Ubuntu on Windows 10: Docker vs WSL

Updated 2020/02/18 to reflect changes introduced in WSL2

Hi! Microsoft PM working on WSL & Command Line here.

WSL allows you to run native, unmodified Linux ELF-64 binaries directly on Windows, and enables you to run your favorite Linux tools atop your Windows "host" OS.

WSL1 took an approach of adding a Linux syscall compatible layer at the top of the NT kernel, allowing Linux binaries to run atop NT, sharing the same underlying filesystem, networking, process list, etc. as the host OS.

The soon to be released WSL2, on the other hand, runs distros' binaries within Linux containers, atop a real Linux kernel, inside a lightweight VM that allocates only the RAM needed by the apps it runs, and then releases freed RAM back to the host OS. This provides 100% Linux compatibility, and allows your Linux tools to run with near native performance, and consumes minimum resources necessary from the host, ensuring your machine runs fast and smoothly.

Prior to WSL2, one could run the Docker client in WSL1, using it to drive Docker for Windows running atop Hyper-V on the local host, or to manage a remote Docker server. But one cannot run Docker Engine on WSL1 for many technical reasons.

However, you can do the same in Docker on WSL2, but you can also run the Docker Engine itself atop WSL if you prefer. This is, Docker's preferred and future path for running Docker on Windows desktop.

To learn more about WSL, review the videos & docs here: https://aka.ms/learnwsl

That is correct. One thing that you do fail to mention is that WSL is currently rather slow in io even with a fast ssd/lots of ram/8-core xeon cpu. This is still a problem in 01/2019. I just did a ray@DESKTOP-O0MT13B:/mnt/c/Users/rayjh$ dd if=/dev/zero of=test bs=64k count=16k conv=fdatasync on my workstation with a samsung SSD and only got 97.6 MB/s.

Running bare metal ubuntu LTS this box will get SEVERAL times that. Never mind the endless problems when you try to combine WSL with VSCODE.

I'm wiping windows 10 off of here and installing ubuntu 18.04LTS.