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Comment by ramses0 | Hacker News Reader

WSL is terrible. It's basically a tech demo (look up what happens if you `cp` a file from `C:\...` to `/home/user` versus `copy` or going the other direction.

It's alright to boot up a linux "VM" using docker, but then you have to pay extra for windows pro or whatever so you can unlock hypervisor privileges.

I recently bought an extra SSD to put into the windows desktop I bought and am happily running linux, don't miss windows since I put it on there (even some steam games are quite nice and convenient).

Anyway, just look into WSL before you bet the farm on it.

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I don't see the issue with this, they clearly warn you not to modify the WSL filesystem from Windows because you'll break it: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2016/11/17/do-n...

They advertise it as being useful for development work, and it perfectly fulfills that purpose for me

I use it daily with zero issues. I don't know why people keep perpetuating this, but it works great, as if it were native.

Same. I've found it to be really great overall. The default colors are basically unusable (looking at you, blue), but the functionality leaves little to be desired.

The Command Line team recently updated the default colors (especially a less terrible blue), but unfortunately it doesn't auto-apply to existing profiles for backwards compatibility concern reasons. Highly recommend grabbing the ColorTool and updating to the new colors if you get a chance.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/08/02/upda...

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/commandline/2017/08/11/intr...

huh. I tried to run our rails app in WSL, and it was so slow that it was unusable

I too use it daily on multiple machines (albeit Windows Pro with Hyper-V) and it's changed my day to day dev work dramatically.

Combined with Docker there is no reason for me to even look at MacOS or running Linux natively (which I have done before for years.)

For me it's the best thing to come out of Microsoft in a long time.

> For me it's the best thing to come out of Microsoft in a long time.

Agreed, I think it's an amazing feature. Have been a full time linux user for 20 years, my new laptop is BIOS locked ( ugh ) so I _cant_ install linux ( didnt know that before buying it ) , but it's actually not an issue because of WSL, it's exactly what I always wanted in Windows.

Please name and shame the brand, so we can avoid it. A BIOS that prevents you from installing Linux should be illegal IMO.

When my Windows laptops get too old and slow for the latest Windows plus patches, I get another 3 to 5 years of life out of them by installing Linux. I still have a little Dell laptop that I first put into service in 2004 as a Windows box, converted it to Linux in 2009, and it still runs.

What laptop is it? Was it part of an OEM sort of purchase through an employer, or something consumer off-the-shelf?

Interesting... I haven’t had any issues using WSL recently (since they fixed the networking stack).

I tried WSL briefly and discovered that the overhead of forking processes is annoyingly high, just like when I'd used cygwin in the past. (Maybe I should have expected that, but...) Try doing something like:

  time for i in $(seq 1 100); do /bin/pwd; done | wc

Compare on Linux (or even Mac OS) vs WSL. I was disappointed.

Did you report this as an issue? They seem to be fairly responsive to feedback. Would be interesting to see what their take is.

I believe Windows Defender is responsible for a lot of the IO overhead within WSL. You can get around that by marking your development directory as "don't scan" within Defender.

This is not accurate. I used WSL professionally for 2 years until recently switching back to Linux for unrelated reasons¹. The only issue I have had with WSL is filesystem performance. However, that is largely a result of the real-time virus protection in Windows Defender. Real-time protection is practically useless and slows down the rest of your computer as well, so disabling it is a pretty easy fix.

WSL is actually a fantastic piece of software. I can't believe how easy it is to install literal Arch Linux onto my Windows machine. It's also fairly simple these days to integrate VS Code with it.

¹ I've gradually lost enough vision in both eyes that I frequently lose track of the mouse cursor, so I switched to Linux for i3wm and better keyboard controls. Otherwise I would likely still be using Windows + WSL.

I moved my development side to WSL on the PC after giving up hope that Apple is ever going to replace my 2008 MacPro tower. The experience has essentially been flawless, and I'd consider it basically magic on how well it works. Best of both worlds. Any future Apple is just going to be whatever is cheapest as a daily driver, while the PC is going to handle heavy lifting from now on (Gaming, Development, Editing).

I'm a grad student and I'm using WSL for working on coding assignments. The only gripe I have is that it doesn't support launching IDEs (or any GUI applications for that matter) yet. You can jump through hoops by using an Xserver to connect to WSL but I haven't tried that out.

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