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Comment by foobarbecue | Hacker News Reader

I'm fairly happy with my situation: Windows 10 work machine, I do almost everything in WSL. WSL is pretty impressive these days, with native graphical support and decent filesystem and device interoperability. Windows has come a long way; it has a decent terminal now and utilities like ssh and curl have been added to stock cmd.exe . I've been able to turn off all the awful ad stuff. Never crashes, and I can do vertical taskbar and three monitors easy.

Then I have a kubuntu laptop / convertible tablet for all my personal projects which as you say is great but has lots of weird issues like rarely surviving sleep, screen tearing, high touchpad latency, etc.

The big win is avoiding Apple.

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WSL2 has been pretty frustrating to deal with when I needed to anything that wasn't very basic - which limited its usefulness to scenarios already served well enough by WSL1 (or MSYS2)

But it's little things about the desktop experience that makes me roll my eyes; like drag an icon from your desktop to your start menu. Try to change the settings on your audio device. Try to uninstall Skype and remove all of the preinstalled stuff without removing something important. Try to use the start menu search to launch an installed application.

Terminal is a great application though, very needed on Windows and the usability of things like explorer and multi monitor window management is fantastic (though MacOS does workspaces better than Windows, everything else about MacOS's window management story is garbage)

After using WSL. I liked it so much that it made me reinstall Linux lol

The last update broke WSL for me.

Do wsl --update as administrator

If doesn't work the first time try a few times

> If doesn't work the first time try a few times

Windows sounds like it hasn’t changed much after all.

It depends, does the process also require restarting the system for user app config changes?

Works. Thanks.

> I do almost everything in WSL.

You can run Linux in a virtual machine on any OS.

^ 100% this.

WSL1 was interesting because it was a Linux compatibility layer for Windows. WSL2 is a VM that automatically provisions additional hardware and adds some paravirtualization for Nvidia GPUs.

Before WSL I was just using VMWare or VirtualBox to run a Linux instance on Windows. VSCode has the ssh extension that allowed me to develop within the Linux VM while appearing to be native.

Technically correct, and I even have couple of VMs to play around from time to time, but daily driver is WSL/WSL2 in my case - interop makes things different and GPU based workloads without passing any device are deal-breaker for some people too.

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