@aescling @coriander it does feel a little wasteful to think "i need to diff this, better go to linux" lmao

@monorail @coriander there are cygwin and msys2

@aescling @monorail @coriander cygwin deez nuts

@wallhackio @monorail @coriander flower trick

@coriander @aescling the technical way it works is like. i bet i'd understand it if i looked it up. but it's not important

the practical effect it has on your life is that you have a little linux computer hidden inside your windows computer. and whenever you want you can just pull it up and use linux for things. it's not as heavy (or complete) as a vm but you can get a command line and do linux stuff on your mounted windows filesystems

@monorail @coriander no it is actually literally just a virtual machine

@aescling @coriander oh lmao

@monorail @coriander WSL1 had a cool WINE-like translation layer going on but they just do VMs now

@aescling @coriander that must be what i'm thinking of

@monorail @coriander i’m sad they gave up on the WSL1 way of doing things but i’m not exactly surpurrised either

@monorail @coriander WSL1 was really cool though, it would run linux binaries natively on windows. with some hackery you could ever run the binaries directly from CMD!

@aescling @monorail that does sound real cool but still not like something that would be much use to me

@coriander @monorail the newer version of windows subsystem fur linux. it lets you install linux distributions within a VM that you can launch as an application. which is Certainly A Way to get a posix environment up and running on windows

@coriander @aescling @monorail WSL2 only works if you enable virtualization in your bios which will add An Annoying Step if you don't happen to have it enabled otherwise it's very easy to install