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I'm surprised they didn't say "why don't you just use Windows with WSL? We're trying our best to make sure your IT department forbids you from using anything else anyway"

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I have already worked at least one software company which developed Linux-only _desktop_ software (i.e. which used some X11 toolkit) while literally using Windows-only development machines, and Office, Outlook, Teams. (This was before WSL).

I have worked at a software consulting company that worked (for other companies, mostly) on C++/Qt software that was only made available for Mac and Windows. Most developers were developing on Linux, though.

This bizarre mismatch still happens in some companies, post-desktop, and the impact can be worse than everyone merely being less-productive.

It can also be a symptom of other organizational dysfunction.

For tech companies, especially startups, it's something we should consider before joining: how does the company determine the tools/infrastructure that engineering and production use, and what are the current determinations?

Would have quit on day 1 without question. That is pretty nuts.

The Windows Teams client is also crap.

There's a small but non-trivial number of Microsoft employees who only use Linux.

With the InTune/device attestation stuff they will feel the heat to move to Windows as well.

Microsoft has a “secret” Intune Deb for Ubuntu, but I must admit I haven’t tested it.

You can see it here: https://ubuntu.pkgs.org/20.04/microsoft-prod-amd64/intune-po...

Yeah, I teach a class about operating systems. It's supposed to be developer-oriented. I remember the first time we couldn't run VirtualBox. I filed a ticket, and waited, and waited. Finished teaching the class, bumped the ticket. A year later, the class runs again and we still can't get anything done. Department chair and I have a meeting with the IT director, and he pushes to use WSL.

I'm like, uh, really? No. By this point I've had to "teach out of the book" so much I'm used to it, COVID has happened so half my class is working from home anyways... I pretty much just work around my IT department any chance I can. I bought a System76 laptop just so I don't have to request software upgrades and installs every other semester.

I'm quite impressed at how nice WSL is. It's very snappy, great internetworking with the host Windows, and is kept up-to-date. The only thing it's missing, for me, is nl80211 support (I do wifi) and usb-serial. I do a lot of console app dev in WSL regardless.

Honestly PCI pass through would probably make it perfect for me. Pass through a usb controller or whatever other weird device you need

I think it's quite crap actually.

If you don't have IPv6 on your network it just makes an address up and then tries to route everything through it because IPv6 has precedence.

And of course the sysctl to disable IPv6 doesn't work under WSL. It took me 30 mins just to fix that and that was straight out of the box.

I don't know why I'd want all the windows baggage on my Linux laptop.

WSL1 was so much better. WSL2 appears to simply be an effort for Microsoft to showcase Hyper-V and it has all the issues associated with virtualization - despite Microsoft's best attempts at blending the two environments.

WSL1 was almost useless on anything that did a lot of file I/O (so, installing or updating packages for a development environment took ages). This was not fixable given how Windows handles the file system and as I understand it this was the main drive to move to WSL2

I think it was only if you were interacting with the Windows host FS, operations within the Linux fs were fine with performance. I would be surprised if there wasn't a solution to that they could have worked towards.

Anyway, doesn't WSL2 mount Windows volumes over Samba?

WSL actually mounts over 9P from Plan 9 fame. fwiw I remember WSL1 being dog slow on file IO perf.

The WSL instance is a special kind of VM, in a virtual network that gets masqueraded onto whatever network the host is on, yet nowhere in Windows can you manage this, for example to set the subnet the WSL runs in. Sometimes you have to reboot to get DNS going again. I'd call that not great.

you can normally just disable/reenable the virtual network switch to fix that. Not elegant but does the job:

> netsh interface set interface "vEthernet (WSL)" disable

then run again with enable.

Well USB in general is missing, and the workarounds don't always work (or in my case just plain don't work)

WSL might be integrated nicely, but then you still have to deal with Windows. No thanks.

A few years ago I got a new laptop, and booted windows so I could download a Debian installer. The first-time Windows setup was full of telemetry and other crap that would have needed to be turned off, and then I immediately started seeing ads for Edge and other crap showing up. It was disgusting.

You'll be even more impressed when you see Windows running on Linux on KVM with hardware passthrough, because that's what WSL is, a glorified VM with hardware-passthrough.

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