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Comment by jmkni | Hacker News Reader

The Windows Subsystem for Linux fixes a lot of these problems, you can even point VS Code at Ubuntu now on Windows and avoid CMD entirely.

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I was someone who installed the first beta of Windows that included this, just to try it out for Rails. It had LOTS of problems. I filed bugs. I kept trying over the next couple of versions, and finally gave up. I tried it again a few months ago, and, again, ran into a show-stopping problem of some sort, and gave up again. Are you saying that you use it "in anger" for serious development, and have no issues?

People complain about doing Rails on Windows, and, while there's definitely extra friction, and I hate Windows in general, I have really good luck with RubyInstaller. I used to have a hard time with ExecJS, but now I just install Node (on either Mac or Windows), and I'm usually off and running.

I use WSL (without anger) for serious development, for about two years now and have had almost no issues.

Running 'Pengwin' (Debian) Linux via WSL, RVM using Ruby 2.4.1 + Rails 5.1.7 and Ruby 2.6.2 + Rails 6.0.0.beta3

Today, everything works just as expected, right out of the box with no effort. This includes ActiveRecord (to SQLite, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL), including Node.js / Asset Pipeline, Prawn PDF and ImageMagick integrations, uploads to AWS, email integrations, capistrano-based deployments, Heroku Gem + integration, and so on.

It's gotten to the point where we spend more time helping OSX folks figure out occasional Homebrew weirdness, than we do helping Windows folks with WSL. Especially since WSL people can almost always just re-use any Ubuntu instructions verbatim.

except when you install a native module in WSL and then try to run it from CMD. WSL is no different than having a headless VM and comes with all of the problems of one

I've done most of my Linux development on WSL for the last year. It stuggles sometimes under certain types of heavy IO load, and there are ocsssional compatibility issues, but overall it's been impressively reliable and convenient.

I am using WSL more and more often nowadays and it's really good now, it works just like you'd expect Ubuntu (or other distro you choose) to work. The only thing I've had to do is turning off anti-virus real-time protection for linux subsystem.

Hell, not only VSC supports WSL. RubyMine can manage rbenv/rvm on WSL and more https://confluence.jetbrains.com/display/RUBYDEV/How+to+add+...

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