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Introduction

So, a friend of mine made a new Windows Subsystem for Linux distro called WLinux.

Disclaimer & Details

He didn’t pay me for anything or provide me with a copy that I used for this review. I purchased it myself from the Microsoft Store. I do some fiddling around with Linux on occasion along with other OSes, so I decided why not benchmark it. The features it has aren’t reflected very much in the benchmarks. It has many quality of life improvements over other distros in WSL specifically for doing work in WSL. I’ll do the bullet point thing here in a second, don’t worry. I’ll admit that I’m partial to the complexity of Arch and less-so to things like Ubuntu. But I gotta say that I’m impressed with how smoothly and quickly you can get up and running with very simple tasks in WLinux like running programs in a window on your Windows desktop. The X410 integration is very slick.

• A fast Linux terminal and development environment for developers and pro-users built on Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 10
• Popular development tools, including git and python3, are pre-installed. Additional packages can be easily installed via the apt package management system.
• Out-of-the-box support for most Linux graphical apps with no need to configure display or libGL settings. Note: Requires a Windows-based X client, such as X410.
• Pre-installed with WSLU, a set of useful open-source utilities for interacting between Linux and Windows 10.
• WLinux offers faster patching than any upstream Linux distro for WSL-specific bugs.
• New features are actively added based on community interest, including paid bug and feature bounties.
• A handful of unnecessary packages, such as systemd, have been removed to improve stability and security.

Benchmarks

So with the bullets outta the way, let’s get into the benchmarks.

Go HTTP

Go JSON

GO Build

Go Garbage

TTSIOD

HIMENO

7-Zip

StockFish

Kernel Compile

Cray

FLAC/WAV

MP3/WAV

M-QUEEN

PGBench

DarkTable Boat

DarkTable MassKrug

DarkTable ServerRack

DarkTable ServerRoom

REDIS SADD

REDIS GET

REDIS SET

Blender Barber

PYBENCH

PHPBENCH

GIT

Summary

Good for you! You survived the charts! I benchmarked WLinux against other WSL distros like Ubuntu and this third-party one that let me install Arch; along with my native Windows 10 install. Make of the speed in some of these benchmarks what you will, like I said, the bulk of the improvements are quality-of-life and not necessarily raw performance. If you like tinkering around in Linux, give WLinux a go! It’s regularly $19.99 but it’s on sale right now for $9.99!

• https://www.microsoft.com/store/productId/9NV1GV1PXZ6P