[Miracle of the word wide web meme template]
“Thanks to the miracle of windows subsystem for linux…”
“…I can use the Linux terminal from the comfort of windows”
[Computer monitor showing windows update screen]
“Marvelous”
Combines the power of a really half-arsed Linux distro with the pure speed of the Windows file system.
I mean, it's slightly better than nothing, but installing a real Linux distro on Windows through eg. VirtualBox absolutely fucks it into the bin. I don't see who WSL is for. People in really locked-down corporate environments?
I stopped using virtualbox after I discovered my compiles were way faster in WSL2. It was pretty close to native Linux speed, not that I had a great way to compare it.
My guess is that this time they really wanted to pull the developer demographic over into the M$ sphere of influence. MSYS, MingW, and Git Shell already fill the same niche as WSL, so it wasn’t destined to succeed. Thing is, they probably didn’t expect it to succeed either. Microsoft’s strategy has always been to throw a hundred dicks at the wall and hope that one of them sticks (think Zune, Windows Phone, etc). This time, Azure kind of stuck. WSL didn’t. When you’re as big as Microsoft, the occasional win more than covers the cost of a hundred fails.
I use it a lot - I use my main rig for gaming and general stuff, but also need to be able to program things; rather than dealing with dual booting and the headaches it brings (including limited hardware support), I use docker with WSL2.
I am able to launch VS Code or PhpStorm on my local, have it remote into WSL and run things how they’re meant to be ran on a Linux box, without dealing with installing windows specific variants.
This makes working with things like Laravel/Composer a lot easier and with everything built on docker, deploying to prod is as simple as a docker image push to my registry of choice.
I also enjoy the benefits of not having a bunch of dependencies sitting around - drop the container and you’re system is as clean as it was before
I understand that this doesn't work for everyone but I'm kinda the reverse. My entire workflow relies on Linux, but I occasionally play video games. I'd say any game without aggressive anti cheat works fine on Linux nowadays.
I’ve not been able to get full performance of games on Linux; then you add on lack of support for mouse/keyboard/headsets and it just becomes easier to have a windows setup to play games
The one good thing that came about for me from Reddit was realizing I’m not the target gamer demographic anymore. It really opened up my mind to realize if I’m not enjoying or playing online multiplayer anyways what do I have to lose?
I was so afraid of potentially missing out on the one or two games I’d actually be interested in playing that I stayed on windows even when it only gave me a pain in the ass every other quarter. Nowadays If the game doesn’t work on Linux it doesn’t deserve my money, and that isn’t as big a compromise as I thought.
I don't see who WSL is for. People in really locked-down corporate environments?
That's me pretty much. Locked down low spec Windows 10 laptop that would probably suffocate under the weight of a full VM anyway, so I'm happy to have access to a proper Linux shell with a nice-ish terminal that's a lot less clunky than "git bash", MingW etc.
I use it for ad hoc scripting and things like interacting with webservices (curl), massaging text files with tools like jq, sed, awk and to use Azure and AWS cli tools to interact with cloud infrastructure.
That's funny, I did the opposite - I got used to developing on osx, then Linux, but that was always on my work computer - my desktop has always been Windows (I'm still using the same license and chassis from the computer I bought in high school a decade and a half ago).
Then I burnt out hard, and started picking up contracts here and there, but didn't have the money to pick up a second computer powerful enough for gaming or work. So I ran virtualbox and avoided cmd like the plague for a while... It was driving me nuts, so I made plans to run Linux with Windows in a hypervisor - I was looking at pci passthrough so I could give it direct access to the graphics card.
But then wsl came out and it just didn't seem as important. Even as Linux gaming has grown, I just haven't felt the need to switch... It's sometimes finicky and setting everything up on a new computer is a pain, but the only time I considered switching one of my machines over is setting up LLMs - that was a real pain to coax into working, and it'd run better on Linux
Personally, I think WSL is a great start point to introduce users in Windows to take the first step to Linux. Me myself and several people from what I know starts from WSL and end up using Linux full-time
Weird how tribal people are. Let people enjoy things for God's sake. I use all combinations of macOS, Windows, Fedora, Ubuntu (server + on WSL), Pop_OS!, and what not. Different horses for different courses, and I like each one of these in their ways they excel at.
it's fun to fling shit at the other side on the internet, regardless of what you truly think. has been for 30 years. how is that difficult to understand?
