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Comment by ahupp | Hacker News Reader

I switched to WSL2 a month ago and it's been great. With WSL1 I'd regularly run into subtle compatibility problems but haven't seen anything like that with 2. Despite a handful of annoyances, the Win10+WSL2+Visual Studio Code Dev environment has been a lot more pleasant than OSX.

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I never thought I’d say it but because of this exact setup with VS Code I’ve actually stopped using my MBP at home in favor of my desktop, which was really only built with gaming in mind. I’ve now gotten used to having all the extra computing power at hand and would struggle to go back to a laptop as my primary development machine.

I'm in the same boat.

I'm looking at selling my Mac and just getting an iPad to replace it - running Windows 10 + WSL + VSCode on my desktop pc is more pleasant for me to code at home with than my macbook.

But why could not you do the same before? Even before WSL there was MSYS, which IMO is great, unless you need to compile a C program, that directly uses Linux headers.

It’s possible I could have and I just wasn’t sufficiently in the know about which tools to use. I hadn’t used MSYS. I’ve taken my current workflow so far as to even use nix as my primary package manager. Would this have been easily possible before? I ask in earnest. My setup right now is such that even mildly arcane things like that just seem to work for the most part.

Turns out "nix" is hard to search due to engines matching "*nix" to it.

Nix is probably not supported on MSYS, but YMMW. I'd love to have something like it on Windows.

With WSL I'm running stock Debian so every too I use is just an apt-get away. I don't run anything on the Windows side for development except VS Code.

I've stopped coding on my 2012 Macbook Air in favour of my desktop PC for similar reasons. The fact that my ports are shared between Windows and Linux makes the web dev I do a dream.

The new Terminal app is great too. I've got all the same split pane stuff that I rely on in iTerm, including useful keyboard shortcuts for switching between them and resizing them. I'm very impressed.

I'm currently trying to do the same, I'm sick of running out of ram on my MBP. What software/setups do you find indispensable to move to Windows? I'm not a first time Windows-only user, but first time to do full development work. For what it's worth I already use VSCode, I'm doing FE Development, and I use Docker a lot. I'm kind of unsure due to having to lose my Mac-specific tools such as Maccy (Clipboard Manager) and Alfred (Quick Launcher).

That's good to hear. I use VirtualBox to develop on a real Linux VM from Windows and if this lets me get rid of an Oracle product, I'm happy.

Did the same. Just that i use emacs with x410. Only gripe I have at the moment that docker eats up a lot of memory. But everything else works perfectly fine. Was quite surprised and happy.

X410 is a bit more inconvenient w/ WSL2 because the VM has it's own IP address vs using whatever local magic it did before.

Could you elaborate why it's been more pleasant than OSX, please?

I'm agnostic to Win10 vs OSX as a desktop environment. What I like is running an real copy of Debian that starts instantly, and has transparent access to local files. I'm sure I could cobble something together with VMWare but this just works so cleanly. Homebrew is a fine option on OSX but its nowhere near is nice a full linux system.

I can also run Linux docker images now.

Cool thanks for the info. Can i just update from wSL1 or do i need to be careful? Bit scared that it will screw up some things :-)

Thanks

The update to migrate the filesystem took way longer than the docs said, I ended up just letting it run and came back a few hours later. And it wasn't like I had much in there. Otherwise it was straightforward.

I switched to windows insider to get it, but WSL2 should hit GA in the next month or two.

What are the annoyances?

The most annoying issues mysteriously fixed themselves after 6mo or so: a trackpad that would go haywire ever once in a while, and diagonal tearing on the screen. It was a brand new model so maybe there were driver updates. The fingerprint scanner is way flakier than the mac. This is on a Lenovo X1 Extreme gen2.

Win10 is just a little less... elegant than OSX. But not in a way that really bothers me on a day to day basis.

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