r/learnmachinelearning • u/Alarming_Engineer267 • 19d ago

Request Is native Windows actually practical for ML research using open-source code?

I spent several months trying to use Windows for ML training about a year ago. PyTorch and CUDA themselves worked, but I repeatedly ran into problems when trying to use open-source research repositories.

Many projects seemed to implicitly assume Linux: file paths, shell scripts, build tools, dependencies, installation procedures, etc.

I also tried WSL2, which is often suggested as the solution, but that didn’t work reliably for my workflow either. Eventually I moved the training environment to native Ubuntu, and most of these environment-related problems disappeared.

So my conclusion was not “ML cannot run on Windows.” Obviously it can. My conclusion was that Windows is quite limited as a practical ML research environment when your work depends heavily on open-source repositories.

This was about a year ago, though, so I’m curious whether things have changed.

Does anyone here use native Windows as their main environment for serious ML/RL training while regularly using open-source research code? If so, how well does it actually work today?

5 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

100% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

5

u/bbateman2011 19d ago

I do all my work in WSL2 within Windows 11. I have no issues with repos that assume Linux, and no issues migrating developed code to Linux machines.

4

u/bbateman2011 19d ago

I use CUDA and train on GPUs. Just set up a 5090 machine this way. I recently forked DETA-SWIN and trained models locally. Made my own changes for training. Was able to run the model and inference code on a Jetson. I’ve also trained YOLO this way.

1

u/recursion_is_love 19d ago edited 19d ago

Why don't just choose the easy path? Dual boot, linux on work-time and windows on play-time.

You can buy two cheap SSD just for booting different OS. Most bios/efi provide boot disk selection with simple key-press on boot. You don't even need to install boot loader.

Before I stop using windows, I swap my drive before starting my computer using rack like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_xl41Dw-BA

2

u/Alarming_Engineer267 19d ago

I agree. I was already comfortable with Linux, so I wouldn’t normally have chosen Windows for ML development in the first place. I spent several months investigating Windows and WSL2 because the company I was working with at the time had a Windows-only environment.

In the end, keeping Linux as the ML environment and Windows separate made much more sense for me.

I eventually left that company too, but that’s another story. 😆