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Comment by dlevine | Hacker News Reader

I have been a Mac user for many years, and typically used Macs for development and a Windows PC for gaming. I recently setup WSL2 on my new Ryzen desktop, and it has been great for web development. Works pretty seamlessly, and not being able to run GUI apps was one of my few complaints (mostly because I wanted to run a graphical git difftool). Glad to see they have addressed this.

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This is EXACTLY my story (right to the Ryzen processor). Always been a Mac developer, got windows PC for gaming, then tried to do all my development on it, with WSL making that that actually enjoyable.

The VS Code team has done a phenomenal job with VSCode remotes - it's like magic. Such an incredible architecture that allows them to do that.

Hej, almost the same for me, but after seeing steam-proton and wine overall more and more capable of running games, i consider switching to linux. Even Microsoft accepts that linux is so important today, that they started to do a hole lot to emulate/integrate it. Why bother with an emulation, when you can get the real deal?

With WSL1 way back, I ran GUI apps using a Win32 X server. I had some Linux GUI tools that I needed to be able to run and it was pretty seamless.

I was somewhat surprised that WSL1 could run the valgrind memory checks at least well enough to match results of basic tests on a real Linux machine.

I actually still use WSL1 and vcxsrv to do that when I use Windows.

It is seamless, even the icons that show up in the Windows taskbar are correct.

If this new WSL2 experience works just as well, I might finally switch :)

I've always found it to be 99% there. But that 1% prevents you from doing any serious work. Things like mongo become a nightmare when using WSL. Its been entirely frustrating for me. I would have much rather they focused on getting popular libraries to work rather than focus on the flashy GUI features

Isn't it easier to simply run Linux anyway? Either in a VM or barebone?

Yes. On my Surface Go 2, WSL2 got me 99% of the way there, but having to forward my ADB port (for KaiOS dev) and then other issues (unresponsive X apps on resume) led me to install Arch and then wipe Windows.

More specifically: i3 helps me make better use of my limited 10.5" screen AND my limited RAM & CPU. Plus, 'composing' my own desktop environment has advantages: with the help of i3's wonderful docs, customizing things to fit me is easy: foreign city's time next to local? Done. A custom brightness command whose intervals I can adjust? Check.

I loved WSL2 until I discovered the speed of my Arch + i3 install.

I used to think i3 was only going to be useful on my small laptop screen.. then I got dual monitors.. it's so nice having such control over my windows.

While not a direct counterpart to i3, I'd recommend taking a look at FancyZones in the Power Toys project: https://github.com/microsoft/PowerToys

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