Linux Development Experience in Windows with WSL and Visual Studio Code Remote

devblogs.microsoft.com

1 point·iamd3vil··4 comments

I'm quite amazed at WSL. Everything (almost) works. Emacs keeps losing the blinking cursor which is annoying. Other than that everything I've tried worked.

I started developing on it and was making great progress. I had several days worth of work in many different forms.

Then Microsoft decided to reboot my device and I lost it all.

WSL is now "just a toy". Real tools do exactly what you tell them to do WHEN you tell them to do it. Rebooting my machine without asking makes EVERY Microsoft product a toy.

Don't use WSL for anything valuable.

What's really sad is that Microsoft claims it wants "developers, developers, developers". But when I pay over $1000 for a computer I expect it to work for me. Losing work at any time, for any reason, is a problem.

Losing work because Microsoft "needs to reboot" is unacceptable.

I won't disagree that it's unacceptable.

But in practice you can prevent the automatic reboots happening while you're working with the 'Change Active Hours' feature (just search on that term in settings).

Again, not arguing about the rightness of Microsoft's silly policy here, but if you're using Windows you might as well obviate the issue. You can - I've never had an automatic update & reboot interrupt me.

Crossing OS boundaries like this just to do development is kind of silly in a way, and still has some frictions. But for the most part it does work really well. The VS Code wsl remote extension is the first thing to tempt me away from IntelliJ Idea in many years.

WSL2 + VS Code + Windows terminal has become a truly viable dev environment.

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