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Comment by Naomarik | Hacker News Reader

I've also switched from Mac to a Ryzen desktop. So far the experience has been extremely good and performance is amazing. Been working with clojure and react native on WSL2 several months now.

I didn't want it to be this way though. Apple has been continuously pushing out laptops that are not what I want. My Mac is also notifying me nonstop about 2FA authentication and iCloud storage, and I can't seem to turn those off. I used to eagerly await their keynote events to see what cutting edge innovations they will announce. There have been none I care about since Steve passed.

The lack of a decent modern laptop (I just want a proper keyboard without touchbar, some ports, with a decent cooling system) and MacOS becoming more buggy and annoying has pushed me to find an alternative.

WSL1 did not cut it for me, but WSL2 has taken Apple out of my mind entirely with regards to my development environment.

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Why do you guys even use WSL? React does not work on Windows proper? If a few command line tools is all you need - there is MSYS and Git Bash. Genuinely curious: I use it mostly for testing, as some of the software we make supports Linux.

I switched to Windows full time a few years back. I started with WSL1, but ran into some serious bugs (that have since been fixed) and made the full jump fairly quickly.

I think a lot of folks take this path because it's just easier. The fact that I know I can do most of the stuff the same way I always have makes it an easier decision to make. I think there's also, for some people, an ideological component, that is, they're still using UNIX, it just happens to be in a Windows host, and that's easier to accept than come to terms with Windows just being a decent OS on its own merits. (I am not saying anyone in particular in this thread is that kind of person, of course.)

I develop multi-platform C and C++ code (intermingled with some python for testing and automation), and my experience has been that while MSYS + Git Bash works, I run into 'rough edges' on that side much more frequently than on the WSL side.

If you deploy / admin linux on production side it just seems to be a lot easier to also basically develop in a linux like environment.

With WSL2 you can go from - I wonder if this would work, do a quick no git checkin no vm no docker quick script, then looks good, let's drop this into git, get a dockerfile going, test on docker then test deploy or start going to production.

And it's all pretty fictionless and you can use your Windows machine still for whatever other desktop stuff you have (which many find easier than getting a linux desktop going especially if you need to interop with a word / excel / microsoft business).

I think Microsoft is finally paying a bit of attention to what developers are looking for. The vagrant / docker on windows solutions were in part providing for this need (windows desktop / linux development). This is also what made MacOS so great (unix/bsd under the hood with a nice gui). Why not bake it in? Linux is open source - you don't even have to license it from someone.

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