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Comment by Night_Thastus | Hacker News Reader

I've been using WSL on and off for Linux development for the last few years.

When it works, it's great! When it doesn't....oh man it sucks. It has been non-stop networking and VPN problems, XServer issues, window scaling issues, hardware accelerated graphics not working, etc. this whole time. I've spent more time trying to fix WSL issues then actually developing software. It's never gotten better.

It's fast. It's powerful. But using it as a daily driver is very painful in my experience. I avoid it as much as possible and do most of my work in MSYS2 instead. Sure, it's much slower. But at least it works consistently and has for years.

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I'm still waiting for the day I need to install WSL, but so far git-bash is working just fine.

I use WSL as daily drive for dev. Never had any issues. Love it. I use it from VS Code.

I still can't use usb-serial devices from within wsl2.

It was possible under wsl1, but wsl1 is an entirely different thing.

"never had any issues" is a meaningless statement. I "never had any issues" with infinite things I never tried to do in the first place.

there is GUI program to automatic this progress[1]

I have been using WSL to develop Firmware in Zephyr, no problem so far.

[1]: https://blog.golioth.io/usb-support-in-wsl2-now-with-a-gui/

Not available in Win10 until recently, and broken and fixed even more recently... but thank you for the heads up. It seems this is finally a thing.

I will have to see if it actually works in my case. The devices are intolerant of timing. Even using usb-serial instead of legacy hardware, let alone the ip stack, can be a problem unless using real ftdi adapters.

Basically virtualizing rs-232's hardware flow control into usb packets was always technically invalid since the beginning, but if the host is overwhelmingly fast enough, you get away with it, usually, and by now all new serial devices have adapted to expect the behavior of usb-serial adapters since that's what everyone has. For that reason, new devices generally tolerate even worse timing and you can even get away with going over ip. But the fact is the timing is garbage by that point and not everything works.

Still, I'm sure it's working well enough for most things or else there would be more reports that it doesn't work.

Since WSL2 is basically VM now, i guess we can passthrough the usb device to VM and skip the whole IP stack, latency is still there, but much better than usbipd

I don't do anything like USB pass through. I use it purely for the linux tooling to support software development. I find it a perfectly suitable system for that purpose and would recommend it.

I've tried WSLg for couple of times and all I run was something like xclock to ensure it works. I literally have 0 interest in running GUI Linux apps, so for me it all smooth sailing.

I think I'm still on a beta version because I'm afraid to update it and breaking all the stuff I have working.

The beta version actually updates more often than the release group. I use the beta so I get the updates sooner. It's been rock stable for me for YEARS.

These days I don't even use a WSL distro directly, but I do use it as a backend for my Docker Desktop.

I use it all the time but then I've never run a GUI application in it.

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