> I need WSL2 so I’m just avoiding doing anything private on my personal computer for now.

This is madness. It's hard to consider a machine your "personal computer" if you're afraid of doing anything personal on it.

This is just a taste of what it means to have Operating System as a Service. Which is where Microsoft is apparently heading.

Windows as a Service has been their stated goal since prior to the release of Vista. Nadella has opted to go full speed ahead, with everything from Office to the versions of Windows running on the Surface & Xbox being entirely SaaS. I'm just waiting for the "You must subscribe" hammer to fall for Windows in general.

Well its the insider build. The normal build doesn't require that

Then don't join a beta test of softwaree as part of a collaboration with a 3rd party business?

"Personal computer" means one person per computer, vs a mainframe. It's not a privacy statement.

This is actually not how I understand the origins of the phrase. Before the PC, all computers were owned by large corporations and governments, and the PC was seen as a way to take back that control. See also: Apple's famous 1984 ad.

On the other hand, an insider build is a beta, the only purpose of this is specifically to be able to get telemetry to detect issues before releasing.

> the only purpose of this is specifically to be able to get telemetry to detect issues before releasing.

They could just ask for feedback, which is what I naïvely considered the "insider" build for—obviously Microsoft is just spying on you for some reason.

Right, because people are gonna provide core dumps in their feedback.

Again, if you don’t want telemetry, don’t use the build Microsoft uses specifically to collect telemetry.

Don’t complain that the build MS uses only for telemetry requires you to provide telemetry.

> Right, because people are gonna provide core dumps in their feedback.

Not my problem. Sounds like a problem for a company with a QA team.

I don't think there is a problem at all actually.

Insider build is very clearly targetting people that are ok with potential bug and instability and that are ok providing telemetry to Microsoft so they can improve stability.

You are not one of those people, and thus shouldn't use it.

Microsoft famously fired their QA team, and outsourced the work to paying customers.

Have you ever seen support forums (like Apple)? It’s full of people who just say what the problem is with no detail about the circumstances. Then when you ask them what they were doing, they don’t remember or can’t reproduce it. There’s tons of stupid users.

For example: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251380226 Okay, you can’t send email? Well, did you delete the built-in email app? Do you have your email account set up?

Telemetry aims to fix that by providing context to what was happening when the problem happened. Whether it actually helps software development, I can’t answer.

That will highlight the pet peeves of a small group of users because of self-selection bias.

Maybe I'm missing the point, but you can download ISOs with the media creation tool.

If you want to download ISO, you must pretend you are not Windows. Otherwise, it will redirect you to the media creation tool, that will download bunch of files that it wants to hide from you and insist on creating a media for you.

Media Creation tool doesn't download the ISO with CU updates. It downloads one that is about a year old and then once you run Windows Updates, it has about a years worth of updates to install (if not more).

The point was that Windows 10 2004 is RTM but you have to be a MSDN subscriber to download it, or find some shady Russian website to get it from.

Last time I tried, changing your user agent to Safari (OS X) or Firefox (Linux) made the media creation page redirect to a link to download the ISOs. I suppose if you had WSL installed and an X server you could bring up a browser in there, or you could use lynx :P.

AFAIK 2004 is supposed to be released next week, 28th. It is not yet available on partner download site either.

It is available on MSDN.

OK. It's not on MPN yet.

> I need WSL2

Actually you need Linux, not WSL2. That's the way Microsoft is slowly, sneakily, furtively, planting the idea that their Linux is the real thing, which is absolutely not. This approach is much much much worse than Ballmer yelling that Linux is cancer, because there is no evident hate, no apparent will to destroy the competition which would raise warnings in the community. It is just Microsoft becoming smarter, then absorbing the technology up to the point it will become one of their products -and associated services-. It's Microsoft PR 2.0 and sadly... yes, it will succeed.

WSL2 IS linux though. There was definitely an argument to be made that WSL1 wasn't linux, but WSL2 is full linux within a virtual machine on windows. I don't know how you can claim that is not the 'real thing' when it definitely is.