People who get out, see the world, meet people from other places tend to be far less tribal. Early career, I could have easily been a paid Microsoft Evangelist (is that still a real job title?). Eventually I was forced to begrudgingly learn a whole bunch of other things, then I became obsessed with OSS, shunning my former tribe every chance I got. At some point I just stopped caring about everything. Language, tabs vs spaces, design patterns, IDE, frameworks, I just don’t care any more. I still have my go-tos if I’m starting fresh but, if the direction of the wind changes, it doesn’t bother me a bit.
So true :'-) I used WSL on my company computer. Somehow I managed to snake through corporate restrictions on administration settings and WSL had practicaly full access to system. I even managed to make xserver and GUI apps working :-)
I think most actual Linux users saw this as expanded access to the Linux environment, and easier ways for Windows users to dip their toes in. That was the feel i got from the general community at the time.
I used WSL extensively at a couple of previous jobs. Sometimes IT only gives you the choice of Windows or Mac. I'm quite happy to have a Linux machine at my current job, but WSL has gotten the job done for me when I lacked that option.
My company mandates Windows laptops but I mostly work with Linux VMs hosted on our servers. WSL2 and Visual Studio Code (with Remote SSH and WSL2 plug-ins) are the best things that happened to Windows in years. Without these tools I would simply be unable to work.
My personal computer is Windows mainly because of gaming and game dev, but WSL means I don't have to dual boot to tinker on a web project or something. In a way, it killed the Linux desktop for me, but I still use Linux as much as ever. With Docker as well.
the worst thing about windows is that you can’t natively change the window manager or desktop environment. that is so backwards. they even removed the ability to move the taskbar wherever you want. this is so weird.
They also removed the ability to disable window stacking in the enterprise version. When I got Win 11 for my home pc I use it just to force myself to get it instinctively.
I work at Oracle and leverage WSL for for some things. It works.. but I wish I could just use Linux. WSL is full of gotchas and weird bugs. Performance is not good either.
WSL2 is essentially a VM, and doesn’t seem to have any weird bugs or gotcha’s anymore (at least for command line programs). I don’t use it for work, but playing around with it as a hobby, it seems fairly solid.
I use WSL2. It has bugs. DNS stops working when you connect to a VPN, which I have to do every day for all of my work. To fix that you can either modify the resolv conf (which gets wiped out on every startup) and then chattr it to prevent it from being deleted (this still didn't quite work for me). Or you can install wsl-vpnkit and pipe all of your network traffic through another container.
I have been working in docker and rancher desktop, both of which have integrations with WSL but with other caviats and bugs. I basically have a bunch of very highly specific steps written up for other employees for "how to get this working with WSL" because it is so buggy.
I feel so vinticated reading somebody else going through the DNS hell WSL2+VPN DNS issues. It is a nightmare in professional environments and for the life of me I cannot get my resolv to stop reverting after a while. Thanks for the tip on wsl-vpnkit, much harder to convince VM teams to spin you up a remote dev environment than to just use WSL sometimes.
Tinkering around to get things working is a part of the authentic Linux experience. Performance is 95% to Ubuntu 20.0.4 so not sure what you mean by that. resolv.conf won’t get wiped out if you put
I've been using Linux for 15 years. Tinkering with WSL is not as fruitful as tinkering with Linux.
The link you provided for DNS is exactly the solution I was describing in my original post. It never worked for me, though. We have a custom DNS setup in-house and simply setting the nameserver doesn't work. It is far too much of a hassle, so we just spin up wsl-vpnkit when we need network access.
Mac users and Linux native users don't have these issues and everything works out of the box.
The performance I get when compiling and running integration tests through Rancher desktop integration on WSL is abysmal. Taking 30+ minutes to complete whereas for other employees on Macs see things done in under 5 minutes. Not sure if there is a WSL specific firewall / networking issue or what. If you look up "WSL2 poor network performacne" you'll see dozens of open GitHub issues. It is very non-deterministic. Some days it runs great, other days it is terrible.
I assume I'll have a million of other replies coming along that link me to random benchmarks and articles about how great WSL2 is, but I'm telling you, I use it every single day at my job as a software engineer. It has problems. I'm grateful it exists and you can hack it just enough to work (sometimes), but it is nothing like using Linux natively.
It gives me the chance to realistically insist that my fellow developers work under linux, so they stop randomly changing the case of filenames in the repo. And work in the same environment we're deploying in.
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