> 10s of thousands of a second
10ms? That's a very long time. Phone clocks are much more accurate than that because they're synced to the atomic clocks in cell towers and GPS satellites.
Hell even NTP can do 1ms over the internet. AFAIK the only modern devices with >10ms inaccurate clocks by default are Windows desktops. I complained about that before because it screwed up my one-way latency measurements: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6310
I solved that problem by RTFM and toggling some settings until I got the same accuracy as Linux: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/networking/...
Anyway I dunno why the math would be too complicated, GPUs are great at this kind of signal processing
In Phased Array Microphone (2023)microsoft
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
13 sourcesWhat measures have you taken to prevent things like this https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7868
In Launch HN: Quetzal (YC S24) – Stripe for Internationalization> thanks to modern hardware, very little performance penalty
I would not call 1 order of magnitude performance penalty for accessing a local file system “little”: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197
In Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparisonIt’s somewhat more complex than “NTFS is slow”. Here’s a good explanation: https://github.com/Microsoft/WSL/issues/873#issuecomment-425...
I’ve benchmarked deleting files (around ~65,000 small node_modules sort of files) and it takes 40 seconds through Explorer, 20 seconds with rd, and roughly a second inside WSL2 (cloned to the VM’s ext4 virtual hard drive).
In SQLite: 35% Faster Than the FilesystemHow's the peripherals support on Surface Linux?
I've been wanting to switch to Linux on my Pro X SQ2 for a while due to the WSL2 support on it being terrible (might be fixed now [1]) but always thought that most stuff such as LTE, webcam and surface connector wouldn't work [2].
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/11274#issuecomment-2...
[2] https://github.com/linux-surface/surface-pro-x/issues/1#issu...
In A Review of Linux on Surface Pro 4Oh boy, Windows does the same thing (regarding hidden files to sort out FS stuff), but they hide it (just like Apple). We WSL2 users found out the hard way and Microsoft refuses to offer a solution. Relevant issue: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/7456
Apologies for my post getting snipped, The latest iOS beta keeps randomly eating my text. Apple is aware.
In The Origins of DS_store (2006)Hopefully this will incentivize Microsoft to fix the current WSL virtualization on ARM chips.
Something's that's been broken for years now: https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/11274
(also see this as a warning if you are considering a Microsoft ARM device)
In New Arm-Powered Surface Pro and Surface Laptop Aim Directly at Apple Silicon MacBeware of randomly truncated output https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4082
In Mutt on Windows Without WSLIt absolutely 100% can be true.
As an example: Windows Services for Linux 2 used a special init daemon to interact with the host OS.
That meant no systemd. That meant that the `systemctl` program wasn't there.
This baffled legions, armies, of wannabe sysadmins.
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55579342/why-systemd-is-...
https://superuser.com/questions/1785697/systemd-in-wsl-on-wi...
https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/9477
https://askubuntu.com/questions/1132230/unable-to-run-any-sy...
People on the whole have no idea how this stuff works, and they just copy magic incantations from StackOverflow to get stuff to happen. If that doesn't work, then this OS is broken. The end.
For these guys, WSL was broken.
Result:
MS hired Lennart Poettering.
https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/07/lennart_poettering_re...
He "fixed" it. Systemd now
Read the rest
works in WSL2. All those guides for noobs now work. Everyone is happy.
In a world where tools like Flatpak and Snap are proliferating and it's driving deep divisions between Linux distros, if you think the average person struggling with Linux is going to use `ldd` to work out where the dependencies for something live, I'm afraid you are a deep guru who lives on a different plane of existence.
We now have widely-used packaging systems which simply embed an apps entire dependency tree into a package to avoid people having to work out the difference between `apt` and `rpm`. Thousands of terabytes of disk are being burned to make this stuff go away.
Yes, this is too hard. Way too hard.
It's not just me and my system. Go look at open github issues, some of the most commented, each of which have 1-400+ comments:
Jul 2022 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8529 "All WSL commands hang (including wsl --shutdown) but WSL is constantly using 30-40% CPU "
May 2021 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/6982 "High CPU usage"
Jun 2022 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/8529 "All WSL commands hang (including wsl --shutdown) but WSL is constantly using 30-40% CPU "
Jul 2019 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197 "[wsl2] filesystem performance is much slower than wsl1 in /mnt"
Feb 2020 https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4901 "Very slow network speed on WSL2"
In VSCode + WSL makes Windows awesome for web developmentI have no earthly idea, but WSL2 is known[1] for its snail-like cross-platform file transfers. Some of my colleagues install MSYS2 in parallel with WSL2 so they can sync our nightly much faster but still not have to jump through all the hoops of getting our proxy, certificates, network shares, etc working in MSYS2.
I use the extra time waiting for WSL2 to get a coffee.
[1] https://github.com/microsoft/WSL/issues/4197
In Useful Uses of cat