You get a Microsoft-supplied kernel, which has modifications to integrate more with the host OS. I'm not going to make a value judgement about it being the real thing or not, but it's definitely not the stock kernel that comes with Ubuntu.

That's fair. True, it may be a modified linux kernel, but it is still linux. To say otherwise would be disingenuous and misleading, imo.

WSL1, on the other hand, was just a proxy masquerading as a linux kernel, so I would understand confusion between WSL1 and WSL2 on which is real linux and which isn't.

Microsoft effectively forked Linux here -- some pieces such as integration with the host NTFS filesystems or Direct3D support are unlikely to ever be upstreamed. Yes it's Linux, but not really.

Another way you can tell it's not actually Linux: if something is acting up, where do I inspect the source code? Where can I send a PR if I come up with a fix?

It's smart that MS bought itself a Linux foundation platinum membership; that probably goes a long way in preempting trademark claims of the 'Linux' name.

Linux can be run without Microsoft telemetry.

Op was saying that he/she could not run WSL2 without Microsoft telemetry.

So, yes WSL2 includes Linux plus Microsoft telemetry. Parent was saying that Op actually wants Linux, since Op wants Linux functionality, but not Microsoft telemetry.

I was more addressing the second part of the parent comment, which stated that WSL2 wasn't true linux.

It is not true Linux in spirit because it forces the user to live with telemetry and other closed source software and drivers, which defeats the purpose Linux itself was built upon.

Not just that. Privacy, trustworthiness and security aside, let's imagine Microsoft porting (or simply making WSL-aware) some of their software, libraries, system internals hooks, anything that Linux users wanted for ages, gaming libraries etc.), to WSL and not Linux, that is, they require WSL but won't run on Linux, or will run "better" on WSL, or possibly will run on Linux but require some closed or prohibitively licensed code to (properly) run. Those surely are bleak scenarios, but corporations are there to make profits, and forcing Linux users to require a Microsoft branded layer of software is without any doubt a way to keep them hooked to Windows, which for some will turn into buying products and services from Microsoft, and for others into finding less and less software that will run on plain Linux. I wouldn't be surprised at all if say in two years more books will be published about WSL than about Linux. That would hurt as well since it would mean less courses, less schools adopting Linux, in plain words less users.

I completely agree and I'm sick of the number of apologists on HN

WSL2 contains Linux and other stuff. I would not say "WSL2 is Linux" because that kind of imply a bijection which does not exist, and MS is starting to play on that while extending WSL2 with e.g. D3D12 access to the host and talking about that with titles like: "DirectX loves Linux". That's not even strictly similar to the more traditional "integration tools" of VMs, given the user experience integration they provide which is at the core of WSL (in their case the VM aspect is more of an implementation detail, see the network, stdin/out, and maybe tomorrow GUI integration -- and of course see historically the architecture of WSL1 which provided a subset of the same services without a VM and without Linux), and also given they never talk about opening that kind integration to other VMs, even less third party ones. Maybe they will (I would not count on it) in which case it is slightly more ok, maybe they won't, in which case this is border line an hostile attempt to fork the ecosystem and redefine "Linux" (in the sense of traditional GNU/Linux desktop distros) as Linux running under Windows with WSL.

I dual boot to Ubuntu 20.04 and I also use WSL in Windows10.

WSL is Linux, but without X Window or gnome. Very convenient for command line stuff because the native Windows Command line is awkward and unfamiliar to use.

Some things work better in Linux, some things work better in Windows. To pretend otherwise is being a fanatic, in my opinion.

He might need Windows AND the WSL2.

The whole point of an insider build is to collect telemetry.

since MS switched on the personal data vaccuum with Windows 10: I dumped all but one of my physical Windows machines

the remaining one is used for Win32 app dev/debugging, however it's on a separate VLAN, with a separate external IP address

I think it's really quite sad that you have to adopt military style separate PCs&networks if you don't want your data harvested

Opt into full telemetry. Install WSL2. Opt out. Delete diagnostic data.

They make you send full diagnostic data because WSL2 is only in the Windows Preview program.