We Love Linux Kinda

I've been using WSL2 (can we just call it WSL yet?) heavily lately, and I've noticed that the developer experience is... as much as I hate to admit it, not as good as MacOS or Linux. This article brings up a few good examples. A few more:

1. "windows terminal" defaults to a Windows NT console, you have to open new tabs using a dropdown and choosing your Linux install. You can't use Ctrl-shift-t top open a new tab at all because of this. Annoying.

2. Windows terminal also is slow to open new tabs. This is annoying because...

3. ...If your laptop battery dies during sleep mode, it'll just shut down and close all of your apps.

4. ...Windows updates itself pretty often, again, closing all of your terminals.

5. Another terminal complaint: there's no command-m like in MacOS. So you can't easily clear the scrollback of a terminal while running a command. You need to exit out of the command and type "clear".

I went through this disaster in the reverse sense back in the 90s when I tried to use WABI (Windows Application Binary Interface) in UNIX (Solaris). While it did work, in a fashion, it was never as good as running Word or Excel under Windows itself.

Now people are struggling with trying to run Linux stuff under Windows. For the love of God, why?

If you want to run Windows or run Linux, run it natively. If you want to run Windows and Linux at the same time, run a Windows guest under a Linux host, or run a Linux guest under a Windows host. VirtualBox and similar are your friends.