using ND proxy to solve the "one WiFi MAC address" problem without NAT. I guess Microsoft thought that was too hard.
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/discussions/5855
In The Roll-Out of Windows 11 Is the Perfect Time to Decide to Switch to LinuxI attempted to use Void Linux in WSL2 and hit problems the moment I tried to build a package. It seems that you're considered to be "in a chroot", which triggers security limitations on what you can do with kernel namespaces:
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2981
In The Roll-Out of Windows 11 Is the Perfect Time to Decide to Switch to LinuxI've also had issues putting in my full name as my username. Lots of programs do not expect spaces in the path, and I experience a lot of errors which are resolved by changing the path to not contain a space.
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2577#issuecomment-90...
In I couldn't debug the code because of my nameFair enough, hopefully that gets fixed, my machine doesn’t go to sleep that often so maybe that’s why I haven’t been affected. My servers are not usually long-running, I only use them when developing so that’s probably why.
For future reference linking to the issues page when there’s over 1.2k issues is unhelpful to the reader, you’re better off putting that list into your blog post, or just pick one that’s the most useful like https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7492. I doubt the reader is going to trawl for every single issue to find the ones you’re talking about. It’s like saying “Google it yourself”.
In Part of Windows 11 is a revamped Windows Subsystem for LinuxLocalhost mostly works, and I use localhost when it does work.
But when it fails (once a week or so, and this keeps happening on 3 different machines running the latest/a recent Insider build), usually after the PC wakes up from sleep, I have to restart the PC to access via localhost again, which is undesirable for me because I have to spend 10 min restoring all apps & windows back to how they were.
Or I can use the IP address directly and map it to a friendly hostname, in my case `wsl` and keep working. This is done behind the scenes with a scheduled task, so when I see `localhost:PORT` doesn't work, I just retry it with `wsl:PORT`.
The reason I haven't linked to a specific issue is that there's just so many [*], and localhost sharing is still buggy and hasn't been fixed even after 2 years.
[0]: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/
Read the rest
One issue that I've run into is that if you only bind to IPv6 in WSL, then you will only be able to access the service using IPv6 on the Windows side (i.e. ::1 works, but 127.0.0.1 doesn't). OSs usually automatically bind to IPv4 whenever you bind to IPv6, but that's not the case with WSL (actually, it does bind to both, but only inside WSL, not on the Windows end). Lots of programs (like node) bind to IPv6 by default, so this can catch people off guard and they wonder why 127.0.0.1 or localhost isn't working.
Here's the github issue about it: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4851
In Part of Windows 11 is a revamped Windows Subsystem for LinuxThis github issue in interesting: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/2886
It sort of hints that you could coax LxssManager.dll into running an elf binary without WSL itself really running. Though you would need to do some things to make lxss happy, so it's not trivial.
In Black Lotus Labs uncovers Linux executables deployed as stealth Windows loadersIf WSL2 is your killer Windows application, then upgrade to Windows 11 whenever you can. WSL2 on Windows 10 suffers from some FS corruption bug [1]. The bug is currently fixed only in Windows 11 Insider Builds. It is uncertain if/when the fix will be backported to WSL2 for Windows 10.
But other than that, Windows 11 is mostly Windows 10 with a different shell. So it's not like it will disrupt your workflow or something.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/5895
In Windows 11: Just say no>But I mean come on, they're Microsoft. If they really wanted filesystem access to be efficient across systems, we'd have it by now.
Here's one of the developers saying it is hard back in the WSL days.
https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-391...
The reason makes sense to me, but I'm not an expert. Maybe you could expand on why you think they could do it but chose not to?
In Windows Subsystem for Linux GUISystem performance is, IO between Windows and Linux isn’t.
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197
In Windows Subsystem for Linux GUISee here for some notes from the WSL team why certain filesystem operations that would be fast on Linux are slow on Windows:
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-391...
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
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